How to get your first ten customers (2013) | Hacker News Reader

How to get your first ten customers (2013)

danshipper.com

314 pointsmax056326 comments

I loved the part where you mentioned we should ‘Shut up and listen to them’.

This worked exceptionally well for DarwinMail [1], which I built to replace Google Inbox months before it was due to be shut down.

DarwinMail received initial traction from a Product Hunt release and a submission to the Show HN section (on the same day).

1. From day 1, I had a contact us option from which I received tremendous amounts of feedback which was instrumental to DarwinMail's development. Many requests & fixes were added to our Trello board via email feedback.

2. I created a public Trello board, from which every single user could see that I am adding their suggestions to the roadmap & working on them too. They could also see the future features.

3. For every user that joined our mailing list, I updated them every other week with the latest updates/fixes and features to DarwinMail.

4. I posted to Twitter regularly on various changes such as UI enhancements and mini-feature releases. I also had a lot of correspondence with users via this medium.

5. I gave away free lifetime coupons to anyone who would share DarwinMail with their friends. This generated a lot of momentum.

I hope this helps. While there is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to getting your first users, I have learned so much from the experiences of others and so I hope I have provided the same kind of useful information for you.

[1] https://www.DarwinMail.app

This is both really interesting, and excellent advice.

I've been working on exactly this myself, and while I'm lucky enough to have found an initial handful of customers from the classic blind selling of my product, it's ridiculous how much I've learned & reevaluated things using the actual feedback & conversations with those customers.

For other people wrestling with this, one thing I'd suggest is reading The Mom Test: http://momtestbook.com/. Great intro into exactly how to handle those feedback conversations, who to talk to, and how to talk to them, even if you don't have any product at all.

Thanks for reading :)

Mom Test is a great book, just finished it. A short but good one is "Talking to Humans"

This is really interesting.

I have been studying this for a while and there are other great HN posts on this subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490437

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534034

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14797284

It's interesting that Ads basically never worked for me, Facebook Ads, seems to be just bots tbh, they hit the website and bounce like less than a second.

Google Ads works good but only to get leads on information or offline service business where customer have to leave a call back request, but for selling SaaS, it's just people signing up and barely verifying their emails. For https://www.gonevis.com, whenever I run Google Ads, I just find a noticeable drop in pageviews, without Ads I'd get much better signups that return and continue using the service, but anyone from the Ads are just bouncing quick and even if signup, they won't come back.

I might be targeting wrong region or using wrong keywords, but after so many combination, I found it to be just wasting money and time fine tuning google/fb ads campaigns.

I simply let them grow organically, even though it's pretty slow to grow, but so far it's fine and I get paying customers.

Good article and very useful information.

I have the same experience with running adwords. All I get is signups with fake email addresses that never log in. They are obviously bots or mechanical turks. I've tried tuning the keywords and regions, but eventually gave up on it. I have spend hundreds of euros on adwords, it created good traffic but almost no conversions.

Interesting. For our local events, we get tons of real people in our area from Facebook ads. We optimize for event responses (basically people clicking "interested" on an event). YMMV

Good point.

Facebook seems to be useful when advertising to get things inside its own platform.

Like page signups, event responses, post reach etc, but when it goes to something outside of it, it will not be that useful as far as my experience goes.

Woof, timely. I'm doing all of these bad-initial-traction-methods on my side project right now, and feeling quite burnt out, thinking about moving on to the next thing.

Perhaps especially when building on the side a couple hours a day, easy to get wrapped up worrying about what the max return on my time could be, and just default back to code... and writing these cold emails always takes me sooo long :D.

It's a pain in the ass, but worth it :)

An insightful article. On the flipside, I want to know how to apply this to P2P platforms, such as marketplaces and freelance websites.

I've always wondered how the likes of PeoplePerHour, Fiverr, etc, first started. Did they ensure they had a healthy user base of freelancers before they launched?

You probably cannot copy Fiverr it was basically great timing https://podtail.com/en/podcast/startup-grind/the-future-of-t...

Glad you enjoyed it! Usually anything you can do to help fake the supply-side of the marketplace is usually a good place to start.

Something that I found works well is just emailing influential people who you think would really benefit from your product and asking them for feedback. Since you're not selling your product, people (even busy ones) do reply. If you built a good product, they will keep using it (and maybe even tell other people about it) and if there are kinks that need to be ironed out, that's great to know as well.

This is apparently how Ilya from Datanyze got his first customer. He cold emailed Ben (then vice president at KISSmetrics) asking for feedback (https://artofemails.com/cold-emails#feedback).

I do this and got some good feedback but also some "is great you're interested in my services I charge 400 eur/h. Are you interested?"

Interesting article with excellent advice. I would've loved to read some content around communities where you can validate your MVP, get feedback, and even prospective customers.

When we started https://draftss.com we got our initial 10+ customers with showcasing our product on these communities that landed us with $3000+ in revenues within the first month itself.

Which communities did you join?

Back in the day, we primarily showcased our productized service on IndieHackers and ProductHunt. I have covered majority of the activities we did during our launch here: https://draftss.com/blog/zero-to-3325-mrr-in-30-days/

I love this kind of articles.

My dad have his own company. I remember how he used to tell me that he will never forget his first client and after that getting the 2nd client was easier.

Great article, and while also relevant for B2C in some parts, I'd love to read advice dedicated to B2C (SAAS in particular). Anyone got any nice links to share?

I don't personally, but a lot of this stuff is relevant for B2C. I would say, though, using Google / Facebook ads to drive traffic to a landing page in B2C is an excellent way to start (even though I recommend against it in this article.)

You'll get a lot of the same benefits of cold calling (which is harder to do with b2c products.)

Good Post. He has sort of confused 'sales' with 'marketing' though, since most of what he talks about is marketing, but the main takeaways are sound!

This is very good advice. Regarding finding emails you can also use a service like hunterio which can make your job easier compared to doing reverse dns yourself.

in summary, find people, talk to them

one on one

it's hard!

I have been quite passive with my customers, probably a flaw in my engineering decision making.

But I have received little feedback from paid customers. They are quiet.

I also think the way you treat customers has a lot to do with the cost of the product. Sell a 10$ book, at most you can hope they buy book 2.

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