Ask HN: How did you get your first paying customer?
We are building a web application targeted towards educational institutions. We have recently started the sales process and have begun with making cold calls/visits to potential customers. Will appreciate it if you can share your experience and learnings as you went out to get the first paying customer
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I own an outsourcing company with a team of 10 in the Philippines. I started in August 2008 out of necessity when the company I was working for needed more work done than we could handle with the few employees we had. Since the company was based in Malibu, CA, it was difficult to find qualified employees who were either nearby or willing to commute for the salary they were offering.
I had been working with a web designer/developer in Cebu for over a year at that point, so I mentioned that to my boss. After a few small paid projects, they were impressed enough to sign a contract for ongoing projects. I asked my guy in Cebu if he knew any more developers, and he found 3 more. I formed an LLC and with one customer, we were in business.
2 months later, I got an email from a former classmate of my boss who heard about our service, and he needed a website updated, and the original web design company was too busy to get it done right away. In the course of doing that project, we had to contact them to get the server login info, and when we told them what our company did, they hired us to do web design for them.
It's been like that for the last few years, just getting more clients through word of mouth. We now have 8 clients, mostly web design companies who outsource projects to us, or clients they refer to us for content creation, data mining, etc. The team is up to 10 now. We still have that first client, though.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that in all this time, we never got around to building our own website or placing ads. We really don't need to since we get as much work as we can handle through word-of-mouth, and it will be difficult to scale while maintaining high quality.
I think you're doing the right thing by speaking with potential customers IRL. I ran some campaigns for ForeverList.com on Facebook and Adwords without much luck, though I'm admittedly not a pro at online marketing. My target market is people with high ticket items that typically take a long time to sell like classic cars, boats, real estate, etc... I happened to hear about a local boat show and I scrambled to put together a booth in one night, signed up the next morning and was working the show the next day.
The experience was awesome. Selling to people face to face is was so rewarding, I can hardly describe it. It made me despise adwords and the like. I know I still need to embrace online marketing, especially since my business is entirely dependent upon traffic, but right now I'm pretending like online ad networks don't exist.
I only picked up 3 customers from the boat show, but last weekend I went to an auto swap meet 3 hours away that had hundreds of cars for sale and picked up another 62 customers. We had a much better booth this time around with custom T-shirts and excellent fliers etc... I hit the ground running and was selling HARD all day. It was so awesome. There were people who would have spit in my face if no one was around and other people who were falling over themselves to buy a listing. I had one guy chasing me down because he lost my card and wanted another one so he could send me a check.
My advice is sell in the real world if you can, don't let the haters bother you (because you WILL have haters) and go far beyond your customers expectations.
We're going through this right now, too, and we've finally found our first paying* customer.
What I found helpful was introductions, and in this case, even introductions made through a cold call.
I'd been pounding away for weeks, signing up free accounts and begging people to actually use the service, or tell us why they weren't when they said it was something they'd like. I was also sending a lot of e-mails and making a lot of calls to hand-researched groups I thought would make good customers (like your product, it's fairly niche).
I'd get blown off, blown off again, and then when I finally made the call, they though the idea was dumb and we were doomed to failure (gulp). But they'd make an introduction to somebody who was on our side of the country, and with their name, good will and bad predictions, we ventured forward. That introduction has proved invaluable, as that connection, which itself took 3 calls, 4 e-mails and showing up at their office, has been a relentless cheerleader for us, going so far as to give us a shout out at an upcoming panel they're moderating in front of our target customers.
So, personal introductions ... by any means necessary. Hope that's helpful.
* We are, indeed, getting paid, but there's an asterisk for another day
Unless this is a $20 a month cheapie app, the Customer acquisition process should begin before you've even started building. Otherwise, how do you know if anyone even wants your product? By now you should've already talked to potential clients about what it actually is that your product hopes to achieve, and already have their indication that they'd be interested in buying it.
How can you be building to a target that you haven't spoken to yet?
Cold calling is going to be a hit and miss affair at the best of times, it's even harder when you're trying to pitch a product that no one's ever heard of.
The best thing I think you can do is pound the pavement. There'd be dozens of schools in your immediate area; organise a meeting and see them personally for a demo. It'll be time consuming, but at least you will have their undivided attention.
If you're doing something enterprise-y (which it sounds like you are) then you should take a look at the article, "Sean Murphy on the first dozen enterprise customers" that was recently posted to HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671852
It goes through the process of getting your first customers in detail. It jives with my personnel experience and some others I see on this thread.
Key point: Go through your network and find a way to get introductions to folks in your target market. Be creative on this. Once you've got an introduction leverage it to get more e.g. "Do know other folks that you think would be interested in a solution like this? Could you provide their contact info?" etc. Repeat.