Who on earth takes a punt on a bunch of nobodies with a sketchy looking MVP? Thankfully for us founders, such organisations do exist. Yet, when you’re setting up a new business, finding them is a monumental task.
Just over four years ago, we sent out the first invoice for our volunteering platform, Volunteero. It was a wild feeling, having someone pay to use something that myself and my co-founders had built from nothing.
Today, Volunteero has over 50,000 users and 150 clients including Citizens Advice and the Special Olympics. It wouldn’t have been possible without that initial sale.
But there’s no getting around it; gaining your first commitments is a slog. I wanted to share some useful approaches and tips we followed to win our first 20 clients.
1. Focus on a niche
There is no point building something for everybody, when it doesn’t really work for anybody. To start, we focussed on a very small subset of volunteering called “befriending” where users are matched with, and regularly chat to, an individual in their community.
It was a relatively rare use case that had specific, and more painful, challenges than most others. It was also an area where it was hard to use other tools as a workaround.
That gave us two things: a willing buyer with a big pain point, and a customer base to chase. It also meant that when we had one or two case studies, these were super relevant for our initial target market, causing others to more readily follow suit.
If you have a SaaS product, you’ve probably waxed lyrical about to investors about how big your total addressable market is. That may be true one day, but it won’t help you right now.
Tailor your development to focus on a specific lead subset, and understand their challenges intimately. Use their language and classify your product in a different way for example “CRM for Estate Agents” not “CRM”. It makes those early clients feel it’s made just for them!
2. Embrace your age
There is no point pretending to be some big established company… one glance at Companies House and you’ll be scuppered! We made that mistake early on.
The innovators and early adopters you are looking for aren’t put off but the fact you are an early-stage startup. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most of them like it.
I would always advise early-stage founders to lean into their youth and agility, but to do so in the right way. Which leads me nicely onto the next tip…
3. Know your assets
If you can’t offer what an established provider might be able to, it’s time for some reflection. What do you have to offer? Here are three selling points you can boast about.
- TLC – customer service is one the biggest USPs of small businesses. Make clear that potential partners will have your total focus and attention. Let them know how important it is to your success that they have an amazing experience.
- Influence – when you’re just starting out, you will likely still be acting on feedback, and your partners will be a big part of delivering that. Explain they will be able to influence the product and be involved in its future development.
- Pioneering – you’re an innovative, game-changing startup, which means your enterprise partners will be pioneering new solutions and technologies. Appeal to their egos, and make it clear they will get ahead of the competition by working with you.
4. Create the illusion of stability
At the same time, you’ll also want to start putting things in place to capture the next segment of the market who will need to feel they aren’t taking a big risk. Here are four ways to do so:
Investors – if you have investors, especially any that carry weight, then don’t bury them in Companies House. Highlight them on your website and in sales materials.
Advisors – use networking to find forward thinking people in your industry. Give them some share options, and, potentially, bring them on to your advisory board. You can also highlight them in marketing materials. Prospects will be reassured by a big name they recognise.
Emails – super simple one here but you can hide your meager team of three behind support emails like hello@company.com and billing@company.com. I once heard of a founder who created a fake executive assistant, which was just another email address that he managed. This might be overkill, but you get the idea!
Software – we implemented Intercom as our support system and Chargebee as our billing system early. Good business software isn’t cheap, but it really does create the appearance of an established company (certainly more than an invoice created on Microsoft Word).
Finding those early customers isn’t easy. If you can make it happen, and keep them super happy, you will have already made it further than most.
Happy prospecting!
Ash embarked on his entrepreneurial journey after his career in investment banking left him unfulfilled. He is now a passionate member of the UK startup ecosystem as the CEO and co-founder of Volunteero, a volunteering platform with 150 charity clients and 50,000 volunteer users.
