50 Founders Share How They Got Their First Customers

Did you find your first customer surprisingly?

"A cold email? That's a good question. A lot of calls and emailing on Reddit, actually. We don't have them yet; we are currently looking."

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"The first one was actually just kind of very crafted cold outreach. We got our first customer just literally going door to door, standing in the sun, waiting for the owner to just show up because he was just in his food truck all day. He ended up taking a break, and then we just capitalized and closed it. Actually, I’d left a voicemail for one of our physical therapists that we’re working with, and she called me back. She was like, 'Oh, tell me more about, you know, what got your start?' We actually gave our background on like, 'This is why we got into it,' and she thought it was like, you know, we were coming from a good place. So she wanted to work with us.

It should be just customer discovery calls to try and figure out if this was something people would be interested in. We sold it to one company for $250 for a month, and we didn’t have any code. We just made a version of it in seven days and deployed it. It’s pretty rough. Seven days, though!"

"Yeah, we got our first customer by using LinkedIn, and at some point, we got some conversations with those customers. We started better understanding the needs and better understanding what kind of solution they needed. So we made a mock-up of our dream personal finance product. We made a website for it with a little waitlist and posted it on our Reddit group. Within 24 hours, there were close to a thousand people that had signed up for the waitlist. It really resonated with a lot of people that were having the same financial pain points as us.

We launched our closed beta and started onboarding those customers. For us, it was a bit of a wild week in which we launched on Twitter, and suddenly a few days later, I went from 50 followers to like 10,000. We had 20,000 stars on GitHub, we had 150,000 unique visitors a day, and so we’re really fortunate to have had the lightning in a bottle and have all these customers come to us."

"You're asking a great time! We actually got our first customer paying this morning!"

"How did you find that first customer?"

"So we launched! We shared what we were doing about two and a half weeks ago on just our LinkedIns and shared with our friends. A lot of people came inbound; people were really curious about what we were building here. We got a great waitlist, and this customer came through that waitlist, which was really exciting. We don’t really have any customers yet, but we’ve got like one really good advisor who sort of made some introductions to folks at a couple of the big ag tech companies. So sort of networking our way in, really."

"We are in data, so immediately after I get out of here, I’m getting on a plane to go to LA for a few days. We’re going to make the rounds of the production companies and see who’s interested in this tool."

"How are you going to try to get that first customer?"

"I take all the companies that message me, trying to hire me as a software engineer for their biotech company. I respond saying, 'No, but how would you like to buy software that does the same thing?' We have users, and we are currently converting them into paid customers."

"The first customer we got was a friend of ours. It’s like hitting up friends, talking to other people in the space that I was close with. We launched with friends and family so that way we can test our processes out, our pricing, and see what was working and what wasn't. From there, it kind of naturally evolved. We started getting referrals from our friends and family through our networks, Trice's extended family holiday home pages to put in the first system, which has been great. Talk about the best customer for me; for him, having his in-laws' holiday home has been a little bit more stressful, but I'm like, this is great."

"As with a lot of founders, your first few customers come from your network. So I was fortunate enough to work with some amazing folks across a wide range of industries. I went and kind of told them a little bit about what we were building, and they liked what we were building enough to put real money behind it. That’s how we got the first few customers, and, you know, hopefully, the good word we get from them and a few other kind of go-to-market techniques we’re trying will help us really accelerate and get way more customers by demo day."

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