- 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.
