How to get your first 10 customers

I am not a believer in stealth. Stealth implies that in a vacuum you can build a perfect product, perfect your positioning, packaging, pricing, personas and distribution and then launch. The entire thesis of our company LaunchDarkly is that constant iteration is necessary to refine on

• who wants to use your product,
• how much will they pay,
• how will you reach them,
• (and how will they find you) as well as
• what actually is the functionality of your product.

Truly, the first ten customers are the hardest. You are an unknown company in an unknown market. Even if you do have the perfect product and packaging, only the truly desperate rely on an unknown company. If anyone else was doing it, buyers would prefer to buy from a stable known entity with references and testimonials. That said, here’s how LaunchDarkly got our first ten customers.

1, 2 Our first two customers were former coworkers of mine. I told everyone I knew what we were working on, and two separate companies said they were interested in trying us. John (my cofounder) and I went to their office, and they installed it. They were very generous with their time and feedback in all the initial issues they had with our SDKs. I truly appreciated both companies taking a chance on us.

3, 4 Batch Mate Our next two customers were batch mates in Alchemist Accelerator. They saw what we were up to, and said they were interested in using it. This gave us more feedback in actual usability issues, though as fellow batch mates they couldn’t pay us much.

5 I’d been blogging about what we were doing on feature flagging, dark launches and canary launches. An Engineering Director did a google search, found us, and signed up to learn more. I called him and talked about what he was looking for — he’d just left a big company which had it’s own homegrown feature flagging system. When he described what he was looking for, I said “We have that!”. This was my first truly happy moment that we were starting to get unaffiliated customers and our content marketing was working. However, it was very helpful that customers 1–4 had helped us work through many earlier kinks. Unaffiliated customers are far less forgiving than accelerator batch mates.

6–7 People in my extended network who heard what we doing, but who I didn’t consider friends. Again, these were because I was very vocal about talking to people.

8 Another completely unaffiliated company who came in via a google keyword search. I never talked to them on the phone as they were not US based. This was to me an even happier moment that we were starting to get more repeatable.

9 Someone was late for a pitch event, and the organizer asked me to fill in. I pitched LaunchDarkly & got some tough questions from the audience. It turned out the tough questions were because they were interested. They now have been using us for almost two years.

Lesson: Never, ever, ever turn down an opportunity to pitch.

Lesson 2: Tough questions usually mean the person is genuinely interested, as these are the questions they’ll get if they try to be your champion.

10 Former coworkers of John were curious on what we were working on. Started a small pilot. Now two years later they are using us company-wide. Again, we’d worked out kinks with smaller friendlier customers such that they could use us.

Will what worked for LaunchDarkly work for you? I honestly don’t know. I do know that we needed affiliated customers (who would give us brutal feedback) to start to attract unaffiliated customers. And we got our customers by pitching, talking, blogging, and being relentless.

Thanks to Paul Biggar and Schuyler C Brown for feedback on a dark launch of this post.