Too often, businesses ask the wrong question about strategy.
They wonder what the right strategy is. But they should ask when the right strategy is.
Your customer acquisition strategy should evolve over time. What you do to persuade your 1,000th customer to buy will probably not be the same thing that persuaded your 10th customer to buy.
Using the right strategy at the wrong time can stall growth and lead to frustrating plateaus or setbacks.
So what should you prioritize when acquiring your first 10 customers? Your first 100? 1,000? And what are some common mistakes founders should avoid at each level?
How to Get Your First 10 Customers
In the movie Apollo 13, an argument breaks out onboard the ship. Astronaut Jack Swigert floats over to the other two astronauts and expresses concerns about how the ship’s heat shield will perform on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
“There’s a thousand things that have to happen in order for us to survive,” replies Commander Jim Lovell. “We are on number eight. You’re talking about number 692.”
That’s the most common mistake for businesses working on their first 10 customers: they’re thinking like Jack Swigert. If you think too hard about how your strategies at this level will scale when you have 10,000 customers, you’re thinking too far in advance.
If you have fewer than 10 customers, it’s okay to start with tactics that won’t scale.
I call your first 10 customers the “by any means necessary” step. Don’t expect things to scale just yet.
You don’t have to automate your sales processes at this point. You don’t even have to know how it’s going to scale quite yet. It’s okay if the process of acquiring the first 10 customers requires significant manual work and personal outreach. Ad campaigns might even be unrealistic at this stage.
In the early days of my startup Elastic, I wanted to validate the idea for the business by landing a few B2B customers with the solution I was offering. Since my ideal customer was other tech startups, I looked on Crunchbase to find companies that had just received funding. I suspected they would be interested in the solution I could provide them—plus, I knew they had just raised plenty of money to spend! For me, it was as good a list of leads as any.
I went down the Crunchbase list calling every company and pitching my idea. At the end of two weeks, I had seven B2B customers for my business that didn’t even exist yet. That was enough momentum for me to build upon.
Obviously, this customer acquisition strategy can’t work forever. Eventually, that list of leads comes to an end. But this is what I mean when I say your first 10 customers must come by any means necessary.
Knock on doors, call your friends, call your friends-of-friends, pitch a stranger at a bar. With B2B SaaS especially, it can be hard to find the precise buyer within your immediate sphere, so you may have to get creative or go a level deeper in your network.
Maybe you have a marketing tool that you want to pitch Company A, and while you don’t know anyone in marketing there, you do know an engineer. Ask your engineer friend to introduce you to the marketing leader. Whatever it takes.
What’s going to be most valuable to you with your first 10 customers is not revenue, but insights.
Your first few buyers will likely be the customers who have the strongest pain and are the most ignored by the marketplace. Here’s how you can make the most of this crucial group of early adopters:
- Spend time with them: Call them, visit their offices, and become as invested in their success as they are. This practice won’t scale, but it’s not about creating repeatable processes at this time. You’re simply trying to build the best solution possible for your ideal customer—it’s worth your time.
- Learn their pain points: Become a sponge and absorb everything your first customers have to teach you. How are they talking about their problems? They will lead you to the opportunities and pain points that no one else is addressing well enough.
- Work out the kinks: Do customers ignore your main pitch and ask about one of your side services? Maybe that’s the thread you’ll have to pull in your quest to get the next 90 customers. Pay attention to what’s resonating with customers and, just as importantly, what’s not.
The insight you gain from your first 10 customers will plant the seed of your future strategies—but you’ll need to gain even deeper knowledge to reach the 100-customer mark.
How to Scale from 10 to 100 Customers
To go from 10 to 100 customers, you need other people to help you, plain and simple. You’re going to burn yourself out getting to your 100th customer without establishing repeatable processes.
Can you teach your sales process to at least one other person?
Hire a sales rep who can take all the insights you gained from your first 10 customers and leverage those learnings to replicate your initial success. If you can’t teach anyone else to do what you can do, that’s a sign of trouble.
Go back to the drawing board and figure out what’s not translating. It might be a problem with your sales process, your messaging—or even the product itself. Now is the time to figure it out.
It’s also important to remember that when you’re going from customer 10 to 100, you still need to be in learning mode. Hell, you’re never not in learning mode, as far as I’m concerned.
But many founders are too eager to get to a place where they can say, “Finally! I’ve figured out customer acquisition perfectly! Now we can just sit back, turn on the customer hose, and watch our revenue grow!” Don’t get too confident. Always be learning.
Your first 100 customers give you the gift of a broader sample size—which means more variety of people to talk to. If your first 100 customers are validating your solution, how can you find others just like them?
Here are a few questions I recommend exploring at this stage:
- Ideal customer demographics: Industry, business size, budget, etc.
- Buying habits: How do your customers buy other products like yours?
- Preferred content channels: Where do they spend their time online? What blogs do they visit? What YouTube channels do they watch? Do they ever click on ads?
- Preferences: How would they like to be billed? How heavy are their support needs?
Beware: Sometimes, the feedback you get from this broader set of customers can be conflicting. You’ll need to figure out your different customer segments—and which ones you should prioritize.
Maybe your product works “pretty good” for three different types of customers, but it works great for one type of customer. It’s up to you to decide which customers are the best fit for scaling up.
In the 10-100 customer stage, you should also identify and narrow in on the activities that are generating the best results. Where are most of your leads coming from? Events? LinkedIn outreach? TikTok? By this point, it should be clear which acquisition activities are winning, and you can double down on those.
Finally, it’s important to continue to be flexible and adaptable to the insights your first 100 customers give you. These are still early days—and it’s better to learn what customers really want than to deliver the wrong solution at scale.
How to Scale From 100 to 1,000: Building On Your Success
Once you pass the 100-customer mark, it’s easy to rest on your laurels. You might feel confident you’ve figured things out. But on the way to your first 1,000 customers, problems will arise. Things will start to break.
Your little startup needs to become more professional. You’ll need to hire a team that can cover the entire customer lifecycle in some way—sales, marketing, and customer support.
You’ll also need to scale internal operations and processes to bring some kind of order to the chaos. Growing to 1,000 customers is exciting, sure. But let’s be real: It can also be chaotic as hell if you don’t have operations-minded folks steering the ship.
If you ask me, this stage is where the truly deep learning begins.
Here, you’re going to learn more and more about what the business will look like in the long term. While you don’t usually have to worry about your first 100 customers churning, you’ll need to find answers for the inevitable churn that arises on the road to 1,000.
At this point, customer retention will become equally as important as customer acquisition.
Maybe you’ve figured out what it takes to get a customer—now, what does it take to keep a customer? What makes them renew their subscriptions after a year? Is your solution still addressing their problems well enough? Or are they shopping around for alternatives?
You’ll also learn more about your customer acquisition costs and lifecycle metrics. You might find that one type of customer is easy to acquire but churns quickly, while another type of customer is more difficult to acquire but retains for much longer. How will this kind of data inform your priorities and strategies moving forward?
Then there’s customer expansion—what does it take to grow with a customer? Would a customer that’s been successful with your business want to pay more for new services? What about new products or features? Or to add more users on your platform?
The insights you gain at this stage will shape the future of your business. If you can crack the code for customer acquisition, retention, and expansion, your growth can take off like a rocket ship.
Avoiding Common Mistakes and Pitfalls as You Scale
Mistake #1: Leaving “Learning Mode” too Early
If you ask me, some founders leave “learning mode” too quickly. They want to skip from Step 8 to Step 692 as soon as possible. So they glean one insight from their first customers and call it a day. Time to scale, scale, scale!
But you might not have the insights to scale just yet.
When people ask me how I came to understand my customers, they tend to assume I sat in a room and brainstormed. As if I learned about my ideal customer by jotting my best theories down on paper. That’s not remotely what happened. Instead, I was always willing to stay in “learning mode” and see where my existing customers were pointing me.
The temptation is to believe that a growing business means you’ve figured everything out at this stage. You’re so eager to get to a stage where you can scale that you’ll pull the trigger after you glean any new insight.
But it’s a mistake for founders to speed past these early customer milestones without appreciating what a gold mine these learnings can be for shaping their startup into a truly durable business in the long term.
Mistake #2: Scaling Too Quickly
The consequence of leaving “learning mode” is that you try to scale too quickly. But there’s a big risk here. If you move too fast, you can start acquiring the wrong customers, scaling the wrong channels, and even making the wrong product decisions.
Scaling too fast can be misleading. You’ll watch your customer numbers going up and assume you’re growing. But what if you’re growing because you’re spending far too much on customer acquisition?
It might be scalable, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.
Premature scaling is dangerous for another key reason: if you scale the wrong channel or the wrong solution, you may be forced to do a costly, disruptive pivot later on. If you expand without fully understanding your market, you may have to undo a lot of hard work.
Mistake #3: Failing to recognize customer needs over time
What satisfies a customer in one month isn’t the same as what satisfies a customer for five years.
You need time to figure out what customers really want. To find out the solutions they’re willing to pay for over several years—not just weeks.
Learn what it takes to keep a customer. What it takes to expand, upsell, and grow with a customer. Because while it’s exciting to overcome a big challenge with a customer and solve their pain point, you don’t learn what you did wrong until months or years down the line.
My recommendation? Create different customer segments. You’ll learn over time that not all customers are the same. Some might be hard to acquire, but give you long-term loyalty. Others might give you a fast purchase, then churn just as quickly. Your goal should be to figure out not only which customers are the happiest with your solution but which are the most successful with it.
Pay attention to customer behavior over time and you’ll always have a handle on who you’re marketing to. As you get a better sense of what each customer segment needs in order to be successful, you’ll find where the long-term growth opportunities are.
Building True Exponential Success with Customers
Getting your first 1,000 customers isn’t just about growing revenue—it’s about growing your knowledge about your customers and the market. These early adopters will give you all the insights you need to build a solid foundation for a business that can support 100,000 customers and beyond.
You can scale your customer acquisition strategy without breaking everything—as long as you commit to learning, adapting, and growing at the right pace for your business.
