How to get your very First Customers

One of the biggest hurdles for any startup is landing those very first customers. These initial customers are crucial - they can, of course, provide that early stage revenue but arguably, and most importantly, they can provide the most valuable feedback you and your business could hear.

Specifically, your first 10 customers can be incredibly valuable to you at such an early stage. Proof of concept, they’ll help validate your product/service by testing things out and sharing that early feedback. Plus their willingness to pay for what you’re offering shows the market need and that your product meets that need. Testimonials and case studies, the first customers can become your biggest advocates, providing testimonials and case studies that build credibility and trust with future potential customers. Positive word-of-mouth from these early adopters can significantly boost your reputation. Most importantly, feedback and improvement, early customers will provide critical feedback that can help you refine and improve your product or service. Their insights can lead to valuable adjustments.

We’ve asked 5 Memberstack customers to share how they got their very first customers. Most tips are super simple and strategies you can apply right away. 

Jacob Tober, Co-founder and Head of research at Metric  

“Our main business is an in-person gym, but we were regularly blogging. In 2017, we noticed that 60% of our website traffic was going to a single 3 year old blog post, it had a heap of comments and a really long time-on-page. So we built a simple PDF program for these readers to buy, we ran a pre-sale and got 6 copies out the door on day one 100% organic! 

7 years later we now do 100s of sales per month as an extra revenue stream alongside the gym, and host it all as a membership on Memberstack and Webflow.” 

Alastair Budge, Founder of Leonardo English 

“I'm the founder of Leonardo English, a company that makes podcasts and audio courses for intermediate-advanced English learners. I found some podcast apps that would allow me to promote my show for a low cost, posted in hundreds of Facebook groups, and slowly grew the show. 

This sort of snowballed, and I offer a freemium version, where listeners can pay to get learning materials and bonus content. Now I don't do any outreach per se, and rely on producing quality podcasts, week in, week out.”

Dean Fankhauser, Founder of PromptPal 

“After 3 days, I pushed it to Reddit. It’s a great way to test ideas in relevant communities. They aren’t your friends or family, so they’re brutally honest. It also helps that there is a community for almost any idea you produce, so you can make sure you’re seeding it with the right people. 

We built everything with SEO in mind from the beginning. That meant that when the Reddit communities responded very positively, it was quickly picked up by Google and our scalable, programmatic SEO took off. It’s funny because most people think SEO takes 6–12 months to work, but for us, it kicked in heavily after only 4 days.”

Alex Chirstou, Founder of NSDR

“The very first thing I did was setup a landing page targeting a very specific keyword. At the time I launched, the term NSDR was becoming more well known and Andrew Huberman (a well known neuroscientist) released a podcast all about NSDR which definitely helped spike traffic. I did a bunch of ahrefs research and found my list of keywords and made the content on the page the best it could be whilst building some links to the page. I also created some blog content around the main keyword. Producthunt was also super helpful at getting everything off the ground. Within 6 months of launching I have nearly 5,000 members”

Duncan Hamra, Co-founder of Memberstack 

“Tyler and I got our first 100 customers by answering forum questions and giving away free stuff on the Webflow Showcase. We still get customers from that original content. The key was to ask lots of questions, offer free solutions, and NOT try to sell anything. 

Our only goal was to be helpful - not to sell Memberstack. Meaning we’d only mention our product if it was honestly the most helpful thing. 

My advice is to figure out what people want and share the answer/code/project in a public space for everyone to see/ 

Examples of some of those early conversations: 

1. Earning trust by building free things for the community 

https://discourse.webflow.com/t/duncans-webflow-showcase-search-site/62353

2. Another random free project 

https://discourse.webflow.com/t/sticky-on-scroll-in-ix2/65741

3. Recommended by WF team 

https://discourse.webflow.com/t/displaying-personalised-content/99742

4. Recommended by WF team 

https://discourse.webflow.com/t/search-cms-data-only/101360/2”