Getting Your First Customers
Your first customer acquisition will look completely different from later customers. Most open core businesses eventually target large enterprises, but these can be difficult to land initially. Don't be afraid to start with smaller customers or broader use cases while building your enterprise pipeline.
Key principles for first customers:
- Don't anchor on ideal customer profiles. Beggars can't be choosers—get your first customer by any means necessary.
- Let customers force product requirements. Ask: "What problem do you have that you're dying to pay money to make go away?" Let their needs drive your development priorities.
- Do things that don't scale. Once you land your first customer, provide exceptional, hands-on service that wouldn't be sustainable at scale but creates deep customer success and learning opportunities.
- Don't focus heavily on contract value initially. Getting reference customers and learning from their implementations is more valuable than maximizing early revenue.
Working with Large Customers Early
While challenging to acquire, large customers often provide the best product insights. They have sophisticated needs, domain expertise, and request features that smaller customers also want but can't articulate. These relationships can be worth pursuing even at lower initial contract values because they drive valuable product development.
Leverage the open source community
The communities around your open source project are your best source for identifying potential commercial customers. Look for the heaviest users—companies that have implemented your software extensively, contribute back to the project, or ask sophisticated questions about enterprise features.
These communities reveal not just who might pay for a commercial solution, but also what problems are most acute for real users in production environments.
Directly engaging potential customers
Doing things that don’t scale in engaging users directly will help founders more deeply understand their customers’ motivations and get honest feedback.
Advertising efforts will not directly provide the essential insights that come from proactive sales in informing strategy for early-stage companies.
Taking the understanding founders have developed and refined by talking to potential customers throughout the lifetime of a business and continually refining that hypothesis to address the problems potential customers are facing will help position companies to meet their needs.
Outreach to potential customers should be proactive and focused on understanding their problems, not showcasing ideas which are not direct solutions.
Some of the questions founders should be asking customers in refining their understanding of how to approach their problems may resemble the following:
- Can you tell me how you are doing/using [open source software project, substitute for product, similar processes] today?
- What is the hardest thing about that? Why is that hard? How often do you have to do this?
- Why is it important to solve this problem? How do you solve this problem now?
Asking follow up questions will help provide additional understanding (e.g. can you tell me more about that?, what do you mean by that?).