Three Ideas for Unlocking Customers as a Super Early-Stage Founder

Alline Akintore

October 2024

A founder recently mentioned how hard it is to land new customers as a very early startup. He had years of experience in his domain at small and large companies and on paper had founder-market fit. What gives? I learned that in his first customer meetings he spent 10 minutes introducing himself before diving into a demo of what he had built.

Light bulb...

I know first-hand the headache of what it is like in the early days of building a company, to try to sell a vision and to land your first customers as a ‘nobody’ startup. It goes without saying that building a company from the ground up is a painful, albeit rewarding, grind. Ben Horowitz captured it well, “As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby...I woke up every 2 hours and cried.”

Tears notwithstanding, if you are just getting started with your venture, here are three ideas that were not obvious to me in the early days of engaging prospective customers, that I hope may be helpful to you. This mostly applies to companies selling to enterprise customers.

1.      Earn trust, earn trust, earn trust. Then you can worry about the rest” - Seth Godin

Selling is about connecting with people. Very early on, it’s fair to say that you – the founder – are the most compelling offering to the company. You may not have much of a product to speak of, but your prospects need to be excited about YOU, your vision, your unique insights into their problem, the fact that you understand their problem better than they do, and how you plan to address it.

Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes: you are a startup with no track record asking them to trust you with their business. Key to earning trust is bringing your expertise to the problem or opportunity at hand, and one way to show that expertise is to be as focused/specific and in-depth as possible as you showcase your unique perspective. This allows prospects to ground their relationship with you in the trust that you are capable of building the right solution for their needs; it also filters you out from the noise of competing products in the market.

Trust will foster honest conversations with your prospects about the problem you are looking to solve, give you room for mistakes and maybe even create avenues to get the inside scoop on upcoming opportunities.  This might seem obvious, but especially when you have a minimum viable product, it can be tempting to lean in too hard on demoing what you have built as an introduction to your company, just like the founder mentioned earlier. Resist that temptation: the product demo should accentuate your expertise and the value that you bring to the problem at hand. Where possible, save the demo for the right time (see pointer #2).

Lastly, as a friend of mine likes to say, “are you an animal in the zoo, or in the wild?” Where are your prospects coming from? Personal relationships and warm introductions are great to get going, but you will learn a lot and know that you have real and scalable validation of your product when you earn the trust of a prospect from a ‘cold sale’ out in the wild.

2.      "Make a customer, not a sale" - Katherine Barchetti

Not all prospective conversations are worth your while (or theirs), especially early on. Most founders we meet appreciate the importance of championing their customers’ needs, which is great, and I would like to turn this up a notch: creating real momentum early on will be driven in large part by truly understanding your customer’s needs and quickly sussing out your prospect’s true buying intent.

Understanding the user’s needs and pain points:

This requires asking high quality questions. Refine and refine your discovery question set over time, to ensure that you are quickly getting to the heart of your customers’ needs. Like I mentioned, it can be tempting to kick off the pitch with a demo of your product – after all you get to show off what you are capable of. I made that mistake several times. I learned later than I liked that it is much more valuable, where possible, for the prospect to first demo to you how they do things today, so that you can ask a ton of precise questions, before ever showing them what you have built.  

Buyer intent:

Likewise, a prospect’s true interest and buying motivation comes down to the quality and specificity of the questions that they ask you back. In my experience, it was energizing to hear a prospect quantify the value that we might bring, based on existing metrics that they use to measure the problem. This always signaled that the problem is real, is a priority and that they would be ready to pay to address it.

Quickly identify and separate the user from the buyer/payer and establish relationships with both. In my experience, I expected the user to pitch our product to the buyer which was a mistake; not only did we run into blockers when it looked like we had momentum, but those were missed opportunities to learn buyer behavior and refine our GTM.  

3.      The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus" - Bruce Lee

You will run into prospects that have ideas on how you could expand your offering to deliver more use cases. These asks might sound compelling: “if or when you add x or customize y, we shall buy your product.” If you are early, this could be a distraction. You are more likely to land customers/users that believe your product addresses a narrowly focused and specific problem or use case. Once this is solved for, and you have earned the trust of your customer, then you could (and as soon as possible, should) expand to offer new value.

If you are a founder in Oregon or Southern Washington and you would like to discuss this further, please reach out on LinkedIn. The Oregon Venture Fund is comprised of investors and venture partners who have built and scaled successful companies across multiple industries, and we are looking to hear from, and support, the next generation of great founders.