This article comes from: Su Yuan Yuxin, the title picture comes from: Visual China
The enterprise service market in China and abroad is very different; this difference is mainly because China has not experienced a complete software payment era, but has directly entered the stage of SaaS and cloud services.
Even so, we think that as the founder of a B2B company, whether you can get your top 10 customers is actually not directly related to whether you are in China or the United States.
After studying and sorting out the early history of a group of fastest-growing B2B companies in the US market, we have the following five gains:
1. There are only three methods that are generally useful to get the top 10 customers. Make good use of your “golden three axes”: connections, channels, and media.
2. In practice, this three-dimensional axe is not as difficult as you think-almost every B2B business has established its own customer network, appearing in places frequently viewed by potential customers. The question is not which of these two routes, but how strong your network coverage is and how far it can help you go.
3. Having a strong network in B2B is a huge advantage. You can also establish relevant connections by attracting investors or joining an incubator.
4. If you need to sell your products in the traditional way, instead of expanding your customer base by getting the employees to get the boss first(zoom kind ), then the use of contacts is particularly important, because early customers must have a reason to trust you.
5.LikeAs soon as it comes up, it relies on various reports and channels.If you want to do a promotion, often you can’t get the top 10 users quickly.
1. Who in the network can become potential customers?
Key question: To make to B products, if there are no 10 people around you who want to buy what you make, you should not do it…
It’s nothing more than the following kinds of people: friends, former colleagues, internal and external entrepreneurial partners, founders of other companies, and investors who have or have not done it when you raise funds.
Developed investors to become customers: Carta
Our early customers came from two places:
1. Our company’s angel investor: Andy Palmer from Tamr(a big data startup that integrates and analyzes data sources) is eShares (Equity Service Company)Investor, brought our products into his company very early.
2. Other companies invested by our investors: We have established private contacts with them through investors.
Joshua Merrill, former product manager of Carta
Developed investors & former colleagues as clients: Looker
Personal relationships are one of the most important but often overlooked opportunities in B2B.
Looker is lucky to get more than 10 clients through personal relationships (So far, Looker still benefits from personal relationships). Not only through our personal relationship, but also through the relationship between customers and investors.
We only did two things to make the most of it:
1. Do your best to make early customers as successful and happy as possible.
2. Engage some “sharing + discount” mechanisms to encourage our old users to share their successful experience of using the software to others.
Keeran Rice’s early employee of Looker, Vice President of BD
Developed former colleagues as customers: Intercom
Basically, “do something to let people know and understand Intercom”. In the previous business, we built a community of people willing to listen to our opinions, and they became our first target. I send emails every day to tell them about Intercom, what Intercom might help them, and listen to their feedback. I took care of everything by myself. If I did it again today, I would still do it myself.
Des Traynor Intercom CSO, co-founder
Developed former colleagues as clients: Workday
Workday’s earliest clients were mainly composed of CEOs of medium-sized companies who knew the founders. They actually did not pay for the Workday software, but because of the relationship with the founder.
Dave Duffield Former CEO of Workday
Developed former colleagues as customers: Coda
When we started Coda, we decided to hide ourselves behind the scenes so that we could focus on making the product appear in public view. A small startup run by a colleague of mine at YouTube did Coda’s first Alpha version trial. The entire company has been using this product for months, but then one day they suddenly stopped using it. This is a low point for us-losing all users in one day is not good for anyone.
The good thing is that the CEO of the startup company is very supportive of us and gave very helpful feedback-their team is consistent with the vision we are building, but we need to complete a series of improvements(Long list!), Then they will try to use Coda again. This feedback motivated us and gave birth to better products. The reflection of this incident is that lost customers may be the best source of feedback.
Shishir Mehrotra Coda CEO
Developed former colleagues as customers: Salesforce
Convincing potential customers to try our service is not easy.Most people don’t want to be the first to take risks. Realizing this fact is important, we have carefully designed our strategy to target pioneers who might try interesting new things.
The earliest pioneers appeared on Blue Martini Software. Blue Martini Software was one of the small software companies I invested in earlier. I knew I had to call the founder Monte Zweben and ask him for help, but I also knew I provided what he really needed.
We currently do not have a formal sales team, so when looking for early customers, everyone on the team has to contact people they know in any industry or startup. Product manager Diane Mark won the second customer while queuing at the local market Mollie Stone’s. She met a former colleague who was a salesperson at iSyndicate, a company selling multimedia content services (text, picture and video combination) manager. She asked what iSyndicate uses to manage the sales process. “ACT(an outdated and bad CRM software)! And Excel,” he replied. “It’s a mess.”
Marc Benioff Salesforce CEO
Developed a former colleague to become a client: Okta
We used our contacts to contact IT practitioners from the Salesforce website and past work, established a positive relationship with our alma mater network on LinkedIn, asked our angel investors, and sorted out UpTheir LinkedIn network. In the first 6 months, my goal is to communicate with 15 to 18 new IT staff/different companies every month, which is about 85% of the required quota.
Frederic Kerrest Okta COO, co-founder
Developed former colleagues & friends as clients: Asana
Almost all early users of (first 15 users) are people around us. At present, we are committed to creating a perfect experience for them: improving the function settings of the product, responding to their feedback, fixing errors, and improving performance.
On top of this, we will gradually let more and more people know our products. Asana may not experience a special bottleneck period, but has always maintained a constant influx of new users.
Justin Rosenstein Asana product owner, co-founder
Developed friends to become customers: Slack
We begged and “coaxed” friends from other companies to try it out and give some feedback. We initially found six to ten companies and gradually tried to get larger organizations to use Slack. By increasing the number of teams using Slack, we got more feedback at each stage.
Stewart Butterfield Slack CEO
Developed a former colleague & the founder of the incubator at the same time as a client: Gusto
Gusto’s top 10 customers are our friends who have just arrived in California to start a business. Most of them come from the same YC batch of emerging technology startups as ours, as well as non-technological companies that we happen to know through family and friends. Small business groups like (such as children’s swimming camp). We (three founders) basically told everyone we know that we are building a modern and pleasant salary and human resources system , And then asked them if they knew anyone who might be interested in it.
Tomer London Gusto product manager, co-founder
Developed a former colleague & the founder of the incubator at the same time as a customer: Stripe
In YC, we use the Collison installation method (Stripe’s CEO surname Collison) to describe their invented marketing techniques . The less confident founder will ask you, would you like to try our beta version? If the answer is yes, they will say it is good and send you a link. But the Collison brothers never do this. If someone is willing to try Stripe, they will say, give me your laptop and install it on the spot.
Paul Graham, founder of YC
Our first user actually became one of Stripe’s early employees. I have known Ross Boucher for a while. We are developing a payment system, and he just needs it, I suggest him, hey, want to try it? I did not say that it was just developed.
Interestingly, the first friends who used Stripe always asked us if we could invite their friends to use it. These people later invited their friends, and our user community expanded through word of mouth.
Patrick Collison Stripe CEO
The founder of the company who developed the incubator at the same time became a client: Amplitude
Amplitude’s first client came from the YC portfolio company network. During YC, Spenser and Curtis are developing another startup company called Sonalight, and built an early version of Amplitude to explore the reasons for user loss. Other YC companies in the same batch also wanted to use it because they had some questions that existing tools could not answer. Spenser and Curtis quickly realized that Amplitude was a good opportunity before them.
Tai Rattigan Former Head of Partnership Amplitude
2. Are there any channels you can use?
Key question: In what way will your target customers gather?
Ruby on Rails community (to make it easier for you to develop, deploy, and maintain web applications A framework of the program): Shopify
When I created SnowDevil(my online snowboard store), some of my colleagues in Ruby On Rails developers asked me if I would I got the code permission in, so I built Shopify.
When Shopify was founded in 2006, weAn early waiting list was established through thousands of emails. In retrospect, it actually set the model for many later SaaS companies. We launched the Beta version and helped hundreds of stores to establish their online channels, and some of them are still open today!
Tobi Lütke Shopify CEO
Ruby on Rails community: New Relic
New Relic appeared at the end of 2007, focusing on the relatively small but rapidly growing Ruby on Rails market. Rails’ reputation was growing at the time, but it was far from mainstream… I think this is a good market opportunity for new startups: it is not very large, and it will not attract a lot of strong capital to bring excessive competition, but the scale is sufficient Large (more importantly, grow fast enough), can provide support for early-stage companies.
Rails developers are known for adopting the latest technology. They enthusiastically support those shocking products, and they also severely criticize products that do not meet their high standards. New Relic is not the first to target the Rails market, but we believe that New Relic is good enough, and it quickly won the support of Rails community opinion leaders-including more famous members of the Rails community, such as Tom Mornini(Subledger founder who combines blockchain technology with accounting) and many others. Such recognition cannot be bought by money. It had an amazing effect on the attractiveness of our early products.
Lew Cirne New Relic CE
Online developer and product manager community: Plaid
Before the launch of Plaid, we spent 9 months trying to launch a consumer financial product. Finally, without a good foundation, we created Plaid out of our own frustration. In fact, we became our first customer. Since then, we have gradually grown through word of mouth in the developer and product manager community. We met with the founders of some fintech companies to understand their problems and think about how Plaid can help. We spend a lot of time and energy on forums, IRCs, gatherings and startup accelerators.
Zach Perret Plaid CEO, Co-founder
Twitter: Figma
In the early days of Figma, we talked to almost every designer we knew. To seek more feedback, we turned to Twitter, and I realized that we can use Twitter to frame the most influential designers. After obtaining the data, I furtherI have selected people who are inspiring to me. Then I checked the personal introductions of these people, sent them the first email, and showed them Figma. At the time, Figma was still in its infancy, but we still received incredible feedback. When developing products, we let these designers understand the changes that are taking place; when we launch products, we have established contact with these customers, and many customers have expanded our information influence.
Dylan Field Figma CEO
For SMEs from start to finish: Square
Jack used his contacts to attract some “socialist” users to Square, but failed to turn them into real long-term customers. Cheri Mims from Lillybelle Flower Shop and Sightglass Coffee House is a businessman we can travel and communicate together. He is the first customer to use our products every day. We visit every week to see what methods work and where we need to improve. We have been in contact with local companies that have connections with us and convinced some of them to use Square in the early days.
Cameron Walters, the founding team of Square
Hacker News (information aggregation site): Segment
In the beginning, we actually acted as the open source of Hacker News(information aggregation website, mainly focusing on technology, venture capital, etc.) The library was launched, but I didn’t expect it to succeed. The first customers are those who hang out on Hacker News, mostly small companies. The founders were looking for ways to better test their web applications and mobile applications with analysis and tracking, and then they saw us.
Peter Reinhardt Segment CEO
Hacker News: Airtable
First, friends and family, and then Howie released a beta version on Hacker News (I saw this product on Hacker News myself). Later, the most important user development mechanism was word-of-mouth “remote”.
At the time, we didn’t even really focus on B2B—when I joined Airtable, the company was doing both B2B and B2C businesses.
An anonymous early employee of Airtable
3. Use the media: Think about it. In your company’s story, what can move people’s hearts?
Key question: What is the unique and unknown story you can sell?
Tell an interesting story in the media: Twilio
In November 2008, Twilio released a private beta on TechCrunch. Two days before the news, Dave McClure(Twilio’s angel investor and founder of 500 Startups) teased with the fake Beta version of the product TechCrunch’s founder, Michael Arrington, made the company the first to receive a lot of media attention.
Slack’s news blitz
The impressive news blitz helped us a lot, and it encouraged people to send out Slack trial invitations. On the first day, 8,000 people did this; two weeks later, the number climbed to 15,000.
The lesson learned is: Don’t underestimate the power of traditional media when launching products.
Stewart Butterfield Slack CEO
In short, the process of getting customers in the early stage is also a process of quickly improving the product and iterating versions, and it is also a process of laying a solid foundation for the product to serve more B-end customers and different needs..
At this stage, the founder must use both hands and feet to empty the relationship and resources of his friends’ friends’ friends’ friends, so that the channels where potential customers gather have a clear understanding of the product, and must be maintained Good early customer relationships for the top 10 users. Only in this way can we get a ticket to the enterprise service market and begin to embark on the fast lane of growth.