How to Pick Your Startup's First Customer

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• Framing Your Weeks

Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

Today’s episode has got some meat 🥩.

It’s a bit long and probably could’ve been two episodes, but I loved it and didn’t want to break up the flow.

It’s about your first customer - the first group of people you’ll build a product for - and how this group can either catalyze growth or dump you into a cycle of trying to create inertia where it doesn’t exist.

We go through five characteristics of great first customers:

1. Pain - Specifically, how pain is the best (only) way to build trust. If someone’s in a lot of pain, and you show that you understand that pain, you earn trust. If the customer isn’t in pain, there’s no way to gain trust and you’ll spend all your time (money) trying to manufacture it. It won’t work.
   

2. The Right Side of the Knowledge Spectrum Graph - Choosing where your first customer is on the Knowledge Spectrum Graph is critical. It’s tempting to go to the far left of this graph - beginners seem like they’re low hanging fruit.
   

   

   
   It seems like you can easily help them cover a bunch of ground…
   

   

   
   But, it’s much better strategy to start with customers on the far right of the graph. Customers that’ve already invested a ton in being successful and are close to a specific goal. It’s far more likely they’ll actually be invested in solving the problem.
   

   

   
   
   
   

3. Measurement - The goal is to help your first customer be successful so that they’ll tell people about that success. For this to happen, the success needs to be quantifiable. For our golf example above, the goal of “breaking 80” equals success, and can be a soundbite that travels and helps you grow. General success, like “make hiring easier,” is subjective and won’t travel or help you grow.
   

4. Influence - For other customers to care about this measurable success, we need our first customer to be influential. This is another reason we start on the right side of the knowledge spectrum - we want people who are experts and invested in the problem we help them solve. It’s far more likely they’ll be influential to other similar potential customers.
   

5. Frequency - You’re going to be wrong about nearly everything in the startup world. Customer, product, marketing - you’ll start with the wrong idea on each. But, the beauty of startups are that you can just keep trying stuff. Frequency let’s you do that. If your customer runs into the problem you’re solving daily or weekly, you’ll have lots of opportunities to get out all of your wrong approaches on your way to the right one. If a problem comes up twice a year for a customer, there’s no chance you’ll be able to get in the reps necessary to get to something that works.

Choosing a first customer is different from your second, fifth, and hundredth customer. They need these characteristics to catalyze your growth because you won’t have any social proof to lean on for them.

Give a holler with thoughts on the pod. I’d love to hear how this is helpful and where you might need more clarity.

Pod References

• Byldd

• Tacklebox

• Getting Real (museum curator reference)

• Everyman Espresso (☕️ 🐐)

Pod Timestamps:

00:27 First Time Entrepreneurs vs. Second Time Entrepreneurs
03:20 The Idea: Personality-Based Management
06:29 Why You, Why At All, Why Now
08:55 Byldd
09:55 The Story of Your Successful Startup
15:35 The Five Necessary First Customer Characteristics
16:41 Characteristic One: Pain
21:51 Characteristic Two: The Knowledge Spectrum
25:43 Characteristic Three: Measurement
28:24 Characteristic Four: Influence
29:48 Characteristic Five: Frequency
31:45 The End

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re going to talk about your first customers. The first group of people that’ll pay you to solve a problem for them.

In classic Idea to Startup fashion, we’ll be spending most of the episode teaching you how to not royally screw this decision up, like most first-time entrepreneurs do. These poor saps pick their first customers for all the wrong reasons and end up, usually excitedly, building for a horrible first customer, which is the equivalent of putting on an 80 pound weight vest and eating a plate of fettuccini Alfredo right before you run a marathon.

You can bounce back from most things in life, but investing heavily in the wrong first customer usually isn’t one of them.

This is the biggest shift I see between first time entrepreneurs and second time entrepreneurs.

First time entrepreneurs don’t realize what their first customers are actually there to do. What function they serve in the business. Why they’re so much different from all the subsequent customers you’ll need to get. Because it’s counterintuitive and they’ve never done it before. **So, unsurprisingly, they put less thought into who’s buying their stuff and more thought into the stuff itself. Make the stuff good enough and someone will buy it, right? And that’s all we need?

Second timers are the opposite when choosing a first customer - they’re like old, cranky museum curators that have one, final blank space on the wall. They’ve got an unlimited number of paintings for that space, but the job is to figure out which to choose. Which fits perfectly. They agonize over it.

Second time entrepreneurs are tortured by memories of trying to create urgency for customers that naturally don’t have any or trying to teach customers about a problem they don’t know exists or searching for customers that seemingly don’t want to be found.

This is the reason second time founders are more successful than first time founders.

First timers think the first customer picks them. Second timers know they pick the first customer.

So, today is about how we can make sure you act like a second time entrepreneur whether you are one or not. We’ll teach you the type of customer you need to pick - the one that’ll catalyze your business. As importantly, we’ll talk about who can’t be your first customer unless you’re interested in running a marathon with a belly full of fettucini.

The framing we use for this at Tacklebox is hiring.

Because your first customer is way more than just an early adopter. They are, without exaggeration, a member of your team. You hire them.

Your first customer immediately becomes head of product and, more importantly, your entire marketing department. They’ll write the copy, find the growth channels, and spread the word. Your next customers will make decisions based on these first customers. If you choose a bad first customer, you won’t ever grow.

So, which customer should you hire to be your first? Which will be good at those jobs?

Let’s get into it.

And we’ll start … with a startup idea we’ll use as an example for the rest of the pod. It’s not jazz time yet. We’re barely three minutes in. Settle down.

I’ve been pitched this idea no fewer than 5 times the past 18 months, most recently by a founder who emailed saying they’d love for me to talk through it on the pod. So, here we are.

The idea is anchored around an insight you’ll be familiar with:

You can dramatically increase the effectiveness and happiness of a team if the manager of that team is aware of their employees’ personality types - the way they like to be managed, the way they most definitely don’t like to be managed, and the environment in which they’ll thrive.

You’ve probably had a boss with no idea how to manage you, or maybe you’ve been that boss, struggling to reach and unlock someone on your team.

Here’s a firm example - if an employee gets value from their creativity and loves consistent feedback, but a manager creates a highly structured and standardized environment where they meet with the employees once a quarter solely to discuss results, the employee will be unhappy and eventually leave. Something like 70% of employees leave in large part due to a mismatch in management preference and management style.

People are wired certain ways, and it’s always better to swim with the current than against it.

I thought that “swim with the current” line was clever, so I told it to our founder after she explained the high level idea, and she jumped on me a bit.

“Sure - swimming with the current, or managing the employee how they want to be managed, is important. But there are two really hard parts to that. First, you’ve got to help the employee figure out how they want to be managed - very few people actually know their own preferences. Then, you’ve got to teach managers how to adjust their style for all the personalities on their team. It’s not as simple as - the manager has to be more empathetic. This is complicated stuff.”

This insight was hard earned.

For years, the founder has worked at a consulting firm that does just this - they go into a company, run a bunch of personality tests, and give employees and managers rundowns of their tendencies vs employee preference. I won’t say which methodology their consultancy uses for privacy's sake, but it’s one of the big ones you’ve heard of, like myers briggs, enneagrams, DiSC, or the one with all the colors.

I was curious, so I asked the founder if there was any meaningful difference between all the methodologies and she said “you can’t, quote, swing a dead cat without hitting a new methodology these days, but they’re all basically the same - but for a company, using any of them verse using none is a huge difference.” Which is interesting, aside from the dead cat part. Any methodology is drastically better than none.

“The big problem we always face,” the founder continued, ”is that once we help people identify their personality types, we just sort of… leave. We tell managers the best way to deal with X personality type is Y type of communication - and we do train them a bit and give them materials - but it’s unrealistic to expect them to completely change their style and to keep it up. Teams are shifting, managers are moving - how the heck are they supposed to keep track? We’ve tried to sell all sorts of ongoing services, but they don’t land and don’t work.

“And that,” she said dramatically, “is where the idea comes in. And it’s only just become possible.”

This sentence got me excited. Anytime I evaluate the potential of a new idea I ask three questions:

Why you - why the specific founder is uniquely positioned or has been subconsciously preparing to start the business for years

Why at all - why does this need to be solved? How do we know it’s a painful, frequent, expensive, growing, urgent, bleeding neck problem?

And, the kicker for this idea, why now - what’s fundamentally changed that makes this idea possible now when it wasn’t a few years ago. Markets are efficient. If an idea was useful and possible 7 years ago we’ve got to assume it wouldn’t be available to be started today. So, what’s changed?

The Why Now is what makes this idea intriguing - because AI has changed the first principles of this, and a lot of, ideas. I’m skeptical of people throwing around AI as a catchall, but her explanation swayed me -

“AI is an industry changer for personality tests,” she explained. “Let’s say I build a plugin to email and slack and google docs that knows each employee’s personality type. The AI could edit a managers email in real-time to reflect the management preference of the employee it was being sent to.

I’ve tested this with chatgpt and it works - I can write out a generic email about a project to an employee, then prompt chatgpt to “re-write this in a way that an employee with a driver personality would digest well” - and it does a really good job. This would be, literally, the best feature my business could ever come out with. It’s the holy grail.

Clients email us all the time weeks or months after our engagement asking us how to to deal with X type of employee, often attaching an email exchange.”

She finished up -

“But, I don’t know where to start. Because this could help any company - a startup with seven people might get more value than a bigger company? Maybe? Or, there are teachers, parents, coaches of NBA teams - this would be a game changer for relationships. We could save tons of marriages. Maybe we could sell it to therapists? This could basically become a translator to help people with two communication styles get on the same page. The sky’s the limit.”

She continued.

“But… with all these options… how do I figure out a good first customer?

Where do I… start?”

Well, luckily, that’s what this podcast is about.

So let’s jump in.

After…. a little smooth jazz.

Byldd

The Story of your Successful Startup

Here’s the story of how your business will succeed.

I’m not clairvoyant, I’ve just seen a lot of businesses, and sort of like that old saying from Anna Karinina - nothing makes me feel more pretentious than a Tolstoy reference but it’s a good one so it’s worth it - all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. All happy, read- successful, startups are alike - they all look exactly the same, at least at the beginning. They need to be to get off the ground.

And quickly, before we jump in, I can’t say clairvoyant without thinking of a two second story. I used to walk through Washington square park on the way to the office each day, and if you’ve ever walked through there you’ve probably noticed Kyler James, although you probably didn’t know that was his name. Kyler is the guy with the giant tinfoil hat who sits at a foldout table giving tarot readings all day.

One day I walked by and saw my friend getting a reading from him. I couldn’t believe this. This friend is seriously successful - like, maybe the most successful friend I have. I stopped, dumbfounded, and stared at him. He read what I was thinking and said - “don’t judge… this guy’s incredible.”

Then, Kyler looked at me and said - “happy to read your cards any day, then, with a dramatic pause, he said … have a good day, Brian.”

I was blown away for years that he knew my name and told tons of people, with some actually going to get readings. Then, a few months ago, my friend came clean. “Yeah, right before you walked up I said - oh hey, here comes my friend brian. He didn’t like, divine your name.”

—

Anyway, here’s the story of your successful startup. No matter what problem your startup is solving or what market your product is in.

You’ll start, by finding a customer segment that’s got a problem no one else has solved or, in lots of cases, even know exists. This customer will be highly motivated to solve the problem, and they’ll have tried a whole bunch of stuff to crack it already.

Now, you likely won’t find this customer immediately - this customer has a rare mix of ingredients and you’ll have some false starts - but, eventually, you’ll find them.

Next, you’ll get this customer’s attention by describing the exact problem they’re trying to solve clearer than any competitor ever has. They’ll be shocked that you understand the depth and nuance and urgency of the hole they’ve found themselves in, and, because of that, they’ll trust you to throw them a rope and help them out.

Really importantly, since no one has taken the time to notice this customer’s problem like you have before, you won’t have much competition and they won’t have much choice. Even though you have no formal track record or customer testimonials, or, likely, much of a product - they’ll still work with you. When someone’s stuck in a well and you throw them a rope, they don’t check to see if it’s organic.

The first version of your product will look more like a consulting arrangement than a scalable tool. To develop this consulting arrangement, the customer will hop on your side of the table and explain, in detail, their current process for solving the problem. They’ll help you identify the hardest step of that process and help you figure out how to remove it - how you can take it off their plate completely without causing too much damage. They essentially become your head of product.

You’ll charge them a lot for this, and they’ll happily pay, because you just took on one of the worst parts of their job. That’s worth a fat margin.

Next, it’s up to you to figure out a smart way to solve for this moment in the process. But, the parameters are crystal clear - you know the exact moment where you live and what you need to do to help the customer be successful - so, it’s doable. I think of this part like a bus. You know where you pick your customer up and you know where they want you to drop them off.

And then, the magic happens.

Since you helped this first customer be successful, they’ll talk about you. Constantly. They won’t be able to help themselves. When humans solve a hard problem, we don’t shut up about it.

How many times has your cousin Kyle told you about the time he finished the 2017 Chicago marathon.

And even better, when someone else helps you solve a hard problem, you talk about it even more.

So, the customer you helped be successful will tell a whole bunch of other potential customers of yours about how you helped them be successful. They’ll become your head of marketing.

And you’ll grow.

Envy, not greed, is the strongest motivator on the planet. The second you help a customer be successful, everyone in their orbit will clamor for that same success.

This second customer you get won’t be in as deep a hole as the first. But they’ll be motivated by that envy - the objective success of their competitor. So, they don’t need to be as desperate as your first customer was. They probably couldn’t have been your first customer, but they’re more than happy to be your second.

You’ll help them be successful, all the while figuring out how to make that product a bit more scalable, and that customer’s success will influence your third, tenth, and hundredth customers. The envy will flow down the adoption curve, and each customer you help be successful will attract a few more and you’ll be off and running.

And that’s the story of your successful startup. It’s like how I met your mother but with less Jason Segel and better writing.

Burn.

No matter what type of business you have - a SaaS tool or a bakery or an executive coaching agency - this is the story of how your business will grow. There aren’t other ways.

And the whole thing - the entire story - relies on you finding the right first customer to spark the flywheel. There’s a huge burden on them, and they need to be up for it.

So, let’s tease apart the characteristics of a great first customer segment walk through them, and let’s find a great first customer for the myers briggs startup on the way for the heck of it.

The Five Customer Characteristics

—

When I think of a perfect first customer, I think of one word: inertia.

All of the characteristics we look for in a first customer - five of which we’ll talk through now - need to already exist. That’s where the inertia comes from. We can’t spend our time convincing customers to see a problem or feel urgency. We need a customer segment that’s already predisposed to those feelings. That’s a massive mistake first time entrepreneurs make. They think they can influence their first customer. They can’t.

I use this example a ton, but that’s because it’s important - you won’t be able to convince your first customer to leave their apartment to go buy an iced coffee. But, if they’re already on their way to buy an iced coffee, you can get them to switch and buy yours.

That’s what I mean by inertia.

The first customers we’re looking for need to already be on their way to buy an iced coffee.

And with that, here are the five:

First, The Obvious One You’re downplaying the importance of. Pain. Because Pain is the only thing that leads to trust.

Pain pain pain pain pain. If a customer isn’t in pain, they won’t try anything new and, more pointedly, they won’t ever talk to you.

Our brains speak one language: problem - we take action based on problems - not benefits or opportunities. So, if our brain doesn’t recognize an immediate, painful problem - it won’t trigger us to take any action.

Most startups try to lure customers with benefits, but our brain ignores those, because, as I said, It only speaks problem. If you pass a billboard that says “free flights to tampa,” you’ll drive right by. Your mind won’t register it. But, if you have to go to the bathroom and a sign says clean bathrooms next exit, you’ll damn well notice it. Your brain is always problem hunting.

Talking about benefits to a customer is like talking french to a bulldog.

Which means that a problem - more importantly, pain - is our only avenue for customer attention and trust early on.

Luckily, it’s a great avenue. There’s no better way to build trust with a complete stranger than pain.

I’ll prove it to you.

I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop in NYC right now writing this podcast. I’m in my old spot - everyman espresso on 13th - the best coffee in NYC and right across the street from the apartment I lived in for nearly a decade. I miss it here.

Anyway, I’m still in a boot after my achilles surgery.

A guy on the street walked up to me this morning and nodded towards my foot and said, “achilles?” I smiled skeptically and said, yep, then started to hobble on past - I’ve had enough NYC experiences to be wary of people speaking with me on the street.

“I tore mine two years ago, he said, before I was out of earshot. You’re going to hit a wall at like 12 weeks post surgery. I found an amazing youtube channel that absolutely saved me during months 4 and 5. It’s a daily routine that gets you back running distances fast - do you run?”

“Yep - I love it,” I responded, listening more intently now.

“Oh shit - you’ve got to watch this guy.” He pulled out his phone and went to a youtube channel. “Here - check it out.”

I eagerly wrote it down on my phone. He continued.

“I ran the Barcelona marathon a year after the achilles tear and PR’d it - 3:35. And, I’m running NYC this fall. Dude, you’ll be fine, probably better than you’ve ever been, but only if you watch this. Anyway, feel better” he finished.

We shook hands - maybe the only time I’ve shook hands with a stranger on the street in NYC - and went our separate ways. As he walked away I noticed he was super fit. Clearly an athlete.

The flip side of the problem coin is trust.

The bigger the problem, the more unique the problem, the bigger your opportunity is for trust. Problems are your in. Likely, your only in.

But, problems are only helpful if you can see them.

I’m walking around in a giant boot, so it’s obvious. Your job with your first customer is to identify a big, painful, urgent problem. One they’re looking to solve. One you can build trust with by speaking specifically to it. One you know they have - it should be as easy to spot as an achilles boot based on their behavior or industry or size or whatever.

The third side of the problem and trust coin -it’s a magic coin, I guess - is success.

The bigger the problem, the more pain there is, the more trust is built, and the bigger the opportunity for you help the customer be successful.

If you help me run a marathon again after a torn achilles, I’m going to be pumped. That’s a clear success moment. One I can share with everyone who’s got the same problem.

Shareable success is a result of wicked problems.

So, let’s get back to our personality test startup friend.

First, we’ve got to hit the elephant in the room. They shared a bit of a solution in search of a problem. They’re talking about AI as a tool for managing via personality types, but the problem is something wholly different.

The problem they described is that companies that hire them to help their managers manage employees based on personality type eventually hit a wall. A few weeks or months after the consultants leave, everyone reverts to how they were before the consultants came.

That could the problem we tackle. How to continue to manage employees based on personality type months after the consultants leave.

They also alluded to other problems with other types customers. Marriages failing because of communication issues, teachers and students and coaches and players interacting poorly.

Problems start with a hypothesis - I think X problem is painful and unsolved, and I think the customer has inertia to solve it now. Then, you run interviews to get more depth on that problem and validate or disprove that hypothesis.

The more specific you get on customer, the more likely it is that you’ll find a severe pain that’s underserved. Lots of people are helping with achilles surgery recovery. Fewer are helping people recover from an achilles injury in a way that’ll let them run a sub 4 hour marathon within 12 months.

Specificity around a wicked problem is your avenue to trust.

More on this with the next characteristic.

—

The Second characteristic of your first customer - Their place on the Knowledge Spectrum

The next four characteristics aren’t as long as the first, but they’re no less important.

The knowledge spectrum is the most counterintuitive of the characteristics your first customer needs.

If you visualize a timeline with someone at the far left having little knowledge of a problem and no system to solve it, and someone at the far right having complete knowledge of the problem and a great system for solving it, where do you think your first customer should land?

Most people think the customer should be on the left side of the line somewhere. That’s where the newbies are - the low hanging fruit - right? If someones never swung a golf club before, the first few tips you give them might help them go from hitting a ball 10 yards to 100 yards. That’s a 10x increase! That’s incredible. Right?

Nope.

It’s always tempting to think about customers in terms of surface area - to think about the distance you can help someone travel on that knowledge spectrum.

But, the left side of that graph is littered with failed startups.

The way you’ll grow is by starting as far as you can possibly get on the right side of the graph. You need customers that are oh so nearly there. Customers with a ton of knowledge on the problem and a ton of previous investment. Our job is to help nudge them over the edge.

Why?

Because, as we said in the last section, your whole business hinges on your ability to make your first customer successful. That drives everything.

So you need a tricky, wicked, nasty problem your customer has invested a ton into to try and solve. One they’re 95% of the way to solving. Then, we push them over the edge.

In fact, any customer that isn’t already at least, say, 80% of the way to solving the problem probably isn’t worth our time.

Think of that new friend I made on the street.

Why am I so interested in that running program? Is it because I’d sort of like to someday start running marathons? No. It’s because I already ran a marathon and was planning on running the NYC marathon again when I turn 40 this year, and the achilles injury made me think I couldn’t.

Was this the first I’d thought of running a marathon post-surgery? Hell no. I’ve watched like 30 videos on youtube on the topic from various trainers and have already done a ton of research.

I’ve already made the decision that I’m going to run a marathon. I already believe in it. I’m in and I need no convincing.

When I started doing some public speaking years ago, I had a coach who watched me a few times. After one talk, he gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten in any realm - speak to who’s listening.

“You’re out there killing yourself to try to build eye contact with people that are on their phones. Ignore those people. Speak to the person who’s on their third page of notes. That’s who matters. Why would you waste your time with someone who isn’t listening?”

The people on the right side of the graph are listening.

Back to our achilles guy. Why was he so compelling? Well, because he had my exact problem and ran the Barcelona marathon in 335. He was successful. He’s farther to the right of me on the knowledge spectrum. I aspire to be as good as him.

So, what’s this look like for our myers briggs startup?

Well, the first thing it does is eliminate a bunch of potential first customers. You need customers that have already invested in trying to solve the problem. Whether that’s companies that have tried a bunch of stuff to keep the personality based management style months after their consultants left, or marriages where both members have tried something around personality based relationship counseling, or coaches that have had their players take personality tests.

Your first customer needs to be nearly there - we help them push 5% forward, but it’s a huge 5%. It leads to success.

The Third First Customer Characterstic - Success requires measurement

This piggybacks nicely on the last characteristic. Because you need to help your customer be successful, but, importantly, that success needs to be obvious. Measurable.

Lots of success in life is hard to measure.

I feel like I’m a good parent - I’m definitely trying my hardest - but there’s no objective way for me to track what a “good parent” is. Sure, the little guy shouts out DaDa every time I walk into a room then smiles and runs to steal one of ruby’s toys and give it to me, but I can’t really quantify that.

This can’t be the case for your first customer.

Success needs to be obvious. Blatant. Measured. Because, that success is going to become the game of telephone they play when they talk about you. I used X and it helped me do Y is the best marketing sentence on the planet.

Think of our marathon friend. Marathons are tracked. Saying you ran a 335 marathon, without being a pro, after an achilles, is - very clearly - success.

The quote “I ran a 335 in Barcelona a year after my surgery because of this video series” is as compelling as you can get. If he hadn’t ran a marathon and said something like “these videos helped me recover from my achilles - I felt really good a year later,” what the heck does “really good” even mean? It’s far less compelling.

For our myers briggs startup, you can see how this gets tricky. What’s successful personality-based managing look like? How is it tracked? How can you make it easily shareable? What problem or problem subset can you solve that has clarity around success?

When I pushed the founder on this, they were a bit stumped. Because good managing is hard to quantify. You can talk about turnover, but that’s a long feedback loop and there are tons of inputs that drive that. Employee satisfaction has the same problem. They said they’d go back to their notes and coworkers to think on it.

A few days later, they reached out with the email subject “GOT IT” in all caps, then a colon, and then “conflict resolution.”

The body of the email read:

“HR teams constantly measure themselves by their case load. When an employee has a problem, they create a case. HR is judged on how long cases last, the size of their case backlog, and the number of cases that reoccur after first being marked resolved. Basically, case thruput.

Lots of HR teams were interested in being trained in myers briggs type frameworks to help with conflict resolution and speeding up and decreasing their case backlog.

A sentence like “we reduced our case backlog by 70%” is success we can grab onto. Success that’ll travel.

Cool.

Speaking of traveling, that gets us to characteristic number four of great first customers: Influence and opportunity.

Having metrics to share is only helpful if two other things are true:

• You’ve got people to share those metrics with

• Those people are swayed by your actions

Your first customer needs to be influential, at least to their peer group, and they need to have lots of opportunities to tell that peer group about you.

If your first customer is influential - and, again, this doesn’t mean you need like Apple as your first customer, every industry of every size has influencers - other potential customers will look at what they’re doing. And, you’ll grow.

Maybe more importantly, you’d like the customer you choose to have lots of opportunities to tell other customers in their space about how helpful you are.

So, you want a cluster of customers that all have similar problems, are all in a similar place on the customer knowledge spectrum, speak with each other about this problem all the time - and, amongst those customers, you ideally want to help the most influential one be successful.

Our achilles friend who ran the barcelona marathon is influential to marathon runners, as he puts up a serious time. He’d be a good first customer if he was like a physical therapist or did a marathon podcast or ran marathon meetups or was in some position to see lots of people with achilles injuries who wanted to run marathons in sun 4 hours.

Finally, we get to the fifth characteristic you want in your initial customer. Frequency.

This ones simple and important. You want your customers to run into the problem constantly.

This one might be as underrated as pain.

One of the hardest things our founders deal with is the frequency with which they’re wrong. You’re going to be wrong about, like, everything. You’ll think a customer will care about something and they won’t, you’ll think a landing page or a marketing approach will convert customers and it won’t, you’ll think you’ve found the right cofounder but you haven’t, and on and on. Startups are a game of resilience and humility, which are things that are hard to quantify, so I don’t like them as descriptors. Really, startups are a game of reps. Shots on goal.

Since you’ll be wrong about everything, you need a bunch of tries.

And, luckily, no one cares about your shooting percentage. You don’t get taken out of the game if you miss 10 shots in a row. You get to keep shooting. And the more shots you take the closer you are to the one you’ll make.

So, you need lots of opportunities to shoot.

Do you know why no DTC travel startups ever work?

Because people just don’t travel all that much. The absolute most active traveler you know travels like 4 times a year. So, if you’re building a business to serve them, it’s nearly impossible to get enough reps in to combat all the things you’re going to be wrong about.

If you pick a problem that happens once a quarter, it’ll take you 2.5 years to get the 10 reps required to get through all the things you were wrong about. And you’ll be long out of business by then.

Find a customer that has the problem constantly. Ideally daily, maybe weekly. Get your 10 crappy reps in as fast as possible.

For our Myers Briggs friend, that’s a big check in the column of the HR customer. They’re dealing with new cases weekly if not daily. You’ll have plenty of chances to be wrong, which gets you closer to being right sooner.

The End - be choosy, but with action

This podcast isn’t an excuse for you to not take action. It’s not a free pass to say “well, I’m waiting for the right customer to come along,” because that’s not going to happen.

The right customer - the one that fits the criteria we spoke through - is out there. But they’re hiding and you’ve got to find them.

Your job is to dig through customers. To get deeper with segments and problems. To run tests that let the customer prove they’ve got a painful problem they’re willing to solve, that the problem comes up frequently enough that you’ll get a bunch of chances to try to help them be successful, that once they are successful that message will travel.

This will take time and reps to get right. Be patient. Because once it works - your growth will be explosive and compounding. If you nail the first customer, moving to customers to the left of them on the knowledge spectrum will be fast. Every customer you help be successful will be a marketing node that attracts a whole bunch more.

But only if you start with the right customer. The one that can kick it all off.

Otherwise, you’re running that marathon with a weight vest after a bowl of fettucini alfredo. Which reminds me, I’m hungry. Fettucini time.