EV Discussions : Reaching First Customers

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Following our series of Discussion Episodes, today Ben and Hrishi discuss and share their experience on getting the first customers.

Often the first opinions and feedback you get on your new product are from your close friends and relatives. From personal experience we can say that the feedback is in most cases positive, but that is what friends are for. You will never get an unbiased opinion this way, so Ben and Hrishi explore other channels that can be used to reach interested people.

Your first customers are people who share your passion, and have similar vision about the solution.

Hrishi and Ben discuss the part social media and ads can play in getting first customers. They both agree in the fact that it is not the optimal venue to look for such people.

Ben shares his experience of attending events, conferences or any other sorts of gathering of people that share similar interests to yours. He had positive experience gathering valuable feedback at such events, and believes that this is a step up from trying to use social media.

Hrishi shares his experience at coldcalling to gather valuable contacts and feedback. He shares the video he usually points people he calls to. You can view it here.

Of cause there are more ways of getting new customers that we didn’t cover in this episode due to time constraints and lack of personal experiences. An example of one would be “get out of building” approach. If you wish to learn about it here is a great source of information. If you want to get more technical, here is another great source of information on this particular approach.

To learn more listen to this episode of Escape Velocity, where Hrishi and Ben cover all the things mentioned here in more details, and even more. If our show has inspired you to learn even more about this fascinating topic (and we truly hope it did), we found these articles by Jason Cohen to be very helpful in our preparation for this episode, and learning more about the topic in general. If you have the time we highly recommend you tto take a look at these articles: ” How do I get my first few customers?“; “Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?“; “10 things I’ve never heard a successful startup founder say“.

As always, we are eager to hear what you guys think about what we talked about on the show, or about the show in general. If you wish us to discuss something in particular in the next episodes, like going more in-depth about the current topic, or covering some applications that help us reaching and finding customers please don’t hesitate to send us your feedback to feedback@reachev.com, or contact us on twitter at @EVpodcast. You can also contact us individually on our twitter accounts: Ben, Hrishi and of course our producer Sergey.

Last, but not least, we would also like to thank Colum Higgins, who helped us with this episode with his valuable feedback. Thank you.