Whether you find your earliest customers or not will make or mar your startup

You are in business for one overarching reason: to serve a specific group or groups of people. These people (or companies) are your customers, your business lifeline.

That is because your customers, especially your “early days” customers, help you achieve two of the most important things a startup has to achieve: 1) Revenue generation and, 2) Learning for improvements for product-market fit. Meaning that what determines if you will succeed or not with your startup is whether you have a good (and growing!) base of loyal customers or not.

Finding and keeping loyal customers is hard. This is true for any company, at any stage of development. And it shouldn’t surprise you to be told that finding and keeping loyal customers in the early days of your company is probably the hardest thing you will ever do in your company-building journey. Why? Nobody knows you. Nobody trusts you. You are unproven. You are risky.

But finding your earliest customers isn’t impossible nor is it rocket science.  Other companies have successfully done it before. The Andelas of the world. The Paystacks of the world. The Jumias of the world. The Stripes of the world.  The Googles of the world. The Microsofts of the world. The Teslas of the world. The Amazons of the world.  They were all able to escape this startup deathtrap — when they were still startups, when they were still in their early days.

As a general principle, there is only one way to find and keep loyal customers: solving an important problem for customers, taking away an important pain from customers. A few other things are worth noting as well. They have to want to or be made to want to solve that problem. And they have to be ready or made to be ready to stake their hard-earned money in exchange for your solution.

As a starup, it is possible for you to be able to find your early customers. You can do it — after all, if you understood the problem you are solving really well, and if you have experienced the problem personally, you would likely be a customer yourself, and all you would need to do is to find those who are like you

However, oftentimes, due to how hard it can be to acquire customers in the early days,  you will need some help figuring out who your early customers are, what they really want, where they are, the business language they understand, and how to get them to buy your often (unproven, risky) solution. If you are in this group, as you most likely would be, don’t panic, don’t fret.

That is where The Strategic Founder comes into play, to support and back you. Our job is to ensure you build the right product and acquire the right, earliest customers. We can help you find and acquire your “early days” customers, if you let us work with you.

If you need help finding and acquiring the earliest customers for your startup, fill the form below now and we will take it up from there.