Sharing my experience in building first 25 customers for a non-online business. Applicable for B2B SaaS companies only.

1. Building first 25
customers
Girish S Prabhu

2. Co-Founder & CEO
Instio Experiences
Customer experience solution that
facilitates multichannel feedback from
a variety of data-sources to engage
better with existing customers and
help to bring new customers.

3. Disclaimer…
- B2B Sales
- SaaS products
- Target Audience – Founders
- Can’t guarantee results!

4. Real time reputation
management
Establish ongoing
interaction with customer
Root-cause issues
management
Improve experience and
profits

6. Who Am I ?…
Programmer
Architect
Product Manager
Program Manager
NEVER BEEN A SALES GUY!!!

7. Sept2014
Mar 2015
July2015
July2016
October2016
GTM
STEALTH MODE
$$

8. Marketing is EASY!!
Landing Page
Create a beautiful
landing page. Capture
contact details.
Reach out!
Reach out to contacts
you collected and your
immediate contacts.
Nurture offerings
Build relationship and
nurture your leads.
Close or clean them.
Create AHA!
Create AHA moment
for the customer and
start minting money.
Already success!
Why are you even
working ? It is already
$$ M in bank.

9. Initial months…
• Vague idea about who wants our product
• Half-baked ads, few blog posts, few cold
emails, article posting in Hacker News, Reddit
etc
• Cold-emails not even having any tangible open
rates!
• Product sucks!! No body wants!! I am not
getting expected sign ups.. I must PIVOT!!
• Run behind VC / Angel for money to sustain.

10. Who Am I (Wanna-be) ?…
We can't solve problems
by using the same kind
of thinking we used
when we created them.

11. People don’t buy products for the sake of it!
Find the Value!
• Define the target market. Understand what
you are doing for them.
• Reach out personally.
• Be one among them – start thinking like how
your customers are.
• Lot of unscalable things – Get initial traction
and optimize later.

12. How are we doing ?
Q3 2016 Q4 2016 Q1 2017
27Customers
7Customers
3Customers

13. It is during our darkest moments that we must focus
to see the light – Aristotle.
• Get out, get rolling.
• Get response from early customers.
• Create case studies and share with prospects.
• Just focus on one single vertical (target
segment) even if there are more opportunities
found.
• Build sales team.

14. When to scale ?
Product Market Fit
• Customers can’t function with out product
• Really engaged users
• Reduced lead times and shorter sales cycles
• Referrals and Word of mouth leads
• Increased conversion rate

16. Girish S Prabhu
t: @girishsprabhu
E: Girish.s.prabhu@gmail.com