Customers in what space? Enterprise bears minimal resemblance to Pre-K Education, which bears minimal resemblance to Small Business, which bears minimal resemblance to ...
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I am hearing similar stories from people I know. May be it is my network bias. I am building following on LinkedIn but I honestly hate it. I hate the facade of putting of expert hat and writing in stupid one sentence per line style.
The bar for customer acquisition is so high right now.
What can I do to get first 10 customers?
Please suggest for someone who don’t have much of a network.
It felt like being taken advantage of sometimes, honestly. We'd spend weeks building custom demos and proof-of-concepts without any guaranteed return. But when you don't have a network in the industry, you have to do that kind of work to prove your credibility.
The breakthrough was realizing we weren't just giving away free work - we were learning what these companies actually needed vs what we thought they needed. Those free consulting projects taught us more about product-market fit than any survey could have.
By the time we had 10 real paying customers, we'd probably done free work for 30+ companies. The key was setting boundaries about when to transition from free to paid. You have to judge that timing yourself based on the relationship and how much value you're providing.