How to get first 10 paying customers?

You say your "product is partially complete", how did you get there without speaking to customers? If you've spent time on HN in the past, you've probably read about speaking to customers before building, or building to solve your own problem.

Since you say you are offering ML models through a web-service, who else is doing that now? How do you think they find their customers? Can you leverage their customer base to find people that may be wiling to switch?

Step 1 is to identify who needs your product. Then find out where those people are. It's a bit more difficult with Covid due to lack of meetups, etc, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

However, if I were you, I'd take a serious look at how you got to where you are? How did you build a product without knowing how you were going to get customers? How you are going to know if you've built the right product.

Rather than looking for "customers", at this point, I'd suggest looking for "advice", find somebody who has the problem, and show them your solution. Then ask them if it's something they need. If not, why not? Find out what they do need, etc etc.

Love the problem, not the solution.

If your product is something that market already demands, one idea is to set up a site and run a small ad campaign.

"How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study"

https://www.psl.com/feed-posts/psl-studio-kill-xylo

Earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22110004

I also recommend Rob Walling's book Start Small Stay Small. https://startupbook.net/

The book is mostly a practical marketing guide written for developers who are trying to bootstrap a business.

Walling argues for a market-first approach: identify a good niche market of potential customers first (enough potential customers, you have a practical way to reach those customers through search/advertising/niche community newsletters or forums or so on, not too much competition). Then, before building product, run experiment to validate or reject your product idea based on market demand & estimated conversion.

Edit: OP here. Since a few fellow hackers asked about product, I will mention it here. I can’t make edit my own post for some reason (on brave mobile).

My product is offering ML models (classification, recommendation, ranking) through web services. We are offering it for $149/month. You own your data. You can make REST api calls to get output of model. Let me know if you are interested. My email is aimlmodelfarm@gmail.com

> How to get first 10 paying customers?

This is irrelevant without knowing the type of product.

It this is a $3.50 product that looks good relative to limited competitors: ~$50 and a day.

If this is enterprise software: a couple million and a year+

> it’s hard to get traction here on HN without karma points

Please dont try to turn HN into an advertising front.

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Overall, take the time to write a decent post and you might get a decent answer. You need to write without namedropping for obvious spam reason, the type of product, what it does, why it has a place in the market, what you think customers are, are you targeting countries, price vs competitors, is there a significant onboarding if software etc etc

I'm >10 years of marketing products all over the world and happy to offer advice as I enjoy my work, but the quality of post defines the quality of answer.

You should have them before you build anything. And your first lines of code should be there to test that they exist. You don't get them via surveys and landing pages. You get them by observing something where there is a problem.

They're the ones buying some other app that solve the problem, or hiring someone to deal with it, or finding the problem a distraction to their real core business.

I've never used a network for this and I think relying on your network is handicap. Look for strangers. If a stranger is happy to talk to you about a product you're trying to sell them, you're on to something.

It's hard to understand from your post description whether you completed the in-depth customer development analysis or not. Did you manage to identify your market fit and test your hypothesis prior launching the first MVP? As a piece of advice, you may offer your product for testing / evaluation to the people you've initially interviewed for a lower fee or ask them to price the product.

As a practical tip, I find posting on Betalist helpful. On average, I would say you will get around 100-300 sign-ups.

Out of those sign-ups, you may be able to convert ~20% to actually register for your product.

And out of those, you may be able to convert some to paying customers.

That's exactly what I did with my product Newsy - https://www.newsy.co

I have yet to make my first dollar online from my saas side project. But one thing that I am trying out right now is SEO. It might take some time until you start seeing results. But if your saas is solving a problem for your target audience, you can try to create high quality content for that audience.

Find some guys who may need your product and ask them to pay 20% of the money your product shall save.

I’m reminded of this video https://youtu.be/WAXLTG9n7Kw

Usually - word of mouth and solving someones problem helps alot.

Can you share your product? Who knows, maybe you will get your first paying customer ;)

How about get your masterpiece working and post a Show HN instead?

(I generally prefer a product to comment on than a plea for customers).

Reddit has a paid advertisement feature. Has worked for me, at least to get a few initial customers.

Can you tell us a bit more about the product? B2C or B2B? Price point? things like that.

Make a landing page and create a real email. Set up a form to schedule demos.

give aways on reddit

> "Anyone--founders, managers, and executives--trying to break through to new customers can use this smart, ambitious book." -- Eric Ries

> https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...