Where (early) customers come from

Last week, I went to a startup event in Seattle and talked to a dozen or so new founders. Although each of them are working on different kinds of products, nearly all of them eventually asked the same question:

How do you get your first few customers? And after that, how do you get a few more?

There’s no silver bullet to getting early traction, but you can find a whole lot of lead bullets if you think about the problem clearly.

My favorite mindset for getting early customers comes from the book Channels of Growth. Today, I’m going to give you the cliff notes (though you really should just read the whole book because it’s only a whopping 93 pages.)

Distribution

Anyone who becomes a customer of your product has to hear about it first. The way you get people to hear about you is through distribution. If company A and B are equal in every way, but A has better distribution, A will outperform B.

Channels

Distribution can be anything. You can walk out your front door and run down the street shouting your product name, and that’s distribution. It’s not good distribution, though.

Channels are places where people gather that give you distribution leverage. There are a finite number of good distribution channels: Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, Google, Reddit, whatever. Find places where like-minded people gather in large quantities.

Experimentation

If your product is great but no one can find out about it, your business is dead.

It follows, then, that you should spend much more time than you think figuring out which distribution channel works best for your product.

Make a hypothesis. Run an experiment. Iterate.

Product-channel fit

You’ve heard of product-market fit, but here’s one better: product-channel fit. Some products fit certain distribution channels better.

Marketing a dev tool on Yelp is a terrible idea. Posting on a massive subreddit for your hyperlocal startup isn’t much better.

Go where your audiences lives.

One channel

Channels are like lifting weights. Only add more until you’ve mastered what you’ve already got.

Find a channel that’s working well and maximize it until it’s run dry. This will take much, much longer than you think. But it’s also less painful than doing every channel poorly.

Once you’ve done that, add another channel.

One at a time.

Power law

Most product-channel pairs obey the power law: the majority of your users come from 1-2 channels, so don't you don't need to master them all.

Change

Channels change over time. Be prepared to change with them.