6 ways to get your first 1000 customers

If getting customers is such an easy execution we would have more products in this world than the number of Facebook accounts that exist. This might sound like an exaggeration but I guess you get my point. There are few things you need to do sharply right to get your first 1000 paying customers on board. This is like a rocket push for any product and the initial traction decides the trajectory of your product precisely.

Here are the ideas and success stories of some great products that could probably inspire your launch plan.

1. THE FIRST STEP TO GREAT LAUNCH: Get your product right

Get into the shoes of your target customers and understand their problems first hand. Build something minimal with a realization that it is a worthy problem to fix and just focus. Once you make sure it would ease your customer’s pain tangibly go find the right people with right network and get their hands on your product as soon as possible. Like Statuspage.io, you could try HackerNews or other similar avenues to get the initial customer base. Such a soft launch will help you build enough feedback about your product performance and you will know what it lacks to be a full blown product.

You could even approach incubators like AngelPad, YCombinator etc., as your have a live validation from PipeDrive. But make sure your initial customers get the best experience with your product. Spend time on-boarding them, hand hold them (without them knowing it) and register your brand in their minds.

2. Make your signup process dead simple

The best experience and engagement should begin from the very first step. Keep your website signup form simple. Do not trouble your customers asking for their bio data when you need to focus on collecting valid feedback and make some inroads into the market. Enable some analytic tool (Eg: Intercom or Kissmetrics) that fits your need and follow the customer paths.

Spend time on-boarding your customers, hand hold them (without them knowing it) wherever they stumble and make sure you register your brand in their minds.

3. Offer a great deal

Focus on getting more customers try your product and not on amassing the revenue upfront. Don’t shy away from offering great promotional deals for early starters. It is worth it when you really need to build your testimonials and referrals. An offer would incentivize a customer who is trusting you and your product when you have just started building your brand yet.

You could try some creative ideas like Groovehq’s software stack or services like Appsumo. Combining your offer with an established marketplace like this could help you reach further.

4. Experiment with your website design and pricing

When you are ground testing your application you should also try to optimize your website, messaging, positioning and pricing for the target market. Start simple and do minor changes to the content based on the direct and indirect feedback you receive from the market. You have got to do this keeping in mind your long term growth and competitive strategy.

You could refer this article in Inc so more interesting ideas on the topic.

5. Run a referral program

If you remember how Dropbox continues to grow at a break neck pace even at the existence of competitors like Box, Google Drive, iCloud etc. it is through their simplified on-boarding and referral program. Every dropbox user continues to add more storage by referring more people. Such an easy step for any user to take but an important push for Dropbox’s business.

Also do not forget to make it easy for people to spread your product to their network. You can even make this option explicit like Groove did. All this will ensure some amount of virality for your product.

You can explore other ideas on how to go viral in this link.

6. Influencer outreach and Public relations

All the ideas and tactics we have discussed thus far solely depend upon you and only you. You can build a great product and enable every option available for users to easily try your product, experience it, become customers and spread the message.

But what if you cannot get enough people to visit your site immediately after the launch?

This could happen in all probability considering you are new to search engine and you would not show up on any search query; Incubators might turn you down easily; You may not get good amount of traffic from your posts on HackerNews; You could struggle big time to get even few hands to try your product.

Don’t be bogged down. You can avoid such a situation if you can build relationship with at least few (worst case 2 or 3) influencers and convince one or two journalists with your product pitch. Most successes are defined by what happens in this step. Finding right people with enough followership comprising of your target market could give that initial momentum like no other. You can find many articles about how to execute this idea but remember this requires time and enough mind space. There are even products that could help you find right journalists. Here are some examples.

I would definitely love to explore more ideas related to launch topic and if you think I have missed something bring it up for discussion. I also once happened to cover a topic on how to use Twitter for product launch, which you can refer to.

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