This may not make sense at first, but it will soon. The best way to get your first marketing-led customers isn’t through market research, personas, competitive landscape analysis, and all of that — you don’t need it. These activities take a lot of time, and often lead to the belief that you understand the market (and by extension, your product’s place in it) better than you really do. What you really need is a short list of sales and marketing activities that you can actually do to bring in those first, and very precious, paying customers.

Start marketing before you launch

If you’ve already launched, don’t worry, it’s never too late to start. But it’s worth pointing out that the effects of marketing are exponential and compounding (not linear), so the more you do now, the easier it’s going to be to get your first paying customers later.

You might be thinking “how am I going to market a product that’s not even launched yet?” The answer is that you don’t need to market your product — you need to market a solution to the problem your customers are facing. That being said, you may not have a clear understanding of the problem you’re solving or what the solution might look like. In that case, check out The new product development process, Lean startup, or The Value Proposition Canvas. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to assume that you know what problem/pain you’re solving with your product.

Yes, we validate products

Make product validation your top priority, and be as loud about it as possible. When you’re interviewing prospective customers about the problem they’re facing (and you’re solving), show mockups of your product to get detailed and actionable feedback. Do as many interviews as you can schedule, and make that number a success metric. During those calls, it’s also important to note roles & responsibilities of people who are the most engaged — ultimately they’re the ones who will buy your product.

In the early stages of product development, making long term bets without immediate payoff can be risky (assuming your product isn’t backed by venture capital). Therefore, early marketing should do one of two things. First, teach you something about your target audience, and their behavior & buying patterns. And second, getting customers. Early marketing efforts must facilitate these goals, and not be led by them since you won’t have enough of this information to build a marketing strategy yet.

Don’t waste time on these things

Remember how I mentioned that this might not make sense at first, well this is the section I was referring to. So much of the literature around marketing for new products encourage you to dive deep into one (or all) of these three channels — SEO, PPC, and PR. While these are good options for user acquisition, they come with a very high cost and as long as we’re talking about a new product, these channels often do more harm than good.

• SEO (or content marketing): If you know one thing about SEO, it’s probably that it takes a long time to accrue the benefit. There are no shortcuts in SEO; to build an effective SEO process, you first need to build a content creation engine, and that tends to be expensive and/or time consuming. Also, depending how technical your product is, content creators may need to have a great deal of expertise in addition to specialized knowledge about SEO operations including briefs, backlinking, link building, and web-development to get predictable results.
• PPC (or performance marketing): Paying for traffic on search engines and social media platforms might seem like a great option for getting early customers. That is, until you spend tens of thousands of dollars (and much more in opportunity cost), and get no customers in return. Paid traffic requires a lot of time and effort to write copy, design ads, and adjust market criteria. So, even if the high costs don’t scare you, keep in mind that you’ll be doing all of this while the product is in development, website is unfinished, and user behavior is unknown.
• PR/AR (public/analyst relations): While founders love it, this is something a lot of product marketers (outside mature B2B organizations) may be unfamiliar with. While PR can create a short-term splace, and AR requires a huge investment in time and capital, neither are likely to bring you loyal customers who came to solve a problem (rather than jumping on a trend).

To summarize, SEO, PPC, and PR/AR are focused on the ‘awareness’ stage of the funnel. This means that users from each of these channels probably need additional marketing or customer success campaigns to convert them.

Other ways to waste time getting early customers include posting on Reddit, Quora, and other social forums. Don’t get me wrong, I love Reddit (as a users), which may be why I don’t recommend it for marketing. It’s a great place to build your personal brand, but it’s bad for selling products and services — people just don’t come to Reddit to buy things. In the same vein, a big Product Hunt launch campaign is a great thing highlight on your resume, but a total waste of time if you’re looking for people who will pay for your product. First, customers rarely buy something they see the first time, and second, the attention span needed to upvote a product is not the same level of attention as customers that actually want to buy your product.

Building your assets

So, what should you do? First, take stock of what you’ve already got. It’s unlikely you’re building a product for an audience you know nothing about (or haven’t worked with). For example, construction project management software is built by people in construction, farming automation robots are built by aggies, and design platforms like Figma are built by designers. Let’s say you’re a network or cloud engineer who decides to build and market a lightweight VPN — aiming to become a profitable SaaS. At this point in your career, you may have the following:

• Domain expertise about the problem, and available solutions
• Strongly held & defensible opinions about the best solution
• Community recognition, and a strong professional network
• Social media followers
• Personal brand
• Visitors to your blog, and/or subscribers to your newsletter

From this group (and you may think of others), identify your strongest asset — and develop that over any other marketing channel. These are what people commonly refer to as growth hacks, and they’re a crucial part of your early product growth.

If you’re starting from scratch, and working with a marketing expert, you’ll inevitably try to build one of these assets from scratch (I recommend doing whatever you enjoy the most).

Now, let’s take a look at some examples of how you can leverage the assets above to get your first paying customers.

Strongly held opinions & technical expertise:

You’re regularly invited to speak at industry events, and actively participate in tech-specific (networking/VPN) related communities.

If this is the case, then be sure to talk about what you’re working on at these events and in the Slack, Discord, and Reddit communities you participate in. Invite people to try it out and share their feedback publicly or privately. These events and communities are often where you’ll find early adopters, or people who enjoy trying new things. You can also leverage this experience into guest-speaking roles on podcasts, which is another great place to reach related audiences.

Social media followers: 

Let’s say you have 1,000+ software engineers following you on Twitter or LinkedIn. Regardless of how you got those subscribers (thought leadership or reciprocal networking), it’s very likely that your first (beta) users, and even your first paying customers, will come from this group.

Don’t build something in the dark, talk openly about it, invite people to try your solution, and encourage them to provide feedback. In the worst case scenario, you’ll get a ton of useful information.

Y Combinator encourages founders to do two things: first, build something, and second, talk to users — here’s a video from Eric Migicovsky on how to talk to users. The reason I encourage founders to talk to users, is because you might be surprised to find out how willing they are to share insights, and also spread the word about your product.

Domain expertise, and a web traffic:

It’s also fine if you have no professional network, and few social media subscribers, but you’ve been blogging for years about your vacations, pets, and opinions on networking / cloud infrastructure. Even a few hundred people reading your blog each month can be the perfect springboard for scaling content marketing as a viable channel for your early product.

Develop a series of blog posts related to the problem(s) your product solves, and introduce your solution — it’s that simple! That being said, there are a few rules to follow. 1) be sure you’re writing about something people are actually interested in, and 2) don’t forget to ask for feedback. Engage with every reader that provides feedback, and every time you find someone interested in your solution be sure to reach out to them directly.

What if I can’t do any of these? No worries, we’ve got you covered in the next section.

Starting from scratch

Build a landing page with a product waitlist: Your landing page is the starting point for almost everything I’ve talked about so far, so why not begin by creating one? Use any website builder you’d like (including wpcontroller), pick the simplest template, and briefly describe your product. Add screenshots (or mockups), and publicly share what users are saying about your product. You don’t need a $200/hr copywriter, designer, or an expensive domain name. Just pick something distinct, easy to spell/pronounce, choose an available TLD, and you’re all set.

Once you have a page, promote it on high volume platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. To create a high performing post, include these three elements: state the problem, offer a solution, and highlight the benefits of your solution. If the product isn’t launched yet, just add people to the waitlist. This list will be a group of people that need your solution, and is now an asset you can leverage to get your first paying customers.

Build an audience: It’s never too late to start building an audience on social media platforms (in fact, it may be easier today than it’s ever been). Building an audience on social media is accomplished in two ways.

1. Regularly posting content (sometimes multiple times/day)
2. Engaging people directly (usually through direct messaging)

But don’t just rely on your creativity and management skills to build an audience, there are lots of great tools out there including Buffer, and sprout social that can help. I would also encourage you to pay close attention, and draw inspiration from content creators that you enjoy following.

Build community: There are countless examples of individuals building a community, and leveraging that loyal and highly curated audience to sell products. This encourages an environment of trust and exclusivity.

But to understand how to build a community, we first need to understand why people participate in communities in the first place. To do this, I think of communities in two different ways: Learning communities, and Social/networking communities.

In learning communities, people get information that’s not easy to find elsewhere. In this case, your primary objective is to provide the highest quality content you can (or encourage others to do the same).

In social/networking communities, the role here is to ensure that people engage with one-another. It’s also ok if (like most platforms), a small number of people engage directly while a large group of interested people sit on the sidelines. To build a community, you might start with a subreddit, or more traditional forum or you could build on a platform like Slack or Discord.

Create content customers and partners: Start by creating a short list (100-200) of prospects that you think would benefit from your product. Research them to understand the type of content they’re interested in. Write down some ideas, and reach out to someone you can pitch to.

This approach is often successful because it has a few inherent benefits. First, you won’t need to pitch your product because it will organically appear throughout the content. Second, you’ll develop trust and a good relationship with potential customers that can’t really be achieved through conventional marketing. So even if you didn’t manage to make a sale, after this campaign you’ll enjoy other benefits like creating a network, and lots of links to your landing page.

Messaging & positioning

Once you’ve found the channel that works for you (and gets you paying customers), it’s time to think about messaging and positioning — so you can scale your business, and optimize conversion rates. For that, you’ll need to address the following:

• The problem your customer has
• How your product solves the problem
• Any objections your customers have
• How aware of the problem customers are
• Why your product is better (or at least different)
• The benefits of using your product

If you can turn these elements into a cohesive story, and put that on your landing page, everything you do will be more effective. But if you’re not sure, there are great tools available (like Mutiny) to help you A/B test messaging.

Key takeaways

• Be an advocate for your product — no one can market better than you!
• Don’t make big investments — use WordPress, or free templates to get started.
• Don’t promise too much — keep it simple, solve a real problem, and don’t pretend to be bigger than you actually are
• Never rely on single points of failure — build as many engagement channels as you can. For example, when someone reads an article, encourage them to join the waitlist, watch a demo, or offer to help them set up the product.