How to get your first 10 customers

http://danshipper.com/nothing-happens-until-the-sale-is-made

by joeyespo • 13 years ago

257 44 13 years ago

josh2600• 13 years ago

Great post. I wanted to pass along the tool rapportive, which is a built-in email address validator for Gmail with social feeds. It's a killer free tool that no sales team should omit.

Chrome web store link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rapportive/hihakjf...

hanley• 13 years ago

Here's a better link to Rapportive's website. They have addons for other browsers as well.

http://rapportive.com/

dshipper6• 13 years ago

Thanks! I've actually heard that a bunch but haven't used it for that purpose. Much appreciated.

bosky101• 13 years ago

+1 for adwords & rapportive.

     >> ... tool that no sales team should omit.

i'd add olark[1] & nerdydata[2] to that list as well.

I even have a SaaS product built, but yet to deploy - I'm testing the following way:

...i put a "pre-order" or "buy" via gumroad widget, and will start deploying once i have my first purchase. just stats on how many people go down the funnel[3]( clicked the "for companies" link, # who viewed price, # who clicked "i want this" is worth the 10 mins setting up your product on gumroad ...

~B @verbsapp

[1] http://olark.com [2] http://nerdydata.com [3] http://gum.co/wvFqR

unono• 13 years ago

There's always something 'wrong' about tech people wanting to meet face to face. What is the point of the telecommunication tech YOU created? Did you not do a good job?

There's a better approach than what the blog outlines - imagine that you have infinite wealth and begin to build what you personally want.

In most cases you will not be able to create the whole thing, but you can tackle a piece of the problem.

Example - you want a flying car. Imagine that you have 1 trillion dollars at your disposal. What would you do? Hire engineers. How would you hire them? What software is required. Look around, if it does not exist already, that's your first product. If it the hiring problem is already adequately solved, look for the next thing. How do those engineers communicate? etc.

These series of questions will lead to finding niches of opportunity, and it is always a software problem (organizing workflows).

manuelflara• 13 years ago

I think technical founders would gladly do all customer development by email (if it worked). The problem is, often your customers aren't "tech people".

gruseom• 13 years ago

There's always something 'wrong' about tech people wanting to meet face to face.

Boy do I disagree. Face to face communication is richer, more contactful, and more satisfying. There's nothing wrong with any human being wanting that.

dshipper6• 13 years ago

You can definitely talk over the phone. But real business seems to happen more quickly in person, even today. Email certainly doesn't cut it.

The problem with the thought experiment is that it assumes infinite knowledge. It's very hard to imagine what things would actually be like if you had a trillion dollars and you wanted to build a flying car. You can definitely come up with things that you think are likely, but I've found that often times you know much less than you think, and the actual problems are MUCH less obvious than they seem.

It's kind of like a non-engineer imagining what problems he would run in to if he had to build the Golden Gate Bridge including design and construction. You can definitely foresee certain things, e.g. you need a lot of materials, pens and paper, but there's still a ton of uncertainty and real gritty problems that only come out when you're in the thick of things.

larrys2• 13 years ago

"But real business seems to happen more quickly in person, even today."

Cost and time tradeoff and also what you get for closing and how often you have to close a sale.

You can send out more emails than you can postal letters.

You can do more postal letters than you can phone calls.

You can do more phone calls than you can in person cold calls. All depends of course on the product you are selling and the situation.

In any case going for the low hanging fruit to start (say sending an email to the IT manager at a university) doesn't mean you can't send a postal letter or a phone call or try to setup a meeting in person. But it makes sense in many (not all, many) situations to start with the easiest thing you can do and work your way up.

Example: I just closed a deal with a guy who has a reality show and all it took was an email which he replied to because he was interested in what I was selling. That's only one example I've obviously done the other things as well.

Lastly, negotiating in person also has it's drawbacks. Personally I prefer to negotiate by email in most cases. Depending on the other party and your own skills an in person does't always work out the way you would like.

Just another perspective.

alien3d• 13 years ago

We freelancer also do business. Sometime ,we not always online and doing other thing.But too abuse and trying keep cost like only entertain Facebook message just for just communication just too way annoying.To me,i you don't want take the call or meet face to face better not deal with me.Sometimes meet face 2 face required to knew client capability on payment and scheduling.

xarien• 13 years ago

I'd also recommend looking at local resources such as chambers of commerce. Join them (or just attend some of the events), meet their members (businesses), establish yourself as an expert (and trust) by giving free talks at events, and then proceed up the sales chain.

tzury• 13 years ago

regarding email address guessing, rapportive turned out to be quite useful at this (xobni's smartr perhaps as well).

quaffapint3• 13 years ago

Certainly agree, but depending upon your market it can be very difficult to... "Find companies that fit the bill" ...especially when you're more going for B2C or B2SmallerWebsites. Really for me that's the challenge that brings out the need for advertising and such - to even find these customers.

dshipper6• 13 years ago

Not sure I entirely agree with this. For any sizeable niche (or even smaller niches) you should be able to find places where these people hang out on line and get in touch with them. If you can't then you don't know your target audience well enough.

You could certainly use advertising to collect email addresses, and then call those people to figure out what they want. The reason I don't like that as much is it puts another layer of specialized skill between you and your prospects. You have to dump a bunch of money and time in to learning how to write correctly targeted ads that convert before you even know who you're trying to convert, or what they care about. That's a tough problem to get around for most people.

btilly2• 13 years ago

Strongly disagree for the first few customers.

If you're going B2C or B2SmallerWebsites then you're aiming for much less per sale, and therefore to get legs you'll need to be able to sell to a lot of them. So potential sales targets are all around. You won't be able to find them in sufficient volume to make a difference until after you have advertising turned on. But you still need to figure out your business. And talking to people in person is a great way to do that.

quaffapint3• 13 years ago

When your customer is anybody from a forum on toyotas to donuts, how do you find them. I am currently advertising, not with too much success. I'm just following the points of this article that you don't know whether it's bad ad copy or product.

alecsmart13• 13 years ago

Am wondering if it is okay to cold email potential clients? Isnt that considered as spam?

dshipper6• 13 years ago

Yes definitely. In general as long as you're not mass emailing 1000s of potential prospects, you target specific people that you think would be interested, you tailor each email individually to them, and you're respectful and up-front about what you're doing things work out fine.

bitofnews2• 13 years ago

Also be sure to abide by CAM SPAM Act. Must include links to unsubscribe.

alecsmart13• 13 years ago

Suppose I customize and email 1000s of potential clients. Is that considered as spam? Would you recommend any nice template/examples to use? Should I send these emails from a generic email box or from my personal email? If I include an "unsubscribe" option, won't the receiver think "hey, I never subscribed to this, let me mark it as spam".

On a side note, I used to contact potential clients years ago and then GoDaddy marked my domain as spam and made me cough up $199. The email wasn't even sent from the same domain (google godaddy spam scam). I moved off to NetworkSolutions. Anyone sending cold emails, please beware of this.

alecsmart13• 13 years ago

Also, any suggestions on which host to use to send these emails?

anandkulkarni• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, there's a gap between what many lean approaches advocate (Adwords), what startups think they need (features/press) and what actually works.

The most effective way to learn is to go out and find the people who should be using the product, and talk to them.

dshipper6• 13 years ago

Glad you liked it!

lsc• 13 years ago

The most effective way to learn is to go out and find the people who should be using the product, and talk to them.

Problem is? if they are taking the time to talk to you, they are giving you free advice. For whatever reason, they like you.

If you are doing a product that does face to face sales? that's fine. People like you, they buy your product.

However, this tells you very little about how good the product is on it's own, as a low-touch commodity product; so it's not all that useful if you are building something to scale (rather than scaling a marketing organization, which is a very different sort of problem.)

Also, most people? they are trapped in their own worldview, so they can't tell you what they need. "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Really, to actually innovate? You need to both understand customer needs /and/ the technologies you have on hand that could serve those needs in ways they are not currently being served.

My philosophy has always been to build into a market I knew. Sell to yourself. If you want to sell to a new market, learn about /that/ market first. I mean, this approach has it's own problems[1], but eh, it does mean you know when you are providing actual value, rather than having to sort out "this person likes me" vs. "this person likes my product"

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6480139

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

I'd disagree.

AdWords is great for validating B2C products because you NEED the opinion of MANY people to judge the viability of your product/idea.

In B2B your customer typically has money on the line, and it's quite straightforward for them to evaluate your value proposition: "Does this make me money, or lead to making me money, how much?".

In B2C the question becomes: "Do I like/enjoy/have fun with X product?" typically far more subjective and whimsical. Subjectivity shines in small samples (<10 people) and shrinks in large samples (>1000 impressions).

I agree regarding features/press however.

gxespino• 13 years ago

"Do I like/enjoy/have fun with X product?"

This doesn't directly translate to people opening up their wallets and paying for said product.

pkorzeniewski• 13 years ago

I never understood why everyone suggest that a B2B software MUST generate (or lead to) money for the client to reason the purchase. For example, what about security software? It won't generate any money and in most cases won't even prevent losing money due to security issues (as it doesn't happen SO often), yet almost every company values security so much they will happily pay a lot of money for a bulletproof security software.

exo_duz• 13 years ago

Very interesting concepts and ideas. I was looking for something like this for my startup.

Especially the bit about "Shut up and listen to them". I had the same experience the other day at Start Up Weekend, where the best advice was when you listened to the mentors.

Thanks Dan.

danbmil99• 13 years ago

Good post. I think many of us focus on the product and modifying it first (before questioning sales / marketing tactics) because we are developers, we know how to code, and in fact we actually enjoy tinkering with our product; it gives us a sense that we're doing something consequential that could change the dynamics of the situation.

The unfortunate truth is that early in a product's lifecycle, I suspect the quality (as programmers measure it) of the product, the beauty (or lack thereof) of the codebase, and even outright bugs, misfeatures, and poor performance, are not the reasons the product does or does not get traction. As OP says, what gets traction is product/customer fit -- the NEED a potential customer feels for the product. And if the wrong customer is pitched, and the right customer does not know about your product, all the tinkering and new features and bugfixes and refactoring in the world will not change that situation.

TL; DR: Programmers have code hammers, so they just bang the product nail again and again.

chrismorgan• 13 years ago

I am and have been getting 403 Forbidden for the entire domain. Any idea what could be going on? I'm using Firefox Beta for Android and have tried to access it from a couple of different IP addresses in Melbourne, Australia.

namuol• 13 years ago

They conclude that the product must suck and that nobody wants it, because Mark Zuckerberg did exactly the same thing to launch Facebook at Harvard and look at how that worked out for him

Maybe I'm just sleepy, but I'm starting to get tired of condescending advice from newly-born entrepreneurs.

ssreeniv• 13 years ago

Good post with useful tips & tools. It describes exactly what the title states. Nothing more. Nothing less.

How to get your first 10 customers

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