Watch this to get your first 5 customers
A comprehensive guide covering 21 methods (15 free, 6 paid) for acquiring first customers, including social media outreach, content creation, community engagement, and paid advertising. The speaker emphasizes that most startups fail before reaching 5 customers and shares real examples from their own app's growth to over 5,000 users.
Summary
This video provides a detailed breakdown of customer acquisition strategies for early-stage entrepreneurs launching new products or services. The speaker begins by acknowledging that most startups die before reaching their first five customers and presents this as a practical guide for overcoming that hurdle.
The free methods covered include leveraging existing networks (though the speaker admits skipping this personally), direct messaging on social platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, posting in Facebook groups and communities, creating short-form and long-form video content, using cold email outreach, submitting to startup directories like Product Hunt, partnering with affiliates, engaging in product forums, optimizing for AI SEO, building free lead magnets, hosting webinars for other influencers' audiences, using Upwork as a reverse job board, creating custom GPTs, and building local business relationships.
The paid strategies include using lead generation tools like Apollo for email campaigns, running Facebook ad funnels to landing pages, building micro-tools and apps to drive traffic, securing press coverage through HARO and newswire services, using social listening tools to find relevant conversations, and sponsoring micro-influencers or niche newsletters.
Throughout the presentation, the speaker provides specific real-world examples, including how they hired video editors through cold LinkedIn DMs and cold emails, generated thousands of comments through Instagram lead magnets, and grew their app through affiliate partnerships. They conclude by showing which methods they've actually implemented (marked in green), which they're experimenting with (yellow), and which they haven't tried (red), emphasizing that success comes from trying multiple approaches and doubling down on what works.
Key Insights
- The speaker reveals they completely skipped reaching out to friends, family, and past colleagues because they didn't want to deal with explaining their business, despite this being a common starting point for entrepreneurs
- A video editor successfully landed work by cold DMing the speaker on LinkedIn after creating an unsolicited before-and-after sample edit, demonstrating the power of providing value upfront in cold outreach
- The speaker's Instagram posts generated 3,000 comments for faceless video templates and 2,000 comments for SEO playbooks using automated DM systems, showing the scalability of social media lead generation
- The speaker admits pouring over $100,000 into Facebook ads with very negative ROI, emphasizing that expensive failures are normal and entrepreneurs should move on to other methods
- Even after growing to over 5,000 customers, the same acquisition channels that worked initially continue to work at 100x scale, indicating that entrepreneurs rarely truly 'tap out' a marketing channel
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] In this video, I'm going to walk you through how to get your first five customers. I'm going to show you different methods to do it completely for free and then a couple methods you can do that are paid if you want faster results. Now, most startups die before they reach their first five or even 10 customers. So, I made this video for you if you are an entrepreneur launching a brand new service, a brand new product, or a brand new offer. These are suggestions for different ways to acquire users. They're not mutually exclusive. You can try five different [0:31] paths. See which one works and double down on the winner. So, the first one…
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