How To Find Your Next 10 Customers For Your Business?

In the initial stages of a startup, specially before acquiring any paying customers, it's crucial to define a persona to represent your end users. Incorporating personas from the start of the development process ensures the product stays user-centered, relevant, and market-fit. This strategy enhances cost efficiency by clearly outlining user needs and priorities. However, be aware of a potential pitfall: over-focusing on your persona can result in tunnel vision.

At this early stage, centering your business exclusively around a single customer model can risk alienating other potential clients and stifling growth. This narrow focus may hinder the creation of a scalable product that appeals to a broader market, thus limiting your startup's success. Relying solely on a small group of early adopters, without having paying customers yet, can lead to unstable revenue. Since these early adopters often aren't sufficient to support long-term growth, early-stage startups may encounter financial challenges if they fail to broaden their customer base and validate their offerings with a wider audience.

To overcome this pitfall, it's essential to identify and validate at least 10 potential customers who fit your persona profile but are distinct from your initial persona. This is particularly impactful before you decide on the final product offering, doing so allows you to test whether your product has a broader market appeal and ensures you're not working towards a one-customer solution. Changing your approach can increase your confidence that you’ve identified a scalable opportunity and help refine earlier assumptions.

Before starting, it's important to ask, “Is the current persona still valid?” Personas require ongoing research and updates due to frequent changes in markets and user needs. If your persona was created some time ago and hasn't been updated, it might be beneficial to update it before proceeding. This approach doesn't invalidate your persona; instead, it expands upon it, ensuring the information remains current and relevant.

Steps to Identify and Validate Your Next 10 Customers

1. List potential customers:

• Begin by creating a list of more than 10 potential customers who resemble your persona profile. These should be real people.

• Make sure they are similar to your persona yet distinct enough to provide diverse feedback.

  
  

2. Contact and validate:

• Reach out to these customers, presenting your customer journey, core functionalities, and value proposition. Ensure that the customer's needs and ideas align with what you've established from your persona, customer journey, and other research.

• Adopt an “inquiry” approach rather than a “sales” approach during these interactions to collect unbiased and honest feedback.

  
  

3. Analyze Feedback:

• Assess whether these potential customers’ needs and feedback align with your initial assumptions.

• Validate your persona and market assumptions against the feedback. Particularly, validate your hypothesis regarding the persona's top purchasing priorities with these customers.

  
  

4. Refine Your Approach:

• Use the insights gathered to reassess and refine your persona, or create more profiles and product specifications.

• Aim to compile a consistent list of 10 enthusiastic customers. This will serve as a strong indicator of your product's broader market viability.

  
  

Focusing too much on your persona without broader validation can result in a one-customer solution, creating a product that only a niche market desires. History provides clear lessons, such as Dean Kamen’s Segway and Steve Jobs’s NeXT Computer—products that innovated but lacked broader market appeal.

If startups fail to plan for the next layer of users, they may encounter operational and logistical challenges when trying to scale. By not considering this user group, they may neglect to develop the essential features and improvements required to achieve product-market fit for a broader audience.

Successfully identifying and validating your next 10 customers boosts your confidence in your business model. This practice not only reassures you of your product’s appeal, but also significantly enhances your credibility. Investor confidence is boosted when a startup demonstrates the ability to expand beyond early adopters, showcasing a viable path to growth and scalability, making the startup more attractive for funding.

Verifying your product with multiple potential customers not only broadens the customer base but also enhances the startup's resilience to market changes. It reduces the risk of losing any single customer segment and provides a buffer against market volatility.

The Challenge!

Are you ready to elevate your startup to the next level? Contact customers using an inquiry-based approach to gather honest feedback, use our worksheet to collect feedback and evaluate potential new customers.

Download Our Free Worksheet