Founder FAQ: How did you get your first customer?

actually. We don't have them yet. We are currently looking for that.

The first one was actually just kind of very crafted cold outreach. We got our first customer just literally going door to door, standing in the sun, waiting for the owner to just show up because he was just in his food truck all day and ended up taking a break, then we just capitalized and closed him.

Actually, I'd left a voice mail, for one of our physical therapists that we're working with, and she called me back, and she was like, oh, tell me more about, you know, what got your start. We actually gave our background on, like, this is why we got into it, and she thought it was, like, you know, we were coming from a good place, so she wanted to work with us.

Initially, we just had customer discovery calls to try and figure out if this was something people would be interested in. Yeah. And we sold it to one company for $250.

per month. And we didn't have any code, and then we just made, like, made, like, a version of it in seven days and deployed it. It's pretty rough seven days though. Yeah.

We got our first customer by using LinkedIn. LinkedIn. LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Facebook. Reddit. Reddit. Reddit.

Reddit. And Hacker News. And at some point we got some conversations with those customers and we started like better understanding the needs, better understanding like what kind of solution they needed. So we made a mock up of our dream personal finance product, made a website for it with a little wait list and we posted it on our Reddit group.

And within twenty four hours there was like close to a thousand people that had signed up for the wait list. It really resonated with a lot of people that were having the same like financial pain points as us. We launched our closed beta and started onboarding those customers.

For us, was a bit of a a wild week in which we launched on Twitter and suddenly a few days later I went from 50 followers to like 10,000. We had 20,000.

stars on GitHub. We had a 50,000 unique visitors a day. And so we're really fortunate to have the lightning in the bottle and have all these customers come to us. You're actually a great time. We actually got our first customer paying this morning. How did you find that first customer? So we launched.

We shared what we were doing about two and a half weeks ago on just our LinkedIns and shared with our friends, and a lot of people came inbound. People were really curious about what we were building here.

Got a great wait list, and this customer came through that wait list, which was really exciting. We don't really have any customers yet, but we've got, like, one really good advisor who sort of made some introductions to folks at a couple of the big ag tech companies.

So sort of networking our way in, really. We are in beta. So immediately after I get out of here, I'm I'm getting on a plane to go to LA for a few days. And we're we're kinda we're gonna make the rounds of the production companies and see who's interested in this tool. How are you gonna try to get that first customer?

I take all the companies that message me trying to hot hear me as a software engineer for their biotech company, and I respond saying, no. But.

how would you like to buy software that does the same thing? We have users,.

and we are currently converting them into paid customers. First customer we got was a friend of ours. It's like hitting up friends, talking to other people in the space that I was close with. We launch with friends and family, so that way we can test our processes out, our pricing, and see what was working, what wasn't. And then from there, kind of naturally evolved.

We started getting referrals from our friends and family. Through networks. Shreyas' extended family holiday home.

paid us to put in the first system, which has been great, like, talk about the best customer for me. For him, having, you know, his in laws holiday home has been a little bit more stressful, but I'm like, this is great. As with a lot of founders, your first few customers come from your network.

And so I was fortunate enough to work with some amazing folks across a wide range of industries. Went and kind of told them a little bit about what we were building, and they liked what we were building enough to put real money behind it. And so that's how we got the first few customers.

And, you know, hopefully, the good word we get from them and a few other kind of go to market techniques we're trying will help us really accelerate, get way more customers by demo day.