The Espresso:
- You won’t gain customers out of the blue. “Build it and they will come” does not exist.
- First thing: How do you get your first 50 users?
? Paul: (https://twitter.com/paul_tirban)
It’s Paul.
?️ Florin: (https://twitter.com/florin_muresan)
It’s Florin. What are we grinding today? Today we’re grinding ways to get customers for your startup way, Florence.
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So you actually need to find ways used to get customers for your startup. So they are not coming just like that.
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No, sorry, I’m wrong. This must be the wrong apps. So actually you just have to build it and they will come. Okay, let me refresh it’s. Okay. You just have to finish working on the product and then you’ll be super successful without any kind of work.
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So spoiler letter. If you listen until the end, you will learn from Florida how to buy a Lamborghini. Because that’s what I hope to learn from this episode of Florida. So no pressure Disclaimer.
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That won’t happen.
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Okay, maybe a small purple Lamborghini.
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Okay, we’ll get to that.
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Okay. Now on a serious note, Florence, let’s say you know me, I’m a tech person together with a friend, we built a really awesome product that solves a really important problem. So we have this product built in a strong way. It’s a nice product, easy to use. It works perfect.
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Now what that’s nice. Well, if you were to tell me because at all these things I need to know, like your particular use case or what you’re going to try to use it for or how many customers you need to get. So in your opinion, how many customers or users would you need to get?
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Let’s say I just built a product based on a problem that I have. A couple of my friends are having that problem and I actually need, I don’t know, I think in the beginning I need, let’s say 3000 users. Ten K.
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Yeah, that’s a lot. Everybody would like to have those numbers, right?
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You’re smiling. So I shouldn’t start at those numbers.
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No, I don’t think so. Basically, because you don’t have an existing customer base, you don’t have paying customers. Right.
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Well, I have my friends that are using the product and they are telling me that they are willing to pay for it but not paying.
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All right. So then we should start from, let’s say the first 25 users. How do we get the first 25 users? It depends if it’s users or customers. Maybe the first time around it’s 25 users. Then you have like 50 users and then you will need to focus on getting 50 customers and then move on from that to 100 customers to 1000 customers and then Sky’s the limit depending on the app.
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So this is very interesting. So you’re telling me that actually the first users for using my products but they are not paying for it? I can’t consider them customers. So I don’t actually validate it that I can sell my product?
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Yeah, exactly. You don’t even know the usage. I mean, how often will they use the product? Will they use it daily? Will they use it on a weekly basis? Are they going to drop using it after three months into the app. I mean, after three months, maybe don’t offer enough value and they will just stop using it. So all of these things need to be taken into account. So that’s why maybe first you need users to actually use the product and then to start getting customers once you see that users actually like it.
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Okay, so those 50 initial paying customers.
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I think we can make like a whole episode about it. So I think it’s in different stages. We can make different episodes and just talk on an individual episode level on how to get those. But normally if you want to get customers, you should start with things like actually, nobody knows the answers to that. But for the first 25, what I can tell you is that you can definitely go to LinkedIn, to networking meetings, to book clubs. If you’re selling something related to books and authors, you can go to coffee shops if you’re selling something related to coffee or that kind of industry. So it really depends on where you can find the most people who are passionate about the subject you’re talking about.
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Can we call them like some kind of direct sales actually investing, I guess invest a lot of time for this.
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Yeah, you would invest a lot of time for this. So like the first 25 customers, you could even acquire them easily. I mean, get them easily to join your startup. But it would be like a lot of wasted time because you have to spend a lot of time with them to get a lot of learning so that you can build a better product so that you can attract the first 50 customers. So you need to be able to move from 25 to 50, and then you need to start making those people to actually pay for the product, which is a whole different thing. And you need different things for this. But in the first case, if you want to get customers, the best way would be to go where your customers are and just basically invite them over for coffee, tea or beer or whatever and just discuss about the problems like we talked in the validation episodes, right?
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Yeah. So if you want to listen that just go listen the validation episode and then maybe get back to this or listen this and then go and listen that episode also.
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Okay.
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So that’s one way of actually acquiring some customers initially. Now, we know that actually as you grow, you need to increase those numbers. But maybe in a future episode we can discuss, as I said, how you can get your 1st, 25, 5100 and so on.
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Yes. I think it’s going to be interesting to see how you can do it step by step. I mean, step by step is the best way, especially if this is your first startup or if it’s a startup that has only one product. When you have more products. Maybe it’s going to be much easier to get customers for all of the products than it is for when you have just one company with one product. But if you’re a company like one company with one product, then you definitely need to go through those steps. Otherwise, there’s ways to get customers. There are lots of ways.
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Another way is that I hear a lot of it. I make a blog, I write content about it, and everyone will pay for my product that I advertise on my landing page or blog.
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Yeah, this is like the biggest myth that’s been popping around everywhere. On podcasts, on videos, even online training programs. A lot of people will tell other people that, hey, you have a startup, so you need to start blogging. So it’s like blogging about what? Even better, how often will you blog? Because a lot of people are like, okay, so you’ve built a startup, you will create two blog articles this month and you’ll be successful. And I will go to those people and I’ll be like, Damn, son, teach me how to do that because I really don’t know anybody who’s ever done this. And it sounds so far fetched. I mean, this could work. If you have an audience, like, if you’re Rihanna and you have 100 followers on Twitter, then you’re definitely going to write a blog post and people are going to buy. But we’re not talking about Rihanna here. We’re talking about a start up that’s basically starting up and starting from scratch. It doesn’t have, like, following and stuff like that. So if you don’t have following, then you shouldn’t focus your energies on writing two very great blog posts that nobody will ever read.
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Because what it turns out is if you have a blog post, it’s the same as having a product. For a blog to be read by people, it needs to get to people. So how will you get that blog post to people?
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I pay an expert to do SEO for it.
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That’s a perfect way to waste money.
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So paying an actual expert to bring me sales?
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Yes. Well, there are like multiple aspects of this. Because, for example, you can pay the SEO expert to drive sales, but the SEO expert will drive traffic to the site and a lot of people will come and see, like the site, read the content and the stuff you offer. But your conversion rate optimization is busted. Then you don’t have product market fit, and then nobody will buy and you will instantly place the blame on the SEO guy for your in success. But it’s not his fault. It’s your fault because you don’t have validation and you didn’t reach the steps until you get to 100 paying customers. So until you do that, that’s what you need to do. You don’t need to go and do SEO on a blog because you don’t really know what you’re doing. Now, how you could use that. The SEO guy and the SEO stuff and maybe a lot of condo, maybe like 100 or 200 pages on the site is to actually use it to get traffic and then make pop ups and stuff for the people visiting so that they start subscribing to a place where you teach them about the solution you’ve created.
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Nice. So you actually grind them to say like that?
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Yeah, exactly. That’s good.
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They’re paying for your product.
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Exactly. You don’t really want to go directly into sales. What I’ve seen other teams doing is actually they’ve used the SEO guys to drive leads for the sales team and then nobody was successful. And it wasn’t the fault of the sales team or the SEO guy because there wasn’t a process for the sales team to follow because the product couldn’t be sold, because the product wasn’t viable. So it’s not the salesperson’s fault that nobody will buy the product. So that’s why founders in the early stages, they should be the ones doing the sales, the SEO, and kind of like doing everything because they need to get a working model first. That’s why we call them MVPs. It’s a working model, but like a working model for the whole business, not just for the product. So when you have a working model that’s done by the founders, then you can start scaling the team, adding in experts for SEO, adding bloggers, writers, salespeople, and other marketing stuff.
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The next one and I see it quite often. So I have the user persona that I assume I made it for my startup, so I know who’s my target audience. I have money and I go on Facebook and try to target that persona with codes to say like that. So I invest money in Facebook ads or Google ads or YouTube ads or whatever ads.
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It really depends on the type of business. Like, if you’re in a market where there is not a very well perceived notion that people need your product, you shouldn’t do sales on Facebook and Google. I mean, you shouldn’t do ads on Google and Facebook. On the other hand, if you’re like starting a saloon or maybe a car shop, an auto shop, then you would definitely want to try to do ads and Facebook ads and Google ads and stuff like that, because it would directly help you increase your sales because people already know that you’re one of the guys in town who does that. So obviously they will be interested in trying your service, especially if it’s close to them and for other related matters. But if it’s like a real innovation, you won’t get your real innovation being bought and purchased by other people. By doing these ads, especially in the first stages of the server, you might get to this after you’ve completely validated and obtained product market fit. But pre product market fit, you should usually stay away from ads. Now, there’s a lot of people that say you should go for ads and somebody was successful, but nobody was successful and they were just churning out money and their investors should basically punish them.
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Okay.
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I’m saying for a certain stage, as you said, probably this makes sense because the cost is so well optimized that you can actually are making money from those ads.
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Exactly. And you have so many metrics in place that make the whole thing to make sense for your business.
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Actually regarding the metrics and I will deviate a little bit from making money. But actually, what metric would you suggest to actually look? Is it like the amount of money that I’m making every month, the total amount of money that I made.
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It’S the money that you’ve earned per customer versus how much it costs you to bring that customer in?
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Okay. Should I look, I don’t know, month over month, how much that customer brings me?
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You should look at an individual level and have like every kind of user. This is like the best case scenario, right, where you have every user, you know, exactly the source that brought you that user. So if it was paid ads or if it was SEO, if it was content or social media or email marketing or influencer stuff. So how did you get that user? Right. How did you get that customer then that customer ended up paying. Now, how much money did they spend with your company? And that’s like the total lifetime value. That’s the lifetime value. How much time the customer spent with the company and paying the product to the company. So basically you would have like lifetime value of maybe $300 or $1,000 or something like that. And then you need to place this and see how much money it costs you to bring one of those people. And if you have a lifetime value of $100, because that’s the case for a lot of startups, especially in the early stages, you have like $100 lifetime value and you pay $200 to bring users and you have conversion rates. So basically you actually need to spend $200 because before you can bring somebody to pay and the average amount that somebody will pay you is $100, then you’re busting $100 per customer.
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Every single time you bring a new customer, you have huge losses. So that’s easily going to reflect poorly on every report that you make.
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So if I understand correctly, I need to pay attention how much money each customer brings me, how much it cost me. And I need to do this per channel to say like that. Now what we can see also because we currently like discuss about ads, content marketing, or like that SEO specialist. But in the end it cost me because if I pay him or her like $1,000 and brings me a user who gave me $100, so I spent a lot of wasted money from this perspective.
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Exactly. So they may even bring you like a lot of traffic, but none of that traffic converts to a paying customer, then it doesn’t really matter that they’ve managed to do their job. It still won’t help you because that channel doesn’t work for your kind of business. And this is the thing. There are lots of businesses. I’ve started an online store at one point. I only did SEO. I didn’t do anything else, like Nada, nothing. We didn’t even have like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and stuff like that. And we were making money because we were on Google for every single item that we’ve had inside the store. And we’ve made money from day one when we had the product and we got indexed by Google because people are already searching for that stuff. We were on the first page and they entered and they bought and everybody was happy. So our cost to acquire those customers was very cheap because initially we spent some time creating the content, but then once it was created, we didn’t spend any more time and money on the content to keep it running. Now when you do ads, you need to constantly pay for ads.
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But with SEO, you pay once and then you can start getting lots of results. Of course, it depends a lot on many different aspects that we don’t have time to discuss on a single podcast. But that’s what we’ve done and it worked. But I’m telling you, for other businesses, they will do SEO, they will do it as well as with it and it will not work for them. So it really depends on a business to business case. And that’s why usually when you have growth hackers in your team and people who are oriented on growth, they will try to identify channels that work for your startup and not all channels will work. Maybe you will have only one channel that will work and then you will spend five years not being able to find another channel that will work. So there are multiple types of channels. Like a channel means a way to get a customer like SEO or driving traffic via social media, email marketing, or Google ads, but it might not work for your particular startup. So I’ve seen startups that only had success, like real success once they did TV ads. And you’re saying, like, TV ads, who does TV ads?
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And they were successful only with TV ads. That was like their biggest engine of growth for their company, the TV ads. And don’t expect this. I wouldn’t do this like ever, but they’ve done it and it worked.
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I would do it if I make enough money to buy a Lamborghini, definitely.
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But you would have to place like the price of maybe 30 Lamborghinis to actually find a working model even for that channel.
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Speaking about growth hackers, I know that at the end of episode you have a surprise for our listeners. Like a code that will give them access to a couple of marketing hacks on a very nice platform.
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Yeah, actually they should just read the description inside the video, like the podcast, the description of the podcast, and they will find the link towards the platform and also the code that will give them access to 151 hacks to be used to grow your startup. So it’s super interesting because you’ve got a lot of different ideas on what to try for all the kinds of channels that you would ever think of. So ways to get in touch with potential partners, ways to get more customers, way to be awesome on social media and direct attention, like ways to do advertising with very little budget spend. And it’s like a super great collection of 151 hacks.
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What I think is nice to mention is that they’re actually validated. So they were used and not like written.
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Oh yeah, that’s true. Basically, you will learn from startups actually apply them. And some of them we’ve applied ourselves and were successful using those methods. So you get stuff from Zapier, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Neil Patel, then you get a lot of stuff from other agencies and all sorts of different companies were successful using those methods. And we tell you exactly how much success they had and how they’ve done it.
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You mentioned at some point about influencers, I will make the subject a little bit more broad to select that. So I would call them like affiliation. Should I use affiliation as a startup and if so, when?
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After product market fit, as always.
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Okay.
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But there is also way to use influencers before the product market fit and you can use it as an engine to drive product market fit, basically. So it’s really pretty broad. Like affiliate marketing is pretty broad. There are many types of affiliates. So even like influencer marketing, it could very well be sort of affiliation, but not like a classic affiliate marketer. So your influencer might be an affiliate marketer might be your affiliate marketer, might be the affiliate marketer of a third party who worked with you. Or the influencer might be somebody that you actually end up partnering up with on a real partnership level, not through a platform that divides commissions. So it’s really tricky to define this. Maybe we should have like a whole episode just on the subject because I know the teamflatter marketing is very popular these days.
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And everyone is an influencer.
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Yeah, everybody’s an influencer. But you can definitely use influencers before product market fit if you, for example, use them to drive hype towards the landing page that talks about your launch event. So if you prepare a launch event and a product launch formula, I think that we keep mentioning the product launch formula on the podcast. But if you do that, then you can be insanely successful if you have people driving other people towards your launch. That’s basically how we launch score the SEO. So we’ve done 100 people who got tickets to our event or launch event. We got them ourselves. And one of our influencers, who is also an investor, brought us 300 people. So we’ve managed to gather 100. And because this guy was an influencer and he was super popular, he brought 300 people, ended up using the product, giving us feedback. And then after we launched the stable version, they bought the product.
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So I think this is very important to have someone from that industry from that problem space who’s like an authority there. If it recommends you, then I agree.
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Actually, when you’re looking at an influencer like we did, we already knew that he was a very big authority in that field, and especially in that country, in Germany, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked. I mean, if we just took a random blogger or a random YouTuber, it might not have worked. He was an authority. So I know that there are YouTubers who are authorities now. Those are YouTubers that you need to target. I may get like 10,000 views on video, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to be the perfect channel to promote your product. Right. So you need to figure out if that’s the right audience and if that kind of audience would think that that person is an authority in the field, because otherwise it just won’t work.
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I completely agree on this, but I know. So you said that we were discussing another episode about affiliation influencer marketing and everything, but if it would be, let’s say, to name one affiliation platform, let’s say I definitely need to do affiliation marketing for my startup. I’m in that position now. Should I build my own affiliation platform? I don’t know. Should I go somewhere to do this? What would you recommend in this space?
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I know how to recommend this because we’ve done three completely different types. So we’ve completely built our custom affiliation platform. Then we’ve used the paid affiliation platform, where we pay a monthly subscription so that they give us access to their system so that we can invite affiliates will join our program, which is sort of a hybrid between building a custom thing and going to a marketplace where they have affiliates. And we’ve also went to a marketplace that has affiliates. So what I can tell you is that usually the marketplaces that have affiliates are actually the ones that actually work. So if you go to the Avengers affiliate network, or if you go to Share Sale, their affiliate network, they’re usually very hard to understand. You need to spend a lot of time researching and finding out how those things work. But once you do, they will actually bring you people. And if you have some sort of validation for the product, they will bring you customers. It depends, of course, on a lot of things. Sometimes they will bring you lots of customers and you make a lot of money. Otherwise they will just bring you some customers so there’s not guaranteed the recipe for success.
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It depends on a lot of things. Even like being on share sale, you need to know how to convince affiliates to join your program. So then you need a product market fit between your product and the affiliates because you’re basically telling your affiliates to invest time and money into your products and it’s like almost the same as getting customers. So you need to make sure that everything looks good for the affiliates and to do validation with affiliates because otherwise they will not love your program anyway.
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Yeah. Because in the end, like, if you have an awesome product with an awesome affiliation product program, but they’re in the same place, nobody knows about them, then it comes the question, do I promote the affiliation program? Do I promote my product? I think the takeaway is actually that there is no silver bullet. So actually it depends a lot on what stage are with your product and with your startup. And for this, you need to apply different.
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Yeah, definitely strategies to call them like this.
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But I know. Do you think there will be something else that we should mention or you should pay attention as a founder when you try to find ways to acquire customers?
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Yes. So one of the most helpful things that I’ve ever studied was a thing called what’s happening inside your business? Like, who are the key players? What’s required to do something related to your business? Like, for example, of course, I will give my example with Squarely. In order to deliver our software as a service, that’s also a plugin, we usually go and tackle the plugin site. So in our case, we will look at, okay, so somebody will take the plugin. Once they get the plugin, they will go to our software as a service. Awesome. So what do we do? Well, who’s the customer? Well, the customer is business people, small business owners, that’s like 66% of our whole market. And basically these business people, they go to different events, they listen to different podcasts, they go to different meetings, they hang out somewhere, maybe they read different magazines. And those are your acquisition channels. So if you’re thinking about ways to get customers, think about how you can get in front of those people who, you know, who buy your product by using the things that you know about them. So you need to do a lot of customer profiling.
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But in the case of the plugin, for example, it’s a lot easier because in order to have a WordPress site, you really need to have a developer. So then we can basically think, where do we find developers? Because if we get a developer, the developer will get us customers. So where do developers hang out? What do they do? Do they go to meetings? Do they attend different events? Conferences? Do they listen to podcasts? They read different blogs? They read a magazine? Do they have like favorite places to hang out. Maybe it’s not Twitter, maybe it’s Discord, or maybe it’s Facebook and not LinkedIn because nobody uses LinkedIn because everybody wants to recruit you if you’re a developer. So it depends on a lot of things. Then once you have a developer, you need hosting. So you need to go to hosting companies and think about how do I find hosting companies where they spend their time, what do they look at? And this is the thing you want to get in front of your customers. There are multiple ways to think of getting about getting customers by actually thinking, how can I get in front of my ideal customer?
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Which is a fancy way of saying, who’s the dude that’s going to buy my stuff? And basically, once you know that once you have that profile, then you can go and see how you can get in front of that particular kind of person. And if you have multiple persons, then you definitely need to think how you can reach all of those individuals. And in order to reach them, you need to figure out where they spend time. What do they read, what do they listen to, what do they watch? And once you know this and who do they listen to? Because as you said, with authority, who do they listen to? And once you have this figured out, you can figure out a lot of ways to get customers for your startup.
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Yeah, I think it’s a really good advice. And it should be the takeaway, I think of this episode.
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Yes, definitely. Because this solves the problem of should I do ads? Well, if your customer doesn’t spend time Googling stuff every day, then you shouldn’t do ads because they want your ads because they’re not actively searching for solutions. But if you’re a car repair store or something like that and you know that people are usually searching for how do I repair my car in this particular area? Or I need to find an Indian restaurant in Los Angeles, then you can definitely do ads. But if it doesn’t make sense for your customer because the customer won’t look there, then it also doesn’t make sense for your business. So this basically replies to, okay, so you’ve talked about many different channels. Now how do I find out which channels I should tackle first? Well, think about the customer and think about how you can get in front of that customer. And that will be your first thing.
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Yeah. Because I think there is a point in which it makes sense to do a product Hunt campaign. It makes sense, I don’t know, to do Facebook ads if you’re a certain level.
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Definitely.
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If you’re like an ecommerce website, probably it makes sense to do Google Ads or like SEO for the products because people will buy that product and will search for that product. So I think there are a lot of ways in which you can do this. It’s very important to apply the right strategy at the right time.
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Yeah, exactly. At the right time. Even if you’ve done some like, super hyper localized campaign where you attracted a lot of people that you need to attract and they came to your site, it only makes sense that you would start Facebook Ads and Google Ads to those people because you know that there’s already interest from their part. And maybe you can reach out to them later by ads or invite them to your email list so that you can reach them via Ads and email as well. And that’s how you will get customers using these methods. And you can even do this in the early stages before validation, basically because they’ve already had interest. They didn’t decide to do anything. Maybe not bring them to buy a product, but maybe get them to download an ebook, get their email address, get some contacts, download the report or download the course, get them signed up for something. And then this will be your users and they are genuine users that you’ve reached via Ads. And you will also get something out of that. It won’t be wasted money.
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And I was just thinking now, and I think we can make like a whole episode at least about should I start local? Should I start international from the beginning? Do I focus on the market, conquer it and go international? Do I apply the Facebook model? I think there can be a lot of discussion around this also.
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Yeah, that’s actually very interesting because Facebook at first they didn’t even want to go to other different States. They just wanted to stay in one state and that’s it. Yeah.
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So I think there can be an entire discussion about this when it makes sense to do go wild from beginning or start small and then conquer that market and go to the next one and so on and so on. Because, for example, I was just thinking it might be at some point, like you white label your solution. You do all kinds of this stuff.
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But again, yeah, definitely you can also white label solution. And that’s like a way to get customers. And you can get tons of customers by using that method.
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Any other thoughts?
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Well, I think that there’s going to be other thoughts on the other episodes. I was just thinking now that I didn’t talk anything about like partnerships. Right.
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Yeah.
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They wouldn’t mention partnerships.
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No, it’s sadly that you could do some partnership, but yeah, I think we should go a little bit into them.
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Yeah. So partnerships, the best way to think about them is now that you know what your customers, your ideal customers are looking at and how we can get in front of them, you need to think, who are those individuals that already have the interest of my people, of my ideal customers. So who are they? And if you can identify them then start offering different types of partnerships to those people because they already have your audience. Maybe they’re selling other kinds of products that make sense for them. Maybe they have an email list with all your ideal customers. Does it make sense to build your own email list? Maybe, but those guys already have the email list with all your ideal customers. So why not reach out to them and tell them, hey, we can do an email blast together and we can split the commissions that we get out of all the sales and that’s a great starting point. And then we can definitely do an episode only about this.
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I think we can call this like a hack and I think that material that they find on the education cloud about those hacks definitely can be applied in different stages of yes.
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We basically call them hacks because it’s like a very neat idea that was tested and it was basically decomposed. So it was put together by somebody, but then it was decomposed and explained, like every bit of it, how it works and why it worked. And that’s what you’ll find inside education cloud if you click the link and you get the code.
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So don’t forget click on the link in the description, enter the code found in the description and you’ll get access for free.
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Access for free, right? Yeah, do the whole thing. So do all of the hacks, all of the great marketing ideas.
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Awesome. I really hope that you found this helpful, at least for me. I think I’m closer to buy that Lamborghini.
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Yes, because of the TV ads.
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Actually, if I managed to buy a Lamborghini from TV ads, I would definitely come back and make an episode about how I made ads.
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That would be nice. That would actually be nice. This was a light roast of everything that we’ve discussed according to wait to get customers. But then that would be like a really heavy roast, like a very dark roast on how he got a Lamborghini by doing TV ads.
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Yeah. Now seriously, try to apply the right strategy for the time that you are at and let us know if you want to hear us talking about other methods that work for us or for other people that we know. Do this in our Facebook group.
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You can join the Facebook group by going to startupspresso live and you will find the link to the Facebook group on top of the site.
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And if we are enough, maybe we’ll convince Florence to tell us how we can buy a Lamborghini.
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Yes.
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Speak to you next time. Bye.
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