How to Attract Clients as a Newly Launched Business

Lessons from launching an enterprise SaaS startup, consumer platform startup, and event business

You launched, congrats! Now you need to attract the first clients to use your product or service. I’ve had the experience of doing it for an enterprise SaaS startup, consumer platform startup, and event business. Let me share with you my secrets on how to attract your first clients.

Be clear whether you are testing for desirability or value
There are two things you need to test when you launch:

Desirability. Do clients want your product? Essentially, do they sign up if you show it to them?

Value. Are their expectations fulfilled after they used your product?

Testing for desirability is a higher priority because if no one signs up, the value to the clients automatically is zero. The number one reason startups fail is that they build something no one wants.

To test for desirability, you only need to build a façade. At this stage, what you care about is whether people would even click to try your product, not whether it brings value. And even that facade, don’t worry about it being perfect. You don’t have a brand to damage at this point, either people sign up, or they don’t remember you. And if there is demand, it will be obvious.

This is what we did for my startup LaunchClub. First, we only launched a website without any real users or matching algorithms.

Once you see enough demand, you can build the product. At this stage, you can do everything manually on the admin side, and you don’t need to make it automated or scalable. It just has to do the job the client intended it to do. With LaunchClub, we spent 6 months validating the value before we decided to build an algorithm for matching our users.

Recruit first clients by hand
Now, how should you attract people to your website? The secret is not to overthink it. The scalability of the method doesn’t matter at this point. The cost of acquisition doesn’t matter either. Even the target audience doesn’t matter, as you can start by signing up everyone and then see who the best customer is. Bring them by hand. Message your friends and family. Post in random Facebook groups. Meet people on the street and ask them to sign up if you have to.

Here is what we used to get the first users for LaunchClub:

Recruiting friends.

Launching on ProductHunt.

Twitter ads. All kinds of ads, actually, but most didn’t work.

Reaching out in communities, i.e., Reddit or communities on Slack (there are databases of Slacks based on different topics you can find).

Content marketing, for example, articles like this one.

LinkedIn automation.

How to market your product

You have to be aware of what problem you are trying to solve for your clients and what your value proposition is. If thinking about a specific problem your client has is difficult, you can try to think of it as a job they need to get done. What job will your product do for them? For example, for LaunchClub, it would be the job of finding the peer support group and the job of getting ideas on how to solve certain business challenges.

The value proposition can be of two kinds. One is very direct and is targeted towards solving the problem. For example, for LaunchClub, it would be “Get your first clients!” The other way to position your product would be to compare some other product and make clear the difference. For example, “LaunchClub is like an accelerator, but you can actually get in, don’t need to spend equity, and continue your journey for years surrounded by a community of peers.”

One crucial piece of the sales process is asking for money or some other form of commitment. For freemium products, that would be about measuring the time users spend on their app, but for most products, it is about the hard cash. Giving your product for free doesn’t help because people grab free things not because they need them but because of the fear of missing out. As a result, you typically don’t learn much from clients who don’t pay. In our case, we even charged our friends in the very beginning.

What to do if your launch failed
If your launch doesn’t attract the demand you expected, learn, build something new, and launch again. The critical piece here is learning. You need to understand (or at least develop a hypothesis) why there was no demand. Is it about the product, how you marketed it, or something else?

If you have less than 100 data points, it is not statistically significant, so you should revert to interviews. The typical recommendation here is reading the Mom Test book. The main advice here is to listen to the customer stories, problems, and how they solve them now and not talk about your product. The reason is simple: clients often can’t tell you what they will pay money for, but they can tell you about their struggles.
In the case of LaunchClub, we first launched it as a peer-to-peer coaching platform for anyone. We interviewed people who paid and didn’t and quickly understood that people had many doubts about the usefulness of a random person to coach them. So we pivoted toward a more focused platform that became LaunchClub.

Find your support group and brainstorm ideas on a weekly basis
In my experience, there are two traps people get into when trying to get their first clients. One is getting stuck with ideas. The other is giving up due to the lack of emotional support. A community of like-minded people would solve both problems.
Communities come in various shapes and forms. What you should be looking for are places where you can form genuine relationships. Forums could work but work worse than video calls.

On the other hand, you also want a structure that allows you to exchange ideas and insights, not just a networking platform. Communities get spoiled by sales and monetary relationships; look for those that are pure in that regard and are focused solely on sharing knowledge.

Things I shared above are some of the reasons why we built LaunchClub, too. It is a platform that connects startup founders who just launched in weekly 1-on-1 video calls. Try it out; we did our best to make it useful to people looking for their first customers and community to support them.

– https://www.launch-club.com/post/how-to-attract-clients-as-a-newly-launched-business