How To Get Your First 100 Customers

I must be asked at least 20 times a week from you guys exactly how to get the first 100 users/customers for your business. So in this email I want to break down exactly what it is that I did to get here, and how you can do the same.

Identify your sales funnel

I can go into more detail on sales funnels in future emails, but for now, the basics is understanding what vehicle you are going to use to get your first 100 users. In this example I’m going to assume to want to monetise this audience (Im not a fan of free users, as its a slower road to mrr, and they are harder to upsell).

When I started ChatIQ.ai however, the first thing I wanted to do was bring on a few customers to test the product. This is what I’d recommend before starting mass marketing, users can give you feedback, submit bugs and help you improve your product before your real launch.

*Important Tip: (gathering customer feedback/managing customers is the most important thing you can do to improve your mrr/decrease churn)

So here’s our basic sales funnel: Organic traffic > Landing page > Signup for app > Free trial pay wall > Send to app dashboard

I’d start with getting 20 free users to give feedback to help improve the app, but then everything after that should use the above sales funnel.

So if we are only focusing on getting our first test (beta test) users, how many do we need and where do we get them from?

Linkedin

For me I used Linkedin, I show my exact strategy in this video (if it doesnt load to go my YouTube linked at the bottom of this email, its the vid on the homepage):

Essentially all I did was build a list of 2500 leads from Sales Navigator that could be interested in my product and cold messaged them. I setup a powerful offer that would peak their interest, got them on a demo/sales call and tried to close them.

This wasn’t a huge success as I was trying to sell for $2000 with a service alongside my saas, but in the video you can see me do a live close of my saas product.

What if Linkedin doesn’t work?

Now, depending on your business, your customers may not be on Linkedin, or maybe you want something easier and more scaleable. For me I only got 2-3 users from Linkedin, so I started to explore short form content.

TikTok is by far the best platform to see RAPID growth for your business, but ONLY if you do it correctly. Now, I must stress here, TikTok has the power to take you from 0-1000 users within as little as 48 hours. (This is what happened to me), so I recommend your product is at least more than an MVP for this method.

*Important Tip: (If your app starts to go viral please make sure to turn on free trials, this viral traffic will be a spike and won’t last long. Take advantage of it)

Next, we need to identify exactly what type of content we need to make, because, posting just ads for your product is NOT going to get you very far.

Here’s what you need to do:
1) Identify your audience avatar, who are they? What are they interested in? What are their problems? How can you help them?
2) DO NOT create content just showing off your product, I did this at the start and it worked for a week or so but after that I rapidly had to adapt.
3) Think outside the box for video ideas, i recommend looking Morning Brew on tiktok for inspo. Create content your customer would watch, enjoy and more importantly has a much wider target audience. This is critical to see early success.

The biggest mistake I see newbie marketers make is getting their phone out and just mass producing boring adverts for their content on tiktok, they get stuck at 250 views, and then blame the platform and move on.

But think about it, TikTok doesn’t want you to advertise your product, they want users to enjoy their experience, so create content that does this, keeping it relevant to your target audience, then at the end give them a call to action to try your product.

Ok, but what do I say?

Lets imagine for a moment your audience is students, this is a huge market, but students really do not give a f**k about your product, they only care about the solution.

They also don’t want to sit and watch an ad, they want to laugh, be entertained, learn something cool, or (here’s a super power) watch relatable content.

So here’s what you DON’T do:
Hook: “If you’re a student and you struggle with managing your revision watch this! Head to www.yourproduct.com, create an account, click this, upload your xyz…”

This is so boring I’d rather peel my eyeballs. Now, if by some miracle this gets thousands of views you’ve got yourself a LOT of users, BUT it will only go viral by accident and is not a repeatable strategy.

Here’s what you SHOULD do:

Hook: “If Yale was honest: Welcome to Yale, your entire personality as a Yale student is gonna be shitting on Harvard…(fill this in with an entertaining skit)…but really you’re not as special as Harvard, let’s face it, you need extra tuition, so head to www.yourproduct.com and …(insert elevator pitch for your app)”

Now i must admit, I took the Yale example from a very successful tiktok I saw a few weeks ago and adapted it but you get the idea. You are still targeting the same audience, students will be interested in watching this because its RELEVANT, its entertaining, it alienates a part of the audience which causes controversy and gets comments and engagements like: “lol this is so true”.

More importantly however, this video is still an advert for your product, BUT doesn’t come across as an advert. People don’t notice its a product ad until the end. So as a result will get a lot more views.

Thats it!

Thats all I have room for in this email, but if you want me to go into more detail, tag me on twitter sharing the link to The Saas Scoop along with your idea for what you want me to cover in the next email.

Or you can fill out the survey below to let me know what specific topics you'd like me to cover in future emails.

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