Many founders often missout how they are going to have customers. They lost on their ideas and development. After building your product, one of the most common questions arises: How to get your first 100 customers? Customers validate your product, letting you know whether they like it or not and where you need to add some features. Basically, you also need their feedback, not just their money.
There are four common strategies that you can follow to get your first 100 customers:
1. Email People You Already Know:
Reach out to old classmates, close family, and friends. If it is a paid product, you can actually charge them. Go to your contact list and call them. Tell your business stories, product and price. Try to get some feedback from them. If they are young and used similar kinds of products before they will tell you what is missing there.
2. Research and Reach Out:
If you are an entrepreneur you need to reachout thousand of people. Need to tell them about your product. So don’t be shy to reachout. Many people give up where you are now. Identify people who might like your product and email them or DM them on social media. The conversion rate here is really low, maybe 2-3%, but you need to reach out to more people. Ask them to try your new product. Many people may be helpful and might share it with others.
3. Social Media Outreach:
Post on platforms like HN, forums, etc. You can find people in communities where they talk about the same topic. If this is your strategy, you need to figure out how to make it ongoing. The important thing is to look for a traffic source that is sustainable rather than one big pop-up that promptly goes away. Airbnb is an example of a company that used this ongoing process. They just kept going.
4. Buy Ads:
The laziest and least impressive thing you can do is buy ads from Facebook or Google and point them to your website. This is not recommended for any startup because not many startups get big this way.
Conclusion
The world has almost 8 billion people. Everyone is thinking about having a good life. To have a good life you need enough money. So, this is a really crowded race when you are building something. To compete in this crowded market you need to make fast decisions. Need to change your business model if the old one does not work properly. But the first thing you need is to reach out to your customer.