Good qualities of a great MVP
- Very fast to build (weeks not months)
- Very limited functionality
- Appeal to a small set of users (not covering every use case)
3 golden things to look for in your first 10 customers.
- They intensely have the problem you're solving
- Willing to work with a startup
- Are willing to pay to have the problem solved
Here's an email Brex sent to their YC batch to qualify their first 10 users:
Getting Customers
- Create a list of potential customers
- use google sheets or anything
- Send them an email
- Schedule a demo where
- Discuss pricing if it's useful for them
- Onboard them and closely monitor usage and help them use the process
- Make sure you do the onboarding!
- No free trials. If you don't charge, you're not a company
- It's a sign that you're providing value, If they don't want to pay, you should move on
- Increase your price until customers are complaining but still paying
Cold email & LinkedIn outreach
This is probably how you're going to be reaching your first few customers (unless you know them personally) if you're doing some b2b SaaS.
To setup cold outreach with Apollo like I have, checkout Apollo Email Marketing.
Relevant reddit threads & resources on this:
How many cold messages did it take for you to land your first customer?
cold email setup steps
^ This link is super useful, teaches you about how to setup emails as to not trigger spam etc
How do you get your first medium-size-B2B SaaS customers?
Need help with cold emails to get customers
Feedback from early stage founders
Sent 5,000 cold emails with only 30 clicks on links
Cold email templates
How to write a cold email that actually works in 6 steps (2024)
"Ultimate framework for cold emails" (Twitter thread)
^ Continuation from this guy, he had a pdf on some best practices
The B2B Cold Email Mastery Guide: How to send 1000 emails daily with a 75% open rate