Gigantic Lies You’re Told About Getting Your First 100 Customers

Everybody has advice on how to get your first 100 customers.

Build something great and customers will find you, is probably some of the most toxic startup advice someone could give.

Some other horrible tips for indie startups are:

• Start by building an audience

• Focus on SEO

• Build in public

These approaches aren’t inherently wrong, they’re just strategic blunders for a bootstrap founder looking to get to ramen profitability (making enough money to survive) and beyond.

I’ve decided to break down these growth myths and provide you with a legitimate framework for getting customers on a daily basis while building momentum that compounds over time.

I could say that I know what I’m talking about here because of my 5 years working up the ladder of a Growth Hacking agency, having led 50 growth campaigns in the last couple of years alone. But the truth is different.

The truth is, this isn’t about growth hacks. It’s about getting back to the fundamentals. “Acquiring” customers on a first principles basis. Then using technology to scale and compound.

The thing is, most people won’t do this because it feels like more work than building an audience or getting SEO traffic. That’s incorrect.

In situations where you don’t have leverage (you don’t have a huge ad budget or a built-in audience), this is the fastest way to get momentum and start making sales.

If you don’t do this, you’ll fail. I guarantee it.

You’ve probably heard people say you need to “niche down.”

You’ve probably also heard things like:

• Identify your target audience.

• Create a customer profile or persona.

• Build a customer avatar - primary and secondary.

• Figure out where your ideal customer hangs out.

• Find the hashtags your customer uses

• Pick keywords your customers are searching

I’m going to save you a bunch of time chasing your tail with all that vague marketing lingo.

What you need to do, exactly, is pick a target audience that you can easily identify online based on their public profiles.

This will force you to do a couple of great things.

The first is be extremely specific with who you are targeting.

The second is push yourself toward a target audience that is easy to identify.

If you can’t do both of those things, getting customers is going to be a painstaking process.

What does this look like in practice?

Let’s say I’m building another productivity software for busy internet professionals. Hypothetically, this tool saves people time by automatically organizing their work or schedule based on priority.

With a product like that, it would be really easy to say, “Well this is a tool for everyone who works…”

But that’s a BS answer and provides you with absolutely zero strategic direction.

In other words, pursuing that strategy would be the most expensive way to acquire customers and you would leave yourself vulnerable to every software giant (Google, Microsoft, Clickup, Notion, Asana, Trello, Basecamp) that makes “productivity” tools for basically everyone with a computer and a job.

A much better approach is to identify who your tool is most useful for and who no competitors are targetting, and then build everything around them.

For example, Virtual Assistants in the United States.

This is going to allow you to do a few things.

1. Produce the rest of your marketing materials (like problem/benefits, messaging guidelines, etc…) because you have a set of people with problems and goals that are similar.

2. Find those people with relative ease.

Take a peek at this.

A quick hop over to LinkedIn, search “virtual assistant”, and filter for the United States.

And here we have 93,000+ real leads.

No need for avatars, personas, and profiles. Instead, we have a list of actual people who would make good customers for our product.

And this was just a fast LinkedIn example. Using different search tactics we can do the same thing on virtually any social media platform.

Another way to look at social media is basically as a prospect directory. Which it is.

To take it a step further we want to scrape all the people in this search criteria and get them on a spreadsheet. Creating what’s essentially a CRM.

I do this with the tool Phantom Buster.

Now, obviously, 93,000 people is enough to build serious momentum. It might actually be better to find another filter you can use to make the list smaller.

Since I’m in California, I might narrow my search to California so the list is smaller and I have another point of relation with them.

Put your sales hat on.

Now that you have a list of actual leads, that’s how we want to treat them - like leads.

And by that I mean we’re not going to hit them with ads or try to write content to resonate with them hoping they click through and buy our product.

Instead, we are going to use the native tools of the platforms available to us to manually push them through the sales funnel.

In general, a sales or marketing funnel looks like this:

1. Someone becomes aware of you or your company.

2. Through interaction, they learn about your product and the problem it solves.

3. They are encouraged to make a decision and purchase.

Awareness. Then consideration. Then conversion.

The thing is, there is a very natural progression of this that can happen on social media.

For example, I can make someone aware of me on Twitter by following them, liking their tweets, commenting on their posts, commenting on posts that they are likely to read, or DMing them directly.

I can make them more considerate if they look at my profile, maintain a conversation with me, and/or follow me so they see more content.

Then I can push them to convert by putting CTA on my profile or content, as well as closing them in the DMs.

Now. If you’re doing all this passively, it can take a long time to pull someone all the way through your marketing funnel. But… If you’re doing this actively, you can get people through your sales funnel in a few minutes.

Thus, we want to do this actively. Nudging our leads along the way so we can start bringing in new business.

What does that look like in practice?

Here’s what this sales funnel might look like with our virtual assistants on LinkedIn productivity tool example. but know that it’s going to look similar on virtually every platform. Though specific pieces will need to be adapted.

The first thing I would do in our example is change my LinkedIn profile to resemble a landing page.

In other words, it’s going to be caked with things like:

“I help virtual assistants make more money by getting more done in less time.” (Don’t copy that line… I’m using it to make a point, but it’s bad copy.)

The banner is going to reflect that core audience and core benefit, my about section is going to show how I keep that promise I’m making in that bold claim, my “featured” section is going to be Call-to-Actions that lead people to a free trial or something. And my “recommendations” are going to be other VAs that swear by the product I’m pitching.

I’d show screenshots, but seriously just Google (or ask chatGPT) “how to optimize my LinkedIn profile for lead gen” for thousands of examples.

The next step of the funnel is just as simple. I’m going to reach out to them. But I’m going to do it in the way that feels native to the platform.

• Make a connection request

• Like their post (if it’s recent)

• Comment on posts of people they are likely following.

The whole point here is to get them to follow you, or in the case of LinkedIn, accept your connection request.

Once they do that, it’s perfectly acceptable to open up a conversation with them. And keep in mind, this isn’t a normal conversation. It’s a covert sales conversation.

The opening line should be non-threatening and simple.

On LinkedIn, I would just say, “Hey, glad to connect. What are your goals on LinkedIn?”

After you send 20 of those kinds of messages, you’ll see they all have the same few responses. Something like, “My goals here are to improve my business through making valuable connections.”

At that point, I’d usually acknowledge what their response was, and then ask them another question. “What stage are you at in reaching your goal?” or “What’s your biggest challenge right now?”

At that point, their pitch protection antenna is probably down, and they’ll give you an authentic response.

In the ideal case, they’ll reciprocate and ask you what you are working on or what your goal on LinkedIn is.

That’s the point where you’ll tell them, indirectly, that you’re building a company designed to serve people just like them. And you can ask them to take action.

It’s better if the action you ask them to take is one step further

down your sales funnel, and not necessarily the sale itself.

Here’s an example of some conversations I’ve had on Twitter that match this outline perfectly. My goal on Twitter is to get people to subscribe to this newsletter.

In fact, if you’re reading this newsletter right now, you’re probably one of the tens of people who I’ve had a conversation like this with in the past couple of weeks.

With this method, you can start moving people down the sales funnel really quickly.

Notes on this section:

• Just like any sales or marketing, this is a numbers game. Expect to send 10 conversation-opening DMs to get 1-2 results.

• Don’t come off pushy, but always make the ask. Don’t ever assume that because you had a short conversation with someone, they’ll go to your profile and subscribe to your newsletter.

• Sometimes it’s appropriate to make your ask on the second message, sometimes you’ll wait until the 10th to find a more natural opening. Do your best to leave a good taste in the mouth of the people you’re talking to.

Scale the things that don’t scale

So far what I’ve advised you to do is basically the same advice as: Do things that don’t scale.

The only other thing I would say on top of that is: once you are doing things that don’t scale, scale them.

That may sound odd given these are things that “don’t scale.”

But you gotta remember that scale used to mean something else before tech. It used to mean improving efficiency through better processes. And that’s exactly what we want to do here.

If sending 10 DMs in one day results in 1 free trial activated, the question becomes how can we send 100 in a day?

To a marketer, this generally presents a challenge.

But to an engineer the answer is obvious - automate it.

Most people hear automated DMs or emails and immediately their SPAM radar starts popping off. But as we mentioned before, we’re just automating a conversation opener.

In the sales context, it’s the equivalent of automating your prospecting. The problem comes when you try to automate your pitching.

For a developer, it may make sense to build your own automation tools to get this done. For a non-developer like me, I recommend just using a tool like Phantom Buster.

The trick here is to only automate what you would naturally do. A good automation provides a ton of leverage, and bad automation provides a ton of pain.

Here are some examples of automations I would run at the top of the funnel to push people closer to conversion.

1. Auto-following/connecting: Do this at a low rate. You can always unfollow them later.

2. Auto-liking: Make a short list of a thousand or so people who are active and appropriate (don’t want to like posts of people who just post controversial stuff. It reflects poorly. Vet the people in your automation).

3. Auto-DM people who follow you or connect: Again, doing this wrong is an easy way to rub people the wrong way. Just open up a conversation. Everyone that follows you is a lead, not a follower.

4. Auto-DM people who like one of your posts: When someone likes your post, they’re saying they are paying attention. And that’s an easy conversation opener.

One thing to keep in mind, is that there will be limitations to how much activity (manually or automated) you are allowed to do on each platform. Always play it safe. Social media is a long-term game. You never want to put your account in jeopardy by pushing the limits of what a platform allows.

Social media platforms hate spam. But they love keeping users engaged on the platform. If you can help them keep their users engaged, they will reward you. Regardless of whether or not you were using automation the whole time.

Once you are reaching an activity cap for a particular platform, apply the same strategic thinking to another platform.

Although the outline for the strategy will remain the same, switching from say Twitter to LinkedIn will force you to rethink some things.

• You’ll need to create a new list creation method

• You’ll need to change the context of your outreach to match what people are on that platform for.

• You’ll need to change the actions that you’ll ultimately automate.

• And each platform has a different tolerance for activity that you’ll need to research and keep in mind.

After you’ve successfully taken your campaign omnichannel, if you’re lucky, you’ll feel overwhelmed with good conversations.

There are 3 things I highly recommend to help you manage the inflow of conversations.

1. Use texts.com as a tool to pool together all your inboxes and manage conversations from one place. This will help you not miss conversations by forgetting to check a particular platform.

2. Use an adaptation of Inbox Zero communication methodology and archive conversations where no action is needed from you. This will help you declutter so you don’t miss important opportunities.

3. If you find yourself saying the same things over and over again - which you will - save those messages as templates in a document that you can pull up while you’re in these conversations. This will save you a bunch of time.

This is an extremely boots-on-the-ground approach to digital marketing. And it’s an extremely effective way to create initial momentum for that reason.

The biggest benefit of doing your marketing this way is the sheer amount of conversations you’ll have with prospects and future customers. That kind of first-hand data is hard to come by. You’ll build real and lasting relationships with customers who you can call on for help and feedback when you wish.

That said, this is a strategy for the initial phases of getting momentum for your product. It is not a suitable forever growth strategy.

This leaves us with the question. Where do you go from here?

Compound your marketing results with layers.

Marketing, like all investing, is a decision on how to allocate your capital (or time and effort). And the thing about investing is that it compounds.

If you’re selling something with a monthly recurring fee, it’s obvious to see how this kind of activity over the course of a year can compound on itself.

Regardless, there are ways to speed up the compounding effect of your marketing efforts by leveraging your baseline activity with an additional layer.

If you pursue the strategy I just laid out above, you’ll be making tens of connections per day with potential customers. And you’ll be doing that mainly on social media platforms. There’s an obvious additional layer of marketing we can do here to speed things along: Content Marketing.

As you make connections with ideal customers day by day, even if those people are not engaging with your messages, the likelihood that they will start seeing your content goes way up. It’s an opportunity to nurture your prospects you don’t want to miss out on.

Even then, the possible layers continue. All those people you convinced to start a trial, schedule an appointment, or subscribe to your newsletter likely gave you email, or are now in-app, or phone numbers. These of course are additional marketing channels you now have a captivated audience on.

A referral campaign, or affiliate campaign, or UGC campaign are all viable ways to leverage the 1 to 1 audience you’ve built to get more reach.

Once you start building momentum, the doors open up to all kinds of marketing tactics. That’s why I like the layered approach to building an audience.

The cold outreach or 1 to 1 marketing approach is extremely effective, and once you have an audience, no matter how small it begins, it’s easier to continue to grow it.

Conclusion

This was a long edition of the Indie Strategy Newsletter and I hope you can take these strategies and absolutely crush it.

If you need it, here is a recap: