How to find your first 10 clients and not lose them in 1 month
Road to product market fit
Hey everybody! Welcome back to the newsletter!! I wish you had a great start of 2024 and you are ready to eat the world this year!!
So, to start this year I wanted to talk about one of the things that new founder struggle most with: getting their first 10 clients.
But before, as always, some good music to enjoy!
How to find your first 10 clients and don't lose them in 1 month
So, the other day I shared my experience on Linkedin on how I got my startup’s first client in +- 20 days since we had the idea.
On this article I want to expand on it and share with you:
How I did it?
What went wrong, and
How I would do it nowadays.
Let’s get to it.
How I did it
1st. Validate the problem you want to solve is real
Ok, this is my least favorite part.
Basically at this point you haven’t started building your product but you have a rough idea of what problem you want to solve.
Before building a solution, you want to validate the problem is big enough for your potential customers to pay for the solution and to understand in depth the dynamics of your customer’s organization.
How do you do this? Interviews, lots of interviews.
In these interviews you want to gather as much information as possible to be able to build your product and then sell it.
You want to know:
Do you have this problem?
How often do you encounter this problem?
How much does it bother your organization?
How do you deal with this problem?
Who does currently solve it?
How much does this problem cost your company?
Who is in charge in your company to hire or find a better solution for this problem?
If you know a lot about the problem you want to solve with around 30 interviews you should be able to tell if it’s worth it to find a solution for the problem.
2nd. Map out the top 3 problems all the companies you interviewed share and develop an MVP to solve the most important one
Ok, so with the information you have so far you should be able to know which specific problem you must target. Build a quick and easy solution for it.
3rd. Identify your Ideal Customer Persona, your Buyer Persona and your user
With the information you gathered on the interviews you should be able to map out:
What is the profile of the company you target? This includes size, industry and geography.
Who is the Buyer Persona? The Buyer persona is the person that has the authority and responsibility to buy your product. It will vary depending on the size of the company and the use of the product. Make sure you know it.
Who is your user? Sometimes the person buying the product will not be the one using it, and many times you’ll have to convince both, so you better know it!
4th. Make a list of 100 companies that fit the same profile than the ones you interview.
This is pretty straight forward, you basically do market research and then find out information to reach your buyer persona.
You can use many tools for this. I think Apollo.IO is a great tool to help you do your market research.
5th. Design a sales funnel and start cold calling
Ok, this was my favorite part. The good thing about a good sales funnel is that it works, every time. The bad thing is also that it works, so you can sell anything. I’ll explain more about it in another article.
What went wrong?
1st. People lie all the time
Ok, so interviews are not the best way to get to know if a company has a problem or they’d love a solution for it. People lie all the time and will tell you anything so that you can leave them alone. The information you gather from the interviews might not be accurate or valuable a lot so take that in mind.
Also, there is a thing with customers that sometimes they’ll ask you for solutions that don’t make sense or don’t really want, they will mislead you to build something useless.
On my Linkedin post, Soeren, a founder asked me a great question and this was a debate that my cofounder and I had all the time. What do you think is a successful metric to start building the product? The idea here is not to let you decide just based on the interviews. I’ll explain in more detail in the how I would do it now section!
“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” Steve Jobs
2nd. It’s easy to find problems in processes inneficiencies that are really not essential pains
So, one of the common errors is to end up trying to understand step by step the companies processes and then do “process consulting”.
Every company is going to have process ineficiencies, but automating tasks is extremely hard, changing the way businesses work is almost always impossible and many times the ineficiency is not worth any solution. So beware when you are becoming a product trying to mash together multiple processes. It’s not about that!!
3rd. Rushing your MVP makes you build a sh*ty solution that doesn’t work
The book Lean startup is one of the bibles of startups but it’s done a lot of harm. Going out to the market with an MVP that doesn’t work will not help you grow whatsoever. The idea of the MVP is to make a product with no BS but that solves the problem you want to solve. If you offer great benefits but then your product doesn’t give them you are wasting your time and your customers’ time.
Make sure your MVP solves the problem and creates value.
4th. A good sales funnel will help you sell anything but a bad product won’t retain your customers
3rd. How I would do it now
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