Lessons from 500 first-time founders on how they landed their first paying customer, and how they built momentum.

This summer, more than 500 people from more than 50 countries joined an eight-week startup camp my company runs. Most had never started a business. Many had never written a line of code, and it didn’t matter. With today’s AI tools, most of them had a working product within the first couple of weeks.

Getting someone to pay was the hard part, and about 1 in 10 managed it.

I spent the weeks after camp asking those founders how they did it. This is what I learned:  

Almost none of the first customers were strangers. One founder, a marketing consultant, built a small ad tool for his own use. He showed it to a group of entrepreneurs he met with regularly because he thought it might help them. Those 10 became the first paying customers. Another founder built a language-learning app. Her first customer was a math teacher in Italy, the friend of a friend of a friend. Three introductions away sounds far, but each one carried a little trust, and that was enough.

If you are starting out, write down the 50 people who would take your call. Your first customer is more likely on that list than in an ad audience.

The founders who got paid often sold something that wasn’t really a product yet. A founder working on grief support ran her whole service through Instagram direct messages. She had more than 500 conversations before she built a website, and each conversation was both the product and the demo.

Source link