Before you blame yourself: 5 reasons landing your first customer is hard
Five cases of founders hitting early sales roadblocks
Landing your first customer is one of the trickiest milestones of doing a startup
Some obstacles are beyond a founder’s control
Some unchangeable factors can slow progress
This makes it feel like a failure, while it can be just a rough patch
Here are 5 reasons it can take a while to land your first customer
And some ideas on how to deal with increased momentum
1. Credibility chicken-and-egg-problem
Problem: Zero customers, so people don’t trust you. Therefore, you are not getting customers.
Having proof in the form of a first happy client can compensate for that, but that’s a chicken-and-egg problem.
On top of that, young or inexperienced founders sometimes lack credibility, unfortunately, especially in B2B. Many won’t buy with credible background.
I mentored a fairly young entrepreneur (19y), who besides being very new to the market, also got told that he was ‘too young’.
Solution:
2. Market new to the founder
Problem: New market, so you lack the network for easy intros
A founder who launched in a familiar industry told me: ‘Our first client was our co-founder’s ex-boss’. If you don’t have that, it’s harder.
It takes more time to build a network first.
If you are new to an industry, you don’t speak the lingo. This takes longer to assimilate and makes sales calls less effective.
I mentored a recruiter who did management training for recruiters for years. When we started working together, within 48 hours he scheduled 12 interviews and within two weeks 3 pilots were sold. He spoke that language and had a strong network.
B2C, especially broad consumer products, such as FMCG or a product for ‘most parents’, you can just go on the street and walk and talk. Finding one or two people willing to pilot often is feasible.
A founder handcrafting a marketplace for music teachers easily found someone to match among his peers because many people want music lessons. Finding the next 10 proved to be harder.
Solution
Not rocket science: Outreach, networking, outreach. Make yourself the market expert.
3. Multi-stakeholder clients can take a long time to decide
Problem: Corporates or B2G (Business to Government) are notoriously known for requiring several stakeholders to buy something.
If you are new to this, your first customer can feel like it takes forever.
Everyone enjoys you bringing in innovation, but nobody wants to do the sale. Sent from pillar to post.
I know one startup that is doing a pilot with the national police force, that started talking over five years ago. Yup, that long.
For this reason, some founders purposefully stay away from them. There’s good reason to.
Even though it might feel like big money, the time and effort sometimes don’t make up for it.
Plus, they can be very demanding, claiming a lot of power in your product strategy.
Solution:
Try to see if there are smaller organisations or people with more mandates to move things quicker.
The startup that worked with the police deprioritised that pilot at some point and found an entirely different segment, freelancers, who were much easier to sign as customers.
Postpone the big or tell yourself it’s okay it’s taking forever.
4. Hard-to-integrate products are hard to buy
Problem: if your solution requires a lot of effort and coordination to implement, this makes it harder to buy.
A startup that made a digital twin for logistics, such as baggage handling, struggled with this. For an airport to buy this, it is next to impossible to do a pilot (haha), as the entire operation hinges on this. Often it’s easier to find a tiny subset in the process you can do better. Very often these kinds of ‘grand design’ projects are tech push by engineers with limited market knowledge. Show me a digital twin project that’s not research-based and not Boeing, and we’ll talk.
A product that requires third parties of the customer to adopt the solution adds an extra hurdle.
I once worked with a startup that made file management between multiple stakeholders on big construction projects easier. The software seemed way easier for everyone who saw the demo, but the buyer kept postponing the pilot. ‘Not this project, but the next’, they said multiple times. Quite logically: Not only needed the entire team to be onboarded but also all other stakeholders (government, third parties) to take this on. They didn’t want to make the project more complicated than it already was.
Solution: park the big vision, and try to find a smaller problem to solve first, with fewer stakeholders.
The construction startup from above found a part of the process they tried to manage, which revolved around retrieving very specific information about the contracts of big tenders. For this, they build an AI-based search tool for just 1 stakeholder in the project, easier to adopt!
5. Expensive products have longer sales times
Problem: The higher the price, the longer the decision-making process.
A startup that installs home batteries took over seven months to get their first customer. Why? A home battery can easily cost over €8000. These are not snap decisions.
Budgets need to align
If your solution eats out of a particular budget, and your B2B potential client has used that op, sometimes you need to wait till the new fiscal year. Especially near the end of the year when budgets are empty, innovative projects can be hard to sell.
Solution: Niche down.
If your product is really big (like a home battery), you sometimes can’t work around this. Be honest about whether your MVP truly is the minimum. Accept the long sales times if it is.
Embrace the bumpy ride or pivot
Sometimes the idea you want to pursue is hard.
Sure, you can pivot, but if you want to chase that vision, you are in for a bumpy ride.
Accept that’s part of the idea you pursue.
This post is not an excuse to pursue shitty ideas. If you are not moving rightwards on the product-market fit scale for a LONG time, reflect.
Need help in getting your first customer? Check out my mentoring packages!
Coming up: What is hard about landing customer #2-#10
The ideas from this post were supplied by you readers! I did a little poll on LinkedIn with the following questions:
I DM’ed everyone about their first customer to ask about their experience. Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences.
What is hard about landing customer #2-#10? Let me know in the comments or join the chat!
Loving your posts!!
Insightful