How I got my first 10 customers for my SaaS in 2017:
1. I answered Quora questions for which my product was a potential answer.
2. To each person who followed links from the Quora answers to my site and signed up, I wrote a short email asking if I could personally help. I tried to make it obvious these were not auto-generated emails.
3. I did all I could to help the people who responded.
What I didn’t do:
Email cold prospects.
I know Patrick (author of the article), and I hold his advice in high regard. I just want to show that there is another way to get the first 10 customers.
There are a lot of ways to business. I think that tech-savvy founders often have an excessively narrow view of the solution set due to internal barriers -- I know of many founders (and have probably been one) who would be uncomfortable even inviting themselves into a Quora question.
My thoughts on this have matured a bit over the years, partly from seeing how effective one can be when combining classical sales techniques (like cold outreach) with being a savvy Internet citizen who provides value (like you did), and partly after having some experience from the other side of the table. I was a business owner for 10 years; answering unsolicited email is an important part of the job description. Yes you may translate that blog post, no I do not need an intern at this time, no interest on entertaining your guest post, yes happy to appear on your podcast, yes I will happily take a 15 minute call to talk about web analytics software with someone who sounds competent about it. Sometimes those calls result in purchases; that definitionally helped both sides of the transaction.
I've received my fair share of cold call emails. I quickly came to spot the ones who are both well prepared AND actually understand that whatever they offer has to benefit me as well as them.
I've noticed a lot of questions on Quora are saturated by those kind of answers. It seems to be an accepted tradeoff, shameless and often bias self-promotion in exchange for a medium-effort answer. Furthermore it seems to me that a lot of these self-promotional posts are done by paid shills of the company which in my view further discredits them...
As a dev I'm constantly evaluating trade-offs between products and its gotten to the point that for many subjects I won't even check quora links.
Certainly a cunning / savvy way to take advantage of such platforms, but when overused, sites like Quora become notorious and their effectiveness would decrease over time.
I had the opportunity to attend a fireside chat with d'Agostino at The Family in Paris. Someone asked that very question. The answer was they view pitching one's product as a perfectly valid answer to questions such as "what's the best product to achieve X".
As a dev I don't mind these pitches when looking for tools. The comments/votes often provide a rather complete picture, at least for the most active questions
Same here, it's becoming useless for that. "What are the best tools for X" questions on Quora are filled with marketing drivel from SEO specialists/employees of companies plugging their product.
Probably works for a while still, since Quora ranks high on Google searches
As a counterpoint, the last SaaS product I developed, I got my first 10 customers almost entirely through cold contact (emailing and asking for a meeting).
I was able to easily and succinctly describe my product and how it solved a problem all of them face (and that everyone's job in this field depends on), and I'm sure that helped me get my initial meetings.
Maybe if you email cold prospects. With tracking links. And hidden tracking images. And automate sending it every week. And make the email sound increasingly urgent. And call them something intriguing like 'drip campaigns'. And include no unsubscribe link.
We could even build a service to do all of that. I suggest calling it spam.io
"Oh but you're not subscribed to anything. These are just individually sent emails from someone directly connecting with you. On a schedule. That all look the same. And are the same for every person its sent to with the name of the business filled in." wink wink nudge nudge
This varies by country, but for the United States, the law requires you to honor opt out requests. A link is one mechanism to honor such a request. Another way is to remove a recipient from a list after they reply stating their wish to be unsubscribed.
From a practical level, it is worth including an unsubscribe link just to avoid having someone mark your email as spam after not being able to find the unsubscribe link.
It's a little utility to periodically push your Outlook calendar to your iPhone. It works even behind the most evil of firewalls and web proxies, because it uses email as the transport mechanism.
The premise is, you are in Corporate Hell. You want to have your work calendar appear in your iPhone.
Kudos to user logicallee who pointed out to me that the whole thing may look like some kind of trojan/exfiltration device. Hence, the option to buy the client source code, to verify no shenanigans is going on.
- installing iTunes requires decent rights on your Windows account. Installing OutiCal requires only that you can install software in your %APPDATA% folder. You do not need to install in C:\Program Files\
- iTunes sync will only happen when you connect your iPhone with USB or local WiFi.
Now, if you can sync with iTunes WiFi, maybe you are not quite in corporate hell! In corporate hell, they have banned all sorts of Internet access except via Corporate VPN. Which your iPhone will never come near.
Also, even when you can sync with WiFi - this only works when your PC and your iPhone are both on at the same time and on the same local network.
https://OutiCal.com works even when the iPhone and the PC are on completely different networks and works even if they are not powered on or connected at the same time.
Quora needs to crack down on self-promoters. Every other answer includes a link to site for a product or a service. Its taking away from the genuine nature of real questions and answers. Now its just a place business people go to get the word out about their service, product, research, etc.
If you're seeing a lot of these kind of answers, you can sign up for my service http://quorareporter.ai . Makes reporting these kind of things a breeze, and learns automatically from your input! Shoot me a DM on twitter @quorareporter for some discount codes for your first 10 reports.
There is a way to tastefully do it though. I often upvote answers that try to provide some kind of value before mentioning their product, as long as they do it in such a way that it isn't irritating or salesy...
Yes, the execution when it comes to self promotion is very important. No association, but I really like this answer[0] from CloudSponge, saying why their product is best on a thread asking for alternatives. What could have been very slimy comes across as genuine and helpful. It nearly converted me to a CloudSponge user when I came across the question while looking for alternatives.
this is pretty much what I've done in for my startup http://documize.com but seems like Quora is bashing down now on any self promoting outgoing link, I think they are now under pressure to make more revenue from their ads
Yeah, it's really been a big turnoff for me. I think they are missing an opportunity though--rather than run kind of mediocre ads, they should enable a lead-gen model or create their own ad platform that lets users bid to be featured next to relevant questions based on keywords or specific posts. Some of the industries they have traction with would pay a LOT for a highly-qualified lead like they could potentially drive.
Done properly, it could be a user-beneficial value-add that aligns their interests with users and people spamming the responses. This could in turn give them leverage to clean up said comments via policy/automation. Make it prohibited to spam answers, but offer an easy way to promote your services with/without a response required, and charge a reasonable fee.
You are right but it's because answering a complicated question rewards you nothing. Now if the answer is just self promotion then I totally agree that it should get moderated and down voted
Wait until more people start using it as an ad channel. I'm getting $1 CPM and telling all of my customers to try it out. After that I'm coming for Stack Overflow.
I'd like to add that if you're product is fairly technical, or solves a pain that's engineer-focused, you're likely better off finding folks on place like GitHub or StackOverflow. Quora and the like is great, but they tend to be high-level or broader questions.
As an aside: if you're trying to find something to build, just look through GitHub issues and look at the products waiting to be built ;)
"just look through GitHub issues and look at the products waiting to be built"
Interesting idea. Thanks for that. On the topic of quora, I converted alot of followers by putting the product and describing it in depth on my profile. It happens to be a promotional tool. So Quora is so far the most effective strategy for me because a good number of people view my posts and most power users have something to promote.
Finding your first customers can't be automated, finding pockets of them and stitching those pockets into a funny MVP looking suit happens one conversation at a time.
This is off-topic but is anyone else dealing with an insurmountable number of charge-backs selling digital goods using Stripe? I'm using Radar, Sift Science, email verification, CAPTCHA, post code checks, country and domain restrictions, rate limiting and every other trick in the book and yet reportedly a third of my payments is fraudulent.
The way credit card payments work seems backwards and hopelessly broken. I reached out to Stripe several times but keep getting the same templated response. What gives?
It sounds like you've already done this, but have you read about when Candy Japan was hit by massive fraud and how they solved it? (TLDR: don't let fraudsters know the card was declined, make it look valid)
I'm more amazed that Stripe hasn't reached out to you if you're getting 33% chargebacks. I thought the industry standard was that if your fraud rates are above 1% they'll flag your account, and above 2% you risk being permabanned by Visa/MC. (Perhaps that's outdated, I think I first heard that 10+ years ago.)
It's challenging to find a balance between security and not hindering legitimate customers. Telling them the order went through when they mistyped their card number isn't great. I don't expose the reason the payment was rejected however.
I ran a mobile payments app for years that buckled under the weight of machiavellian people constantly trying to find ways to cheat the system.
The problem isn't just the existence of scammers imho, the problem is that the two players with the most power to prevent fraud: The Bank, and The customers are incorrectly incentivised. The Bank doesn't care because it can foist responsibility onto the people moving the money from A to B (eg, Stripe, who then has to pass it onto the merchant) and the customer doesn't care because the bank uses its power to make sure the customer doesn't have to pay the consequences for being unsafe with their credit card information.
Until either the bank gets tougher on fraudulent activity (being more proactive about investigating accounts fraudulent payments went to, punishing customers for being loose with their credit cards, etc) or we can implement some kind of two-factor process inherent to the whole credit card system nothing will change.
We might be able to help at Chargehound. We're the only automated system that fights chargebacks for you. We're also the only one on Stripe's platform that's endorsed by them: https://stripe.com/works-with/chargehound
Thanks for the suggestion. I do this manually and never won a dispute. I suspect the fraud is being committed by a single person or group of people for the purpose of testing stolen credit cards. In some cases victims contact me after seeing my business name on their statement. I also report suspicious transactions myself.
It's not 100% because you may get some folks who sign up on a PC but deal with email on a phone, but if they're on home wifi then it'll be the same address. If your emails are sent immediately then differing IPs seem like they'd be rare.
Just a quick update to note that we are on the Stripe "Works With" page but that that isn't an official "endorsement" by Stripe in any way. That word was probably too strong. The rest of it is 100% true though.
We're predominately helping merchants with 100+ cbs a month, so automation speeds things up. When you are processing as many cbs per month as us, you learn a lot about how to represent the dispute. We pass those learnings on to our customers.
>Payments that are successfully authenticated using 3D Secure are covered by a liability shift. Should a 3D Secure payment be disputed as fraudulent by the cardholder, the liability shifts from you to the card issuer.
>If the card or issuer isn’t enrolled in 3D Secure but the type of card could support 3D Secure (e.g., most Visa and Mastercard consumer cards), liability is still shifted to the card issuer.
Hm, I’m sorry to hear about this. I work on Stripe Radar and would love to take a closer look into these disputes to see how we can help. Could you email me at eeke@stripe.com?
Hey ElbertF - I'm on the product team at Sift Science and definitely want to understand more (33% is incredibly high). I took a brief look at your integration, but should take the conversation to email - send me a note! quan at siftscience dot com.
For me around 1 in 10 is fraudulent. I'm selling a project as pay what you want to pay, and the fraudulent charges are always much more than most people pay. I've lost a bunch of money this way.
That blog is the perfect example of how to create content that provides compelling value for your target market, and establishes credibility for your product. Great stuff!
Have you tried publishing a column in newspapers and the like that farmers typically read? I bet it would be popular and a powerful source of leads.
I haven't published anything or sought to. I should look into that. I've been laser focused on the blog and email list. I need to broaden my reach though.
For any founder getting started, I highly recommend the book traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth.
While most of the advice is better suited to well-funded startups a lot of the tactics can be improvised for smaller startups as well.
Another tactic I highly recommend in your emails to prospects is to use personalization. Make sure that your opening has a direct and personal appeal to the customer. In order to look for avenues for personalization look at news about the target company, events and product launches or news aligned in the business segment. I have even seen one industrious sales rep use college football news as part of their personalization tactic.
After reading that book, it really opened my eyes to all the possible distribution channels and every single one, when executed well, can be success including ones thought to be so low-tech. Which really leads to the mantra of go where your customers are regardless of whether they are online or not. Offline channels can be very effective.
I thought Patrick was a strong advocate of inbound marketing (writing articles and other forms of content). I am sure he still is but I can recall in one comment he had mentioned something that went like: "it's better to put effort in writing one piece of content rather than 10 cold emails."
I am sure both cold emailing and inbound marketing have their own place, but this guide seems slightly uncharacteristic of what Patrick has recommended—and found success with—over the years.
I think I'm still an advocate of inbound marketing, but feel like I've also been learning a bit over the last 10 years. One thing I've learned is that the lead time on it, particularly if you're starting from the position of no platform and (potentially) no experience producing public artifacts, is quite long.
The lead time on writing emails is pretty short; you can execute on it today, have a call lined up for Thursday, and get agreement in principle by Friday (depending on the complexity of the sale, but assume something which could be adopted in a low-touch fashion). Having a customer on Friday is a lot more effective in terms of learning what still sucks about your product than getting your first customer in February 2018.
Your mileage may vary; there are lots of ways to play mix-and-match among approaches here. (I'd note that most of my previous success with high-value deals was indeed mix-and-match; something inbound like "Hey I liked this blog post" from a software company occasioned "Really glad to hear that. I have some thoughts about how it is relevant to your situation, too: $THOUGHT, THOUGHT, THOUGHT. Would you like to discuss in more depth?" occasioned Actual Sales Work (TM) quite a bit of the time.)
It seems to me that building the product is relatively easy when compared to acquiring (and retaining) customers, growth, etc. Often it seems the focus is on technology and product with marketing being a no-brainer, given. Typically, reality is the other way around.
Using stackoverflow/quora to answer questions and then link people to my blog for long reads as a fallback seems to work really well for me.
So basically the answer is given but I also add my relevant link for rewarding myself, having answered that question for free and hoping it helped the person asking in exchange for a click to my brand seems fair.
I run a niche marketplace site.
I use ambush sales tactics to find customer on forums.
Once i convinced them to email me THEN 2nd task is to convert them with a free listing THEN ask them to pay, if i sell their listing / ev car. I started testing $100 got paid, raised it to $150 got paid now im at $250 and getting paid. I am considering to push it to $500 ( maybe not). I think $250 is fine for me im good with selling 4 listings / month and making 1k/month. I use FB messenger to chat with customers and Email or SMS works just fine! i'll keep at it. I have a small email list now of buyers 100-200. I know its not much but an extra $1k-$2k/month for me is fine at the moment. I don't have dreams to be a millionaire or scale or [add your fancy start up lingo here] just keepin it real. Wealth is discretionary time.
I remember seeing a post from you about your marketplace, along with a thoughtful explanation behind your tactics. It sounds like you have a great approach that's working really well, and I really appreciate you sharing all of that info.
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't you push it to $500? Your market, in my naive outsider view, seems to have the discretionary income to handle that.
I ask because I'm wondering at what point do you determine you've set too high of a price? Was there considerable drop-off in conversions near that number? Or a gut feel?
I am at $250/now. I am now seeing some interesting data patterns on selling price and am considering maybe asking for $500. Right now i am gonna stay with $250 and slowly begin testing $500.
But i just started testing a tesla on demand model im not sure how that is gonna work: https://onlyusedtesla.com/ondemand/
Problem: a tesla owner takes his tesla in for servicing.
Servicing center has no loaner for him.
Service center rents a tesla from my platform for the customer.
Problem is inventory.
Also tesla can use my platform to get customers in for a short term rental then try to convert them into a sale ( sell them a tesla)
So new business models are unfolding. there are other ways to make sales. I will of course test my threshold. ;-)
Instead of jumping to $500, is raising it by $50 an option?
If you jump to $500 and some pay, but not enough, then you revert to a lower number, people who paid $500 may feel slighted. Moving up at $50 reduces the impact and those who paid lower will feel like they got a bargain. Maybe...
So i just sold a model x 90D on the site and this guy who is a dealer paid me $500. Now i just listed another model x 90d for him. So i am thinking for a dealer i'll ask them to pay $500 it could be just this guy or i just got lucky ( one off) But the idea of raising it in $50 increments is interesting and I will start testing ASAP! Another online dealer wants to list their used tesla inventory now, they are a well funded start up based in NYC no lots. I gotta work out a monthly deal with them i don't even know how much they are paying to cars / autotrader but looking into it. ;-)
For your first 10 customers, I recommend that the early startup team not wait till the product is ready. Ideally, someone at the startup (Founder ideally) takes the lead and spends 20% of their weekly time talking with prospective customers.
In fact, attempt to start engaging with prospects through the product development process. This tactic is very useful both for product validation and messaging validation.
> Patrick has built four software companies that did business internationally.
Is this in reference to Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder? Or was there something equally notable in Patrick's international business track record?
I think Starfighters was another, a recruiting firm that found talent via coding challenges, for which Patrick built a mock stock exchange with an API for people to write trading bot clients to defeat specific 'levels' of the game. It was a lot of fun.
We are pre-launch startup. We got our ten first customers presenting at 1 million cups events and some pitch events here in Dallas.
We haven't go live yet, but we already do have paying customers :)
I got my first 10 customers by going to all the Hackers/Founders and 106 Miles meetups and just demoing Browserling to every single person that I met on my tiny 11" macbook air.
According to your own site[0], it sounds like Stripe declined to continue to serve you because of an association with a cannabis business. (That's a sub-optimal reality, but I think it's disingenuous to state that it was because they didn't like the name.)
They did, then after I raised that issue, they invited me back, thanked me for being a poineer and said I should proceed and likely wouldn't get caught this time.
I told them to check first, cause I don't want to move platforms then have an issue.
So, weeks later they told me that underwriting doesn't like my new name and I won't get to use their platform.
Bad names include the terms "weed" or "the". Acceptable words are "GrowFlow" or "Mister Kraken" - direct competitors who basically sneak through.
Even when everyone knows what's going on everywhere.
Bureaucracies are inherently risk averse; that is what it sounds to me like you ran into. You have my sympathy for it. I think it's wrong and a net loss to society, but I also have no impetus to criticize a banking/finance company from staying away from anything that even smells possibly grey.
You didn't understand. They have accepted 2/3rds of they grey, and booted me - twice - based on name alone, even after lengthy phone calls and email threads spanning weeks.
Even if they were selling, I would think it's a net loss for society that they cannot fully participate in banking.
My point was more about OP's presentation of why they could not participate. It's pretty clear they're an edge case in an edge case industry -- I cannot judge a large company being risk averse when there is no incentive for them to take on the risk.
(That said, if anyone solves cannabis banking, they are going to be a unicorn.)
I'm surprised to hear this. They happily serve RankScanner, a European company who continued to charge my credit card after I canceled with them. Stripe wouldn't do anything about it. Countless stories of people having to have their bank involved to cancel RankScanner. Stripe still happily processes their transactions.
Research > personalized email > set the call for discussion or demo > close the deal is a GREAT active way to get customers. That said, I find many people in Tech opt for passive, less intrusive sales methods. Both can be successful, especially over time. But if you can get good (and even comfortable) with the Active way to sell, he potential for you to build scalable businesses in most any arena is near limitless.
> $500 a month supports low-touch sales and software which costs more than $5,000 or so annually requires high-touch sales
Am I parsing this wrong? $500/month x 12 = $6,000. $6,000 > $5,000. So wouldn't both of these examples require high-touch? Maybe that was a typo and it's supposed to be $50 not $500?
Or is the focus supposed to be on monthly vs annual billing?
I've been working on a series of content with this exact same title but it looks like it will have a different slant. I always get something of value out of all of Patrick's content over the years and this is no exception. Getting the first customers is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, thing for many entrepreneurs.
Warm personalised emails via ReplyApp. huge conversions. requires crafting the perfect email and testing delivery. Email list must be culled prior for product market fit.
I am a single founder Atlas company with an app that I've been working on for a while now. I'm sitting in Starbucks waiting for Apple to open so I can charge my phone and go to a nearby college campus to get my first users. I don't know anyone here so this is a tall task. I'm going to collect AT LEAST 100 "no's" today. Wish me luck
I'll admit that I do that sometimes -- Patrick's blog over the years has been full of gems that are well written, easy to read, and make me feel like I could put into action were I braver / had better ideas / insert-excuse-for-not-starting-something-here. They were some of the best things I read when I first learned about HN, so I tend to value them more highly.
Because HN saves the list of things you've upvoted, I will at times upvote things that I know Patrick has written because I know it will be a good thing to read when I later get a chance.
Duplicate submissions count as an upvote to the original post.
If you have a source which is known is being popular by the community (i.e. stripe), then there is a race to submit that article to reap the karma of submitting that article.
That race causes duplicates which in turn increases the karma for posting that article first and pushes it to the front-page where it will get even more karma.
That causes a positive feedback loop which keeps that source popular as a source with which to "karma race", regardless of the post quality being sustained.
In this case I haven't read the post itself, so it may be of good quality, but it is a manner in which posts from certain sources quickly reach the front page seemingly without much community interaction.
I upvoted it before I even read it because I'm interested in both the subject and Stripe Atlas, and I think enough of Stripe that I hit the button and then the link. And getting the first 10 customers happens to be exactly where I'm spinning my wheels on a lower volume, "lifestyle" travel project - ideally something where I want to have a steady 10 in the pipeline, but no more, at any given point. Then I read the article, and now I'm back!
I thought it was a well-written article at least. For me I'm more interested in prospecting from various travel-related forums, but much of the remainder sounds like things that I can try. I'm terrible at sales, so even the basics are interesting to me.
32 points as of now. Not that many upvotes really. Stripe has hundreds of employees most of which read hackernews, YC alums also you get people upvoting everything from the company to see their investment succeed and finally fans. Stripe is ridiculously dev friendly so upvotes from the general community.
I don't work at or have any affiliation with Stripe. I saw Patrick Mckenzie (the author) tweeting about this article and thought it would be a good fit for HN.
Generally speaking yes. However it can be gamed for sure, just not consistently in the long run. Not saying Stripe did this in this particular case (in fact I'd think quite the opposite), but just like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter's situation, it can be done with the right motivation.
Because the article is heavy on word count but light on details.
The author should provide details on the benefits of posting such an article in the first place (potential front page on HN, SEO, nurture customers), which could yield better results compared to what the author actually recommends in the article (spamming).
> compared to what the author actually recommends in the article (spamming).
Did you actually read the article?
SEO won't get you customers. Selling will.
He's saying, sell manually at first so that you can get to know your customer (and also see if your product is valuable). I.e. put in the time. This is universal sales 101.
Spending time getting HN frontpage or months on SEO won't get you any customers.
One or two months from launch. Basically just left it there without thinking much of it and then started to get customers all of a sudden. Now doing 7 digits revenue.
This article has hit the front page. I'm sure most businesses owners looking to get their first 10 customers research those keywords, and may be looking for a payment solution, to get incorporated etc. So the subtle SEO here helps Stripe / Stripe Atlas get more customers.
Furthermore, as a startup, content like this allows you to post and promote your brand on Quora, HN, Reddit etc., which can start conversations that lead to sales. These types of posts particularly work great on popular entrepreneur forums.
We got many of our first customers, and continue to get customers, by posting content. Combined with a free option. So far we haven't done any spamming via cold emails.
Certainly cold emails can work, but they may also come across as being "spammy".
Yes, but I know of marketers who have employed this tactic and it actually does work very well. Especially if you target those emails with laser focus.
1. I answered Quora questions for which my product was a potential answer.
2. To each person who followed links from the Quora answers to my site and signed up, I wrote a short email asking if I could personally help. I tried to make it obvious these were not auto-generated emails.
3. I did all I could to help the people who responded.
What I didn’t do:
Email cold prospects.
I know Patrick (author of the article), and I hold his advice in high regard. I just want to show that there is another way to get the first 10 customers.