🗞 What's New: Landing your next group of customers

So, you've got your first five customers. Now what?

• To get customers 6-50, reach out to the warm leads you've generated, while talking to potential users. Also, use cold outreach.
• Product-led growth involves leveraging your product to acquire users. Focus on onboarding, value-driven experiences, and a clear value prop.
• $74K MRR after two years stagnant. Tim Bennetto's rebrand and price increase helped his business skyrocket.

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by Mac Martine

Last time, we talked about getting your first five customers through warm leads. This can be done easily if you've been talking to customers throughout the process of forming your idea.

When done this way, by the time you are ready to bring on your first customer, you have dozens of warm leads and know their pain points intimately.

Customers 6-50

Now, you're ready to get customers 6-50, and the process is a continuation of where you left off in getting your first five.

The conversations you've had up to this point will have been valuable, but this is where you find out whether what people have told you is accurate in reality.

Continue to reach out to the warm leads you've generated in earlier conversations, while constantly creating more warm leads through cold outreach.

I told people I was working on a product, and that I would love their feedback. This was low pressure, and was a gentle way to start building trust. Many people accepted, and I did countless demos, day after day, for months.

A good percentage of those demo calls turned into sales. They also taught me invaluable information about my users' processes, what they were using before, and their pain points. This information is much more concrete than what you can get from the early conversations.

Summary

For customers 6-50, the best thing you can do is to invest time into continuing to talk to as many people as you can. This time, show them the product and learn all you can from them: Their processes, pains, and how they use your tool.

By the end of this, you should start to have some meaningful revenue. After customer 50, you will need to start thinking about all the things you've learned, and how to scale.

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Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by Shounak

Product-led growth (PLG) involves leveraging your product to acquire, activate, convert, retain, and monetize your users.

With PLG, your product is not just the set of features that solve customer pain points, but also your go to market motion and your distribution and engagement channel. This leads to lower acquisition costs, an improved user experience, increased scalability, and faster capital-efficient growth.

Core elements of a PLG strategy

1. Commoditization of customer expectations: In PLG, customer expectations are scoped out, since the buyer persona is defined very early on. The value delivery system is mapped out relative to the competition, along with identifying the most efficient use cases to optimize for.
2. Value-driven experiences: PLG companies prioritize delivering value-driven experiences that keep users engaged.
3. Seamless onboarding: Seamless onboarding is particularly useful if your product is self-serve. This is because it allows users to explore and use the product independently, without the need for hand-holding. The goal is to enable users to reach the "A-ha!" moment as fast as possible.
4. Clear positioning and value proposition: Since a user-centric approach is at the heart of PLG, understanding user needs and sentiment is key. This includes looking at competitors, analyzing customer sentiments, and figuring out loopholes in the value delivery system. Good PLG companies position their product relative to the market, have a clear value prop targeting users, and use this data to provide a seamless product experience.

Resources

You can read more about the aha moment here.

You can read more on SaaS growth and marketing here.

Discuss this story.

💲 Landing sales before launch. Posted by Nithin Jawahar.

📈 40 things you can do now to increase your MRR. Posted by Julian Duty.

🤮 MVPs suck. Posted by Rob Metcalf.

💵 Monetizing your first product. Posted by Dan Kulkov.

🔎 Drop your X handle. Posted by Piyush.

🛠 How do I pull off UX/UI? Posted by HumbleShuttler.

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by Tim Bennetto

Here's how I've built Pallyy to $74K MRR solo.

Getting started

I spent six months or so learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Nuxt. Every evening, I would spend a few hours doing this with CodeCademy, a free learning platform.

Next, I spent 30 days building a MVP of an Instagram analytics platform. The differentiator was that you could "Share" your Instagram analytics with others.

It was very, very basic. My launch was uneventful, as I had no audience. I launched on Product Hunt, but it didn't do well, and I got almost no response from it.

First customers

My friend had a free Instagram analytics tool. He gave it to me, and we redirected it to my platform. It ended up landing me around 100 customers at $5 per month.

Pivot and plateau

Remember the initial "Share" feature I built? Well, absolutely nobody wanted it. So, I removed it and focused on the analytics dashboard.

Then, growth completely stalled for almost two years straight. People wanted scheduling and analytics, but at the time, Instagram scheduling wasn't possible because of the API.

Pivot number two

Instagram opened its API to allow anyone to publish posts, so within a week, I built the scheduling feature.

In the coming months. I added other social platforms, and scheduling quickly became the number one feature.

I also decided to rebrand. Initially, the product was called ShareMyInsights. But, with scheduling as the main feature in the new product, I needed to rebrand.

I chose the name Pallyy because it's short, it was a cheap domain, and it's fun, but most importantly, it's not limited to a certain feature. The logo cost me $1.5K.

Marketing

I didn't start marketing properly until two years in. I hired a content writer to do blog posts and social media posts. Then, I started:

• Optimizing SEO.
• Creating feature pages.
• Creating alternative pages.
• An affiliate program.

This was the turning point. The following year, I saw 10x growth.

I also increased the price for all of my users by $3. This has given Pallyy its biggest revenue boost to date ($10K+).

What's next

It's been amazing doing everything by myself for four years, but it's time to expand. I hired a senior developer who is starting tomorrow.

I'm also planning on hiring a customer support and marketing role in the near future.

Anyone can build a SaaS. For me, the motivation was building a better lifestyle.

I've got no degrees, dropped out of school, and had zero coding or marketing knowledge.

Just get started, and learn along the way!

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Mac Martine, Darko, Shounak, and Tim Bennetto for contributing posts. —Channing