Getting your first customers using Twitter

June 15, 2023

Before we begin, here's a note from one founder to another:

Finding the first few customers is always hard. It's even harder when you start with minimal networks or only a handful of badges on your shirt. But perhaps that's what makes the process so special. When the odds are against you, there's a different level of pleasure waiting to be unlocked.

This little document is all about using Twitter to acquire your next few customers, but treat it as an 'experiment to test Twitter as an acquisition channel.' Throughout your journey of building a product or service business, you'll want to test different channels to unlock growth. Channels? LinkedIn, Discord community, IRL events, newspaper ads, etc.

Also, understand that it's very easy to complicate things when starting out, especially for someone doing it for the first time. You might focus on unimportant, shiny things and lose valuable time. And it's often found that time is super critical in the early stages when you're in a cash-strapped environment, and resources are extremely limited. It's important to be all ears and on your toes simultaneously. In simple words - always being open to feedback and making and executing decisions faster is crucial.

In the spirit of making things simpler, let’s start with defining a goal and sticking to it for a good amount of time.

Goal: Get people interested

Metrics to help you measure progress towards your goal:

- # of people reached out to

- Unique page views

Questions:

- Who are the ‘people’?

- ‘How’ do I get them interested?

- How much time do I have at my disposal?

If you're not tracking page views, please do. Use Google Analytics or a privacy-friendly option like Plausible, Umami, or Pirsch. It acts as a feedback loop. You perform an experiment, record page views, and get a sense of its effectiveness.

Getting an answer quickly is essential. If you aren't able to crack it, you'd want to accept what the market told you, take all the learnings, and make changes to your thesis.

Step 1

Take an educated guess: who can be your potential customers?

Usually, you'd want to check out a competitor, study their customers, and, with a bit of analysis and gap identification, create a profile for your ideal customer.

In case it's not a nicely-validated market, you might want to rely on your initial thesis. Perhaps, map out spending behavior to different functions that you're aiming to help and derive a profile.

If you are your first customer, it's often easier to get it right early on since you possess a decent understanding of the pain points. Your larger problem revolves around how you can find more people like yourself.

Probably criminal to generalize it any further.

Now - you need to find out creative ways of finding these users.

We have a detailed doc on this one (and there’s definitely more to it than using the Twitter Search) -

Step 2: Manually recruiting users

Paul G’s

The idea that users or customers would come to you is fictitious. Being there when they need you is rather obvious. Reaching out to them and hand-holding their way to success is what you should be doing.

You start manually, you transition to automating parts of it. Most people think of automation from day 1.

All of the companies in XOs portfolio are primarily automation tools - but you see - we can’t change the fact that absorption has to happen before automation.

Engage with users publicly. Get them to notice you. Appreciate them. Pass on genuine feedback. Look forward to providing value, irrespective of the stage of engagement.

Follow accounts.

Personal account > Brand account

Tease what you’re working on. Don’t wait for the magical launch day to flip all the fortunes. Think in terms of launching everyday instead.

Share valuable resources with your audience. It can be a doc, or a tool you built.

Reminder: These are little things that have worked for us. Of course it can’t be generalized a lot but you can always draw some learnings.

Step 3

Predictability & Automation

Once you’ll run step 2 for about 10-20-30 people, you’ll start noticing parts of it becoming repetitive. Normally at this stage, learning from the process slows down and burnout due to the uninteresting nature of the task, takes over.

Good time to see if the efforts prove fruitful at a pinch of scale. Talking 100-500-1000 people.

From our experience, these strategies usually work

Even now, you experiment a lot with the kinds of audiences you can reach out to and the kind of pain points you can hit them with. Now, you‘d have much larger numbers to be drawing conclusions from.

Experimentation really never stops.

If you’re looking for some inspiration for writing a nice DM - check this crowdsourced library of twitter DMs