Week 16: I closed two customers

The question I most often get asked is, "How do you get your first few customers?" It's a happy week over here—I just snagged my first two—so this is a perfect time to answer it.

In this week's edition, I'll take you through the timeline of how I closed my first customer. This is a good case study because the deal wasn’t sourced through a previous employer, warm relationship, investor, etc.

Let’s look at what I did right, where I screwed up, and how I got lucky.

The timeline

I’ll rewind a little before I met the customer to give you a full picture.

Week 1/2: idea validation

I started with a problem hypothesis: “Generating demo data for Apache Kafka is tedious.”

I shared that statement with ~30 friends and asked two things:

1. Does this problem make sense?

2. Do you have this problem yourself? Can you tell me more?

I found a few heads nodding.

I took it a step further, writing a few times on social media about the problem statement, talking to anyone who was interested by it.

Enough people understood what I was talking about and felt similar pain, so I continued.

Week 3: landing page

The next thing I did was put together a single page website. The hero on the site today is almost identical to what I started with.

The landing page made the case for the problem, revealed a mockup of what the solution would look like, and invited you to sign up for a waitlist.

I continued posting about the problem statement on social, now linking to the landing page too. As people signed up for the waitlist, I reached out and talked to any willing participants.

I felt enough confidence to begin coding the basic product.

Week 4: initial meeting

I had my first meeting with the to-be-customer. I ran it according to my notes. It ticked all the boxes I was looking for:

1. They had a real, immediate problem I could solve for them

2. There was a decision maker in the room

3. There was budget

Now, to be clear: I got lucky. Finding a prospect that meets that criteria is hard. But I made my luck through volume: I had been talking to dozens of prospects.

We made plans to run a POC with their concrete problem in mind.

I worked more on the product and got a basic prototype fully working.

At this point, I felt good enough to pay a lawyer to draw up a software license contract. In retrospect I did this too soon because I didn’t have a good enough idea of what my business model would be, so I wasted some dollars revising it later.

Week 5/6: POC

I spent a good deal of time talking with the customer about their requirements. Our time together went like this:

1. They told me more about their problem

2. I built what they needed to solve it

3. They reacted and gave me feedback

4. Repeat 1

The product got significantly better and more usable during this time and we achieved a technical win—aka, the product solved their problem.

Week 7-9: build

The decision to officially buy went up the chain. This always takes a little while. I happily spent the meantime solidifying the product knowing I had a high chance of getting a customer.

Week 10: terms agreed

We sat down to agree on specific terms. It’s here that I made a mistake: I didn’t have good justification for the business model, the price, and other terms, so I didn’t make a particularly strong case.

I have so little experience doing this that the mechanics of the conversation were just hard for me. I hadn’t thought of the answers to many good questions.

Fortunately, it ended up being alright. I learned a ton doing this and won’t make the mistake of being underprepared here again.

Week 11-14: wait

The contract got finalized. B2B sales cycles take a while—it’s just how it is.

Week 15: close

We signed the deal. I delivered the product.