How to get your first 100 customers

By the end of this email, you’ll know:

Getting your first 100 customers is massively important.

Your first 100 customers set the foundation of your business. They determine if you stay profitable and make money from the get-go.

But people waste weeks in planning or doing bad marketing.

Then, they wonder why they are losing money and have no customers.

To solve this problem and get customers WAY faster, I will share three free strategies I used to get my first 100 customers and beyond.

(Note: 100 customers is a goal, not a hard deadline to meet. Using these strategies might get your first $100 customer or 100 $1 customers. The emphasis is on how to actually get that customer.)

Message your friends/family/co-workers. Ask them to try your product. To sign up for your service. To give honest feedback.

Yes, this part is uncomfortable.

But once you get customers and feedback through your network, you see progress and start to stack these small wins.

Asking your network gets you skin in the game and makes you motivated to keep on going.

It doesn’t matter if your network isn’t the ideal customer for your business. Just ask.

Do you have the list of people you are going to contact? Good. Let’s keep going.

Here is the part people miss: they ask their network to try it for free without requiring them to buy.

I’ll give an example.

If you are creating a website design service, don’t design free websites for them and let them do no work. Treat them like a customer and make them put in the effort to inform you about their audience and to tell you about their competitors.

When you ask them to pay, your friends/family will take your business seriously because they are spending their own money.

Asking them to pay has two benefits.

First, the people you ask who aren’t your ideal buyer won’t buy because they don’t want to waste their money.

Second, you get paying customers (instead of just friends) who want to buy from your business.

And if no one wants to buy, that’s a sign that your offer isn’t compelling enough.

OK. You’ve messaged the people within your immediate network and got your initial customers. Now, you’re ready for the next step.

Organic content is huge.

You can get hundreds of customers and build a loyal community of customers.

But it takes time. A LOT of time.

Ready for another brutal truth?

Ok, here it comes:

You probably suck at making organic content. If you haven’t gotten thousands of views before, don’t expect to get it now.

I sucked at making organic content and quit TikTok and Instagram Reels after weeks of little results.

Don’t do that.

You see, organic content is a consistency game.

The more posts you make, the better the posts you’ll make. The more posts you make, the more people will see your posts.

If you aren’t willing to post for weeks or even months at a time, you will fail.

On Reddit, I’ve have 3,072 contributions. That means I commented and posted over 3000 times.

Volume wins.

Here are my best notes on organic content:

(DM = direct message)

Cold DM your ideal buyers. Talk to them, help them, then sell them your product/service.

This process requires the manual work of reaching out to people. But this is a great way to get customers.

Don’t be afraid to DM prospects. Yes, you will get rejected and called a scammer but don’t take it personally.

You don’t have to start with paid ads, and you shouldn’t market only through organic content. A DM is more personal and better for communicating with your target audience.

OK Warren, but who should I DM?

After someone follows Tyler on X, he has an automatic DM that asks to subscribe to his newsletter.

A clever way to get already interested followers into his customers.

-Warren

PS: How did you like the format of this email? I spent 5 hours this week on just this article and want to make this newsletter more interesting and helpful. Any feedback/thoughts are greatly appreciated.