How we got our first 100 customers written by someone who currently has 0 customers

If you have ever started or considered starting a business – you will have seen (or actively searched for) one of these articles – “How to get your first customer”, “How to scale your startup”, “How to get customers to pay for your product”.

Articles like these are great, and they are invaluable but they have one common downside. They are, intentionally or not, sanitised success stories diluted for easy reading. These are tips and tricks written by people who have already made it. They are great for inspiration, to give you your first idea on how to persuade people to part with their money, but deep down you know the route to success is going to be a lot harder and longer than any easy reading can accurately surmise.

I wanted to do something a little different. This is our story, from the ground up, on how we get our first hundred customers. Our business has just launched and currently has a grand total of zero paying customers but I want to share with you our journey. Every marketing trick we try, every cold call and email we send, and every friend we bribe we will document to give you a real insight into the struggles of launching a fledgling business.

Given that something like 50% of startups fail in their first year – this article could really come back to haunt me but I think a certain level of recklessness is needed to start anything new.

So here we are. Day 1. Our new business has been live for a total of a few hours and… well.. nothing so far. This isn’t surprising, we haven’t done any active marketing yet but it’s nice to imagine that somehow the miracle of internet connectivity could connect some wayward digital vagabond to stumble upon our website and our (excellently put together) homepage could dazzle them into subscribing to our service.

We have not had so much luck yet.

I don’t want this to be a marketing post – but for the purpose of context it is important you know what our business does. Are My Staff Happy is a simple way for managers to run a survey on their staff to get a pulse of their happiness. It is a simple idea and its nothing new. We just wanted to do it more effectively and affordably to make it accessible for small businesses.

Anyway – the problem at hand. How to get our first customer. We’ve all heard the phrase “content is king” and so we decided to try our hand at it. We (that is – myself and my confounder) decided to start with a list of pieces of content we could create and/or needed to do. This article is a result of that list.

The full list of content and marketing we decided to put together can be seen below:

• Create a LinkedIn launch post
• Persuade people we know to sign up and try us out
• Create an instagram account and start posting
• Write a blog on our journey to get our first hundred customers (hey – that’s what you are reading now!)
• Make a list of companies who would be interested in our product and send them a personalised email.

I’d love to tell you now how successful or unsuccessful each of the above was – but this isn’t that kind of article. This is just the beginning – and with that, we reach the rather abrupt end to this article.

Enjoy following our journey!