I don’t know when or why in the start-up world we decided arbitrarily the first 10 customers were the most important and hardest to get, but we did. Like, why not 15 or 20? 

The bigger picture concept here is important, though. Your first few customers really do matter. In this article, we’re going to talk about why that is and how you can get them (or at least how we did at GodmodeHQ).

It all starts before you build your product. Once you settle on your team and idea, getting in front of potential users is critical. To do this, you can use your own network as well as place on the internet with dedicated communities like Reddit or Bravado. 

This is the point where you spend as much time as possible talking to users about their problems. Do not ask them about their desired solution. That is your job. Find out what their problems are, build what you think the solution is, and then test if they are using it. There are tons of resources out there on how to conduct user interviews at each stage of the process. 

That’s what we did. We built the product, not only based on what potential users’ problems but also based on the problems that we had faced ourselves as founders trying to do B2B sales in our previous businesses. The best problems to solve are the ones you’ve faced yourself. That way, you know what your ideal solution is like. And, trust me, no one is special enough to be the only person that has ever needed a solution to a given problem. 

The problem that we had doing sales previously is that doing lead research and message personalisation was a really slow and painful process. So we built the first MVP for GodmodeHQ. It wasn’t great, but it worked. We put the product in front of people we knew from our network that we knew were suffering from this problem and monitored how they used it and asked for their feedback. 

Don’t judge your product by how many people tell you it’s awesome. And, don’t take the feedback of people who aren’t paying too seriously, although, you shouldn’t ignore it either. That’s what makes the first stages of iterating based on user feedback really hard, no one is paying for your product, so you don’t know what feedback you should trust. 

As you watch how users interact with your product and incorporate their feedback, you iterate on your product’s capabilities. You keep doing that over and over until you get to a product that you think is somewhat sellable. That is when the hard part comes in. 

Because GodmodeHQ can be used by anyone who is selling, our pool of potential users is massive. That makes the product hard to sell at first. The reason is that if you know exactly who you are selling to, you’re able to tweak your marketing messaging accordingly. 

That was a big challenge for us at first. We reached out to SDRs, head of sales, founders, AEs, VP of sales, and pretty much every other sales related roles that you could imagine. We also tried different industries. First we tried SaaS, then we figured that SaaS founders have really flooded inboxes. So, we tried professional services, consulting, accounting, law practices, etc…. We found that they weren’t ready to trust AI at the time. We even tried wealth managers, but realised that they have some crazy inbox protection software that destroys deliverability. 

The point is, we tried “spray and pray”, to an extent. And, it got us some results. But not the results we wanted. By the end of our first 2 months of selling, we had customers who were VCs, recruiters, SaaS start-ups, free-lance marketeers and more. 

You might be fooled that this is good news, but it isn’t. Just like I said before, because our customers came from so many different places, we didn’t know who our ICP was exactly. We didn’t have product market fit within a particular group of people who could not live without our product. 

What did we do to get to our more narrow ICP? Honestly? We just kept trying. We kept seeing who was giving us the most useful feedback. Who was most excited to use the product? Who spent the most time on the product? 

We found out that the answer to that question was account executive of mid-market tech companies. So, we targeted all of our campaigns towards them. The biggest challenge is that AEs are not always buyers, even if they are users. So, the sales cycle becomes much longer as they champion our product to their managers. You might think that the approach here is to go directly to their managers but we didn’t find that to be the case. Why? Their managers don’t face the problem of researching and personalising their leads on scale. So they don’t feel the urgency of the problem enough to buy its solution (our product). 

Once you get to that point, when you narrow down your ICP, scaling past your first 10 customers becomes much easier. If you treat them well, they will introduce you to more leads who you can turn into customers. Also, adjusting our messaging and content specifically thinking of AEs boosted all of our metrics significantly. 

I guess the moral of this story is: try reaching out to different personas depending on who you think could benefit the most from your product. Do that thousands of times, and eventually, you will find a group of people who need your product desperately. Then, 10x your outreach to these people, and tailor all of your marketing materials towards them. 

At some point, you realise that your product sells in a product-led motion. Outbound stops driving the majority of your sales. That is when you know that you are at or around PMF.