A recap of some of the wisdom shared by my guests during Season 4.

"The goal of this podcast is to help business builders learn some best practices when they go looking for their first 10, to expose the things worth doing and the things that might be dead ends and ultimately cost time and money. We should all be recycling these days, and when it comes to understanding your customers and how you talk to them, there's a ton of value that my guests have shared that is worth repeating." – Conor McCarthy.

Welcome to the final episode of season 4 of The First 10, and what a season it has been! This season, we have heard from an array of inspirational serial entrepreneurs who have created multiple businesses and who kindly took the time to openly and honestly share their biggest learnings, challenges, and wins with us. 

This episode is a compilation of the answers that each guest left to the last question I usually ask on the podcast. That question is: What would you say to someone just starting out to find their First 10 Customers?

Helping business builders is at the heart of this podcast, and valuable golden nuggets of advice come with each new episode. So, to close off this season, we will be doing a re-cap with each of our guests to learn their top tips for someone just starting out and hoping to obtain their first ten customers. So, grab a pen and paper and let this refresher masterclass begin with our entrepreneurial experts Andy Mackin, Jakob Greenfeld, Shane Melaugh, Daniel Vassallo, Rob Walling, Dave Parker, Brian Casel, Brennan Dunn and Corey Haines.

Connect with the First 10 season 4 guests: 

Andy Mackin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mackinconsultancy 

Jakob Greenfeld: https://jakobgreenfeld.com/ 

Shane Melaugh: https://ikario.com/about/ 

Daniel Vassallo: https://dvassallo.com/ 

Rob Walling: https://robwalling.com/ 

Dave Parker: https://www.dkparker.com/  

Brian Casel: https://briancasel.com/  

Brennan Dunn: https://rightmessage.com/  

Corey Haines: https://www.swipefiles.com/ 

Nick Loper: https://SideHustleNation.com

Connect with First 10 Podcast host Conor McCarthy: 

https://www.first10podcast.com

https://www.conormccarthy.me/work-with-me 

https://twitter.com/TheFirst10Pod

https://www.linkedin.com/in/comccart/

Check out my podcast partners!

Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1389931

Otter:
https://otter.ai/referrals/ETRNKY16

Calendly:
https://calendly.grsm.io/ilev18qxpn1e

This podcast was produced in partnership with podlad.com

Conor McCarthy  00:08

Hello all and welcome to the season finale of season four of the first 10 podcast. I wanted to recap some of the incredible wisdom shared by my array of guests this last season, a season where I focused on serial entrepreneurs. First things first, though, I dedicated this season to my dad passed away in August 2021 after a short illness. My dad spent his working life as a bank manager working for Bank of Ireland. Through him, I got to meet the entrepreneurs and business builders of his day and hear about whatever their thing was. Dad would explain their business and balance sheets to me, and what he looked out for as they applied for loans, etc. Sometimes I would get to see their built ideas if they had a prototype. My dad ended up helping a lot of businesses get off the ground in Ireland, through lending, through advice, through his connections. He really enjoyed helping people start and grow their businesses, be they early technology companies in the 90s, or simple bricks and mortar businesses. Some of that enjoyment of turning ideas into reality, I guess rubbed off on me, as I started my own businesses or helped others build theirs. I've been able to see how much work goes into building a business of any size, and to spot places where I might be able to support. The successes, the failures, the sprints, the rests, the relationships, the innovations, it's all part of the game of trying to create real value through solving real problems in the world. As I reflected on the podcast recently, I realised how much it's really about finding the stories of people breaking free of gravity as we create the new or growing into new spaces, that gravity might be internal to us, or something about the market or entering or be composed of the many things that get a business going. Getting your first customers is one of the many, many inflection points on the road to success. And as they say, getting started is half the battle. So my job here is to pay more attention to just that piece. Many people who listen to this podcast are on their first business as a freelancer, a bootstrapper or an entrepreneur. And it's entirely possible that one business will be your forever business. But chances are, it will take you places you never would have imagined. In my own case, I went from being an entrepreneur to being a freelancer to bootstrapping and now I'm back to entrepreneurship again. If you seek to be self employed, you may wear one or all of these hats in your work life. And hearing from people who start and start again, I think is hugely helpful. This journey has also been helpful for me to see where my skillset lies at the intersection of marketing customer and product. If you're interested in seeing more of my work or working with me, there's lots more detail on my website at Conormccarthy.me. Just click on the work with me tab, see the different ways we can chat. Finally, the rest of this episode is a collection of the answers to the final question I asked all my guests. That question is, what would you say to someone just starting out to find their first 10 customers, it's like a refresher for my regular listeners. And if this is your first steps of the podcast, it's a great way to dip your toes in. It's actually a pretty great set of pointers for anyone looking for their first 10 customers. The goal of this podcast is to help business builders learn some, quote, best practice when they go looking for their first 10, to expose the things worth doing and the things that might be dead ends and ultimately cost time and money. We should all be recycling these days. And when it comes to understanding your customers and how you talk to them. There's a ton of value that my guests have shared that is worth repeating here. And lastly, a thanks, I've been reflecting on how I really love making this podcast. It's fantastic when I hear back from you about something that's struck home, or an insight you heard into your own business based on something a guest said. I'm very, very grateful for you all and please do share the podcast wherever you see fit. And if I could make just one ask, it would be that you go to the Apple iTunes Store and leave a rating for this podcast, and even a review. Feedback helps me make this podcast better and my podcast editor Bren will be making some amazing images of some of the reviews, so your review might get featured. I'll leave links in the show notes. So I hope you enjoyed this collection of insights from this season and I'll see you on the next season of the first 10 podcast.  What would you say to someone who is starting out in any business who are looking to get their first 10 customers?

Andy Mackin  04:07

That's a good question. I would say just look, look, look at your network. Let's start with your own. Okay, everybody thinks they don't have a network. But like you, if you're in a family, you've immediately got three contacts. Who do they know? And subsequently, they are gonna know four or five people. So then all of a sudden you've got 20 contacts. So just start and with no matter what industry you're in, whether it be talent, health and safety, product design, it doesn't really matter, like, see who's in your network, and then expand on that. And then build out like a professional network. So look for the likes of the chambers, or the BNI's or the whatever, whatever kind of networking groups that are out there because they all have a place. And I think that that's a that's a that's usually a good place to start because you learn, I mean, when I went to begin, I never condensed what I was doing into 60 seconds. So I was instantly getting no. My pitch, it took me probably three or four months to get it right and you'll never be at the start you're going way over two minutes. You know if you if you're getting into a lift with somebody, the kind of like elevator pitch but if you are getting into an elevator or you are you're sitting in somebody's fur on the on the news for two minutes, what do you do? Off you go, if you can get that out? I mean, that's a skill in itself. So all these different things help. So you pick up those skills when organizations and networks. So I think yeah, if anybody's starting off, I would obviously just look at your network first. I heard an interesting one actually, the other day, actually, no, it's been near to me now, because I'm 18 years into the business. But I'm Darren Hardy, who said he was at an event when he was in his late teens, early 20s. And he said he was doing pretty well at the time. I think it was Jim Rohn. And actually, he was listening to it. And the more or less said, Look, plan your plan the type of life you want first, before you plan your business. Because once your business takes off, your life can't fit your business says your business can feature your life. So think about what type of life you want. Do you want to be rich and famous? Do you want to be success? Do you want to house in Malibu? Or do you want to house them on West Cork? Currently want to drive? How much is that going to take? So what is your business have to do to give you that lifestyle? Like you want to have dinner every evening with the kids? Or do you want to work 20 hours a day? He said I thought it was a really interesting thing to do. And if I had to do it again, I probably would have been in a serious problem. Most business as you know yourself kind of like you've got loads. I mean, like Yeah. I have got better, but I'm still still working. Yeah, but I love it. I mean, I genuinely get up in the morning. And I love what I do. So yeah, actually, yeah. Like the first thing that we do is just look at the network and see what kind of a sphere of people that you have there and the different connections that they have. LinkedIn is a great one as well. And have a look on LinkedIn at your own friends that are undefended. And who are their LinkedIn? Is there anybody in a particular market that you're in? That might be able to give you 30 minutes cup of coffee? What did you do when you started off? I mean, no matter where you go, no matter what business you're in, somebody has done it before you. Yeah, somebody's generous enough for their time to give you a half an hour or an hour or whatever, you will learn an absolute ton. All you need is like the three euro for a cup of coffee for them and bring your notebook and pen and just keep writing. Yes,

Conor McCarthy  07:27

Yes. I love that. And and people. I say this all the time. I sound a broken record, but people want to help. I think that's the next step.

Andy Mackin  07:36

We're social creatures at the end of the day, we do like mingling and interacting with people. And there's just a kind of a self gratification of being able to help somebody along the way.

Jakob Greenfeld  07:45

In the world, I'm coming from like, Bootstrap, Entrepreneurs, indie makers, I think it really, really helps, as I mentioned, to, to put your brain out there and to make yourself visible in whatever format suits you best. But I think Twitter is by far the easiest platform to go from zero to something, if you compare it for example, with podcasts or YouTube. They are notoriously hard right to to get off the ground. Whereas on Twitter, you just need one retweet from someone and it doesn't even have to be someone very famous, but just someone a little with a with some following. And you're already Yeah, you're getting off the ground. Right. And this just doesn't happen with podcasts or on YouTube. So yeah, like I said, having an origin story. And then putting, putting your brain out there telling people what, who you are what you are about and and sharing everything you'll learn. And it maybe sounds a bit shady. But the the correct way, I think, to think about it is that if you're if you're an indie maker, you obviously can't spend a lot of money on ads. So what is your unfair advantage, right? And your unfair advantage is this community we have online, this cosy little village of other indie makers. And it, it really, really helps if you have people rooting for you, right? If you really have this community of people wanting you to succeed. And there are many examples of people who are doing a very, very good job at this. And yeah, leveraging, at least if you're in this world of indie makers, if you want to play this game, then I would say, yeah, thinking in terms of having people root for you. And it doesn't have to be very tactical. But you can phrase it in other ways, right? You can just straight yeah, just be helpful, right? Just be authentic, and share what you'll learn. And this is how you eventually build like, I think following always sounds strange, but like a group of people that are rooting for you. And they just yeah, when you're announcing, hey, and testing something, I'm looking for beta testers, or I'm I'm launching today, they just automatically click that like button, right? Just because they want to see you succeed. And they are I don't think there is okay, probably there are some hacks you can you can try to do that. But in, in the long term, it all boils down to just putting your brain out there and hoping that like minded people find you so and realizing that this is the unfair advantage we have as indie makers sitting in the middle of nowhere.

Shane Melaugh  11:04

 I would say, the most important thing is to make sure you get into conversations with people who are in your target market in any way that you can, in any way that you can. Because, you know, like I said, back in the day, one of my venues was like blog comments. And nowadays, and even in you know, forums back when you had, basically forums being a thing. And nowadays, that's different. And it depends on what niche you're in, right? You might be in a niche where the action that the conversation is happening in Facebook groups, you might be in a niche where people are on Twitter, where or where people are on Discord servers, or whatever it is, but become part of that conversation. For me, that has always been the key to being able to get that initial traction and to being able to make sure that my ideas are not delusional, basically, is nowhere the conversation is happening and start having conversations.

Conor McCarthy  12:02

What would you say to someone who's just about to go and find their first 10 Customers?

Daniel Vassallo  12:07

So I think this seems almost something obvious. But sort of, I think lots of people miss it sort of, it's important that you have a strategy on how to get attention and credibility to yourself or to your products, it's, you could have the best product, the best pricing, the best advertising, and yet, if you can't get attention, and some credibility, some amount of trust, nobody's going to find you. And without credibility, even if they find you, they're not going to choose you like so when when I started, like I left my job without any concrete plan. And I remember sitting here at the same desk, thinking, Okay, I'm going to build some products, spend a few months and then release it to the world. And immediately I had a small crisis of anxiety, like I started imagining, working for a long time on something, releasing it, and then nobody sees it. And I could imagine myself becoming very, very discouraged. So I think that that that stressor helped me into the realizing that I needed to find some way to start getting some some some reputation, and some skills to get some attention, which I had none before. You know, I was a developer, I never thought about marketing or social media or getting attention or branding, or whatever. There's many different ways to get attention, like search engine optimization or on other platforms, being active on communities, building a following many, many different ways. The same with building credibility, like testimonials, having funding, it's something that can help, having good customers showing successful stories of people who used your products and whatever. But it's important to have something that because I think without those things, you're just, it's like multiplying by zero, that whatever you try, is almost certainly going to fail. And I see many people get discouraged when they spend a lot of time and energy, because I think you know, you're not guaranteed success, even if you do have a good strategy for how to get attention and visibility, but at least you can see it as like a scientific experiment. You say, Okay, I have an audience of 10,000 people. I'm going to try this thing. I'm going to announce it to my audience. Maybe it's still failed, but I at least can start reasoning about something. Okay, I announce it to my audience, maybe 5000 saw it, 2000 clicked, 1000 signed up for the trial, but only 20 paid and you can say okay, there's something belong there like I expected the numbers to be better. At least now you, you have something to think about. Whereas if you start with no strategy, no plan, I'm just going to build something and hope that people will come and see it and trust me. And then when you fail, you just have no information. But this, this almost this, like infatuation and tack that failure. We learn a lot from failure. And I like to challenge that to ensure we, we tend to learn some things from failure sometimes. But I think we usually don't learn as much as we think we're learning because sometimes we fail. And unfortunately, again, as I mentioned before, the world doesn't tell us why we failed. It doesn't tell us, Oh, you failed, because you didn't have enough credibility, and people just didn't trust you. Right? We might start to speculate a bit. But it's worse than just guessing. Whereas I think we learned a lot more from a small win. That's why going back to what I was saying before, once you do have a small win, it might not be life changing the payoff of that win it self but you learn so much, oh, this is something that worked, I might be able to replicate it with something similar, or keep optimizing it or, or improving it or whatever, and built on top of it. 

Conor McCarthy  16:05

The wins are so so full of information.

Daniel Vassallo  16:08

Absolutely, absolutely. So back to the question, like, why I chose to start building an audience. Back then I wasn't thinking about it that way. I thought, what can I, what can I do that might be interesting to others, right. And I started going in various different places, all the forums, that it's Hacker News, and the Hacker School, LinkedIn Stack Overflow, on GitHub, with open source, trying to help as much people as I could, trying to build my own reputation in the beginning that many of these attempts failed, like, or I try them for seven months, and I didn't see any results. Some of the some of these worked better than others. Long story short, in my case, I started on Twitter, mostly it was the place where I felt I was getting the most return on investment there was enjoying the most. And over time, I've you know, when I launched my first product, I had not huge, you know, 4000 - 5000 followers, people who are following me because they I was sharing how I was thinking about the things that I was doing nothing special, I was just documenting what I was doing, I wasn't like writing long form essays, or whatever I was doing sometimes explaining mundane things, like setting up a business bank account and getting insurance and coming up with a name for my product, or, you know, getting a trademark, you know, basic stuff like this, and people are following along. And then when I had something to announce, there were people there who were listening, that and then they helped spread the word, and you know, give feedback, and and so on and so forth. Again, I had no idea that there was going to be enough or there was going to dissolve into something that was commercially viable back then, it was still very experimental. But at least as I said before, it was it was useful to at least have something that I could reason about that if the things that I tried failed, at least I could say, Okay, I still got it in front of 10,000 people, 5000 people, and yet they still didn't convert. So maybe that's what I need to improve.

Robert Walling  18:14

I would do two things. I've done these two things over and over and over. And they've worked for me. So I would absolutely 100% have some type of landing page with some type of email capture on it. And as you go through anything you're doing online, if you have a chance to do it in a non salesy way, the non crappy way. You mentioned it, you know, you're in you're answering a question on Quora, and it's like, oh, this happens to be real full disclosure. I'm going on this project, so I have kind of an inside, look at this right bing! drop your link, if you're on Twitter, do a little bit of building in public, hey, I'm working on this project, it's pretty cool. But if you're interested to keeping up with it, head over here. If you're on a podcast, if you just wherever you are, you're kind of you either casually mention it, or you intentionally, you mention it. And then the other thing that I would be doing is, I want to figure out where my customers hang out. Sometimes, I'll give you an example. I am not only in the business world, but I collect signatures, autographs, and I collect from like, you know, I've an Alexander Hamilton, for example, like old, you know, it's not modern people. It's like, oh, and I collect expensive comic books, right? So I'm in these groups of people talking about comic books. And so if you would 10 comic book collectors, you would want to be in these groups, they are on Facebook, almost all of them. And then there's one forum on this grading website called CGC. So I literally know all of them. There's only like, you know, 10 of them. So if you wanted to do that you would go and participate. But if I was going to go sell b2b, if I wanted to sell email marketing, you know, ESPs, probably not many Facebook groups. They're probably hanging out in private slack groups, or in communities like Microconf has almost 3000 founders in our online community. It's called Microconf Connect happens to be a Slack channel, but it could just be a forum, right? The software itself doesn't matter. But if I wanted to talk to aerialists, my wife does aerial circus stuff with slings and hammocks, and she does trapeze. They're all on Instagram. So I would if I wanted to sell them, I would get on Instagram, I would start following them, I would start interacting, you know what I mean? So if you're gonna find your first 10 customers, where are they now? Where are they already? Or maybe a lot of them probably listen to podcast, or what blogs do they read? Are they on Hacker News? Or are they on, you know, growthhackers.com or are they on Pinterest? That's what I would be thinking through as they're already gathered somewhere. Everyone gathers right even my brother runs a construction firm, and says construction is so old school, you know, so slow to adopt. And there are places where they hang out. I guarantee you there's some online and then there's a lot offline. There's in person events, they have trade pubs, they have trade magazines, and that kind of stuff. So that's what I would say is I would have a landing page and then I would figure out where they hang out and then I would go be among the people in a non douchey, non salesy way.

Dave Parker  21:09

Boy, you know, I'm gonna give you probably different than the one that you would normally get is going to be all about pricing. Like, I'm gonna look for opportunities to to raise pricing, right, which makes us as founders so fearful, because we're like, I know what the MVP is, and I know all the features it doesn't have, and I know, your products gonna change over time, it's going to mature. So sometimes in the pricing, seminar I do for founders, I was talking about my, I could send you a picture of my son, right? He was super cute. He's five, you know, it's awesome. Except today, he's 29. He plays lead guitar in a metal band. He's tatted up and has gauges in his ears. Now, they're both true, but one of them is accurate. So for the founder dilemma, I would say work on how do you price up, if you if you're giving a Customer Price, and they're not pushing back? It's too low. Right? And we have to you have to go, you have to create enough margin to have a business, right. And if the customer is not willing to pay for the value you've created, you have a problem. And I would rather you know, I think for me the biggest challenges we end up with zombie startups in the portfolio and friends and you guys, you know to like in venture in the venture world top quartile produces returns, the top decile gets monster returns, which means the bottom 75%, the bottom 25 or quarter of that total portfolio dies relatively quickly, which means the middle 50% dies slowly. I would rather you go kill it and start a new idea. And I would wait you another cheque as a founder, than be a zombie startup for seven years.

Conor McCarthy  22:44

What a waste of talented energy, and opportunity.

Brian Casel  22:47

I've been talking about this a lot lately, actually. I think that when you're early on, just launch a lot of things. I don't mean, do them all at once. But you know, you will hear this advice, where people will say like, you have to focus on one thing, and you have to go all in on one thing. And don't, don't follow those shiny objects, you got to focus on on the thing that you have, you just got to give it more time to you know, double down on the thing that you have. I get that. And, and I'm doing that now. But I've been self employed for 13 years. And and I got a lot of value in my whole career. By doing a lot of things in the first 10 years of my career. I mean, I jumped from one business to the next, like, pretty rapidly and at many times, I had several things going. And in those early years, I was a freelancer consultant, basically making a living by selling my time, but I was willing to do projects where I was earning $0 for long hours of work, like building my first digital product, or putting out a first ebook to the world or trying to build a SaaS, I mean, your very first one here, your look, chances are you're not going to be successful with it. But you're going to learn a ton, especially if you're used to being a consultant where you're getting paid like $100 an hour for something you have to be willing to put in the same hours on your own projects getting paid nothing and because you're going to learn you're gonna get gained that experience. And I went through this long list of businesses, I would never have landed on Zip Message now if I didn't learn things from Process Kit, I never would have landed on Process Kit if I didn't learn a ton from Audience Ops and Audience Ops came from what I learned from Restaurant Engine and like I wouldn't have landed on those ideas unless I had gone through that experience.

Brennan Dunn  24:40

Yeah, I think the best thing would be to do the, you know, where can you go to get in front of people who have already done the hard work of getting your ideal customers? So the the way that I think is makes does the easiest way to do that, I think, and this worked for us at ripeness, too, was it's hard if I just cold approach somebody and say, can I go on your podcast? Or can I write a guest post for you? Because who knows what this person is? And are they just gonna promote the heck out of whatever they have? Will they give anything of actual value? So what I found worked well, historically, for me has been kind of like that nine lesson email course I talked about right that I've done. You know, with Double Your Freelancing, it's called charge what you're worth nine lesson email course. And what I would do is, I would go back to when I was doing the podcast rounds, and doing guest posts and conferences and stuff like that, I would, I would basically pitch an abridged version of the email course as the thing I want to talk about on the show. So I go to the host and I'd say instead of just saying, Hey, I'm Brennan, I'd love to go on your show. I know, some stuff about freelancing. Instead, I'd say, I've, I've got this nine lesson email course a lot of people have really enjoyed. It's about, you know, here's, here's the page that goes into more detail about it. But, you know, it talks about everything from how do you go about quantifying the value of a project to how do you turn that into a specific price or set of packages, and so on. And I'd love to focus in just on the quantifying the value of a project like so I'd love to come on your show. And since you've talked a lot on your you know, on previous episodes about this, Nat I'd love to show you something that I teach in the course, that is a really good framework that anyone can use to figure out when a client comes to you and says I need a website designed, how to figure out what that website is worth for the client. And that historically has gone over really well compared to just the ambiguous I'd love to go on your show because it shows something of packagable value that you know, Brennan's gonna come on and he's going to share this and you will look better to your audience because now they can quantify the value of a project lead or something.

Conor McCarthy  26:49

Hmm. So that is that is so important and I've gotten a lot of, of the of those kinds of  Hey, Can I be on your show type emails. Yeah, and it's just you know, it's yeah, it's a it's a tricky one because it's kind of like, to your point earlier about, let's say testimonials, like when you're reading a testimonial, you're thinking, well, what's in this for me like, how do I use this product? How do I use RightMessage to get me somewhere? And what you've just described, there is a great framework for showing, for helping someone else through that, like that thinking process of well, how can I use this? You are giving them all the answers.

Brennan Dunn  27:28

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And by the end of it, too, I don't do this anymore nowadays. So I don't have, I'm not going on and talk about pricing. But I used to have freepricingcourse.com. So I'd end the conversation with Y'know, yeah, over the last 30-40 minutes, we just talked a good amount about quantifying the value of a project, If you want to go deeper, I have a free nine lesson nine day email course that goes a lot more in depth, and I was able to over the last half hour. And that would be my funnel, if you will, where people would go into that that would then work on establishing the underlying problem, like we talked about before, establishing that problem talking about the need to rid yourself of that problem, pointed the solution and then come in with that Campbellesque shortcut versus long road. And the shortcut leads to the product, the paid product, and that's that was basically my method of growing, that business was just doing that again and again.

Corey Haines  28:24

Man, I mean, really treat it like a science, reverse engineer, how your customers who you think will be our customers are accustomed to buying products like yours. Use the research methods that we talked about, get to know them try to learn everything you possibly can about them, try to take some shortcuts about, you know how similar products in your category grew, or what you think are some promising marketing channels. But especially for the you know, for the first 10 where your talking about, even if you're bootstrapped or, or VC backed, there's usually a couple of kind of tried and trued methods. I found on the on the spectrum of like, which channels work for the most amount of people, their channels like LinkedIn, and Quora, you know, niche conferences that like, that's really, really specific, you have to have like this magic combination ingredients. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are channels like sales, partnerships, and SEO, that pretty much work for everyone all the time, no matter what. So honestly, if I just had to distill it down to like, your three ways that you could get your first 100 customers, no matter what tried and true. Just one of these is bound to work. It's got to be sales, partnerships, or SEO, just try one of those three.