Dan Martell - How To Get Your First 1000 Customers

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.

Dan Martell - June 22, 2015

How To Get Your First 1000 Customers

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