A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

24 ways to get your first customers—based on real examples from the last 100 episodes.

• Mistral.vc • Season 3 • Episode 81

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There are a few things harder when building startups than getting your first few customers. When you're on a standstill, getting momentum is incredibly hard. Going from zero to one takes an incredible amount of effort—you have absolutely no credibility, no proof points.

So to help you out I went through 24 ways of getting your first customers using 24 different examples from this show.

Why you should listen:

  • Figure out how to land your first few customers. You are guaranteed to find at least one example that works for you.

Keywords
customer acquisition, startup strategies, community building, persistence, experimentation, free services

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:35) Stay22 - Pay your Customers
(00:02:25) Reddit - Creating your Community
(00:02:58) Rappi - Seeding Supply
(00:04:04) Wattpad - Seeding Demand
(00:05:05) Cameo - Finding Someone With an Audience
(00:05:43) Noibu - Showcasing the Value of the Platform
(00:06:41) Bridgit - Showing up in Person
(00:07:24) Rewind - Attaching to an Ecosystem
(00:08:36) Clio - Adding Friction to the Funnel
(00:09:06) Wealthsimple - Lunch & Learn
(00:09:29) Athennian - Classic Customer Discovery
(00:10:00) Carbon Robotics - Presales from Customer Discovery
(00:10:34) StackAdapt - Creating Custom Software
(00:11:21) ApplyBoard - Identifying Power Users
(00:12:27) Forma AI - Sheer Force of Will
(00:15:01) Blockthrough - Starting with an Obvious Problem
(00:16:25) GoBolt - Finding Problems Close to You
(00:17:08) Shopify - Building a Waitlist & Showcasing the Product
(00:17:43) Fullscript - Cold Emailing
(00:18:30) Spellbook - Running Experiments Exceptionally Quickly
(00:19:27) Legion - Finding a Design Partner
(00:20:18) Knak - Consulting
(00:20:54) Dabble - Building Distrobution
(00:21:55) Zeffy - Making the Product Free

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

Pablo Srugo (00:00):

There are a few things harder when building startups than getting your first few customers. And honestly few things are more important. 'cause Once you have those customers, you have not just traction but you start to actually have learnings. Of course you have revenue, but the flip side of that is you have people actually using your product, people who actually care and are paying for your product. And you can learn from all those behaviors, from all the things they say. And really it just gets the ball rolling. Like at the end of the day when you're on a standstill, getting that first momentum is incredibly hard. Going from zero to one, like literally from no customers to one customer is an incredible amount of effort. You have absolutely no credibility, no proof points. And so for literally like the first time ever, like I haven't seen anything like this, we're going to go for 24 ways of getting your first customers with 24 different examples from this show. You've got a lot to go through. So I'm not going to go into incredible detail about every single one, but of course if you wanna learn more, just go back to those episodes, look up the name of the company in the podcast and you'll find it easily.

Pablo Srugo (00:57):

So I opened up listen notes.com today, which is a platform that ranks podcasts worldwide that I've often used to understand kind of where we're at. And as of today, we are now a top 1% podcast globally. That's across all the millions of podcasts that are out there. So I just wanted to let you know this because we're building this community together and I wanted to say thank you, thank you for listening, thank you for following the show. Thank you for sharing it with other founders. I love the fact that I get to do this. I love that we continue to grow and I love to end the year on such a high note. Let's do it again next year. Here's to 2025.

Pablo Srugo (01:35):

The first one is Take22. They had a product in the travel space that was gonna help other people in the travel space think about companies that create events or think about companies that are in the ticketing space. And the bottom line most important thing is it would help those companies generate new revenue. Here's the problem. When Andrew went out and tried to sell this product, no one believed him, nobody would buy it. So what did he do? He literally offered to pay those first few customers. So that's the first thing. Pay your customers, you think you're gonna generate money for someone, guess what? Put your money where your mouth is. And literally what he did is he just said, okay, listen, you know what? I'm so confident in this. If you sign up, I'm gonna pay you X dollars next month just for signing up.

Pablo Srugo (02:13):

And then of course people said, okay, if you're that confident, let's go ahead and do it. He didn't end up even having to pay them. The product generated the revenue it was supposed to generate and boom, it was done. He had his first few customers. The second one, and this is a pretty known story, but Reddit, Reddit needed to hack away to create a community. So what did they do? Literally for the first few months, the only people who posted anything on Reddit were the founders themselves and their friends and family <laugh>. So there was no network effects here. There was no marketing stunt or way to go viral. It was literally just hours and hours and hours of just seeding content into their community. That's how they ended up getting the first few customers in the, in the case, I would say the first few users is because they actually created enough content that there was value in going into reddit.com in the first place.

Pablo Srugo (02:58):

The third one is Rappi. Rappi is like Uber Eats, but in Lat Am, right? In Latin America. And the way that they started, they absolutely hacked it. Again, these are marketplace examples. So you have to find a way of solving that kind of chicken and egg supply and demand problem. So what does Rappi do? Rappi just decides, you know what, we're gonna hack our way to success. We are going to pick the 25 absolute best restaurants in the first geo where we're landing and we're just gonna add them to our app. We're not gonna go and spend time and ask these restaurants if they wanna be part of our app or not. We're gonna not gonna try and convince them one by one by one because it's not gonna happen. We're just gonna add all of them. And they did. They added all of them.

Pablo Srugo (03:36):

And of course when they launched people were like, wow, these restaurants are available for delivery. That's a zero to one event. They started ordering like crazy. What did they do? Well, they just hacked the other side of that. They literally sent couriers to those restaurants and they would just order takeout, take the food and deliver it. It was incredibly inefficient, but it worked. It worked to get them the first few users. It's a complete Hack <laugh>, complete way to skip over all the stuff you have to do to convince people to join. They just put 'em on and now they're a multi-billion dollar company. The fourth one is WattPad . And you see these examples, you have to find a way to seed either supply like Rappy just did or to Seed Demand, which what Wapa did, what WattPad does today is they're a marketplace for readers and writers. So if you want to, and they have like a hundred million people on their marketplace, so if you wanna read like original stories, you wanna create original stories, WattPad is the place you go.

Pablo Srugo (04:25):

But that's not how they started. They started with single player mode. And so what they did is, this is back in the day pre iPhone, this is when flip phones were around. They just built an app that let people read classic books on the go. That's all you could do is take a book that you read like in elementary school and you wanna read it on your mobile phone. That literally was all that Wapa did. But what that did is they seeded the man. So that was the key. They seeded the man, they got people to just use Wattpad to read books and then once they had like a thousand readers, they had an asset because they had an audience. And then this is two years that it took by the way, they finally had the first writer upload a book and then the network effect was starry.

Pablo Srugo (05:04):

That was the zero to one event. Cameo is another marketplace, another consumer marketplace. If you think about it, you go to Cameo because you want to pay a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars or $5,000 whatever it is for a very short video of someone famous saying something specific to you or your family. A lot of use cases are around like gifting. And so they needed someone to start off with and what they did is they had one person they knew it wasn't even, it was an NFL player but wasn't even a starter and that's who they used to get things started. So they found somebody who already had an audience, already had a network and that's how they seeded supply and that's how they got actually their first sale was through that person. Now we're shifting completely to e-commerce. So a company called Nobu, their strategy for getting the first customer was showcasing exactly the value of the platform.

Pablo Srugo (05:52):

What they do is they help e-commerce merchants find checkout errors. So if you can imagine, you go to a page, you're about to buy something and when you get to the checkout moment and you try to pay, it doesn't work. There's some bug on some browser and device combination that you happen to be using and it won't let you check out. It turns out that e-commerce stores lose like 5% to even 10% of the revenue from checkout errors. Extremely painful. So what does Nobu do? Instead of sending out normal cold emails and telling people about the problem and asking for a demo, they just go, they audit a website, they find the errors, they try to get a sense of how much it cost them and they send like videos like showing the errors and basically saying, listen, we found this error. It's probably costing you thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, whatever it is, let us know if you want us to solve it.

Pablo Srugo (06:38):

That is a no-brainer way to get your first few customers. BridgeIt actually kind of hacked it. You know the way they did it - BridgeIt construction tech software. And what they did is they started going and they would look for literally cranes in the sky. They would show up in person on site and bring a gift, a simple gift like coffee and donuts. And that opened so many doors for them. You wouldn't believe it! They were students at the time. So that's another card they played. So for them, the way to get customers was effectively through hacking the way into a relationship being just like, I mean we're not talking about a huge effort. It's a tiny little lift that it takes to be different than the people that are sending emails that are doing cold calling. And you can, because you're a founder and you don't have a company yet, you have a lot of time.

Pablo Srugo (07:18):

And so trying to find these things that just make you be seen differently often are the difference between going from zero to one. Rewind. Rewind is a SaaS company and what they do is they are like a SaaS backup company, but they work with Shopify, they work with QuickBooks, they work with a lot of other apps and they're just a way to back up your SaaS apps. So if you have a Shopify store and some error happens and you happen to delete all your products for example, you can't do anything about it, you've gotta start all over. There is no backup within Shopify at that level. And so they created a platform that backs up your Shopify store. And then like I said, they expanded to a bunch of other apps. The way they grew was by attaching themselves to a massive ecosystem.

Pablo Srugo (07:55):

So Shopify grew from 900 apps in 2015 when they started to 13,000 apps today. And so when the big behemoth that you attach yourself grows 10, 15 x from the time that you start till you know many years later, that obviously is a huge tailwind for growth. And that was the way that they got their first few customers. Frankly, they literally just put out an app into that store and at that point, not only did they grow because of it, they also were able to effectively shine because there were just not that many apps. I mean 900 apps covering all sorts of use cases. When you think about backups as one of those use cases, they were one of the only ones if not the only ones at the beginning. And so there was just kind of pent up demand in there and they got to ride it.

Pablo Srugo (08:36):

Clio is a legal tech startup now worth over $3 billion. And the way they started was through your classic beta. They did it a little differently though. They actually added friction to the funnel. So they said, you can be part of our beta, but the only way you're gonna be part of our beta is if you watch this 30 minute webinar. And so that actually added friction to the funnel. Obviously a lot of people that would've been part of the beta weren't as a result, but what they, what they made sure of was that the people that were in the beta were clearly engaged, they actually cared and that was how they got their first few customers. WealthSimple, which is now certainly the most popular and widely used FinTech app in Canada and is worth $5 billion. It's like the hood of Canada. Mike Catchin started by doing lunch and learns.

Pablo Srugo (09:17):

He literally would run around Toronto with lunches back like 10 years ago when he started just to do lunch and learns about finance and investing in different companies. And that's how he got his first few users. Athennian, another legal tech startup that's now like series B plus did just classic customer discovery. He was selling to paralegals, so he found an ICP that doesn't really get a lot of love, a lot of attention. Paralegals aren't sold to nearly as extensively as let's say lawyers are. And he leveraged that in order to get more time with them and just run like classic customer discovery. He would run focus groups, he would do it in person, he would do it for hours. And of course through that, built the right relationships and was able to sell to the first few law firms as a direct result of customer discovery.

Pablo Srugo (10:00):

Another different one from left field. This is a robotics company. They have a robot that shoots weeds with lasers. So you think about a big farm, they have weeds, they have a problem because it eats up other crops. The robots goes and spots weeds shoots it with lasers and he was able to get $10 million in pre-sales before building his product. So that's another way to go out and get your customers way before you have any product. There's really no excuses, but especially if you're doing something B2B, especially if it's mid-market or above, if you find somebody who really has pain, you can get pre-sales and that's another way to go from zero to one stack adapt, which is now doing $400 million in revenue and they've raised only like in the tens, low tens of millions of dollars. So they've raised way less than the revenue that they're generating through custom software.

Pablo Srugo (10:50):

I know that they talk about how often you don't want to build custom, custom software because custom software doesn't scale, but that's what Stack Adada did. They ended up building this ad tech solution, but the way they started was with one Enterprise customer building something that was tailored to their needs. Now obviously they did it with scale in mind and so the way that they architected their product and the way that they set up the IP, they were able to build on top of it for future customers. But make no mistake, they started with just one customer and now they do $400 million in revenue. ApplyBoard The way they got really going, and I guess this isn't really the way they got their first customer, but it's certainly the way that they got their first meaningful customer was through identifying power users. What ApplyBoard does, it's a $4 billion company today.

Pablo Srugo (11:32):

What they do is they help students study abroad. So move countries and study somewhere else. And at first they were direct to consumers because Martin started it to solve his own problem. He had been a student and he'd gone through the pain of having to study abroad. And so he built a solution for people just like him, but by watching the data, they found that there were people that were using it not once a week or twice a week, but every day for hours on end. And what they realized was that these people were agents, they were professionals that lived abroad and would take on 10, 20, 30, 40 students and help them, for a fee, they would help them find a school to study abroad and they were using Apply board to do so, and now apply board mainly works with agents.

Pablo Srugo (12:16):

So they decided to go all in on these power users and effectively build a layer that sits on top of all these fragmented agents that already exist and are already servicing students internationally. Forma is one of my the most interesting kind of stories. I mean Forma got their first few customers through absolute sheer force of will. It's a sales compensation platform that helps companies organize all of their bonus payments, all of their commissions so that it's properly aligned to whatever they truly want to incentivize. And you really have to listen to this story to fully kind of get it. This guy is a person who just walks through walls who just won't take no for an answer. I mean, I'll tell you a story again, it's not about his first customer specifically, but just to give you a sense of the stuff that Nabeel was willing to do.

Pablo Srugo (13:01):

I mean Nabeil at one point when he needed to do his first renewal, right? And he's selling enterprise, obviously renewals is really a huge part of your effort. I mean you need not, not just to get companies to sign up for another year, you need to expand, you need to, you need, you really need them to expand because it's all about expansion revenue. So he and his co-founder go and they're gonna go from Toronto to Ohio to do this kind of in-person meeting and they book a flight from, you know, from Toronto to Ohio in February. they show up at the airport and it turns out, you know, there's a huge snow event. It's obviously the middle winter in Canada, in Toronto. And so the flight gets canceled. So they, they book a different flight, they, they end up, they decide that they're gonna go from Toronto to LA and back to Ohio on the eye overnight.

Pablo Srugo (13:44):

So it's already just a terrible setup. They're gonna be super tired for their meeting, but whatever they book it, they get onto the plane, the plane's on the tarmac, and it just starts getting delayed and delayed and delayed. Nabeil realizes that there's just no way he's going to make it. He's just not gonna make the flight because he is not gonna make the connection in la. He's gonna miss that and then he is gonna miss the meeting. I tell this story because it's at this point that any sane normal person, myself included, would just send out a text, send out an email and say, listen guys, I tried everything. I'm so sorry, you know, it's a snow storm. Like what, what? There's nothing I can do about it and I'm stuck on the plane. I'm, I'm stuck on the tarmac, like literally I can't get off the plane so, so sorry, let's do it over Zoom or let's postpone, but Nabeel just won't take no for an answer.


Pablo Srugo (14:29):

So what does he do? He gets the flight attendant over, convinces her to let him talk to the pilot, she takes him to the pilot, which you never see, I just haven't ever heard of this. And it's not because of an emergency, it's because of a business issue. And he convinces the pilot that because he's gonna miss a meeting that he should let him off the plane and he does. The pilot lets him off the plane and Bill books a different flight for the day after and makes the meeting in person. And this is the kind of thing - walking through walls sometimes you just gotta go forward and nothing can stop you from getting that first customer. And that's sometimes what gets you from zero to one block through is another ad tech startup that was sold for a hundred million dollars.

Pablo Srugo (15:04):

Totally different. I would say the way they got their first customer was actually, it's kinda like it's by starting with an obvious problem. So their problem is there's ad blockers out there, right? And so if you're a publisher, imagine you're cnn.com, you put out media, you put out content and you make money through ads. Well, in a world where 50% plus of people have ad blockers and they don't see a single ad, that's a pretty big problem. Now, if somebody were to go to you and say, Hey, how would you like to make money on the 50% of people that have ad blockers where you make $0 a day, every single publisher, every CNN of the world will say, well yeah, of course. And because of that it's an obvious pro problem. If you went back to when Marty was starting block through, everybody would tell you of course if you could monetize ad block users, that is a huge, that's a great idea, but how are you gonna do it?

Pablo Srugo (15:49):

So he went after an obvious problem where there was no way he wasn't gonna get a customer if he could build it, if it could happen. Now his story is full of challenges. This guy was like living on ramen noodles for way too long. He's living off his credit card. He had like, you know, he measured runaway in weeks for years and he had to kind of change his technical staff multiple times. So it was not easy to get the product to work. But when he did get the product to work, it flew off the shelves, like it went from zero to a million in like four months and then grew to 10 million and got acquired for a hundred. So that's another way to get your first customer. It's: find that obvious problem that nobody else has figured out how to solve and solve it.

Pablo Srugo (16:26):

Global, Global is now doing well over a hundred million dollars in the logistics space. But they started with a very simple solution. It was literally just, they were students and they noticed that their, that other students like them would go home for the summer break and they had nowhere to store their stuff over those four months. So they just started a service. At first it was just like storing his stuff over the summer and then later moved to kind of helping you with the move and then now it's like doing logistics for ikea, like massive, massive companies. So the way that he got it for his first customers was by finding problems close to him. But more than that was by solving problems for his peers, people that he had direct access to and could sell into. And that's how he went from zero to one.

Pablo Srugo (17:07):

Shopify is a classic story which Shopify did. obviously they started off selling snowboards. They built an e-commerce platform to sell those snowboards. People started coming in and asking them what that platform was and then they decided to go all in on the platform. Now what they did over those years, even though they're like technical people at heart, they clearly had a marketing angle there because they went and they built a pretty serious wait list and they showcased their own snowboard product that garnered that attention. It's kind of the main event. And so the idea was like, Hey, you like this store? Like if you wanna store like this, sign up to the waitlist. When they launched, they had thousands of people on the waitlist and it's no surprise they converted a bunch of them. Fullscript is an interesting one. They're doing $900 million in revenue today, a hundred million dollars in EBITDA.

Pablo Srugo (17:47):

And what they do is they help healthcare professionals ,think like a naturopath, sell supplements. So naturopaths typically in order to generate extra revenue, they would have supplements like in their local store. Problem is they can only, you know, stock so much of different types of supplements. With Fullscript you basically have a Shopify for naturopaths and other people in the, in the, in the health sector to sell supplements. Believe it or not, they got their first customers through cold emailing. This is no kind of crazy idea, this is no hack. It's just like cold emailing. I say that because sometimes I think as a founder you try and think of new ways to do this, new spins to put on things, but sometimes you gotta try the old stuff, you gotta try the proven stuff. Cold emails work for Kyle, they work for Fullscript and like I said now they're doing close to a billion in revenue.

Pablo Srugo (18:30):

Spellbook is a legal tech startup. And now like in an AI enabled, let's say legal tech startup that absolutely blew up. Like it grew like 20 x in a year. The way they got there was through constant and incessant experimentation. I mean these guys created for years what I would argue is an experiment shop. Like that's really what I would think about how what they created was an experiment shop. It was a way to run experiments consistently, like I'm talking every week or two, maybe a different landing page, maybe a different positioning statement, maybe a different feature. But everything was orchestrated around not building a product, not getting to scale and just specifically orchestrated around running experiments exceptionally quickly, getting clear feedback on what worked, what didn't and why. And then trying again. And one of those experiments became SpellBook. It became this kind of AI that sits inside a Word document for lawyers and helps you draft faster. 

Pablo Srugo (19:28):

Legion. It's software for like coffee shops and other retailers to do scheduling. The way they started is they worked in stealth. They worked with one customer for over a year to perfect the product. And the founder worked as a barista for like a few weeks just to understand the ins and out. And so I think the way that I would say they got their first customer was by finding a design partner that really wanted to invest the time they didn't pay for a long time, right? But I really wanted to invest time and going all in on that design partner. He said to me the time that I decided to sell to others was when that design partner was willing to 100% depend on my product. And that's the time that I knew I had product market fit. And so that was the way that he got his first customer, was by finding a design partner, not thinking about getting 'em to pay or not getting to pay but just getting 'em to invest time and then spending enough time with them to build the right product.

Pablo Srugo (20:18):

Another company that's now doing well over 10 million in a RR is called NAC. And they got there through consulting. Like consulting, honestly is looked down upon in the tech world, in the star world because you can't scale it, but you can learn a lot from consulting. So they were doing like Marketo implementations, like that was what they started off with and that turned into software. And then what they realized was that people just needed the same stuff over and over and over again with Marketo. They needed landing pages then even they needed email templates. And so they built software to allow people to do that and that software grew to over 10 million. Obviously at that point they had people they knew to sell him to but they understood the pain point Perfectly Dabble is a sports betting app that grew from zero to $150 million a year in just four years.

Pablo Srugo (20:59):

And the way they did it was they built distribution, they built a community first and product second. It wasn't really on purpose, it wasn't thought out. They had a marketing agency for sports betting apps and so they got exceptionally good at marketing these sorts of apps and they had an audience that clearly resonated with sports betting. At one point they decided to build their own product. When they did, they already had this distribution machine. Not only did they understand the ICP, they understood the customer, they understood the value, they also had distribution, they had a community of people, they were perfect ICP. And so when they launched they had literally too much demand. that was their problem. So that's another way to think about it is where can you build a community around content or, or even in their case, a marketing agency for a certain ICP where you don't not take any product risk, you just figure out distribution.

Pablo Srugo (21:50):

The thing is, if you figure out distribution, you have way more than half of the battle done. The last one I'll mention is Zeffy. Zeffy is in such a non-traditional space they sell, I mean they sell to non-for-profits like <laugh>. Very few people are building massive tech businesses selling to non-for-profits. And what's worse in a sense is they don't sell to them, they give the product for free. So what Zeffy is, is a fundraising platform for non-for-profits and it's offered 100% free to non-for-profits. That's how they got the first customer. You wanna get a customer? make it free <laugh>. And I know that that might sound like crazy advice. Now their platform, the way it works is if you're an organization and you wanna raise money for a cause, I mean basically every single charity has to raise money. So you're targeting a top priority problem.

Pablo Srugo (22:32):

You go in and you say, here, use my platform. If you wanna raise money, it doesn't cost you anything. And on top of that, we don't take any fees. What do they do instead? They just ask the donor who's already in a donating mindset, they ask them for an extra donation, they have some texts when you're about to donate and it just says, listen, like the reason that 100% of your donation goes to the cause you want it to go to is because we're free and don't charge any fees. So if you want our service to continue, donate. Now you might remember a model like this from Wikipedia. Wikipedia seems to struggle a lot with it, but of course with Wikipedia you're not really in a donating mindset. With them, you are. And so that's another way to think about it is if there's some part of your product or all of your product in their case that you can make free.

Pablo Srugo (23:11):

Free is incredibly powerful when used properly. So there you go. That is 24 ways of getting your first customer. I'm absolutely exhausted. I'm not gonna lie, that was way more than I thought. But I am sure there's at least one thing in there that makes sense for your business, that makes sense for your startup. So honestly, steal it. Steal it right away. Try it out. Try out as many of these as you want as you can and go get those customers. So guess what, I met this founder who listened to every single episode of the

Pablo Srugo (23:44):

Product Market Fit show. He just called me and he sold his company for over a billion dollars. That's right. If you listen to every episode of the product Market Fit show, that's what's gonna happen. That's just, it's, you know, I can't say it's guaranteed, but it's what I've seen. It's just, it's what I've seen in the past. But you won't know for sure unless you, you know, tried out for yourself. So go back 'cause there's over a hundred episodes of the product Market Fit show and you haven't listened to most of them. Check them out.



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