- Yeah, so I think getting your first thousand customers
is no different than getting your first
5000 or million customers.
It all comes down to a few things.
Number one is having a product
that delivers...
Delivers on the promise but also gratifies your customer.
When they sign up or they experience it, you know.
If you think about the first time
you ever been to a Starbucks,
and just the interactions and the experience.
There was this aha! moment,
where you walked away and you were like,
wow, that was amazing!
I've never experienced that concept.
They asked me for my name.
The coffee came out tasting really great.
It just felt like it was really thought out and thoughtful
and kind of well-developed, and I feel like
that's the part that a lot of people don't have
that if they get right, really makes everything else work.
Some people think it's a marketing problem
and I'm going to tell you right off the bat,
it's a product problem.
So, getting to your product to a point
that delivers on the promise
that you display on your homepage
and gratifies your customers,
or gets them to this aha! moment.
Or sometimes I call it the core product value,
like getting them to experience that core product value.
That's number one.
The second thing is to build a growth engine.
I like the word engine because it has
this connotation or context of turning over.
You pour gas in the tank and then it produces energy
and it kind of moves the thing forward.
And as long as you keep pouring gas in it,
it keeps moving forward,
and it's just a great way to think about
building your marketing, or your demand marketing,
or your inbound marketing.
Whatever you want to call it,
but essentially your ability to get new customers.
So building that engine,
and the way you do it is you test different channels,
different marketing strategies,
where you can figure out that a time or money
inserted or inputted into the engine
will result in x amount of customers.
Profitable customers.
That's another thing where people,
they don't realize that they can do
a bunch of viral marketing
and they get a bunch of people that sign up
and never use the product.
This happens all the time with PR,
where they think, well if I get covered
on TechCrunch, that's the holy grail of anything.
If I get covered on TechCrunch,
my start-up's going to be successful.
And I can't tell you, it's further from the truth.
It goes like a big spike.
A bunch of people sign up to register
to confirm their usernames.
That's the only reason they sign up;
they have no interest in the product
but they think, if someday this might take off,
I gotta make sure I've got my username.
And they never come back, and they never use it,
and they skew all of your metrics.
And they make you feel great the day or the week of,
and then you just feel like, wow that spiked
and now it's flat again.
And it's not sustainable.
And that's why to me, it's about building an engine.
So it's figuring out these different channels.
Now, the third thing you want to figure out,
once you have the product that really delights
and you have a concept of building habits
that get new customers, it's doing less.
A lot of start-ups, they create a bunch of stuff.
They think, well, I gotta do Facebook marketing.
I gotta do content marketing.
I gotta do PR.
I gotta be speaking at events.
I need to do all this stuff,
and what happens is, most of the time,
is when nothing works,
when you're really not seeing the results,
because you're doing too many things,
you don't know which one of those things
is the reason it's not working.
Whereas if you do less, then you know
that it's that thing that's not working.
Think about this concept,
because most companies die
from indigestion, not starvation.
Indigestion, not starvation,
where they die because they do too many things
and they don't focus.
And when you do too many things,
you don't know what's not working.
It's the same concept of
death by a thousand paper cuts.
So I think those are the three areas.
If you want to get your first 1000 customers,
or your first 5000 or a million customers.
you want to make sure you have a product that delights;
you focus on building an engine
that's repeatable, scalable, to get new customers
that are profitable;
and then you want to make sure
you're doing less things not more,
so that you really deliver or really learn faster.
Because to me, at the end of the day,
the definition of a start-up
or the purpose or what you should be doing with your team
is learning as fast as possible.
If you have competitors out there,
he who learns the fastest, wins.
And those are my thoughts
on how to get your first thousand customers
and I appreciate the question.