how to hack your first 100 customers

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How to Hack your First 100 customers ?


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Leverage Ur Connections

• Start looking for customers from your contact lists.• Write email providing short intro about ur startup and then email to your

friends to spread the word in their network.• PM all your friends on Facebook and send them info on your startup and

as them to like your Facebook page and spread the word.• Extract email ids from LinkedIN and send mails to all your former

colleagues


Leverage StartUp press to drive awareness

• Reachout to Startup press to drive awareness about your products. • Don’t Expect 100s of visitors from them !! A mention by all of them is not

equal to a press mention in Times of India .• But mentions here help build Google SEO juice and ensure that your

website ranks for your own brand query !• These also help build credibility by adding these links to your website

with the link ‘As featured in” ! • A thing to note is that your target audience does not read these , so this

is more hygiene factor !


Listen to Press mentions of competitors

• Leverage competitor mentions by monitoring brand mentions using ‘Mention’ and Google Alerts.

• Can also be used to track domain keywords. Once you find a mention email the author of the same and pitch your product as an alternative solution to your competitors.

• Be sure to make a detailed pitches. Normally reporters are not pitched directly and they would surely include your name in the next mention in that domain.


Answer User questions - Quora, Forums ..

• If you are solving the right problem then there will surely be questions and pain points which you can address using your product /service.

• Seek out these questions and answer those as honestly as possible and at the end pitch your product.

• Don’t write stuff like “My product will solve this “ !! You loose credibility , solve the user query and the subtle push to your product will work.

• Use the same approach to find popular SlideShare and post comments on them.


Twitter – Listen & Pitch in real time.

• Listen to competitors , keywords in your domains using listening tools like Hootsuite(free for 3 social accounts).

• Create a product profile and then “Tweet Pitch” your solution.• Try and have a Twitter conversation and then get them to share their

phone numbers.


Twitter – Start a Tweet Chat with influencer.

• Use FollowerWonk to get influencers and then “Tweet Pitch” to them.• TweetChat : This brings massive visibility because influencers are gate

keepers to a target audience.• Interview an Influencer: Interview an influencer in your domain and post

the same on to your blog. At the end of the interview add a short about your company. The influencer will normally tweet the interview.


Blog Commenting

• Find Bloggers and Blog posts written in your domain and then write comments which add value to the discussion and at the end leave your company name as part of the signature.

• Remember the comment will not be approved if the comment does not ad value !


LinkedIN – Connect with Potential Customers

The very first platform which should be leveraged by B2B start-ups is LinkedIN and here are some ways to leverage the LinkedIN platform.

Connect with your potential customers on LinkedIN

• Make use of the Information Asymmetry ! And build an extensive LinkedIN profile with ‘CEO and Co-founder” or ‘CTO and Co-founder’ .

• Build a profile which sells your offering and do ensure that you have enough information on your Linkedin profile about the product which you are selling.

• Send invites to key influencers in the domain first and then once they have accepted the invites you can reach out to customers. If you send 10 invites you would get acceptance from 5-6 if you have done a good job at building your LinkedIN profile.


LinkedIN – Groups

• Leverage LinkedIN groups specific to your domain to participate in discussions about problems faced in the industry and then you can position your solution to the right target audience.


LinkedIN for sale professionals and Email Export

• LinkedIN for sales professional 30 day trial with your customer. Once you are at the end of 25 th day cancel the same and then after a few weeks you can start the free trial !

• Once you have built up a large enough LinkedIN profile you can export email ids of all of them and target them via email


SellHack – Chrome Extension


SellHack – Chrome Extension

• Use SellHack Chrome extension to get the e-mail id of any decision maker in the companies which you are targeting.

• Don’t SPAM them with your company information rather right a honest email with 1-2 lines intro about yourself and your service!

• Have seen that this works well because of the general connect which many people have with entrepreneurship . Leverage this!


Volunteer – At a conference …

• The best way to reach out to a large targeted audience is to become a ‘Volunteer’ for conference.

• Being part of the conference gives you access to 100s of decision makers without having to spend money !

• Leverage all the connections ..!• To volunteer , all you have to do is is ‘ASK’ !


Content Marketing

• Start a blog !• Write an blog post once in a week about the problems faced by

your target market.• The same content can be marketed in Forums , Quora , E-mails !

These are the ‘Ammunition’ for your reach out to decision markers in case of B2B and in case of a B2C start-up these serve as inbound traffic sources.

• Don’t worry too much about keywords, SEO worry about building great content !.

• Volunteer to write a guest post in a popular blog/ newspaper which your target audience reads.


Measure your conversions!

• Setup Goals in Google Analytics to measure conversions !• The importance of this can never be underestimated , this is

the true measure of the effectiveness of all the outreach which you are doing to get your first 100 customers.

• Use UTM tracker codes in all links which you share on social media and then mask the UTM trackers using bit.ly codes.

• Get a sense of where your conversions are coming from !


Use CrazyEgg to see if your visitors are getting lost• Setup a FREE trial on CrazyEgg

and install the code on your website.

• Start an experiment to track visits to your home page.

• Get a heat map to understand why the user is not taking the action you want them to do.

* BE CAREFUL and ensure to cancel CrazyEgg subscription before 30 days


Advertise Using Facebook

• Don’t spend money to build Facebook FANS !!• Spend money on FB to get initial visitors from your target audience. (Clicks

as low as Rs 3/Click).• Choose a great visual for this ad , this is a killer when it comes to cost per

click• Chose audience based on interests and experiment for conversions , this

also gives you a sense of the customer jounrney.


Pull off a stunt !

• Everyone knows the stunts done by Uber !

• Think of an unusual way to do something and then reach out to press !.

• Uber Chopper service was a limited edition ride where they rented a helicopter for 1 day ! And got 10 couples to have a helicopter ride .. Cost of this stunt was 2.5 lakhs only !


Questions ?


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