Ask HN: Got first paid customer, what now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Got first paid customer, what now?

13 pointswanapreneur7 comments

Hi HN,

I had a side project (SAAS) that I stopped working on for 8 months (mostly stagnant, but still live) and now out of the blue I notice people are registering and someone actually just paid for a subscription. What should I do now? I have a full time job and is currently working on other side projects, should I resume working on this one? Reach out to the paying customer and ask what they like? Sell the project to someone who might grow it better than me?

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Deliver the most amazing service you’re capable of and see what happens. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

For example, email them personally on Saturday and explain that you’d like to welcome them with a small token of appreciation. Confirm or obtain their mailing address and send them something from your area, like a bar of local chocolate or coffee.

Either in that email or in a week or two, email to ask whether you can save them time with setup, or whether they and their team (or family or whatever) would like an interactive guided tour from you.

If your service has any complexity, offer to optimize their setup by hand.

Intentionally lose a small amount money to deliver the best service that this customer has ever experienced. Have fun with it.

See whether it translates to referrals or a tweet.

It may not be cost-effective with 100 or 1000 customers (or it may be…), but it’s amazing with 1 or 10.

Sounds like a great idea, I am going to try this! Thanks!

Congrats! You have made something of value that people appreciate. Getting the first paid user is usually the hardest.

I would not sell the project at this stage as you would sell it for not a big value. You would need a couple more paying users to prove your concept.

Once you have a few hundred paying users, you would see interesting data. Like how many months they keep paying? How many of them churn? How much can I afford to pay for acquiring a paying user?

If you're interested in selling it, feel free to contact me as I might be interested. Email is in my profile.

Both as a developer and entrepreneur, what can you learn about the customer?

This experience should help inform next steps.

My product is very similar to something like canva where you can create easy designs. It is meant for people without much design skills but need to make something quick for their job or business. I noticed that the customer is using my product to create marketing contents related to resumes.

if yoy are not interested in continuing the project you can also sell your project at flippa/feinternational etc

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