Comment by waldopat
7 months ago
Totally agree. It's easier and easier to build a product and harder and hard to market/sell your product.
Here’s what I’ve seen help in getting those crucial first 10 customers:
Be brutally specific about who you're helping: Which ones, where, with what exact pain, and why now. This is your ICP.
Write your Dream 10 list (real names, real companies). These are your early believers. Go deep into their problems and show up where they already are.
Your unfair advantage right now is your founder network, your story and your industry experience. This is where the “why you” matters most. And honestly, every B2B founder needs to be able to pull in 10 clients from their own network off the bat.
Early traction comes from being focused, obsessed and specific. You need to be honest with yourself and get those first three things down before you build or go make lists with Apollo.
You are correct, founders forget their best edge early on is them, their story, their network, their obsession.
Another way to think about it is it is very, very hard to break into an industry as an outsider. Impossible? No, but you'll need to be very savvy on the marketing front and really do the homework. So not having much of a network is likely going to be the riskiest part of the OP's startup.
I am facing somewhat similar problem. I do know a couple of folks who are kind of guiding our product development. But, we need experts and it is indeed very hard to break in as an outsider.
Have you found any solutions or hacks that worked for you?
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