About two years ago I decided I wanted to strike out for myself. I started Campo, a B2C popup campsite concept, and learned a ton about what does not work and a couple of methods that do work if you’re trying to get initial traction. I’m sharing some learnings and methods that worked to help others on their journey to acquire their first customers. Although these are specific examples I’ll try to keep the learnings general so anyone can use them.
1. Talk to your (potential) customer face to face.
This is one of the most fun things early on. You have to be creative in how you’re going to reach, court and then sell to new customers that don’t know who you are, what you do or where you came from. Unless you put in the work, nobody will know or care about what you are doing. Do not hope customers will just come, because they won’t. The key here is to be creative in your outreach and once people are interested, overdeliver.
Our initial product was neighborhood specific outdoor guides for young city professionals. We had initial traction and engagement but wanted to learn what people really wanted so we could build it for them. So we set up our Instagram and started posting valuable content 3x per week. The next step was to talk to the people that expressed interest in our brand and product. Because people have personal profiles on Instagram you can learn a ton about who engages with what you’re offering. We sifted through the people that liked and commented on some ads we ran and Instagram DM’d the ones who fit our target audience. Using this method, we scheduled 35 coffee meetings and got a lot of valuable insights, supporters and future customers. Prepare a discussion guide with open questions and make sure you only talk 20–30% of the time. It’s about them. You’re there to learn, not sell.
Cost: $30 IG ads + $120 coffees
2. Run a reality check on your assumptions
List your assumptions about the market, product and customer and then try to falsify them. Every entrepreneur starts off with a bunch of assumptions about their market, product and customer. Write these down. For us this was focused on outdoor trips for young professionals living in NYC.
Once you’ve written them down and all the founders agree that this is how they assume the world works, it’s time for a reality check. We took our assumptions and created a survey with an unbiased question for every assumption we had. Again, we ran ads on IG where people would enter a contest to win a $50 Amazon gift card if they filled out our survey (we used Typeform). 250 people filled out the survey and we learned quickly where our assumptions were wrong.
3. Customer development is key
Sometimes you have traction with multiple audiences but they all want something slightly different. So who do you build for? I found Customer Dev Labs to be very helpful. You prioritize them based on market size, accessibility and pay for value. A simple exercise that helps you see your customer segments clearly. You want to be pistachio and cater to a well defined target audience. Avoid being vanilla.
4. Ask for forgiveness, not permission
You probably will have to bend the rules a bit to get your company off the ground. Social conventions, T&C’s of products you use, marketing best practices, etc. As long as you do these things on a smallish scale, it doesn’t matter. Nobody will care and you will learn. If you don’t know if ‘they’ will allow it, just go ahead and do it. If you get some pushback, be respectful and adjust course.
5. Overdeliver
Spoil your first customers. We would write them a handwritten thank you note and add a small outdoorsy gift (compass, multitool,…) to thank them. The overall standard of customer satisfaction is rather low. Think about all the large companies you buy products and services from and don’t really care about. Now compare that to the ones you tell all your friends about. Turn your customers in your advocates and marketing will take care of itself.