Michael Sable is the co-founder (at age 25) of startups Justin.tv/Twitch (capitalization of $ 15 billion) and Socialcam, member of the Reddit board. Ex-CEO Y Combinator.
My name is Michael Sable and I am a partner at Y Combinator. One of the questions we get often is: How do we find our first 10 clients?
To begin with, we hope you are solving a problem that you or someone you know has. Therefore, ideally, your first client or first couple of clients should be the people you know. Second, YC advises to always find 10 people who love your product and do it in a non-scalable way .
Therefore, you should be thinking that your first 10 customers shouldn't come from some complicated advertising scheme or some viral growth mechanism. Most likely, you have to draw them yourself, manually.
The next thing to keep in mind is that there is no benefit in targeting hard-to-reach clients. Therefore, you should look for clients who are facing the problem you want to solve, who are willing to work with the startup early on, and who are generally willing to pay to solve the problem they have.
One of the mistakes that many founders make is that they target difficult clients early, who don't want to pay, are not interested in working with companies early on, who don't really have a problem. They just think they might have a problem in the future. In fact, you won't get any benefit from attracting customers who don't have a major problem you are trying to solve, or from attracting customers who, honestly, will not be the people who will initially like your product.
Next, you have to charge your customers. One way to find out if your customers really have a problem is to charge them money to solve it. If your clients brush you off and say, “Oh, I would use this, but only if it was free,” it kind of telegraphed you that they don't really have the problem you are trying to solve.
Dropout
Often times, founders think they should shut down any first 10 customers that reach out to them. But this is not the case, in fact you have to do what is called customer qualification. Therefore, for people who come to you and whom you recruit, you usually have four to five questions that you can ask them to understand how intensely they are faced with the problem you are trying to solve, and how quickly they are ready to act. ...
You should try to "serve" only qualified customers who will answer these questions correctly. How about other clients? It's okay if you leave them alone for now and focus on them later.
So, to summarize.
Firstly,you should personally know at least your first client or a couple of first clients, because there are people who are new to solving a certain problem.
Second , there is no benefit in targeting hard-to-reach customers first.
Target those who are willing to pay , who want to work with a startup and are faced with such a serious problem that they are ready to use a product that is an MVP, an early product.
Charge clients . Use this as a signal of the intensity of the problem they have.
Finally, make sure you have four to five clarifying questions so you can separate interested customers.from customers who are just eyeing, but do not want to close the deal.
Good luck!
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