How We Found Our First 10 Customers
Week 96 of Founding Typogram
Hey friends, I hope you had a nice week so far. Last week I shared with you that I have been organizing my posts on Typogram’s build blog and organizing my thoughts into learnings and lessons. As I was summing up these lessons, I realized how vital everyone’s support has been. Thank you for continuing to support me on my journey. Today, I want to share three things that helped Typogram get its first 10 customers.
№ 1. Writing a Newsletter and Building in Public
Thanks to everyone here, I have been motivated to write my newsletters for the past two years. When I launched my start-up, I started this newsletter as a daily series called 30 Days of Starting-up. Initially, I was worried I couldn’t maintain the consistency required for newsletters. But soon, I realized it was easy to come up with topics to write about because there is so much learning and making involved in building a start-up- as long as I make time for it. Also, having a group of supporters help me stay motivated, and I like having some accountabilities. I recommend all founders try this.
№ 2. Sell a No-Code version of a product feature to test monetization.
Building a full fledge SaaS product is costly: It’s monumental efforts of talking to customers, designing and coding software - it takes our most valuable resource: time. To make this process faster and easier, we created No-Code versions of our core product features and sold those on Gumroad to test monetization. We started this validation process with our Brand Personality Workshop to see if a feature was worth pursuing before coding and launching Typogram publicly.
№ 3. Engineering as Marketing
Engineering as Marketing or creating fun side projects helped us a lot in getting users interested in Typogram. As a two people operation, we have a minimal budget for ads. We are builders and craftsmen, so we made indie side projects to generate buzz for Typogram. For example, Coding Font was a project I launched at the start of this newsletter to generate buzz. You can see our launch stat here, and it still creates referral traffic to Typogram.
Hear from You
Do you have any thoughts on marketing and finding customers? I would love to hear about it.
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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them!
I’m also trying to get those first 10 customers, and it is really hard. I’d say it is the hardest part—everything that comes before and after is relatively easy.