Getting the first 10 or 100 customers is often the hardest. But don’t feel overwhelmed by the hard work that lies ahead, rather be inspired by how it will help you to learn more about your customers, your market, and your business. Once you have the first 100 customers, you’re on your way to success, this is just the hard bit at the start. Nearly 100 new Chick-fil-A restaurants open each year, and since 2003, customers across the country have been celebrating many of our openings with a First 100® Campout. This is an overnight event in the restaurant parking lot that rewards the first 100 customers with a prize worth waiting for – free Chick-fil-A for a year.

1. How To Get Your First 100 Users
2. How To Get Your First 100 Customers

The beauty of SaaS is that it scales. When you have thousands of customers, you have hundreds of thousands of data points that you can use to test, measure, and optimize your marketing strategy. You can A/B test 41 different shades of blue for your landing page call-to-actions and then dive deep into your analytics to optimize and tweak your conversion funnel.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that analytics and thousands of users to A/B test against are the only things that can help you make informed decisions. But even when you’re in the process of getting your first 100 customers, you have a lot to work with.

There are a ton of things you can do to smartly market to your first 100 customers by getting out the door and interacting with real people. Founders generally don’t think about building software in this way, but the ones that do develop a stronger understanding of their products, customers, and businesses.

Getting to your first 100 customers is a dynamic process—and it’s also going to look and feel different than any other stage of your business. Use the three steps below to build a foundation for marketing that won’t just help you win over your first 100 customers, but also the next ten thousand.

1. Practice $0 marketing to start building a customer base without going all in on expensive paid acquisition.
2. Talk to each of your customers to understand their actual problems and needs.
3. Identify your most successful customers—and learn to let go of the customers who might not ultimately be the best fit for your product.

Let’s dive into real examples of how companies got to 100 customers by hitting on low-cost forms of marketing, talking directly to their customers, and really listening to their early customers’ problems and successes.

Practice $0 Marketing

A lot of companies make the mistake of trying to jump from zero to 100 customers as quickly as possible. They end up pouring a ton of money into paid acquisition with very little understanding of who their potential customers are and what they want.

Early on, you want to avoid throwing money at the customer acquisition challenge. Spending a lot of cash on Google or Facebook ads might net your business a bunch of new customers early on, but they won’t always be the kind of customers that will stick around. Instead, focus on low-cost forms of marketing, like building a word-of-mouth campaign or giving potential users free resources and tools. Figure out what works. Then do more of it.

Here are some scrappy examples of how companies got to 100 users by practicing $0 marketing:

• Go straight to the source: FounderKit got their first 100 members byemailing the Y Combinator founders email list. With their prototype of reliable product reviews, FounderKit reached out directly to everyone on the YC founders email list. Their outreach was so effective, FounderKit actually heard back from Jessica Livingston, asking if they had somehow scraped reviews from the email archives.
• Word-of-mouth can take some patience:Airbnb began by leasing out spare air mattresses in the CEO’s apartment. It still took about eight or nine months on a basic HTML website to reach 100 users. But by individually messaging people who had listed their homes on Craigslist, Airbnb was able to coax a critical mass of hosts to come and join them on their new site.
• Find where your potential users are already hanging out:Creative Tim makes web design tools. They’ve focused on content marketing, submitting these important subreddits in the web design community: /r/web_design, /r/html5, /r/frontend, and /r/webdev. They’ve also found new users where they hang out offline: at hackathons.

How To Get Your First 100 Users

In each of these cases, someone hit upon a low-cost marketing idea, saw that it was working, and then did more. Airbnb saw that it worked to reach out to people who listed their apartments on Craigslist. It took considerable effort, but pretty soon they had enough hosts to reach out once more and talk to every single one of them about what they wanted from Airbnb.

Talk to Every Single Customer

Let’s say you’ve had some success with $0 marketing. Marketing is still an uphill battle when you’re staring at an empty Google Analytics Dashboard day in and day out. Early on, you might only get a couple website visits a day, and when the sample size is that small, you can’t rely on analytics for marketing insights.

The advice I like to give founders at this stage is to reach deep, not wide. If you only have ten customers, that’s great. Call them up and learn everything you can. Shadow people in their offices, and turn your sales calls into customer development calls. Even with ten customers, your depth of understanding will help you get to 100 and beyond.

Here’s how several successful companies talked to their early customers, and how it paid off:

• Do customer research to create a customer-centric marketing: Slack first began by beta-testing their product on a very small group of 6-10 customers, shadowing them and conducting interviews to see how they used the new product. They then applied those learnings to onboarding the next group of users—and then the next after that. Talking to their customers allowed Slack to iterate on its messaging and marketing around real customer behavior.
• Double up customer research and development: Before Belly even built the first iteration of their product, they went out and pounded the pavement in Chicago, speaking to hundreds of small business owners in person and on the phone. It wasn’t easy, but these customer interviews helped Belly hone in on real customer problems. In the process, they were able to sign up 500 local businesses to their customer loyalty platform.
• Build your marketing around real human behaviors:Tinder tapped into the existing ecosystems of college sororities. One of their co-founders went out across the country to pitch chapters of her own sorority and have them download Tinder on the spot. Then she’d walk over to the fraternities and show them how many girls from their college were already on the app, giving Tinder a deeper understanding into how actual people were using their product.

As you’re out making customer visits and calls, you’re showing that you care about the problems customers encounter. By getting real live feedback around what people actually care about, you’ll be able to reach more people more effectively going forward. You’re setting yourself up for future success.

Identify Your Most Successful Customers

Figure out who your best customers are early on, and build around them. Don’t waste too much time on non-ideal customers that end up sucking too much time and resources from your team.

The most important thing is reaching customers that can be successful with your product. Identifying high value, high-LTV customers early on will help you focus your marketing efforts around those customers as you grow. To get there, focus on these questions:

• How many customers are in your space or vertical?
• How many of those customers can you reach? Can they adopt your product on their own with a free trial, or do they need help from engineering?
• Do they have money and a budget?

Here are three companies who identified and learned from early customer success:

• Don’t be afraid to switch focus:ConvertKit, an email marketing company for professional bloggers, got their first 50 customers via their content marketing efforts, writing about The Web App Challenge. They quickly switched focus to the specific niche of bloggers, rather than just anyone who happened to need email marketing, after realizing that bloggers all had the same issue with other newsletter services. MailChimp was too complicated for many bloggers; they needed something simpler.
• Throw away your assumptions: When KISSmetrics first started, we assumed all of our customers knew exactly what they wanted to measure and how. So we provided the ability to customize. But we ended up with a lot of initial users who didn’t really have a need for our product, and therefore, didn’t want to pay for it. We started to focus instead on our most successful customers: internet marketers.
• Reward your successful customers: Early on, Yelp’s big problem was getting people to write thoughtful reviews on the site over and over.The more reviews, the more value for everyone using Yelp, and the stronger the social component. Yelp launched “Yelp Elite,” an incentive-based program that encourages their best users to post more often. These successful users drove even more engagement among the rest of the user base.

Marketing to your first 100 customers isn’t just an exercise in acquisition. You want to do it to find the best users for the product that you’ve built. The best users are the ones who really have a need for your product and understand its value. Finding and retaining them early on will help you scale.

Putting in the Effort Up Front

Winning over your first 100 customers this way isn’t easy. It takes time, which is a startup’s most precious resource. But, an early investment in your customers always pays off down the road. You gain an understanding of who your core customer is and what they most want our of your product. This three-step process will also show them how much you care.

Anything you can do to reduce the distance between you and your customers—visiting offices, making calls, taking on support, asking tough questions—puts you on the path to really understanding customer needs and problems. This gives you the insights necessary to scale your business—not just on the marketing side of things, but on the product side, too.

The path from zero to 100 can be enormously instructive if you:

• Start with low-cost marketing and see where it takes you. Where are your ideal customers already spending time online? Can you use existing communities and online forums to generate new leads?
• Pick up the phone and ask customers questions. What are they getting out of your product? What common problems are they running into?
• Hone in on your most successful customers, even if it means losing a few less successful customers. Who is able to articulate the value you’re providing?

At the early stage of any company, there’s plenty of data at your disposal. It absolutely takes some legwork on your part to collect it and then learn from it. But once you’ve done the legwork, you’ll see how strong a foundation you’ve built—one that actually enables you to scale.

Want to find out how to scale your marketing beyond your first 100 customers? I’ve written about this here, here, and here.

“The sales won’t roll in just because you’ve built the website or opened your virtual doors, you need to do some legwork to get customer attention”, says payments expert, PayGate.

In the late 1980s, the movie Field of Dreams told businesses everywhere a disastrous lie. “If you build it, they will come.” While the sentiment was great, the reality is that your business is not a single baseball diamond in a field of corn – it is one of many brilliant ideas looking to catch the customer’s attention. One of the biggest mistakes many start-ups make is sitting back and waiting for the sales to roll in after they’ve worked incredibly hard on their launch.

Building abusiness is hard work, and the effort you’ve put into creating your brand,products and website was worth every moment. But now you need to take the nextstep, towards your customers, to catch people’s attention, inspire engagementand develop trust. This is how…

10 ways to get the customer’s attention

There areseveral methods you can use to encourage customers to find your store and startshopping. While some will require extra investment, others are either free orfairly affordable and only require time, effort and commitment to ensuresuccess. Here are some of the steps you can take to catch those first 100customers, keep their attention, and then catch 100 more:

1. Network

Networkingremains one of the most powerful tools in the business arsenal today. Startwith your own network of family and friends, tell them about your new venture,and then ask them to spread the news. You’d be amazed at how many sales cancome from these connections, and how quickly the news can spread.

2. Be social

Do research into the social media platforms that your chosen customersare most likely to favour and then set up business profiles. Facebook,Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter are powerful resources that can help you buildyour business slowly through intelligent messaging and careful contentcuration. Join groups that suit your niche and then slowly start contributingto the conversation and promoting your brand – if the page allows it. For example,if you sell dog toys, look for groups that focus on pets. Then use paid-foradvertising and competitions to enhance your exposure further down the line.

3. Start a blog

Bloggingdoes more than share your views and build engagement, it also improves yourorganic search ranking. When consumers are looking for certain products on asearch engine, you will have a better chance of being found if you have regularblogs on key topics with the right keywords. Focus on the latest trends, newapplications, tips and tricks, and more that are interesting to your readersand will give people a reason to visit your site, even if they weren’t planningto buy anything.

4. Create a newsletter

Emailmarketing is an excellent digital tactic that not only drives customeracquisition and retention, but makes them feel as if they are part of acommunity. As your list of newsletter subscribers grows, you will find iteasier to generate sales through discounts, specials and links to products oryour blogs. To build this newsletter list, you need to encourage people tosubscribe through your website. Offer them discounts, give them rewards, andcreate an ecosystem that makes them feel that, by joining your newsletter, theyare part of something special and important.

5. Create a launch special

Create adiscount code that’s only eligible for your launch period and promote it acrossall your social media platforms. This increases the chance that you will getpeople’s attention and make a sale. You can do anything from offering them afree item, to saving them a percentage on the sale. You can also use yournewsletter to run regular competitions that will get your name out there andyour customers excited.

6. Build strategic partnerships

Collaboratingwith other people can really help you leverage one another’s networks to buildbusiness and generate sales. Consider working with brands that are eitherlike-minded or not-competitive and that already attract the kind of peopleyou’d like to see come to your business. You can then work with these partnersto run shared competitions and offers, to send sample products, or to advertiseon their mailing lists.

7. Make payments simple, mobile and efficient

Nothingchases people away faster than a bad payment process. They’ll get secondthoughts, give up and go somewhere else. Don’t lose shoppers in the check-outprocess, especially not today when you have access to so many solutions thatwill help you make everybody’s life a lot safer and easier. Optimise yourcheckout process by removing unnecessary steps, especially on a mobile device,and make purchase completion as simple as a few clicks. Also don’t ask for moredetails than is absolutely necessary – their billing information and shippinginfo alone is fine.

8. Engage in digital marketing

Thisdoesn’t have to be an expensive investment, you need only a few hundred Randsevery month to spend on paid-for advertising to your target market. This canhelp your brand get noticed on the search engines which is very helpful whenyou’re starting out. Work out your budget, target your traffic with clickable,text-based ads that appear in specific search results – Google Ads can help yourank for certain keywords and phrases – and your customers will see you whenthey’re looking for what you sell.

9. Reach out to influencers

It’s easyto dismiss influencers as people who simply live on social media for attention,but they can actually be powerful tools in your arsenal. You don’t need to aimfor the big guns, either. Focus on niche, micro influencers who talk directlyto your target market and who can use your products, review them honestly, andtalk about them with their audience. You can pay for them to use your product,or you can work with them as partners, it will depend on the influencer and thesize of their following. Influencer platforms in South Africa includeWebfluential, Continuon, and newcomer, Humanz .

10. Go offline

No, thisdoesn’t mean taking all your hard work off the internet and into the streets.It means that you shouldn’t discount the value of establishing real connectionswith real people. Networking at relevant events, spending time talking to thepeople who would be your customers, exploring other sales options through brickand mortar partnerships – all these offline options can add immense value to yourbusiness. For example, a pet supplies shop could find partnering with a localshelter and opening a pop-up shop there on Saturdays to be very lucrative.

Conclusion

Everybusiness starts with zero customers in the beginning – yes, even Amazon.Getting the first 10 or 100 customers is often the hardest. But don’t feeloverwhelmed by the hard work that lies ahead, rather be inspired by how it willhelp you to learn more about your customers, your market, and your business.

Once you have the first 100 customers, you’re on your way to success, this is just the hard bit at the start. Explore, try different methods, fail, try again – adopt a strategy that works for your business and keep on tweaking it as your business grows.

How To Get Your First 100 Customers

DPO PayGate is a proud Partner of the NSBC.