How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup
@jteusa's retrospective from 2014 captures the critical transition from initial concept to the first dollar of customer revenue.
Discussions analyzed Show HN launch mechanics, cold DM outreach conversion rates, and the psychology of validating customer demand before writing code.
Fantastic write up! A couple of nice take aways from this:
1) Give away the product -- I love how you started up a GoToMeeting and got the product running on a site right there. I know you mention that conventional wisdom says to get the customer to validate by paying first, but that seems like a brilliant move.
2) Don't give away the farm -- I would have stopped right there, I imagine. "Hey, they loaded up my stuff on their site. I'll get 'payment' from them in the form of a testimonial for the site. That's validation enough." Nope, you turned them into a paying customer. Even better, and you can still get the validation.
3) Don't over think everything -- Even though I have been successful in the past, I often over think things. I have to figure out all of the models before I can launch. The actual model rarely looks anything like what I thought up because in reality, it takes running the business/product to really understand the model.
I'll be watching for the future updates!
Enjoyed reading but have to say that 1) this is a ridiculously crowded market and 2) there are some very good options that start at free (Olark, Zopim). But, best of luck and nice job on breaking the revenue seal.
Edit: Many apologies, I misunderstood the service. $97/month for actually handling the inquiries (up to 500/month) then sounds like a bargain.
Edit: I went back and studied the website more closely and while it does describe the service you mention, it doesn't seem as clear as it could be. The spotlight seems to be on the web chat window which is a very well-understood mechanism and it's hard to get past that to understand that you are actually wo/man-ning the chat sessions. I would really work on making that cleare because at $100/month, it's a no-brainer for a lot of business types.
congrats - I agree with your approach of getting a real business working before worrying about solving every possible problem that will arise.
It took my startup 6 years of hustling to become profitable (we're around 50k users now) and we did it basically just as you are doing it - creating a product that people wanted, and then just adding features and solving problems as they became known to us rather than trying to anticipate things that may never wind up being important. It feels a bit like flying by the seat of your pants unfortunately but I think it's always going to be that way.
In short, sales. Marketing and publicity don't really provide benefit unless you're offering a free service to end users. My own startup reached front page of HN. Total sales resulting from that: about $0 (or negative dollars if you count server costs). Every sale is because I directly approached clients I thought needed my software.
Awesome post! Should be included in https://yourfirstcustomers.com/podcast/ and http://www.unscalablestartup.com :)
THANKS HACKER NEWS!!!
Tons of great feedback received, summarized below:
- Explain the service better (i.e. we're not a chat software)
- Answer the main question directly (i.e. how can you possibly know enough detail of the business to answer visitor questions)
- Answer a few other basic questions (chat system included, 24 / 7, etc.)
Here's what I've done so far:
- Revised headline to (as of 12/24 am) "Website Chat Support, Done For You", and also sub headline- will tweak it a bit
- Added FAQ section to the page
- Revised testimonials (with approval of course) to speak more to the main question of "how can you know enough about my business?"
- Included REAL EXAMPLES of chat lots to show how this is working for a diverse group of clients
- (coming soon, recommended by a HNer that I can't find the name of in my logs - comment here for credit) I'll be testing the impact of changing entire focus of home from "here's what we do, it works, here's why, blah blah blah" to "Test Us Out on Your Site Right Now" using the preview feature that pops up our chat on your website right away (i.e. you're connected directly to me via chat). We got bombarded from HN traffic (yay!) but I think that could work REALLY well if I streamline it a bit (and make the feature looks better of course - hacked quickly).
In short, THANKS for all your feedback. I'm taking action as fast as I can (got quite a few customers, so building some backend stuff as we speak) and wanted to say thank you!
Happy holidays!