Attracting your first 100 customers
Lessons Learnt — Part 3 of 3
Phase 3: Automate and Scale (Customers 71–100+)
In Part 1 and Part 2, I discussed some lessons learnt when growing and retaining your early customers. Once you start to approach the 100 customer mark, you’re officially reaching a major milestone in your startup. You’ve gone from a project to a business, you understand product-market fit and can start to refine and optimize your processes.
As you set yourself up to scale, it’s important to understand a few key points to ensure you are set up for success.
Lesson 1: Automate Your Manual Processes
I emphasized the importance of leaving scale out of the picture when you are growing in your early days. Your entire focus is on revenue growth. Now that you have achieved early traction, you cannot sustain that growth without investing in automation and enhancing your product.
Scaling a startup with manual processes is like trying to reach the moon on a horse.
All the processes documented that we discussed in Part 2 can now be automated. Using tools like Zendesk for customer service and engagement or Zapier for automatic transfer of data between different applications you can save a lot of precious time and resources to maintain a seamless operation. Build out your MVP (minimum viable product) to include added features and functionality to allow you to execute on your mission.
Lesson 2: Network, Network, Network
“Your network is your net worth.” — Porter Gale
Networking can be exhausting and after the grind of running a startup all day, it can often be the last thing you want to do. The reality is a business is not an entity that operates in a bubble. You depend on partners, customers, vendors, talent, investors, mentors etc.
Here are some key reasons to network and how it will help your company scale and thereby attract more customers.
Fundraising — Always top of mind for any founder. The reality of attracting customers is that it is expensive. It will require funding. Once you’ve built your story, got your first set of customers, you can pitch to investors. This is a very long and arduous process. Start early. As with anything in life, investment is a relationship that is built on trust. Don’t look for money till you’ve shown commitment to your startup and invested your own money.
Industry Expertise— Industry professionals offer meaningful insights into your product and can often serve as beta testers for your products. By offering them free samples or discounts in exchange for their feedback you can learn how to enhance your product. If they like your product, they will recommend it to their fan base. More potential customers.
Personal Branding — Always think about how your personal brand portrays you as a leader for your business. Engage in educational talks, keynote speeches, panel discussions and any other PR opportunity that comes your way. Use it to put your startup and product front and centre. Be approachable and be nice. It may sound obvious but nobody wants to buy from a startup if their leader comes off as arrogant or rude, no matter how good the product is.
Partnerships — Growing your business and customer base through partnerships is excellent if there are synergies to be had. Meeting other vendors and exploring cross-selling opportunities can help boost your growth.
Talent— Recruitment is pivotal to any growing startup. You cannot scale a business by yourself. Most technology meet-ups always have professionals looking for opportunities at startups.
Lesson 3: Remove Yourself from the Equation
As the founder of a startup, it is your job to empower your team to execute on the day to day affairs of your business. Whilst it is expected of every founder to be able to perform any or all of the duties in the early days of the business, it is imperative for the business to not be 100% reliant on you. If every decision requires your approval, your company’s growth will be hindered by your limitations. Learning to scale is to be able to grow your business leaps and bounds without needing to be involved every step of the way. And let’s face it your time is not infinite.
“The courage of leadership is giving others the chance to succeed even though you bear the responsibility for getting things done.” — Simon Sinek
Hopefully, through these 3 articles, you’ve gained some knowledge on how to attract and retain your first 100 customers, while learning what matters as you embark on this journey to build your startup.
