How to Get Your First 50 SaaS Customers

Summary

The speaker discusses the advantages of not being a brand-new founder and how leveraging existing contacts helped them onboard the first 50 customers. They manually reached out to around 250 people, scheduling personalized onboarding sessions to ensure smooth signups and valuable feedback. By observing user behavior, they refined the product and eventually automated the onboarding process. The key strategy involved persistence, leveraging past relationships, and asking for referrals to grow the customer base, while maintaining trust and credibility with initial users.

Takeaways

• 📅 The founder set a fixed launch date and committed to onboarding the first customer on that date.
• 📱 They leveraged their existing contact list, creating a large Google sheet of potential clients from their network.
• 🏢 The contacts included a diverse range of industries, such as real estate, insurance, and coaching.
• ✉️ The founder manually reached out to each contact, offering a 60-day trial and emphasizing that they were a new company.
• 💡 It was crucial to avoid the perception of being in 'beta' mode, encouraging early users to transition to paying customers.
• 👥 The first 50 customers were acquired through direct outreach and personal follow-ups with potential users.
• 🔍 They observed user onboarding closely, identifying pain points and making improvements based on real-time feedback.
• 🎨 Small changes, like altering button colors, significantly improved the user experience.
• 🛠 The onboarding process became fully automated by the time they reached 100 customers.
• 📈 After exhausting personal contacts, they realized the need for a new strategy to continue growing their customer base.

Q & A

What is the benefit of not being a brand-new founder when launching a product?

The benefit is having an established contact list, which allows the founder to reach out to previous connections and potential customers, making the initial launch easier.

How did the speaker decide on the launch date for the product?

The speaker and their team simply chose a date and committed to it, ensuring they wouldn't delay the onboarding process.

What method did the speaker use to compile a list of potential customers?

The speaker went through their phone contacts, old emails, and created a Google sheet with every possible company and person in their Rolodex who might be interested in the product.

Who were some of the people or companies the speaker reached out to?

The speaker contacted vendors they had done conferences with, real estate companies, insurance companies, coaches, and other various businesses.

What was the trial period offered to the initial customers, and why?

The speaker offered a 60-day trial to the first customers to let them know the company was new, while also establishing that they would eventually need to pay for the product.

Why did the speaker avoid using an Alpha or Beta phase for the product?

The speaker avoided Alpha or Beta phases because they found it difficult to convert people from these free stages into paying customers.

How did the speaker improve the onboarding process during the initial launch?

The speaker watched customers sign up and go through the onboarding process, which helped them identify and fix issues, such as making certain features more prominent and improving design elements like button colors.

How did the product's sign-up process evolve over time?

Initially, the onboarding was manual, but by the time they reached their 100th customer, the sign-up process had become fully automated.

How did the speaker grow their customer base after contacting their initial list of connections?

The speaker asked each contact for referrals and kept adding to the list, though they acknowledged that relying on personal connections eventually became insufficient.

How many people did the speaker reach out to manually, and what was the significance of personal outreach?

The speaker manually reached out to at least 250 people. Personal outreach was important because these initial contacts were more forgiving, took time to listen, and trusted the speaker due to previous business relationships.