You often hear of startups taking off overnight or posting on Product Hunt and acquiring their first one-thousand customers within a few days.
But, that’s not the likely reality of starting a company. Tech blogs don’t like to write about mediocre startups or lifestyle businesses, so the general public rarely hears about them. The perceived image of startup culture is skewed due to survivorship bias.
Starting a company is a grind, finding product market fit is daunting, and selling your first 10 customers is exhausting.
Failing to Find Product Market Fit
Finding the right audience for your product can almost be as hard as building the product itself. For Cloud Campaign, we’ve both pivoted and changed our target customer in hopes of finding our place.
We “launched” on Product Hunt and quickly got to a few hundred users, but noticed users were more interested in the technology and the novelty of the idea than actually using the service to post to social media for them.
Initially, the sole focus was around triggers and data-driven marketing. Social media posts could be triggered by weather and trends. You could still schedule posts similar to the competitors, but it was hidden in the UI and wasn’t the main focus.
The initial response? Confusion. People had gotten so familiar with the current solutions that they expected Cloud Campaign to operate in the same way. It was apparent we had two choices.
- Fight the uphill battle
- Pivot to make triggers a secondary feature
We decided to pivot. Since scheduling already existed, it was as simple as rebranding, and updating both the dashboard UI and the landing page to reflect the change in direction.
After the pivot, we received less support requests and usage went up. Awesome! But, we still didn’t have paying customers.
I began focusing on 1-on-1 sales targeting restauranteurs. My thought was restaurants need to be active on social media and the weather trigger functionality would be especially interesting since weather directly affects their business.
What I didn’t anticipate is how hard restauranteurs are to get in front of. They often work strange hours, aren’t in front of a computer, and are extremely busy.
After sending and following up on a substantial amount of very personalized cold emails to restauranteurs and receiving no responses, I began to explore other customer bases.
Who else would benefit from the uniqueness of Cloud Campaign’s dynamic marketing capability?
Ah, ha! Ski resorts! Their entire business depends on the weather. Switching my focus in this direction yielded much more positive results.
Getting your Piece of the Pie
Unless you’re building something completely novel, chances are you’re fighting for market share. There are likely large, established companies already occupying your desired space that have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in marketing spend.
It’s an exhausting process trying to either convince potential customers to switch to your product, or educate someone on why they need a product of your type in the first place.
With Cloud Campaign, which is just finally nearing 10 paying customers after 6 months of hard work, I’ve found the best strategy to be laid out in 3 steps.
- Send a cold email to someone in your target audience
- I do prospecting on social media, forums, blogs, and local businesses
2. If they respond, get them on a call or demo to figure out how you can address their needs
3. If they don’t buy, figure out why (usually a feature), and circle back in a few months once you’ve built said feature assuming it’s related to your core product
Don’t be discouraged by rejections. See it as a step in the process to eventually acquiring them as a customer. See it as a chance to prove yourself — to prove that you can execute on feature requests and that you can move quickly.
Patrick McKenzie from Stripe recently shared useful advice on acquiring your first 10 customers.
My biggest takeaway from Patrick’s advice is to find qualified buyers. Find people who are used to paying for software. There are many forums and sites geared towards early adopters of new software, which is a good place to start. You can also target people paying for your competitor’s software if you think your product can better address the issue at hand.
You should also be very clear with what your value proposition is. In the initial cold email, tell the recipient why they should care and how your product will benefit them; don’t list features.
This part of the process is going to be a grind. It’s going to be exhausting and discouraging, but it’s a necessary part to developing your product through feedback and getting your first handful of paid customers.