How to get your first 10 paying customers

Steve McLeod
Jul 24, 2017 · 9 min read

Here’s a true story about an entrepreneur who failed to get paying customers:

Jo launched … and not a single person in the entire world noticed.

A software developer — call him Jo¹ — dreamed of running a business. The business would earn money by creating and selling a software product. Jo thought that the hard part would be making the product. Jo considered himself a good developer so he was confident he’d be able to crush this part of the business. Jo started programming in the evenings after work. Within a couple of months Jo released SuperSiteMonitor v1². It was not exactly the product Jo envisaged — everything took much longer than expected. But Jo read that if you are not embarrassed by version 1, then you didn’t release early enough. So Jo launched…

… and not a single person in the entire world noticed.

There are many would-be entrepreneurs like Jo. They make a basic product, add a payment system, and put it online. They subsequently sell to exactly zero people. It comes as a shock that “build it and they will come” almost never works. If your product is good but no-one ever hears of it, you’ll never have a viable business.

Jo learnt a lesson. His pride was wounded and some of his illusions about business were dispelled. He retreated from trying to make and sell his own software product for a couple of years. Instead he set himself to learning how to market and sell software. Clearly he lacked these skills.

Jo tried again, with a new product. This time Jo knew to expect silence from the world. He knew that customers would only come if he pursued certain activities. He knew that the path to making a living from selling his own software would be long and slow. This attitude helped, and eventually Jo was able to quit his day job and live solely from sales of the software he made, marketed, supported, and sold.

Here are some strategies Jo adopted for getting those first 10 sales:

Is lack of sales really the problem you are facing?

If you have a marketing website for your product, does it have any visitors, other than yourself, your friends, and your family? Do people find it on Google? Do people recommend it on other sites? If not, then the problem you need to solve is not “how do I get my first sales”, but rather, “how do I get my first site visitors”. This is an entirely different problem which deserves a full article, so I’ll be brief.

There are three parts to selling anything on the internet:

  1. Getting people to your website (“traffic”).
  2. Encouraging some of the people in step 1 to sign up for or try your product (conversion to “signups” or “trials”).
  3. Convincing some of the the people in step 2 to purchase your product. (conversion to “paid customers”)

There’s no point in trying to solve steps 2 and 3 if you haven’t yet solved step 1. For now, your goal is to increase traffic. First, achieve a certain level of daily traffic to your site, and then you can work out how to sell to people.

So how to get that traffic? Here are three good starting points:

You gotta have patience

People running their business for the first time have unrealistic expectations. They expect success to come quickly. Here’s some news you don’t want to hear: there is a good chance you won’t have a single sale for several months. Some people do get sales quickly, but those are the remarkable examples. We hear those stories because they are exceptional. Many business success stories had a very slow start.

FreshBooks (which offers accounting software for small businesses) is a multimillion dollar company today. Michael McDermott, the founder of FreshBooks, reminisces about the early years. Two years after he started coding FreshBooks, he had only 10 paying customers, each paying $9.99/month. $100/month for two years’ work sounds pitiful. Many people would have given up well before then.


An aside: imagine that having reached sales of $100/month, the founder of FreshDesk set out to improve sales by 10% each month, any way that he could. Four years later, through the surprising results of exponential growth, he’d have roughly $10,000 in sales per month.

Surprised by this claim? Here’s the maths: 4 years is 48 months, and 10% growth is the same as multiplying by 1.1.

$100 * 1.1⁴⁸ = $9,701


You gotta have patience.

Talk to the people you know

Do you already know people who might be interested in your product? Current or former colleagues? Friends and acquaintances? The answer should be yes. (If not, then why did you choose to make your product? Seems like an unwise decision if you don’t know any potential users of it.)

Assuming you actually do know people who might be interested in your product, meet with them and tell them about your product. Don’t be pushy about it: there’s no need to try sell to them directly.

Ask if you can meet with them to get their opinion on your product. Let them offer their opinion. Listen to them. Ask them what they’d do to market it and convince people to buy it. Openly accept their opinion, good or bad, without arguing or letting your ego get too involved.

Some people will tell you that actually they’d like this product and will want to know when they can buy it. Some will tell you that it is almost what they need, but could you just add this one feature. Some will tell you that they know someone who could really use this.

You’ll find most people to be impressed with what you are trying to do. Some will tell you they’ve dreamed of doing something similar. Other will want to help you, perhaps by recommending you to someone they know.

Be generous and offer special “friends and family” discounts.

Just remember, don’t directly try to sell to your friends and close acquaintances. It’s not a nice feeling when someone you know asks to spend time with you socially and then tries to sell you something. Just seek their opinion on what you are doing, and if they do show interest in buying, humbly thank them, and tell them that’s really nice, and you’d love to offer them a big discount if they do buy.

Go to where your potential customers are

Where can your target audience be found? At certain conferences? In online communities? Reading trade magazines? At relevant meet-ups? Go to these places, virtual or otherwise. Talk to people. When they say “what do you do”, tell them briefly about your product. If they ask for more information, be ready to tell them, be ready to offer them a demo, be ready to give them a business card or brochure, and be ready to contact them again some days later to follow up.

Go way overboard in helpfulness with your first trial customers

Do you have a one month free trial period for your product? Most “SaaS” (Software-as-a-service) products do. As soon as anyone signs up, email them personally. Make sure it is clear you are actually writing in person, as people are getting used to automatic emails pretending to be personal. A good way of making sure the recipient knows this is a personal email is to mention something about the customer’s site, something you can usually deduce from their email domain name.

A short, simple mail helps. Here’s an example:

Hi,

Thanks for signing up for <your product>. Let me know what I can do to help you get started.

<insert personal comment here>

Regards,

John Smith
Founder, <your product>

A surprising amount of people respond to these emails. If someone does respond, and has more questions, answer them and offer to have a Skype call so that you can discuss what they want to achieve with your product.

If you are a software developer, you probably just read the last paragraph and were shocked. You’d never want a company representative to Skype with you just because you tried their product. But most people in this world are not software developers. Many of these not-software-developer people actually appreciate a telephone call.

The amazing thing about Skype calls is some people will sign up as a paying customer simply because you agreed to be on the phone with them. Towards the end of your call, pose a direct question: “do you expect to be signing up for one of our paid plans?”, and typically the answer will be “yes”.

Be generous

Be willing to offer extended trial periods and discounted plans. Often someone who is considering buying your product but is wavering in the decision will instantly buy when you offer a discount. Something in our human brains just loves knowing we got something at a special price.

Steam, an online platform and marketplace for computer games, takes advantage of this. They often offer discounts on a game a few months after the game’s initial launch. Discounted games sell by the ton on Steam. Many purchasers will never even play the games, but will still believe they got a bargain.

Hustle — Do things that don’t scale

Not so long ago, “hustling” was a negative word and referred to deceptive practices in gambling. Now, in business, it has a positive definition. The modern definition is to work enthusiastically and energetically in chasing after every potential lead. It exhausts you and can’t be maintained long term. In the short term, however, it can help land those first few sales.

Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator (a remarkably successful hybrid of an investment fund/business incubator) recommends that in the early days of your business you should do things that don’t scale:

The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.

Do it in person

Whenever you get the chance to meet in real life with people interested in your product, do so. You’ll learn a lot by watching people as they struggle to understand exactly what your product is. You’ll see which product descriptions work. You’ll hear people attempt to describe back to you in their own words what problem your product solves. If you can, note down those words and start using them in your marketing copy.

Real life people are far more likely to tell you their doubts about your product, concerns that you’ll need to answer, both in real life and on your site.

For example, a potential customer will comment, “This wouldn’t work for me, because I would mostly use your product on mobile”. Now you know that this is a valid concern. Whatever answer you give that person, make sure to add it to your site.

Share on sites such as Quora, Product Hunt, reddit

Many developers hope that by getting their product mentioned on these sites, money will start raining down on them. I’m dubious. They can be good for finding initial people to engage with, but they can also be distractions that get you nowhere with your actual target audience.

Having said that, it certainly doesn’t hurt to submit your product to Product Hunt. It is a good experience in trying to promote your product in an environment where you have limited control over the appearance. You’ll need to work hard to find the right words to describe what problem your product solves, who the target audience is, and what your unique selling proposition is, all in a couple of sentences.

On Quora, search for questions where a description of your product is an appropriate answer. Describe how your product is relevant to the question succinctly but thoroughly. Make sure to add quality screenshots.

On reddit, find an appropriate subreddit if possible. Be sure to get permission from the subreddit moderators before posting. You can also post to /r/startups in their monthly sticky “Share your startup” thread.

Cold selling

I write this for completeness, but I detest cold selling. Cold selling is when you approach someone you don’t know, with whom you have no existing connection, to try to sell your product to them. This approach works for some people, but us software developers almost certainly don’t have the right personality to be able to do this. It takes a lot of effort to find out who to contact, and then more effort to contact them. You’ll need to cope well with either being ignored or told no in harsh terms.


Getting traffic, and then trial customers, and then paid customers is a slow, hard grind. Accept this, be patient, persistent, and assertive, and perhaps you’ll get those all-important first sales.

[1] Jo’s real name is Steve, which not coincidentally is my name.

[2] The product was actually called Barbary Monitor. It was released in 2005. It never had a single sale before I, ah, I mean, Jo closed it down.

Steve McLeod

Written by

Founder of featureupvote.com, living in Barcelona, Spain

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