Finding Your First 100 Users

Founders often labor under the belief that once their product is ready, beta customers will come flooding in. This is often described as The Field of Dreams fallacy from the movie of the same name. In the movie, our hero—Kevin Costner—is woken with a vision; If he builds a baseball diamond in his corn field, “they will come”. 

While founders are rarely visited by apparitions, they often have a vision of a better world, and believe that customers who share that vision will simply turn up. However, experience has shown that even the best products can struggle to find an audience on their own. So founders need to quickly switch focus from building a valuable product to connecting the value the product delivers with prospective customers. There are essentially three ways to do this. However, before you choose a path, you need to think about who these early adopters are. 

Finding your early adopters

Founders will often have a picture in their mind of their Ideal Customer Profile. The people who will get most value out of their product. However, these ICPs are often fairly sophisticated users in well established tech companies who typically have an extensive list of requirements. This can lead founders to spend the next 12-18 months chasing feature parity in order to tempt these clients over. However, feature parity is an ever moving target, and you're in danger of building a “me too” product if the best you can say about your products is it does everything the competitor does. 

Instead, you need to hone in on a “beachhead” customer. Somebody who is unhappy with the current competitive offering—usually because it falls down in one significant area that they really care about—and are willing to switch to a product which solves that problem elegantly, even if it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. 

If you’re casting a wide net, these sorts of customers are hard to find. You’ll have plenty of customers who assure you they’ll sign up if it does A, B and C. You’ll speak to other customers who tell you it really needs to do X, Y and Z. This feedback is super helpful and should definitely inform your roadmap largely because you want to be able to add features over the next 6-12 months that will allow you to onboard those more sophisticated customers. However, the real trick is to find people who “need” your solution so much that they’ll put up with its lack of features. And if you’re not finding people who are willing to take such a leap of faith, it’s either an indication that you either haven’t found the right USP yet, or you might be fishing in the wrong place. 

Having an early adopter mind set is rare. In fact, I’d imagine that less than 10% of the people you speak to will be willing to give a new and untested product a try. As such, you’ll probably need to talk to 100 people in order to find 10 who are willing to kick the tires; and with activation rates often hovering around 5-20%, of those 10 calls, only 1 or 2 might sign up. As such, early stage acquisition is very much a numbers game, and you shouldn’t feel too disheartened if those early conversations go nowhere. 

Founder Led Sales

Most founders feel like they are bad at sales. Because of this, they have a natural tendency to want to spend more time in the area they are comfortable with — namely, product. However, in my experience, I’d say the majority of early customers come from direct founder outreach, so sales is something that founders need to get good at. 

The good news is that founders are generally much better at sales than they think. They’ve managed to convince a bunch of early teammates to join them on an incredibly risky journey, often for much less money than they’d be able to get elsewhere. They’ve also managed to convince a group of angel investors and VCs to part with often sizable amounts of money. Both of these activities are sales activities.

In my experience, founders are actually surprisingly good salespeople because they really understand the problem they are trying to solve, are able to empathize with prospective customers, and outline their vision for a better world. Also being frank, it feels much nicer being pitched an idea by a founder than some junior sales executive. As such, I generally find that founders are able to close more deals than a professional salesperson, while only spending half as much time. 

This generally means that in the early stages of a product's launch, the best leverage you can have is to spend time on sales, and you might end up needing to hire two or three sales executives to close the same number of deals as a founder. 

Your Early Sales Motion

While founders often feel shy when it comes to sales, they usually have no problem reaching out to people for a “customer discovery” call. As such, I generally recommend founders build their early sales motion off the back of these calls.

In a typical customer discovery call, you want to try and understand your prospective customer’s problems in order to create a meaningful solution. So you ask people about their role, their work, what they find challenging, and what tools or processes they use to solve these problems already, and what it would mean to them if there was a better solution. You then take notes, thank them for their help and let them know that you’ll be in touch when the product is ready. 

With a “sales discovery” call, you still follow the same approach. However, you now have a possible solution to their problem, so you add one more thing, which is to ask whether they’d like to try the solution. If the people you are talking to are keen, you might very well be able to land a sale right there. However, if you’re shy about asking for money—something you really need to get over—you could try to land them as a “Design Partner” or Beta Customer on a free or discounted package for a few months. Once they’ve used the product for a while and started receiving value, asking them to start paying will be a lot easier. And if, after a few months, they’ve not been getting enough value to pay, you’ve learnt something super important about the product in the process. So how do you find these early customers?

Prospecting and Outreach 

Customer prospecting is an article in its own right. However, most founders start by building up a picture of their target prospect. Things like their job title, the sector they work in, the size of their company, where it’s headquartered and maybe their revenue or funding level. You can then use tools like LinkedIn to hone in on these people and start building your sales sequence. 

A sales sequence is usually the series of steps you’re going to take in order to reach out to somebody. On LinkedIn, this might be visiting their profile, reading or liking a few articles, following them, verifying some skills, reaching out to connect, sending an initial message, and some follow up messages if that doesn’t work. 

Doing all these actions can be quite time consuming, so early founders will often hire some sort of junior to do this prospecting for them. There are also an increasing number of tools like dripify which will automate this process for you. This allows founders to focus on the highest leverage tasks; hopping on a call with prospecting customers and closing the deal. 

One thing to note is that the way you craft your outreach can have a significant effect on hit rate. If you send a fairly generic sales email introducing your product, the response rate is likely to be low. Instead, it’s usually better to open with a personal message that shows you’ve actually connected with that person, ask a question relating to a problem you think they might have (and you know your product can help with) and then share some useful or intriguing offer. 

For instance:

Hi [name], I really liked the [article you wrote/comment you made] on [location] the other day. As an [insert role] I was curious what you’re currently doing about [problem]. I’ve [just started a new company/written an article about this subject] and I was wondering [if you’d be up for giving me some feedback/taking a look]?

This is obviously a super basic script, so I’d expect you to write something a little more sophisticated, but you get the basic idea. Be human, show interest, ask questions and if possible, have something useful to offer beyond your wonderful new product. 

Like most sales motions, you’ll get a lot of rejections. I think this is one reason why founders generally shy away from sales. However, if you’re not willing to experience this, why should anybody else on your team? One way to get around this blocker is to set explicit targets for the number of contacts you’re going to make each week, and carve out specific blocks of time when you’re going to focus on this. Otherwise, the tendency is to let this slide in favor of the more fun product stuff.

Once you know that every 100 LinkedIn connections leads to 5 discovery calls and 1 conversion, you know that doubling the outreach and calls you can do, will double the number of sales you make. This allows you to manage your time (and growth) better, as well as know when you need to bring other folks in to help out. 

While sales can be off-putting for many founders, the good news is that sales is actually a brilliant way to learn about how to position your product; what objections customers come up with and how to tackle them, and what features and functions really are deal breakers. As such, founder sales really is the natural extension to discovery. In the early days, it’s also something that can drive a lot of value, because if you don’t have people using your product, you can’t really learn what you’re doing right or wrong.

Founder Led Marketing

In some regards, founder-led marketing is very similar to founder-led sales, in that you’re trying to connect the value your product delivers with your early adopters. The main difference is that you’re doing this by broadcasting rather than narrowcasting. Or to put it another way, rather than finding individual prospects, you’re finding the places where your prospects hang out, and sharing messages on those channels in the hope it will resonate with prospective customers and draw them to you. 

Early-stage founder-led marketing generally works best if the founder already has clear channels they’re comfortable with. Maybe they have a bunch of followers on X or LinkedIn. Maybe they speak at conferences or have a popular blog?  Or maybe they are members of an existing community. Either way, your first job is to start telling people what you're doing, which generally means creating content. 

If you don’t have any existing channels, you obviously have to find one first. This generally requires having a good knowledge of your customers and where they hang out. Finding channels that work can be a challenge. Especially cost-effective ones. So rather than spreading yourself too thin, your goal should really be to find a single channel that works best for you, your users, your product and your team, and then build out from there. This requires a lot of experimentation and it might take months before you find a channel and message which lands. 

Sadly, I see a lot of early-stage companies producing a tonne of low value ”background radiation” type content which is frankly a waste of time and energy. This is often because they don’t really know what resonates with prospective customers, so end up just throwing things against the wall in the hope that something will stick. Much better to have a strong understanding of your user needs and create content that really connects on a deeper level. Often, this content will come from the conversations happening on the channels and communities you’re exploring, and the discovery and sales calls you’re having.

So what are the things that keep your customers up at night, but nobody else is talking about? What do they hate about existing solutions, and the companies that provide them? What are the industry “sacred cows” which are ripe for being turned over? In order to cut through the noise you need to have a strong position and something important or meaningful to say. So why did you start down this journey in the first place, and how can you connect those feelings of frustration and anger with the status quo with your early adopters. Content creation is another thing that founders like to outsource to junior team members. However, they probably don’t have the same burning vision as you do, so the best early content usually stems from the founders themselves. 

One of the great things about content marketing is that good content is easy to repurpose. So even if you are primarily focusing on a sales led approach, having one or two high quality pieces of content you can offer up during your sales outreach is a great way of connecting with prospective customers, reconnecting if you haven’t spoke to them in a while, or as a way of getting permission to contact them back in the future. 

Paid Ads

This brings us nicely onto the topic of paid acquisition — essentially ads. Ads can be a super attractive way for founders to acquire customers if they don’t want to put the effort into sales, or don’t want to wait for their marketing activities to take off. You can select a channel like search or social ads, define specific characteristics you’re looking to target, define how much you’re willing to pay per click, and have the campaign running in the background. 

The big problem with paid advertising is that it’s costly, meaning you can burn through a tonne of money fairly quickly. This is especially true in highly contested areas where bigger and better funded companies are able to outcompete you. Setting up a good advertising campaign also takes a reasonable amount of skill; and not having these skills on your team can often mean you spending much more to acquire customers than is strictly necessary. Advertising is also addictive, so that once you start relying on paid acquisition, it becomes much harder to wean yourself off. As such, while advertising might seem like a great “turbo boost” in the early days, it can quickly become a rod for your own back. 

With that in mind, I generally think it’s better to start with either a founder-led sales or founder-led marketing approach, and use advertising as a back up. The one caveat I would add is that paid advertising can be a cost-effective way to test your positioning, as it allows you to try numerous different versions of your value prop, to see which lands. You can also use advertising as a crude form of multivariate testing, driving different groups of people to different landing pages in order to see which performs best.  However, as Jeff Bezos allegedly once said “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.”

Conclusions

While it’s tempting for founders to delegate sales and marketing to junior team members in order to focus on product, building a customer acquisition engine is going to be key to your success. As such, this is something that founders should place a great deal of focus on, only passing this on to somebody else once the core pieces are in place. Getting those first 100 users is vital to the success of your startup, and the learning you’ll gain through doing this will be invaluable. This is probably one of the reasons why “First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.”

For more ideas on finding your first 100 users, check out The Growth Equation