The technology eventually becomes important in a differentiating factor. No new technologies. THALES TEIXEIRA: Airbnb had one engineer for a long time. Getting the first 1,000 customers will not guarantee your success, but it will you give you a chance to get some real-world feedback -- and maybe even pay some bills at the same time! How to build a customer base takes a lot of time that I need to do all the footwork to achieve this. All of these things are overwhelming to startup entrepreneurs and they basically can’t do them all at the same time. they won’t come. Required fields are marked *. Instead of just showing their inventory they hid it. THALES TEIXEIRA: Well so clearly research has shown that more startups fail in the early phases. I’ll tell you why in a moment but first let me tell you that influencer marketing isn’t cheap. So, instead of hiring people to go on the phone to do product support and help when their customers call in and say “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to do that.” They actually gave these consumers the task of teaching the new consumers how to operate the software. One of the biggest reasons that they fail is actually they don’t get enough customers to pay for the cost of their maintenance or their survival. THE COMPLETE FLUTTER BOOTCAMP: ZERO TO HERO IN FLUTTER DART, The Complete 2020 Flutter Development Bootcamp With Dart, Complete Python Bootcamp : Go Beginner to Expert in Python 3, Understand the basics of growth marketing and traction channels, Drill down on customer pain points and build user personas, Align marketing channels with their personal preferences and skills, Use Twitter and Facebook to conduct research and sales outreach, Canvas Reddit, Meetup, and other platforms to canvas for customers, Set up, manage, and analyze user stats & behaviors through Google Analytics, Successfully drive sales through posting & commenting on Reddit, ProductHunt, & HackerNews, Set up, populate, and use an Instagram account, Market using 3 different techniques on Instagram, Set up, populate, and use a Snapchat account, Market using 4 different techniques on SnapChat, Strategize angles for pitching and being covered by press, Understand the mentality and mindset behind press & journalists, Successfully manage relationships with press and pitch them successfully, Build a comprehensive content marketing plan, Use 5 different techniques for coming up with blog & content ideas, Promote their content through 6 different strategies, Employ the skyscraper technique successfully, Find, track, and land guest posting spots on other blogs and outlets, Plan, script, and produce videos for marketing, Analyze and track video marketing metrics, Decide which camera equipment fits their budget and needs the best, Effectively combine video marketing with pre-existing content, Strategize and produce videos for marketing on YouTube, Build landing pages for email or lead capture, Understand the best practices of creating and promoting lead magnets, like webinars & white papers, Analyze your on site SEO factors and optimize them, Conduct keyword research for SEO opportunities, Manage keyword density and other metrics needed for ranking on Google, Design, plan, and start advertising on Google, Bing, and Facebook, Analyze & understand search engine marketing & social ad marketing metrics, You should have basic familiarity with social media, You don’t need to have a product or business, however, it helps, Anyone who has a product they want to sell (does not have to be online), Anyone who has a service they want to sell (does not have to be online), Anyone who works in in Marketing, Sales, or Management, Anyone interested in learning how to acquire customers. Technology is always the enabler or the way to speed up the process. in your favorite podcast app. THE COMPLETE JAVASCRIPT COURSE 2020: FROM ZERO TO EXPERT! There are people out there that prefer to give their business to a startup than a big company. A lot of the advice for budding entrepreneurs goes like this: offer something that is ten times better than what’s on the market, build network effects, put in place a technology infrastructure, and own the end-to-end customer experience. I think It’s all about attracting the right people to us using your methods. • Social media marketing through Twitter, Instagram, & SnapChat, • Community management and promotion through Reddit, ProductHunt, & HackerNews, • Pitching press and getting covered in blogs, news outlets, & other media sites. 💻MVP is just an MVP. Getting more and more customers for each dollar you spent and being more effective. MOST RECENT EPISODE. You guys really loved that post, you left a bunch of comments, and shared your own stories. Thales Teixeira studies three of the most successful “platform” startups to understand the chicken-and-egg challenge of how companies can attract their first customers. And so, if you were one of the last ones to go there you just basically had no place to stay. You could scale. Build a Strong Product. In order to be successful with your startup or small business, you must have the ability to proactively go out and find customers. Airbnb had no new technologies. CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. I have to set realistic goals so I don’t set myself up for failure. A show about what it's really like to find your first 1000 fans in business. / The Right Way to Get Your First 1,000 Customers. And so, if you don’t have it you have to do a little bit fake it until you make it. What an amazing blog post you have here walking us through How To Get Your First 1,000 Customers. And when you look at successful, disruptive businesses like Uber and Airbnb, those lessons ring true. THALES TEIXEIRA: And it helped set the tone for quality. CURT NICKISCH: To figure out why they’re running as fast as they are today. A single post on Instagram might cost you as much as $1K. This makes me think of Pinterest also which really incubated its early customers by being really judicious about who they invited onto the platform at first. If you’re small and you don’t get to that phase, there’s no point in trying to do things at scale if you’re going to die beforehand. He’s also the author of the book Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Customer Disruption. And you start amassing a group of customers that starts to get bigger and bigger. But if the infrastructure to deliver value to consumers is not primarily through technology, through an app, through a website then probably you can get away early on without having to hire a partner with a – you know, a CTO that will build a technology. You’re just testing out different methods to “see what sticks” and what you should double down on. Netflix had no new technologies. And there are people out there. There’s this idea that you should build your best product possible. How do you think Airbnb answered that question early on? We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. In this course, we’re going to focus on how YOU can take any product, service, or business and sell it to 10s, 100s, or even 1,000s of customers. Showcase Cinemas is celebrating the skill launch by providing one free adult general admission ticket per transaction for any film or Event Cinema programming for the first 1,000 customers … And in that regard, this is a little bit of a shift away from what others have advocated for. And suddenly people started seeing this in a better light and that created the standard for all of the other ones. New apps. If you speed up a bad process, you’re going to just drive through the cliff with your startup faster. The technology’s not the primary driver of the experience for these products, it’s the products itself. Technology is never the driver of digital disruption, in my experience, from my research. And so, having a CTO early on is not kind of the main driver of your early customer adoption. 13 Jul 2016 | by Michael Blanding. CURT NICKISCH: One of the common things that any founder is told who has an idea is that you need to partner with your CTO early on. 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