Welcome back,
In a rush to get revenue for your new business, it’s easy to overlook the tactics that bring in customers one by one. However, this is one of the most common mistakes founders make, and it will cost you valuable time in building your business.
In this edition of our newsletter, we’re going to talk about why you must do things that don’t scale to find customers in the beginning, and we’ll go over a few of the best ways to do it.
In the early stages, you’ll change and pivot your business, your offer, and your product or service many times as you understand more about what your customers want and need.
By reaching out to potential customers personally and meeting them on a call at some point before they become customers, you can gain the nuanced feedback you need to tailor your product or offer to exactly fit your market’s needs.
Personal interactions build stronger relationships. When customers see that you’re willing to invest time and effort into understanding them and working towards their success, a few things can happen:
First, they can become stronger advocates for your business, helping you reach more customers on autopilot.
Second, you’ll learn even more about your customer’s wants and needs by connecting with the same customers time after time as they use your product or service.
And third, you can start fostering a rock-solid, loyal customer base very early on in your business.
By taking the time to meet customers before onboarding them to your product or service, you can sort of filter them out before welcoming them into your customer base.
I know this sounds strange, turning down customers so early on, but trust me - customers who aren’t dealing with you for the right reasons are worse than no customers at all.
By focusing on creating a high quality customer base in the beginning, you set yourself up to get the best feedback possible, make the right decisions time and again, and keep a loyal group of customers who want to see your brand take off.
The best ways we’ve found to reach out to customers directly is through social media. Why? Because it’s supposed to be social!
There are social media platforms for every group of people and every possible market you can imagine:
(Notice how they all say Reddit…)
The most important thing to remember here is that you want to connect with people personally over these platforms. That means connecting with people who engage with your content or DM people after doing proper research on them first.
Do NOT automate this yet.
The best way to not only convert people you’ve connected with into customers, but also filter them out to find the highest quality customers, and start building relationships, is to meet them over a video call.
There are a few ways to go about this depending on what you offer:
Relationship building doesn’t end when your prospects become customers. It’s critically important that you keep the conversation warm and keep developing the relationship over time.
The two ways you can do this is to regularly jump in and help them out, and to ask for feedback.
You can keep an excel sheet to note down the last time you spoke to each customer and what the conversation was about, and follow up every so often to see if they need help accomplishing their goal.
During these conversations or separately, ask them how they’re finding your product or service. Take interest in how it’s helping them accomplish their goal and if there are any bottlenecks or difficulties they’re having.
Note: this applies to services as much as it does for products. These conversations should be separate from any scheduled meetings you already have set up for your service.
Airbnb’s founding story is a classic example of doing things that don’t scale to get the business off the ground.
The problem: When Airbnb first launched in 2008, the founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk struggled to attract users. The concept of renting out air mattresses in someone’s home wasn’t clicking with travelers.
Advice from a mentor: During their time at Y Combinator, Paul Graham advised them to “go to their users.”
Doing things that don’t scale: The founders flew to New York, where most of their early adopters were located, and they made an important discovery: most listings had poor quality photos which deterred potential renters.
The founders personally took professional photos of the apartments for their users, improved the quality of the listings, and helped them find renters.
This hands-on, personal work for their customers led to a dramatic increase in rentals on the platform and helped their users make money by renting out their apartments.
Getting feedback: The founders met each of these users face to face, where they built trust and gathered really solid feedback as they helped each user make the most of their new platform.
At the end of the day: We all know Airbnb today as a billion dollar company, but it started with a handful of users and very personal, non-scalable work from the founders to make it work.
Doing things that don’t scale might seem slow and time consuming at first, but it’s a sure-fire way to learn more about your customers, get the feedback you need to perfect your product or service, and start generating revenue from a loyal customer base.
Keep pushing, learning, and experimenting.
Until next time,
Avery
P.S. Have your own stories of unscalable tactics that worked? Hit reply and share them with me!
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