How did you get your first 10 paying customers?
Cold email has been a poor use of the week. I tried a few Reddit threads and two LinkedIn posts. People were kind and nobody bought. If you got to the first ten without ads, what was the actual channel?
Comments (9)
I am not convinced "People were kind and nobody bought" is the constraint yet. The people who saw it may have been the wrong room.
I would stay with "Cold email has been a poor use of the week" for the week already named. A quieter result is still a result.
Did "I tried a few Reddit threads and two LinkedIn posts" become a conversation that almost paid, or a compliment?
I have been adjacent to this. The sentence I would not skip is "If you got to the first ten without ads, what was the actual channel". Finding who it is for mattered more than adding another feature.
My first ten were all people I had already talked to in interviews. The public launch brought signups and zero of those early invoices.
LinkedIn posts did nothing for me until I wrote about a specific mistake, with the numbers. The product link was in a reply, not the post.
A niche forum, not the launch. I answered questions there for six weeks before I mentioned the product, and four of the first invoices came from that thread.
Related discussions
View more- How did you find a community that was not already full of founders?
Every forum I open is people selling to each other. I want the place my customer already asks for help. I have been guessing from job titles and I am probably guessing wrong.
Sofia AlvarezQuestion5 votes5 comments
- How do you say no to a feature a paying user asked for?
Three customers asked for the same export. It is real money, and it pulls the product toward a reporting tool I did not set out to build. I do not want to be precious about the roadmap either.
Ben CarterQuestion10 votes8 comments
- How much support do you owe a free account?
I answer everyone because the inbox is still small. A few free accounts write every day. The paid ones write less and I am getting to them second.
Kenji SatoQuestion8 votes8 comments
- What do you ask when you are tired of hearing 'interesting'?
My calls end with encouragement. I leave without a story I can build from. I think I am presenting the idea too early and they are being nice.