How to Attract Clients as a Newly Launched Business

Lessons from launching an enterprise SaaS startup, consumer platform startup, and event business. You launched, congrats! Now you need to attract the first clients to use your product or service. I’ve had the experience of doing it for an enterprise SaaS startup, consumer platform startup, and event business. Let me share with you my secrets on how to attract your first clients. Be clear whether you are testing for desirability or value There are two things you need to test when you launch: 1. Desirability. Do clients want your product? Essentially, do they sign up if you show it to them? 2. Value. Are their expectations fulfilled after they used your product? Testing for desirability is a higher priority because if no one signs up, the value to the clients automatically is zero. The number one reason startups fail is that they build something no one wants. To test for desirability, you only need to build a façade. At this stage, what you care about is whether people would even click to try your product, not whether it brings value. And even that facade, don’t worry about it being perfect. You don’t have a brand to damage at this point, either people sign up, or they don’t remember you. And if there is demand, it will be obvious. This is what we did for my startup LaunchClub. First, we only launched a website without any real users or matching algorithms. Once you see enough demand, you can build the product. At this stage, you can do everything manually on the admin side, and you don’t need to make it automated or scalable. It just has to do the job the client intended it to do. With LaunchClub, we spent 6 months validating the value before we decided to build an algorithm for matching our users. – Recruit first clients by hand Now, how should you attract people to your website? The secret is not to overthink it. The scalability of the method doesn’t matter at this point. The cost of acquisition doesn’t matter either. Even the target audience doesn’t matter, as you can start by signing up everyone and then see who the best customer is. Bring them by hand. Message your friends and family. Post in random Facebook groups. Meet people on the street and ask them to sign up if you have to. Here is what we used to get the first users for LaunchClub: 1. Recruiting friends. 2. Launching on ProductHunt. 3. Twitter ads. All kinds of ads, actually, but most didn’t work. 4. Reaching out in communities, i.e., Reddit or communities on Slack (there are databases of Slacks based on different topics you can find). 5. Content marketing, for example, articles like this one. 6. LinkedIn automation. – How to market your product You have to be aware of what problem you are trying to solve for your clients and what your value proposition is. If thinking about a specific problem your client has is difficult, you can try to think of it as a job they need to get done. What job will your product do for them? For example, for LaunchClub, it would be the job of finding the peer support group and the job of getting ideas on how to solve certain business challenges. The value proposition can be of two kinds. One is very direct and is targeted towards solving the problem. For example, for LaunchClub, it would be “Get your first clients!” The other way to position your product would be to compare some other product and make clear the difference. For example, “LaunchClub is like an accelerator, but you can actually get in, don’t need to spend equity, and continue your journey for years surrounded by a community of peers.” One crucial piece of the sales process is asking for money or some other form of commitment. For freemium products, that would be about measuring the time users spend on their app, but for most products, it is about the hard cash. Giving your product for free doesn’t help because people grab free things not because they need them but because of the fear of missing out. As a result, you typically don’t learn much from clients who don’t pay. In our case, we even charged our friends in the very beginning. What to do if your launch failed? Continue reading this article to find out :D – https://www.launch-club.com/post...