A new bookkeeping service launches on a Monday. The website is live, the logo is crisp, the LinkedIn announcement has collected 43 likes, mostly from former colleagues. The founder sits back and waits for enquiries.
By Friday, there have been two. One is from a website developer offering to improve her search ranking. The other is from her aunt.
This is an extremely common experience, and an unfairly demoralising one. Many people start a business with a quiet belief that if the product is good and the website looks professional, customers will appear. Sometimes they do. Much more often, the first customers have to be found, one at a time, by the founder, using methods that feel slow, awkward and slightly beneath the dignity of a real business.
One Like insight: Your first customers aren’t won by marketing. They’re won by conversations.
Do things that don’t scale
In 2013, Paul Graham, co-founder of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, wrote an essay that has since become one of the most quoted pieces of advice for new businesses. Its title was its argument: “Do Things that Don’t Scale.” He described it as one of the most common pieces of advice Y Combinator gives.
Graham’s point was that many founders believe a business either takes off or it doesn’t, as if success were something that happens to them. In his experience, the businesses that took off were usually pushed by founders who went out and found users personally. The most common of these unscalable tasks, he wrote, is recruiting users manually, and nearly all start-ups have to do it. As he put it, “You can’t wait for users to come to you.”
His examples came from technology firms, now famous, whose founders did things that would be absurd at large scale: installing their product on customers’ computers by hand, or personally visiting early users to help them improve their listings. The same principle applies, even more naturally, to a bookkeeper, a caterer or a landscaper. In the beginning, the founder is the marketing department, the sales team and the customer service desk, and that’s an advantage rather than a weakness.
What the first ten teach you
Finding customers by hand isn’t only about revenue. It’s the fastest education a new business can get. Each conversation reveals how people describe their problem, what they’ve tried before, what worries them about switching, and what they’re actually willing to pay. That knowledge shapes everything that comes later: the website wording, the pricing, the services worth offering and the ones to drop.
Graham also argued that early customers should be given an unusually good experience, far more attentive than would be possible later. For a small business, that might mean the founder personally phoning every new client after the first job, fixing small problems the same day, or handwriting a thank-you note. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t need to. Delighted early customers become the referrals and reviews that bring in the next twenty.
It helps to start narrow. Rather than trying to reach “small businesses in Gauteng”, a new bookkeeper might focus on, say, independent physiotherapy practices in one suburb. A tight focus makes it easier to find people, easier to tailor the offer and easier for satisfied customers to recommend you to others just like them.
[Infographic placement] Your first ten customers. A row of ten simple figures. Under the first three: Who you already know (former colleagues, suppliers, community). Under the next four: Who they introduce you to (asked-for referrals). Under the last three: Who you approach directly (a tight niche, visited or called personally). Beneath, an arrow labelled What you learn: the words customers use, what they’ll pay, what they worry about. Caption: “You can’t wait for users to come to you.” Paul Graham, 2013.
Where to start
Make a list of fifty people who either might need what you offer or know someone who does. Then contact them personally, a handful each day. Not with a sales pitch, but with a short, specific message: what you’ve started, who it’s for, and a question about whether they know anyone facing that problem. Ask satisfied customers directly for introductions, and make it easy for them by suggesting exactly who might benefit.
Keep notes on every conversation. Patterns will appear quickly: the same objection, the same phrase, the same type of customer who says yes. Those patterns are worth more than any marketing plan written before you’d spoken to anyone.
A few questions can help:
- Who are the fifty people we could contact personally this month?
- Which narrow group of customers could we serve better than anyone else?
- What would an unusually good experience look like for our first ten customers?
- What have early conversations taught us that we didn’t know before?
Which brings us back to the bookkeeper, her two enquiries and her aunt. Her business isn’t failing. It simply hasn’t been introduced to anyone yet. Fifty personal messages, a few coffees and a narrow focus will almost certainly do more for her first year than any number of LinkedIn likes. The website can wait for the customers to arrive. The founder can’t.
Sources
- Paul Graham, “Do Things that Don’t Scale”, July 2013.
