Startup Advice
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5 things you need to win your first customer
A startup is a beautiful thing. It’s the tangible outcome of an idea birthed in a garage or on the back of a napkin. But ask any founder what really proves their startup has taken off, and they will almost instantly say it’s when they win their first customer.
That’s easier said than done, though, because winning that first customer will take a lot more than an Ivy-educated founder and/or a celebrity investor pool.
To begin with, you’ll have to craft a strong ideal customer profile to know your customer’s pain points, while developing a competitive SWOT analysis to scope out alternatives your customers can go to.
Your target customer will pick a solution that will help them achieve their goals. In other words, your goals should align with your customer’s goals.
You’ll also need to create a shortlist of influencers who have your customer’s trust, identify their decision-makers who make the call to buy (or not), and create a mapped list of goals that align your customer’s goals to yours.
Understanding and executing on these things can guarantee you that first customer win, provided you do them well and with sincerity. Your investors will also see the fruits of your labor and be comforted knowing their dollars are at good work.
Let’s see how:
1. Craft the ideal customer profile (ICP)
The ICP is a great framework for figuring out who your target customer is, how big they are, where they operate, and why they exist. As you write up your ICP, you will soon see the pain points you assumed about them start to become more real.
To create an ICP, you will need to have a strong articulation of the problem you are trying to solve and the customers that experience this problem the most. This will be your baseline hypothesis. Then, as you develop your ICP, keep testing your baseline hypothesis to weed out inaccurate assumptions.
Getting crystal clear here will set you up with the proper launchpad. No shortcuts.
Here’s how to get started:
- Develop an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) framework.
- Identify three target customers that fit your defined ICP.
- Write a problem statement for each identified target customer.
- Prioritize the problem statement that resonates with your product the most.
- Lock on the target customer of the prioritized problem statement.
Practice use case:
You are the co-founder at an upcoming SaaS startup focused on simplifying the shopping experience in car showrooms so buyers enjoy the process. What would your ICP look like?
2. Develop the SWOT
The SWOT framework cannot be overrated. This is a great structure to articulate who your competitors are and how you show up against them. Note that your competitors can be direct or indirect (as an alternative), and it’s important to categorize these buckets correctly.
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Box’s Aaron Levie says it will take creativity and focus to get through this crisis
The COVID-19 virus is touching every aspect of our lives and having a profound impact on individuals, businesses and society at large. Box’s Aaron Levie has built a successful business from dorm room to IPO and beyond. He spoke to TechCrunch today about the level of creativity and focus that it’s going to take to succeed in the current environment.
Levie pointed out that his company was a fledgling startup when the economic downturn hit in 2008, but he thinks this one could have a much greater impact on business than that one did.
“I think Silicon Valley is going to definitely experience this in a very, very significant way. We were building a company in 2008, and that was extremely hard, but I don’t think it is going to compare to how hard the coming year is going to be,” Levie said.
This morning on Twitter, Levie wrote that we are in uncharted territory, and everyone will have to work together to help navigate this crisis.
We have *no* playbook for this type of economic event. That means we can’t wait around for others to execute their playbook. It doesn’t exist. We all have to collectively find a way, however creative, to support others as we find a way through this.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) March 22, 2020
He believes the government will need to step in to help individuals and businesses alike. “Businesses, who have lots of employees, need to be supported, but fundamentally we need to make sure that we’re focused on all the workers that are out of work, hopefully just temporarily displaced, but we’re going to need a lot of government financial support to get through this,” he said.
For startups, he advised startups to firmly focus on their mission. “It’s about extreme focus right now. It’s about extreme discipline. It’s about making sure that you’re maintaining your culture during this time,” Levie said.
As for his own company, he’s looking a three areas: his employees, his customers and the community. He said his first priority is making sure his employees are safe and healthy and that the hourly workers who support the business normally are being taken care of as we move through this unprecedented situation.
Secondly, he’s making sure that he supports his customers. To that end the company has removed any license limits as customers deal with increased usage with employees working from home.
He has also joined forces with Cloudflare in an effort to provide small businesses with 90 days of free services to help ride out the situation, and he said they would revisit extending these programs if the situation continues.
Thirdly, he says every business who can has to look at ways to support the communities where they live to assist non-profit organizations who are helping in the response. “This is an event where business communities globally are going to have to put more of a concerted effort on this than any issue in modern history,” Levie said.
Levie is not alone in this thinking by any means. He points to other leaders such as Chuck Robbins, Marc Benioff and Tim Cook, all who have stepped up in recent days to offer help and support.
He has built his company from the ground up to one that’s on nearly an $800 million run rate, but like so many business leaders, he is dealing with a situation which, as he said, has no playbook. Like every other CEO, he’s trying to help keep his business thriving, while not losing sight of the needs of the people in his organization, his customers or his community. It’s not an easy balancing act for anyone right now.
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Essential advice for securing your small startup
Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked. And if the richest person in the world is vulnerable, chances are good that your startup could get hacked, too.
The good news is that, as a tiny company, you’re not a big target. But as soon as you hire your first employee, it’s time to think about adopting basic security practices to ensure that you’re less vulnerable. Nothing is perfectly secure on the internet, but you can mitigate risk.
When you have fewer than 10 employees, you don’t want to use a single sign-on service like Okta. Solutions that work great for companies with tens of thousands of employees are not practical because they’re not designed for you.
As a basic rule, you want things to be simple by design. Relying on fewer services will reduce your attack surface, and if people can follow rules without even thinking about them, your organization will be less vulnerable. You might be great at spotting phishing attempts and securing your own accounts, but your startup is only as secure as your least-savvy employee. Most security issues come from human error.
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20 critical startup truths no one will tell you
Some knowledge is so important, everyone assumes everyone already knows it. But they don’t, especially in the tech world where things move so fast that most people are faking. But Stripe’s Patrick McKenzie spends his time helping the payment platform’s startup customers survive, and now he’s laid out 20 crucial learnings everyone should read. Click or scroll through… Read More
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Seattle angel investor John Staenberg on the state of startup investing
Q: Gil Penchina (the top-ranked angel on AngelList) said one of the things he has learned about investing is how little control he has on the outcome. Do you feel the same way?
Absolutely. Most investors like to pretend they add a ton of value and expertise but they don’t. I am clear about it. The value I add is in having a good enough relationship with the founder so that when things… Read More
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