How to get your first 10 paying customers

You have finished your product. Now, the next exciting part is how to get the first few paid customers.

I know It’s hard. Evenly many founders have to quit because they couldn’t find customers. I know exactly how you feel. I’ve been there too.

So in this post, I want to share with you the top ways to get the first few customers based on my research and experience. Hopefully, you can get something from this.

There are three important questions you need to answer before going deeper. The first one is what are your targeted customers? After defining them, the next question is where they spend their time online and offline or How to find them. After knowing who they are, and where to find them, the next big question is how to convince them. In other words, what is your marketing message, what problems are you trying to solve, and what are your mission, value propositions and unique selling points? You can use Golden Circle to craft your marketing message – what is it, how you build it and why you build it?

Meanwhile, you can connect with people offline such as joining events, holding workshops, meetups, …, But in this post, I will focus on online channels which are feasible for everyone to do.

1. Online Marketing channels

While inbound marketing is to make customers actively find you through content marketing, SEO, paid ads, …, outbound marketing is that you actively find them. Inbound marketing will need more effort and take more time to get effect. So at the early stage, when you want to find the first few paid customers to validate your start-up ideas, I recommend you to focus on outbound marketing first. But If you have more resources, It’s ok to do both things because inbound marketing would pay in the long term.

However, in this post, I’ll give you some inbound marketing methods which are suitable to do at the beginning too.

1.1. Outbound marketing

Here are the main ways to find them online:

Groups or communities:
- Find and join groups: These can be Facebook groups, subreddits, LinkedIn groups or online communities. Then reach out to those who post relevant ideas and questions and engage in discussions. Or you can comment on your solutions under related posts.
In-person:
- Your personal and professional network: Ask friends to ask their friends and so on.
- Social platform: Here’re the main ways to do this:
  - You can scan Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. Look for people who are:
    - Looking for alternatives to your competitors.
    - Complaining about your competitors.
    - Asking for recommendations for a solution to their problem that your product/service directly solves.
  - Find influencers on Twitter, Linkedin and so on. On X (Twitter), you can find accounts using relevant hashtags, follow them, reach out to them and join in the conversations. How do you find relevant hashtags? Use a site like Hashtagify.me or hashtags.org or ask people.
  - If you do B2B or your targeted customers have a specific job title, you can find them on LinkedIn.
- Email: You can find the email of the people who belong to your targeted customers and contact them through email. For the cold email tips, you can refer to this post.

1.2. Inbound marketing

There’re many ways to do inbound marketing. But for early-stage startups with few resources and just want to find the first few customers to validate the start-up ideas, Here are the ways I strongly recommend

Actively post something on social groups or communities. You can ask chatGPT to write a post title for you. For example, many subreddits hate self-promotion posts. So you should write titles which show that you’re providing value for the readers or wanting to get advice, but not self-promoting.
make a video of how your product works (product-led growth)
SEO, content marketing: at first, you can optimize SEO for your landing page first. Then when you have more time or more resources, you can do content marketing such as writing blog posts, write content on social media.

2. Crafting marketing message

You know your targeted customers. You know where to find them. Now, the next step is to craft an effective marketing message to convince them to try your products. This is a long part. So I wrote a separate post for this, you can refer to this post here.

3. How to talk to users

Now you have all the information you need. You know who are your targeted customers. You have your powerfull message. Now step out and talk with your users. It’s may be the most intimidating but important part founders must do to validate your ideas and actually get first paid customers.

Talking to users is not easy. Many people do it in the wrong way. I wrote a separate blog post to help you talk to users in the right way. You can refer it here.

4. Advice

Here are some advices when you find your first customers.

4.1. Avoid hard-to-get customers

There’s no benefit to making your first customers hard to get customers. Instead, you should looking for customers:

That intensively has a problem you’re trying to solve.
Willing to work with early-stage startups.
And willing to pay to solve that problem.

4.2. Charge your first customers

Charging your first customers is a way to validate your startup idea. The willingness to pay is a strong indicator for needed ideas.

4.3. Qualifying your customers

Make sure you have 4-5 qualifying questions so that you can filter customers who are interested from those who are just browsing.

How intensely they have the problem
How willing they are to move quickly