A few weeks ago a friend asked me how did I get my  my first customers.  Since I spent almost a year getting start up money and figuring out a workable business plan now it was time to implement some of these ideas.
I went to GetResponse and made a simple free Landing Page with that and a linkedin group I was able to generate 75 new leads in 24 hours.  I have used these techniques many times and they always work so let me tell you what I did. Step 1: Nail Down Your Target AudienceThere are billions of articles and books on the importance of defining your target market. I’m not going to give you a lecture on how to define your target market. I will say that for this technique which I’m about to outline you have to know exactly what type of people you want as leads.In my case I want to contact the woman of the house as she buys most of the clothing and gifts throughout the year for the family. If you are not that sure of your audience you might pitch your idea to several groups of people and see who bites. Step 2: Find your most active Facebook or LinkedIn group.Now there are plenty of groups on LinkedIn and Facebook but you need one to be your test group so you want the largest and most active as far as participation goes to test your pitch. This is important step though nothing should be taken for granted. So I did this and got 8 new leads and out of these leads I got four new early adopters.  These are very special customers, who do not need  testimonial they just were interested in buying your product and they want to see your company do well. Early adopters are usually called first customers.How do you get to these people. 

  1. Make a list of everyone you know. Then ask them introduce you to someone in the community you don't know.
  2. Become an expert, try and help other business owners and the rewards of getting those first customers will come. 
  3. This is what I did last week to create some action and first customers on my site. I had a couple of business people go to my site and give me feedback. Then we fixed what ever those people saw as wrong with the site including rewording of the site, renaming pages, doing  new meta-tags. 
  4. Then I hired someone to send 50,000 hits to my site. I then put up a popup that said anyone willing to join the site would get 40% off the first purchase. I then threw a big sale 30% off most things on the site. I let them as first time buyers to combine the sale price and the joining price so somethings they got 70% the original price.


There is no silver bullet for finding users for your startup, just tactics like the ones below that work to varying degrees depending on your idea and market. Even for good channels, a 10-20% response rate is normal, so don’t get discouraged.