We got our first customer! Here's how we did it

We recently opened our product, Edition in private beta and now we got our first customer! In fact, they decided to pay 6 months' worth of contract upfront. I thought I'd share some lessons so far.

How did we pick this market/space to work on?

I had the fortune to grow my last startup to $8M ARR and worked with various startups (mid-stage to later-staged) as our target customers. So I've seen various pain-points faced by the startups, especially around publishing and community-building. Plus, we tried to build our own community (not very successfully) and I was fortunate to participate in great communities like On Deck, TechStars, etc., so got first-hand experience on what works and what doesn't.

More importantly, it's an emerging market. As more people build communities professionally or around their product successfully, they are discovering various pain-points which makes this a great timing. We are also strong believers in the community being the next moat for any startup or creators.

How did we hone-in on the problem?

First, we decided to talk to over 10 different community managers to understand what are the various pain points they are facing. We learned that community building involves various activities that go beyond just picking a discussion platform, such as building relationships and audience through newsletter, events, sharing resources, etc.

We also noticed that some of the successful communities built their own tooling since it didn't exist in the market. This was a great sign since it showed how far were they willing to go to solve their pain-points.

Based on this we decided that we need to create a "no-code" software so we can provide building blocks to community managers so we can empower them to do these various things to improve the engagement of their communities.

Where did we find potential customers to interview?

We discovered various communities for community builders. CMX, Community Club are some of the great examples where our potential customers were already hanging out.

We started to participate in these communities and followed up with community managers who were openly talking about their pain-points.

How much did we build before signing up our first customer?

We built out most of our core product i.e. publishing engine before we got into "sell" mode vs the "customer interview" mode. I don't know if I'd recommend this to others. I think it's always best to create some sort of light-weight prototype which you can easily iterate on before moving on to hard implementation, but in our case, we felt that the product we had in mind is best communicated through a working demo. Plus, we had a strong conviction on how the product should look like. This certainly helped us convert our first customer faster, but we'll see if it continues to be the best strategy.

How did we price the software?

We looked at related products such as Ghost, Mighty Networks, Notion, even though we don't directly compete with them it gave us a good idea of what the market expects. We started with a rough number and also candidly shared with our potential customer that this is what we are thinking at the moment. We also asked how much would they be willing to pay. It helps us evaluate how much do they value our solution. Based on that together we arrived at a number. It wasn't super important for us that what that number looked like, but we wanted it to be significant enough so we can validate the value of the product, which it certainly did (at least as of now).

I hope this provides some value to others. Please let me know in the comments if you'd like to learn more about anything else. If you are interested, you can follow my adventures on twitter - https://twitter.com/kuldeepk.