Dan Martell - June 22, 2015


How To Get Your First 1000 Customers

Hosted by
Dan Martell
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

210.65

Word count

891

Sentence count

35


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Origin Stories, I sit down with my good friend and founder of the coffee startup Caffeinated. We talk about what it takes to get your first thousand customers, how to get them, and how to keep them coming back for more.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.440 Yeah, so I think getting your first thousand customers
00:00:02.600 is no different than getting your first 5,000
00:00:04.400 or a million customers.
00:00:05.840 It all comes down to a few things.
00:00:07.300 Number one is having a product that is,
00:00:10.080 delivers, like, delivers on the promise
00:00:14.580 but also gratifies your customer, right?
00:00:17.320 That when they sign up or they experience it,
00:00:19.480 you know, if you think about, you know,
00:00:20.780 the first time you've ever been to a Starbucks
00:00:22.380 and just the interactions and the experience,
00:00:24.060 there was this, like, this aha moment
00:00:26.200 where you walked away and you were like,
00:00:27.360 wow, that was amazing.
00:00:29.120 Like, you know, I've never experienced that concept.
00:00:31.820 They asked me for my name.
00:00:33.260 You know, the coffee came out tasting really great.
00:00:35.860 There was, you know, it just felt like it was really
00:00:37.860 thought out and thoughtful and kind of well developed
00:00:40.300 and I feel like that's the part that a lot of people
00:00:42.600 don't have that if they get right,
00:00:45.320 really makes everything else work.
00:00:47.460 You know, some people think it's a marketing problem
00:00:50.600 and I'm gonna tell you right off the bat,
00:00:51.700 it's a product problem.
00:00:53.920 So, getting to your product to a point
00:00:56.460 that delivers on the promise that you display
00:00:58.260 on your homepage and gratifies your customers
00:01:00.520 or gets them to this aha moment or sometime,
00:01:03.000 I call it the core product value,
00:01:04.640 like getting them to experience that core product value.
00:01:06.740 That's number one.
00:01:08.060 The second thing is to build a growth engine.
00:01:11.400 I like the word engine because it has this connotation
00:01:13.700 or context of turning over.
00:01:16.040 You pour gas in the tank and then it produces energy
00:01:19.680 and it kind of moves the thing forward.
00:01:21.560 And as long as you keep pouring gas in it,
00:01:23.140 it keeps moving forward and it's just a great way
00:01:25.460 to think about building your marketing
00:01:28.020 or your demand marketing or your inbound marketing,
00:01:30.460 whatever you want to call it,
00:01:31.280 but essentially your ability to get new customers.
00:01:33.760 So building that engine.
00:01:35.220 You know, and the way you do it is you test different channels,
00:01:38.520 different marketing strategies, you know,
00:01:40.820 where you can figure out that a time or money inserted
00:01:44.420 or inputted into the engine will result
00:01:47.120 in X amount of customers, right?
00:01:48.800 Profitable customers, so that's another thing
00:01:50.940 where people, they don't realize that they can do a bunch
00:01:54.800 of viral marketing and they get a bunch of people
00:01:57.000 that sign up but never use the product.
00:01:59.240 This happens all the time with PR, right?
00:02:00.820 Where they think, well, if I get covered on TechCrunch,
00:02:03.360 that's the holy grail of anything.
00:02:05.180 If I get covered on TechCrunch,
00:02:06.740 my startup's gonna be successful.
00:02:08.480 And I can't tell you, it's further from the truth.
00:02:10.920 It goes like a big spike, a bunch of people sign up
00:02:13.520 to register to confirm their usernames.
00:02:15.600 That's the only reason they sign up.
00:02:16.740 They have no interest in the product.
00:02:17.800 But they think, if someday this might take off,
00:02:19.920 I gotta make sure I have my username.
00:02:21.700 And they never come back and they never use it
00:02:23.600 and they skew all of your metrics
00:02:25.040 and they make you feel great the day or the week of
00:02:28.040 and then you just feel like, wow, that's spiked
00:02:30.440 and now it's flat again and it's not sustainable
00:02:32.900 and that's why to me it's about building an engine.
00:02:35.480 So it's figuring out these different channels.
00:02:37.680 Now the third thing you wanna figure out,
00:02:39.080 once you have the product that really delights
00:02:40.720 and you have a concept of building kind of habits
00:02:45.080 that get new customers, it's doing less, right?
00:02:47.960 A lot of startups, they create a bunch of stuff.
00:02:51.320 They think, well, I gotta do Facebook marketing,
00:02:53.260 I gotta do content marketing, I gotta do PR,
00:02:55.180 I gotta be speaking at events, I need to do all this stuff.
00:02:58.700 And what happens is, most of the time,
00:03:00.380 is when nothing works, when you're really not seeing
00:03:03.020 the results, because you're doing too many things,
00:03:05.420 you don't know which one of those things
00:03:07.360 is the reason it's not working, right?
00:03:09.840 Whereas if you do less, then you know that it's that thing
00:03:14.520 that's not working.
00:03:15.440 Think about this concept, because most companies die
00:03:18.100 from indigestionation, not starvation.
00:03:20.920 indigestion, not starvation,
00:03:24.680 where they die because they do too many things
00:03:28.420 and they don't focus.
00:03:29.920 And when you do too many things,
00:03:30.920 you don't know what's not working.
00:03:32.420 It's the same concept of death by a thousand paper cuts.
00:03:36.420 So I think those are the three areas.
00:03:38.360 If you want to get your first thousand customers
00:03:39.780 or your first 5,000 or a million customers,
00:03:42.060 you want to make sure you have a product that delights,
00:03:43.920 you focus on building an engine that's repeatable,
00:03:46.260 scalable, to get new customers that are profitable,
00:03:49.460 and then you want to make sure you're doing less things,
00:03:51.600 not more, so that you really deliver or really learn faster
00:03:56.220 because to me, at the end of the day,
00:03:57.600 the definition of a start-up or the purpose
00:04:00.340 or what you should be doing with your team
00:04:02.180 is learning as fast as possible.
00:04:03.860 If you have competitors out there,
00:04:05.360 he who learns the fastest wins,
00:04:08.000 and I mean, those are my thoughts
00:04:10.240 on how to get your first thousand customers,
00:04:11.820 and I appreciate the question.