I led a session yesterday on “Getting your first users” for ODF20. Here’s some of interesting items that were discussed:
- Cold email is THE most prescribed way to get customers but it can be soul sucking
- Use apollo.io to set up your sequences
- usertesting.com could be also be a good way to talk to the exact person you’re looking for but you need to give them a reward for getting on the call. Something like a $100 gift card.
- Build in Public is all about being completely authentic on Twitter/Linkedin and sharing every moment of your startup journey. Example 1 and 2.
- Gives more visibility to what you’re building organically, and customers come inbound, so you don’t have to do the selling.
- By building up goodwill, you unlock relationships that might know 10 people in your exact ICP.
- Have a helping mindset, not a salesy one. People really hate being sold to.
- When is it a bad idea to share publicly? Prob after $1M ARR.
- Even if you have a low number of followers, if you keep writing about a particular subject, algorithms will put your content out in front of the people most likely to read it so follower count shouldn’t be a major limiting factor.
- Sharing MRR screenshots (anything with money) gets a LOT of attention. Example.
- For more SMB, enterprise sales, webinars are a good marketing channel where you teach the audience about a particular topic, get them on a strategy call afterwards and try to close.
- Webinars vs. podcasts. You will build an audience with podcast but that doesn’t mean you can email them (or even help them) because you don’t who they are. Webinars are very intentional. 20 people in the room want to learn something, they provided their email with qualifying questions, you can have an offer at the end. Webinars are much better for early stage companies to actually get customers vs. podcasts are better for awareness campaigns.
