Hello 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
wrote a wonderful post on one of my favorite (and least favorite, haha) topics: imposter syndrome. Check it out, and let me know what you think. We can swap imposter stories!
If you’re about to start a new business or if you’re working to scale a young company, one of the first things to figure out — and to celebrate — is finding your first customers.
Startups find these first folks in a number of different ways. Well, technically, the data shows they do it in about seven ways. Here are the seven levers that Lenny Rachitsky found when looking at over 100 consumer companies:
After reviewing the early growth strategies of more than 100 consumer companies, it turns out that there are really only seven reliable ways to find your first 1,000 users:
Reach out to friends and colleagues
Reach out to targeted strangers
Go where your target audience hangs out (online or offline)
Enlist influencers (paid or organically)
Get press
Create viral content
Get physical placement (e.g. flyers, stickers, signs)
This list of Lenny’s covers early growth for consumer (B2C) companies, and I’ve found it’s quite similar when it comes to B2B companies, too. When I was at Buffer, we found our first 1,000s of users and customers through viral content, which we distributed across social media, blog, syndication, and guest writing. When I was at Oyster, many of our first customers came through introductions from our VC networks, friends, and former colleagues.
In September, I co-founded a new business, Bonfire, and got to experience this build-from-scratch dynamic all over again — although this time, we were building all by ourselves, truly from scratch.
I’ve heard from others that this can be one of the most daunting aspects of starting your own thing. Where will you find customers or clients? Will you ever find customers or clients? (You absolutely will, don’t worry.)
So I thought I’d show you how we got our first 10 customers / clients at Bonfire and some of the lessons we’ve learned.
Here is the breakdown of our first ten:
Four came from friends — These were friends of ours who either knew someone who could use our services or who needed our services themselves
Four came from referrals — These were businesses that knew about our work and put in a good word for us
Two came from former colleagues — These were folks we used to work with and who brought us with them to their next thing
We were very grateful to have a lot of opportunities to choose from when we launched: More than 25 inquiries came into the inbox in the first day. This inbound interest followed the pattern of our first customers: Most was from friends, colleagues, and referrals, and the rest was from viral content on LinkedIn and our newsletter.
And now that we’ve had a few months to reflect back on those first few days and weeks of business-building, here are some of the key learnings we’ve had so far.
1. “Start” before you start
We publicly launched in September, but we were already working with a handful of clients before then.
Not only did this help us refine our idea of the type of work we wanted and didn’t want, it also took the pressure off of needing the launch to provide a particular amount of new business interest.
2. Put it out into the world
Five out of the seven levers for gaining your first customers require you to … well … reach out to people.
It’s both as simple (tactically) and as difficult (cosmically) as that.
We had an intuition that people would respond positively to us launching a new business; we had built up a fair amount of goodwill and connections over our careers. But it still felt a like a leap! And now that we’re on the other side of the jump, I can safely say that people DO respond positively, more people than you might even realize.
We are a brand storytelling business, helping companies refine their brand strategy and messaging and helping individuals through career coaching and mentorship. These first 10 customers represented a very wide mix of industries, job titles, scopes, and goals. Here’s a sampling:
We worked with a pre-revenue Series A startup to systematize their marketing efforts and nail their PR & Comms strategy
We worked with a fast-growing Series A startup on building brand foundations of purpose, mission, values as well as channel strategy
We worked with two Heads of Marketing on career coaching
We worked on a PLG funnel for a Series C mega company
We worked with two folks on personal positioning, helping them figure out what to do next in their career (and what to call it)
We coordinated a lifecycle marketing project for a seed stage startup
Were all these our dream engagements? Nope.
Did we learn a ton from each of them about what we liked doing and what we didn’t? Absolutely!
Now we can be a lot more judicious about the types of things that come into our inbox. Still, we may say yes to projects that are outside our ideal scope — we know how to do them, we just don’t prefer to do them — but we are able to better understand our why and to optimize toward more and more of the stuff we love to do.
How did you get your first 10, 100, or 1,000 customers?
I’d love to hear!
Got any questions about how specifically we did our first customer acquisition? Let me know, and I’ll be happy to answer.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
