I will share what I did to get customers and the lessons I learned to help fellow startup founders.

The revenue is not life-changing, but I’m thrilled it’s gaining traction! 🙏

A little backstory:

After many failed startups, I realized the problem I needed to solve for myself: finding customers.

So, I built CustomerFinderBot to scratch my own itch, and it turns out others found it useful too.

The pitch:

Find Your Customers in Seconds with Social Media AI.

Until now, I still can't believe that people are using and paying for a tool that I built. I have very low expectations when I built and launched this because I'm already so used to building and launching projects and ending up with 0 or close to 0 users.

Or when my previous projects gained some users, none are willing to pay so they end up being added to my list of failures.

Launch Results:

1st day - Gained 2 paying customers
2nd day - 0
3rd day - Gained 1 paying customer
4th day - 0
5th day - Gained 7 paying customers

After that, sales started coming in almost daily!

Here is what I did so far to get paying customers:

1. Share the project on Reddit and Twitter/X.

2. Find people on Twitter and Reddit that are looking for alternatives to my competitors, complaining about my competitors or asking recommendations for a solution to their problem that my product directly solves.

I use CustomerFinderBot to save time and effort since it automates these things.

Then I reach out to them to help them by answering their questions and suggesting the tool that I built.

It's a win-win for both parties.

This strategy is effective because they already want my product so they have a high probability to end up buying.

My next steps:

• Keep on iterating by improving the tool based on customer feedback.
• List on directory websites.
• Launch on Product Hunt.
• Invest time and effort in SEO. This takes a lot of effort and patience because it takes a while to see results but based on what I learned from others and from my own personal experience it's one of the most sustainable customer acquisition channel.
• Build and ship free tools for marketing purposes and it will also help with SEO.

Lessons I learned? 👇

1. Building and growing a SaaS is hard as hell. It's not a quick and easy way to make money and it has a very high failure rate considering around 90% of startups fail.

2. Gathering feedback from customers really provides you with a lot of valuable information. You will discover a lot use-cases that you haven't think of which will give you a better idea on what features you should build. By doing this, you'll end up building features that your target customers really needs and wants instead of building features that you think will be useful but ends up no one uses.

3. Burn out is real so do everything you can to prevent it. It's really very tiring especially if you're a solo founder which does all the work.

4. Solve real problems (e.g, save them time and effort, make them more money). Focus on the pain points of your target customers. Solve 1 problem and do it really well.

5. Prefer to use the tools that you already know. Don’t spend too much time thinking about what are the best tool to use. The best tool for you is the one you already know. Your customers won't care about the tools you used, what they care about is you're solving their problem.

6. Don't add every feature you can think of. Start with a MVP that solves the core problem, then iterate based on user feedback.

7. Validate immediately to see if people will pay for it then move on if not. Don't over-engineer. It doesn't need to be scalable initially.

8. Do lots of marketing, this is a must because build it and they will come rarely succeeds.

9. Keep on shipping 🚀 Many small bets instead of 1 big bet to manage risk and increase your odds of launching a product that customers will pay for.

I hope this post helps others to get their first customers for their startups.

Any questions? I'll be happy to answer them!

Let's follow each other on Twitter - https://x.com/FI_investor

Check out my other projects:

Calm-Jobs.com - Find Jobs With Better Work-Life Balance.

JobHunterBot.com - Automatically Find Jobs from LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster, ZipRecruiter, and hundreds of other job boards.