Are you magnetic?

The push and pull

At EF, we often find our first time founders struggle with how to focus their time when starting up. There is a sea of things you could do and little direction on how you should spend your time. Time is the most valuable asset you have, but it’s also one of the least tangible — unlike money, you don’t see it slowly depleting. You need to constantly ask yourself “what’s the optimal use of my time?” (read here for how to answer this in a more meta sense).

When you run a big company, knowing what to do is easy. There will be constant pulls on your time by customers. Customers will have orders that need to be fulfilled, complaints that need to be resolved, new customers to be reached etc. If you’re ever stuck for how to spend your time, a customer can probably pull you into action.

In the first 100 days of your startup, this pull from customers may not exist. It can become easy to get distracted — you need to remind yourself that you’re building a product, not a startup and that to build an amazing product you need to have some people using it.

Find the magnets until you’re magnetic

All ideas are born flawed. It’s only through trying to get customers to use your product that you realise this. At EF, we have never had a good startup that has pushed their product to customers and felt satisfied. If you’re not feeling the fear, or feeling the pressure, it’s because you aren’t interacting enough with potential or actual customers.

When starting out, you’re not magnetic to your customers. Your customers are not naturally drawn to you and what you do. There may be a handful of super pro-active customers who are actively googling your product, but in the early days you cannot rely on this. You need to find the magnets that already have a pull on your potential customers.

What constitutes a magnet?

• Meetup groups where customers already gather. This doesn’t mean browsing meetup.com, it means finding the groups specific for your customer e.g., mother and baby groups for a childcare focused startup, track days for a car based startup.
• Physical locations where your customer spends a lot of time. This might be the pub next to the office that your customer works in, this could be supermarkets during the day that young mothers go to, or the cafe that London cabbies hang out in.
• Online groups whether it be forums, LinkedIn groups, hangouts etc, that are specific to your niche customer group.

Working out how to access these magnets and work them to your advantage is one of the key attributes of our successful founders. It can be easy to sit back and wait for people to come to you, but the best founders hunt down their customers and get under the skin of their habits.

Some of our most successful founders at EF have worked out how to, not only interact with these magnets, but become useful to them. For example, meetup groups need speakers, after-school clubs need volunteers, startups need advice on office space costs. It maybe that by providing an auxiliary service (of value) you can access the time and headspace of the people you want to talk to.

Stop or try harder — whichever is most appealing

Every year we have teams that say their customer group is particularly hard to reach. This is another great kidding-yourself attitude. Finding customers is hard and the founders that win are not necessarily those that build the best product, but those that are best at reaching customers.

I worry if you are struggling to reach customers because it means one of two things, either:

• no-one wants what you’re building, or
• you don’t have (or aren’t quickly developing) the skills required to find customers.

In the end, I’m less worried about the former as this is fixable, once you realise this you can change what you’re building. If it’s the latter and at least one of your co-founding team isn’t willing to learn, or to start the slog required to do this, then that’s a much scarier prospect.

As Alex from the EF team says “If you contact 500 people and none reply, they probably don’t want your stuff. But if you contact 10 and start complaining, you should stop or try harder, whichever is more appealing”.

Use existing magnets to short cut the process of finding customers, but don’t expect this to act as a panacea. Magnets, like introductions, are an accelerant, not a panacea to all your customer development woes.

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