Getting Your First 989 Customers for Your SaaS

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0:07[Music] thank you rob said the co-founder kickoff labs we do simply amazing landing pages whether it's for running a contest lead generation or launching a product I'll try not to talk too much about that today but it is part of our journey to 989 paying customers which is what I'm going to chat about with you didn't start with 989 customers we founded we started kickoff labs in February of 2011 it took us a few months to get our MVP out that we were gonna charge people for we launched in June of that year and a month later you know we were rolling in the dough we we raked in ten whole

0:53dollars in the first month it's awesome I contacted Scott he's in New Jersey I'm in Seattle we do all sorts of things startups aren't supposed to do over Skype and I said what are you gonna do with your five dollars I'm just forgetting about expenses this was $5 profit and his answer was uh hookers and coke well you can do with yours and as I know you live in New Jersey but you're gonna have to lower your standards we're gonna have to figure out how to sell our software ironically we were building software for marketing purposes to have landing pages to help people with their launches and we failed to take advantage

1:30of ours so that's kind of a little bit of backdrop since then we've had well over a thousand thousand paying subscribers to the to the software so it's still kind of still very small and we're here to learn primarily which is why but figured we could give back a little bit while we're here I think the most important customer is is you and so when you start thinking about you know how many customer who my customers are going to be you have to think about yourself first and and Sherri's talk was was really valuable to hear because it rang true I had before we started kickoff Labs I have what a lot of people

2:07but my mom would have described as a as a great job I ran a software team at a company that did social software and and on paper it looked great but the last couple years I was there they shifted and they started focusing more on the the fortune 500 customers as opposed to medium smaller medium-sized businesses and that just led to the the shift in customers and who we were working with even on the the product team just changed our strategy how we had to how we had to talk to them how we planned our products and I got really tired of the 12-member cross divisional cross

2:44country you know planning committees that were now dictating my life and these people can decide whether a reply button need to be on the left side of a post or the right side of a post and they didn't care about the data that proved the one way or the other they just wanted to sit in a room and argue because they got paid for it and so that led me to come home and take these arguments out and you know my family and kicked the dog and I didn't kick the dog that much but but I was talking to my wife one day about one of these stupid

3:13arguments it was probably the reply button and I didn't think I was talking that loud and we'd had our first son was nine months old at the time and we were at the dinner table and and he started crying and I realized he's small but I realized it was because the way I was talking about my day I wasn't even that mad about it I kind of thought it was a funny story but I must have been a little agitated it was turning me into a bad person it was turning me into someone I didn't like and so I had to find a new set of customers in the

3:43company that I was working for was not going to give me those customers they decided to go onward and upward and and that's great though they if they've had and will continue to have a lot of success doing that I'm sure but that's why you have to be selfish because there's a founder you get to choose who your customers are and what challenges you put in front of yourself so focus on that first lots of people have said it I want to go to much detail but getting to customers 2 through 20 go outside after after we launched you're both tango person we're actually good start talking

4:13to customers should done that before they said but but that was I was extremely valuable to start start getting stay away from from personal friends acquaintances even just casual conversations like you know I hear a lot of people have hearing he having here pitching ideas that's great but you're not going to get the real feedback like people said unless you say so give me a check right and and then you'll find out what people what people really think one thing that worked really well for us even though we are bootstrapped is I really got a lot of good feedback going and talking to investors and not that I really wanted

4:46the investment because I want it to bootstrap the company but they're used to telling you what they really think for the most part and the good investors will just flat out say here's a 10 things wrong with your business and you know eight of those 10 things are probably right on you'll you'll learn that and so talking to investors is really helpful for us in this space customers 21 through 100 we started thinking we should scale up our blog we should start tweeting we should start facebooking I like to test everything so we know we did all this ad nauseam and this is a fail and to fail because at 2

5:20through 100 people we've contacted you don't have an audience you're you're nobody I mean nobody even even if you're celebrity as Jason said earlier it that doesn't help you and you know I think a blog is great for long term content marketing plays but it's not going to satisfy that itch to start getting profit in revenue as quickly as you want it so what you want to do is start finding out where your customers are hanging out where are the places online and offline that you can actually meet and talk with meet and talk with these people and get them to sign up for your product for us that had to do with

5:57finding a lot more of a niche start up in marketing communities Cora is I think a great resource just as one specific tip that worked for us 10 hours worth of Cora postings for on my account have generated over $35,000 worth of sales for us in the last year and a half 10 hours so how did I do that in 10 hours I looked for peak questions people were asking about landing pages about launching products about you know running a startup and I added my two cents and my byline has a link to our product and the other thing that people do is they all the time they ask for hey

6:35I'm looking for a service that does that does invoicing what are the best invoicing services your answer should be there there's no shame in being from your company and saying hey you can preface it I'm from this company this is what we do here's why we're good add an image make it look better than some of the other answers that people see it's a social directory and there's other versions of this community for us I happen to be kora inbound org places like that where marketing professionals hang out for you it might be a different a different niche community point being it's not your Facebook friends it's not

7:07the people on Twitter it's a specific location and within each location there's ways you can optimize your success by you know in our case it was looking for what people are asking you know looking for people are asking answering questions and then Cora has a nifty promotion system where you can promote your answers because you've earned some karma and you can spend your karma there it was free money essentially another big thing was I was having a thing about you know customers also bought most of you are not in the business of building a complete end-to-end microsoft office solution that's going to solve everybody's office needs we're in the business of you know

7:42we solve this problem really well but a customer also has this problem this problem this problem and if you think about your customer profile on your customer persona what are the other tools they were using for us people were using tools like like like like user voice for customer support like KISSmetrics for analytics and so we reached out to those companies say hey you know could we do a guest blog post on your blog you know will trade audiences back and forth and trading audiences with related products and getting mentions and newsletters talking to the other founders figuring out where their customers were in has been a big help

8:17for us so if you imagine that Amazon thing of what customers have also bought it's extremely important to think about people don't talk about this much stealing customers the slide is intentionally a little bit obtuse but the point being the point being customers they look for you know solutions alternatives to a problem and if your name isn't coming up to alternative to competitor why not if you search for for a grasshopper alternative and grasshoppers of voice voice avoid company and and you search for that on Google you're gonna find some of their competitors own that space or you know grasshopper alternative you should at least know you know what you know

9:03what you are how you're different how your competitors are different than you because your customers are gonna ask they've asked us I'm sure they've asked anybody who's had a had a product and the other thing we did was ID no shame about you know if I saw somebody talk pro or con about a company that I thought was a was a was a competitor to us on Twitter on Facebook I just chat them up and say hey you know why do you like that feature so much what does it do for you they're doing it in public there's no reason you can't be personal and and bein going public and I'm not

9:33trying to say switch over to using my service I want to learn from them and sometimes they do switch and that's nice but I want to learn like why they're choosing this service how they found it what they came from because I can only learn so much from the people that have found our service just starting out as a new business and we personally email a lot of people that were using that we're using the competition that we could find and it was incredibly valuable to find out what our weaknesses were and what our competitors strengths were just by talking to their customers like I could

10:04I could lead with this and say love your customers for 101 to 500 but it's way too easy to love that one customer you get every week because I sure I sure as heck hope you're you get one customer week that you're talking to them directly you're solving their problems it have your product it gets harder when you start having when you start having you know in the triple digits of customers coming through trying the product per week and I'm sure it gets even harder at the scales we've heard today of you know several thousand customers coming through a week and and it's just amazing to me the low bar that

10:38most of the competition especially bigger company set for support I feel bad one day I emailed a customer back and had been like 26 hours since they emailed the support line and I said I apologize for the delayed response and and his answer is delayed response I emailed your competitors and they didn't get back to me for a week you know you guys are killing it I was like it's such a low sad sad bar and so it's easy to do especially when you're small and if you have a choice between emailing and helping a customer going back and behind the computer screen and adding a feature by all means

11:13choose the customer because you're going to learn so much more from that from that back and forth why you can do it while you're still the one answering those emails then you will from going and coding up a new feature which real easy leads me into getting personal I literally did email every single one of the first 500 people that signed up for our service and went through the process of creating a landing page it wasn't an automated mail it wasn't an account mail I looked at the page they created I looked at the title they put in I looked at the logo I looked at the

11:43company they were they were promoting and I emailed them some personalized tips and I said hey what if you changed the tagline to this what if you added this as an as an image that would probably help your conversions on the page because I just wanted to get to know them I wanted to get to know who they were who why they wanted to use our service and then find out hey you know I they'd answer and say thanks I'd follow up and say you know how come you can click the Buy button once you've established that relationship and it can be really quick they'll tell you and say

12:13well I didn't click the Buy button because you don't have this and you start to hear that as a pattern and you say that should prioritize that could prioritize what we do next I just have this just if any of you have a service do not ever send a no reply email it's just my personal plea to everybody why are you making it harder for people to get in touch with you that want to get in touch with you just don't do it so much that this comes down to over delivering because I think I think it's especially important in the beginning that you have to do things didn't scale

12:47I guarantee we lost lots of money on the first 100 200 300 customers if you count at the time it took Scott and I to work through some of the issues that they had but I don't think we'd be where we were today if we hadn't gone through that process of setting the bar if we're gonna over deliver fifth person asked for a feature you know the first person asked if it was on our roadmap somewhere we just bump it up and say we're gonna do this next and email them back in two days and say hey check it check out the site now and they they're just blown

13:14away and those people become your Angeles that later on you can hit up for case studies and and for marketing materials and to help send newsletters and blog posts on your behalf and to do some of that trading I talked about earlier but establishing those relationships is is so critical around it's worth over delivering to that first and every set of customers really but especially when you're when you're starting out small it's way way more important as I said earlier than then adding another feature being social sharing goals we have a silly thing people like to feel like they're part of something there's a lot of studies

13:48behind it I won't get into the research but so we put a silly bar up on our site that says help us get to 500 500 customers and I'm it it dramatically increases the amount that people are willing to share their click the Twitter button the Facebook button and then I'm amazed when people call support and I'll talk to them I'll say oh looks like you're really close now to 20,000 people I know you're gonna hit it next week and people get bought into it and I'm amazed how much a little psychological trick of just being honest with hey this is our goal we want to get to 500 customers if

14:20we get to there we can keep serving you better and and we were honest with it in it and it works to involve customers and your goals that's my cute kid picture um I have no shame I think a lot of people try in our space to pretend like you're a huge company and I don't know why there's you you want to look professional but at the same time you can you can lower the bar of expectations people have and make over-delivering easier if you say hey we're just two guys with kids who we have to feed and we're doing this business and if we get to this many

14:54customers it could help and here's my kid he wants to eat three times a day I know share some point that won't make sense on our website anymore and we'll find some other way to hook into people's feelings but but but it can work people say like you want to you want to stand out do something a little bit different from other people it does work I had some journalists that I was tweeting back and forth with and they said and they were just joking about the return of pest calm and so I put up a landing page on our service for pets com2 coming soon and

15:31pushed it out there published it and and that got us written up in three different places just because I was willing to go out there and do something a little bit crazy to market what were you doing by this point 599 you've got some success stories hopefully spend your time amplifying what they say take collect a document with any quotes they give you that you can reuse and start reusing them in emails and newsletters and say case studies quotes good karma can earn you a lot when you start building trust with customers you have to literally you have to literally ask and say hey you know they say thanks for

16:07support say I still say I said don't thank me if you liked your experience tell 5 to 500 of your friends they say oh I will and I can see the tweet come five minutes later where people tweet about it or blog about the the customer experience but they wouldn't have done it if I hadn't asked just having a like button on your pages not enough you actually have to ask people can you recommend us because once you've built the trust they will measuring how much time I'm at but we measure we measure weekly to things and I put this at the end because at first you don't really

16:38need the advanced funnels and everything when it's 10 people a week you can just ask them directly but when you start getting volume the measurement makes sense there's two really critical things that we measure through a funnel we use KISSmetrics I love it and the two the two big funnels we measure are the sales funnel which is they hit the site you know they register they sign up for the free product and they purchase an upgrade and then we measure the other one which is really important in a lot of people myths which is the the first five-minute funnel so they landed on the page they signed up for an account they

17:10signed up for one of our email courses they named the landing page they added coffee to a landing page and I can see people drop off at each step and each step is important because that tells you where the holes are the people that actually go all the way through and publish a free page or way more likely to upgrade in the people who dropped off so you can see where you start having problems and every single one of those first impressions the first five minutes forms their opinion for the rest of the rest of the time and I learned that I was I worked at Microsoft now as part of

17:37a usability study for a visual studio some of you might know that product but the they did a usability study where all they did in the two different versions they gave people a programming task and they made the startup time on one version ten seconds longer than the startup time on the other and then they asked them a series of questions about about the application performance people swore up and down they're the only difference the startup time people swore up and down the editing experience was slow or slower to create a form slower to build their project just swore up and down the whole experience for an hour of using the

18:08software after that first ten seconds was horrific and way worse than the other version of the of the product there's no difference and so that's why in this funnel when you start thinking about your phones that those first the first five seconds the first 30 seconds the first minute I try and measure those things out for the first five minutes and every time we've improved the first five minutes there's been a correlate or correlating increase in the percentage of customers that go from free and start paying us for the service that's my talk I hope you enjoyed it at Josh lard blogs kick-off Labs calm Josh Leo calm landing

18:45pages 1:07 comm all sorts of places you can learn more just chat me up at the the conference I'm happy to share more tips this was from an hour-long talk I cut it down and I think it was 12 minutes