Finding Your First Customers: The Road from Zero to Your First Sale

In his History of Animals, Aristotle notes a curious detail about bees. Every bee that returns to the hive is followed by three or four companions. What they gather is hard to see, he says, and how they do it has not yet been observed. The question goes unanswered for centuries.

The early 1910s. To find out whether bees can see colour, the young zoologist Karl von Frisch sets out a sheet of coloured paper on an outdoor table, with a small glass dish of sugar syrup on top. To keep the crowd down, he pauses the feeding. While the dish is empty, only the odd scout bee comes and goes. But if a scout finds the dish full and returns to the hive, within a few minutes the whole group is back at the table. Has the scout told the hive?

Frisch moves a small bee colony into an observation hive with a glass window and numbers the bees one by one with coloured dots. What he sees astonishes him: without even unloading, the returning bee turns left and right on the comb, tracing tight circles. The bees that chase after her set off on a new flight shortly afterwards. In the years that follow, he works out that the dance also conveys the direction and distance of the food.

His most interesting finding is something else. The sweeter the syrup, the livelier and longer the dance; as the syrup is diluted, the dance slows and eventually stops. Describing this in his Nobel lecture on 12 December 1973, Frisch doesn't shy away from the word: this is how the effect of the advertising increases. Nobody in the hive forces anyone. The bee that finds a good source simply can't stop talking about it.

The Product Is Ready. Where Are the Customers?

Most startups think they're ready the day the product is finished. Yet that's the day the real question begins: where will the first customers come from? Frisch's bees give part of the answer: newcomers don't arrive because of a billboard, but because of the dance of someone who has seen the source and come back happy.

What Sandra Lewis described in an interview on Starter Story resembles the human version of this dance. Lewis is the founder of Boldly, which provides companies with experienced remote professionals on a subscription model. As she tells it, in the early years there was no business plan and no market research. They were simply trying to keep up with word-of-mouth demand.

How to Find Your First Customers

Your First Customer Probably Already Knows You

After moving with her family from the US to the UK in 2009, Lewis started offering founders remote HR and project management support. Her clients soon began referring their friends to her. When she couldn't keep up on her own she built a team, and that's how the company was born. You don't need to shout at a crowd of strangers to make your first sale. Start by looking at the handful of people you've done genuinely good work for.

Carry Your Message with the Right Scent

In one experiment, Frisch fed one group of bees on lime blossom and another on false acacia. Only the lime bees followed the dance of a bee returning from the lime; the acacia bees ignored her. The bees were paying attention to the flower scent clinging to the dancer. When choosing a channel, ask yourself: where does my customer spend money today, whom do they trust, which door do they come in through? Sometimes the right channel is the one your industry never looks at.

Calling out to everyone at once is like a dance nobody stops for. Let your message arrive in a language the listener already knows, about a problem they care about. A familiar signal to the right audience brings in more customers than a stranger's shout to a crowd.

Be Good Enough to Recommend

According to Lewis, most of their growth came from customers recommending them to friends. That came at a price. They only hired people with at least seven years' experience in their field, which made recruitment very hard. Like Frisch's syrup: the better the source, the livelier the dance. Word-of-mouth marketing can't be bought; it can only be earned.

Test How Much Your First Customers Believe in You

In its first year Boldly invoiced at the end of each month, and because of late payments they never knew whether they could cover salaries. One of their early customers, the author John Warrillow, became their adviser at the end of 2012 and suggested taking payment upfront and on a regular basis. Lewis started asking new customers to pay in advance, backed by a satisfaction guarantee. She expected pushback, but as she tells it, not a single customer objected.

Sharpen Your Ideal Customer over Time

Lewis is open about the fact that at first they didn't know who their ideal customer was. Over the years they realised they wanted to work with leaders who understood collaboration and grasped the value of the service. Your first customers also teach you whom you should be working for. Listen to them carefully.

Recommendation and Bequest Share a Root

The Turkish word for recommendation, "tavsiye", comes from the Arabic "tawṣiya". According to the Nişanyan Sözlük (an etymological dictionary of Turkish), the root verb "waṣiya" means to counsel, to commission, to entrust a task to someone. "Vasiyet", the Turkish word for a will, comes from the same root: instructions left with someone to be carried out after death.

The English "recommend" has travelled a similar road. According to Etymonline, the word rests on the Latin verb "commendare", meaning to entrust something to someone's care and protection. When someone recommends you, they are really entrusting you with their own name. That's how your first customers carry you.

Final Word

In the fourth book of the Aeneid, Virgil describes rumour, Fama, as a winged creature:

"Mobilitate viget virisque adquirit eundo, parva metu primo, mox sese attollit in auras." She thrives on movement and gains strength as she goes; small and fearful at first, she soon rises into the air.

The dance in the hive also begins with a single scout. Who is telling whom what about your business today? And have you given those first few people enough confidence to entrust you to others?

If you're wondering what price to charge your first customers, take a look at Startup Pricing: How Do You Put a Price on Your Product?