MBA2471 Q&A Wednesday: How do I get my first few customers for my new app?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, powerful business lessons you can count on. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenhom. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Clark. And Clark asks, I'm about to launch my very first web app. It's a SaaS product helping business owners integrate unique music in their media, whether it's video, podcast, or wherever they want to insert custom music. My question is, how do I get my first few customers?

0:50I'm very strong on the product side, but my weakness is marketing. Would love your help. Thanks, Clark. No worries, Clark. I got your back. Luckily, my strength is marketing and sales. And I'm going to explain to Clark and everybody who's listening, what's the best way to get your first few customers, to get that traction that you need to validate your product, to get feedback from those first customers and make some initial money, make some cash and start to get the ball rolling when it comes to marketing and sales and get on your way to having a successful business. Just for context, I ran a software company, a SaaS business, a web app myself for 10 years, Webinar Ninja, and I was exactly where Clark is right now.

1:3110 years ago, I had to get my first customers and then I had to get more customers and more customers. 30 ,000 customers later, I'm happy to say we had enough of success on our hands that we got acquired. So I'm going to share with you what actually worked in the real world with software and acquiring customers. We're going to zoom out a little bit, have more of a wider plan on how to acquire customers, especially those first ones, and how to build assistance that we can continue to get customers to buy our app. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Getting customers to exchange their money for your product is really when the rubber hits the road.

2:07That's really when you have a business on your hands. And Clark's about to launch his app and he wants to start selling and get new customers. So how does he get started? How does anybody get started? Well, let's back up a little bit. We have to start thinking about how do people actually buy? How do you buy anything? Okay. A lot of people think that all I got to do is say, hey, I have this thing for sale, create enough awareness, maybe run some ads and people will buy. That's just not how things work. Okay. That's just not how people buy. Think about the last thing you bought. It could be a TV, it could be a pair of shoes, it could be a vacation, it could be whatever.

2:42But most people, when it's time to buy something, it's not the first time they heard about this product or service. It's not the first time they thought about buying something or buying this product. There's a sequence, there's a process that people go through before they actually make that transaction. And we have to honor that process. That's a real thing. We can't just ignore, we can't just pretend it doesn't exist because we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot, it wastes a lot of money on marketing ads if we just pretend this process does not exist. So what is this process? Well, basically, people need to be aware of your business and what you do and your product way before they actually want to buy or need to buy.

3:25You have to be top of mind. So you are there and ready and top of mind when they are ready to buy. For example, I just went on a 500k bike ride for charity in Thailand. I am not really an avid bike rider. I ride bikes, you know, occasionally, you know, when I'm on holiday, on a tour or something like that, but not really seriously. I'm not, you know, riding 80, 90, 100ks a day, which is what I had to do on this bike ride. So leading up to this bike ride, I had to start training. I had to start understanding what makes it easier for me to ride for long distances. So I started to read some articles.

4:02I started to read some blog posts. I started to realize, okay, there's certain accessories that help like padded shorts or a gel seat that you put on your seat. And then I realized there's all the different kinds of shorts and all kinds of seats. Which one's better? What's the best product? What kind of features am I looking for here? It's a whole new world for me. I'm not even sure if I want to buy these things for just a short period of time, maybe a few days when I'm in Thailand. Do I actually need it for training? So there's an educational piece that came with it where I had to understand what I really need.

4:33I then attended a webinar on what is the essential gear you need when you start bike riding. There's the obvious things like helmet. But then I realized you also need gloves because your hands will start to hurt if they don't have any padding, especially your wrists, if you're leaning on the handlebars for hours. See, I wasn't even aware of the problems that I could have. And therefore, I wasn't even aware I needed these products in the first place. So say, for example, I started getting ads for gloves. I would ignore them. I'd be like, I don't need gloves. There's a grip on the handlebars. Why do I need gloves?

5:06So the why I need the product and the value of the product was something I need to be educated on before I was ready to buy. Eventually, I did buy gloves and it did help me a lot on the ride. I did buy a gel seat for my bike seat. I did buy padded shorts. Once I understood the use and the need, but there was a process involved. Okay. So when it comes to your business, your product, you need to educate your audience. They have to understand the value of what you're offering. You need to be able to be kind of their coach or mentor in understanding the use of your app, your course, your whatever.

5:46So the easiest way to do this is to get them on your email list. You need to get people on your mailing list so that you can educate them via newsletters, via great articles or posts or even mini courses. You might invite them to a webinar like I was invited to and learned all about all the things I need for biking. So even before you start thinking about selling your product, yes, you want to sell your product, you want to make money, this is going to happen. But there's got to be this piece where we nurture our audience and they get to know what we're all about and the value we offer. So your first job is again, get them on a mailing list.

6:22So one of the best ways to do this when you're launching a new product like Clark is, is to start a waiting list and to drive traffic to that waiting list. Now, you gotta tell people why the waiting list is important. Because again, they don't really understand the app, they understand why they need it. So you might wanna say, hey, if you wanna learn more about this app, get a demo, a live demo, learn the top 10 problems this app solves, learn why this app is gonna save you three hours a week, whatever it might be. You gotta give them a reason why to join your mailing list or join your waiting list.

6:52Say, hey, join the waiting list and you're gonna get all these benefits You're going to learn all about this stuff. Driving traffic to that page where you collect email addresses for your waiting list is probably the best thing you can do at the start. Why? Because now you have a database of people you can communicate with, nurture, and they can learn from you. Now, you have to understand, everybody on your mailing list is not going to buy, and that's okay. Everybody's going to buy at different points. The point of the mailing list is so that when they are ready to buy, they don't go shopping around.

7:22They go back to you. They buy from you because there's other competitors out there. There's other options out there. And remember, there's the option of not doing anything, all right, of just ignoring you and ignoring the problem they have and not solving it. But by being on your mailing list, you get to remind them of the value that you offer and the problem that you solve and why this is actually a win for them. Now, my advice to you, and this is something that I didn't do at the beginning of Webinar Ninja and started to do and really helped me, is I didn't just drive traffic to this waiting list or this opt-in so they get on my mailing list to anybody.

7:57I really started to understand who my target audience is, who would be perfect for my product because I want to get the right people because it's going to take time and effort to get people on my mailing list. I might as well choose the right people instead of just saying everybody in the world, come on my mailing list, and then they're not really interested. My message is falling on deaf ears. So before you spend a dime on ads to drive traffic to your waiting list or your mailing list or your opt-in, you know, I'm going to give a freebie away, a cheat sheet, a guide in exchange for being on my mailing list so that you can then nurture them and then sell your product.

8:33Before you spend a dime on ads, you need to know who you're targeting. You need to understand exactly who your audience is. I'm talking about not just demographics. I'm talking about interests. I'm talking about income, how they spend their time, what they're interested in, how they spend their money, all that kind of stuff. This is really important because you can really target and narrow down your search to people that are exactly who you need with the amazing tools of social media and ads on social media. So, for example, if I were running ads for my audience at the$100 MBA, I know exactly who I'm looking for.

9:12Most people that are interested in the$100 MBA, this podcast or our program, are people that are looking for the second chapter in their life. This is not their first career. Entrepreneurship's not something they're looking to do right out the gate. They probably are working in a job or have worked in a job and have transitioned to entrepreneurship. And so they're probably somewhere between their 30s and their 40s. And they could be a bit older as well. They have enough disposable cash to invest in themselves because even though our products are either free or$100, they're going to need to invest in themselves to be successful with the knowledge I give them, right?

9:47They're going to need to invest in starting a business, hiring people, run ads. So they need to have some disposable income to have a chance of success. They have to be open to learning and self-growth. So they have to be interested in personal development and business in general, be listeners of podcasts in the first place. So you get the point. I really have to understand who I'm looking after so that I get the right people on my list. Next, the easiest way to fast track your mailing list growth, which will lead to sales, is to run ads. That's it. Once you know your target audience and you're targeting this audience through your ads, you're really just throwing money at the problem here.

10:27And in this case, it does work. Running ads does help because you're basically borrowing the audience from Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, wherever it might be. You don't have an audience yet, but you want to get in front of people and these platforms let you do that if you pay the money. Now, you don't have to spend a lot of money to run ads, but I have to say, if you're going to do this yourself, there is an education piece. You have to learn how to run ads yourself. This might take some time. You could take some courses on Udemy or Linda, or now it's LinkedIn learning, and this is going to take some investment.

10:58But if you want to fast track it even more, hire an agency. There's plenty of agencies out there that will do this. There's a lot of freelancers on Upwork that will run ads for you, ranging from spending$200 to$300 a month to run your ads to people that are gonna charge you five to six to$10 ,000 a month if you're looking at a very, very highly successful agency. But the point here is just to get started. Understand that every market's different. Every value per lead is different. Some markets, you can get an email address or convert to an email address via ads for a few dollars. Some of them, it's gonna cost$15,$20.

11:34This is something that you're going to know when you experiment. And ads is all about experimentation. If you don't want to run Facebook or Instagram ads or paid ads in general, or maybe you don't have the budget for it right now, the best way to grow your email list is then using free content. You're going to have to spend your time instead of your money. This is like creating blog posts on a regular basis, two or three blog posts a week. This is like running a podcast like mine or publishing YouTube videos on a YouTube channel where they watch the content and then your call to action in the description or at the bottom of the blog post or whatever is sign up for my mailing list.

12:10Sign up and get this freebie. Join my waiting list and get these advantages. This is gonna take longer, but it will serve you long-term. I'm a big fan of content marketing. I think everybody should do content marketing regardless of the running ads or not. If you're running ads, it's just putting fuel to the fire. Now you're like, Omar, what's going on here? I get it. I'm growing my email list, but what about my actual sales? Yep, totally get it. And this is going to happen through the nurturing sequence inside your email marketing service, right? If you're using ConvertKit or Drip or MailChimp or whatever it might be, there's a way for you to send automatic emails to people that join your mailing list.

12:48And this is basically a curated way for you to educate new people that join your mailing list, give them the freebies you promised, but also help them out. give them value. Show them how they can excel in whatever they do in the market that you're in. So for example, Clark says he has an app that gives them customized music for their videos and their podcasts. So I would like to know if I were on his mailing list, how do I choose the right music? How do I make sure that I capture the right mood for the topic of my video, for example? What about for sales? What kind of music should I use for sales?

13:27What makes a catchy jingle? What makes it more engaging? Educate people about how your product and what you do can really help them and make their life easier, make them more money, save them time, whatever it might be. And this could be a series of emails. It could be one email a week or one email every few days. I'm a big believer that too many emails is not a good idea. I think one every other day for the first week is a good cadence to start with. And then once a week is plenty. And then, of course, once you've spent some time to educate them, let's say four or five weeks, you can invite them to learn more like a live demo, a webinar, or watch a video on your website or on your YouTube channel to learn a little bit more about how your app works and how it can help them.

14:14And then you can invite them to a sales call or you can invite them to buy right there and say, hey, I got an offer for you. Thanks for being on my mailing list. You can get 15 % off your first month. or if you're in software, free trials are great. It gets them through the door. And I like the method of free trial with credit card on file, which means that when they sign up for the free trial, they put their credit card in. And then when the trial is up, they get charged automatically. This requires them to be a little bit more committed and it gets you a little bit more of a serious customer.

14:41And you can decide on how long the trial should be. Every product is different, how long it takes them for the setup and get the value from your product so they can actually get a win. So that could be 14 days for you, it could be 30 days. And then after 30 days up, you can remind them, hey, your trial will be up in a few days. We're going to charge your credit card. You love the app. There's nothing you have to do. If it's not a good fit, you can cancel the site of your account. Free trials are a great way for people to get a chance to really fall in love with your product and see for themselves the value and a great way for you to convert.

15:12At Webinar Ninja, our whole goal is to get as many free trials as possible because we knew that if we got X amount of trials, we're going to get X amount of sales. We had about a 44 % conversion rate on trials, which is very good for our market, but that's because we spent a lot of time nurturing our audience before we invited them to sign up for a trial. Now, also consider partnering with other people that have audiences. Some people call this influencers, but they're more like partnerships and they don't need to be an influencer for this to work. They could just be somebody that has another app that is in the same market.

15:50So for example, let's say you know somebody has another app that works in video editing and they are always trying to find great music for the video editing. So you can partner with this business, this app and say, hey, if you refer me customers, I can give you a referral commission or a affiliate commission. If you email your list to join my webinar, anybody that converts off that webinar, I'll give you a kickback. You're basically leveraging another person's audience and it's a win-win because that audience will have more results with their app, the video editing app, if they have great music.

16:28They'll get better results. They'll stick around for longer and they get a kickback. They get some commission for inviting their audience to your webinar or to your sales page or to join your mailing list. We did this all the time in Webinar Ninja. We We partnered with so many people. We partnered with most of our integration partners. So for example, Webinar Ninja integrated with emailing apps like MailChimp and To ConvertKit and AWeber. And we ran webinars for MailChimp and AWeber and got exposed to hundreds of thousands of people because we just showed them how you can integrate our tool with their tool so that they can grow their email list and use AWeber more.

17:07And this allowed us to really get more customers that have never heard of us to learn more about us and sign up for our product. The last bit of advice I want to give you is that as you start getting these first customers, you've nurtured them, they've signed up, it's really important that you get feedback because you want to learn from customers, whether they're on trial or they've paid, what they love about your product and what you can improve upon. And you want to make these iterations as quickly as possible. Why? Because when we did this with Webinar Ninja, is that as soon as we started getting our first few customers, our first, I would say, 100 to 200 customers, we would get on the phone with them.

17:46We'd talk to them. We would email them. We would chat with them. We would send them surveys. We would learn very quickly and make quick updates and fixes. And literally in the first week or two of them being a customer, they would see improvements already. They would see updates. And they would say, wow, this product is really cool. They're constantly improving. They're listening to feedback. Tell them about this idea or give them this piece of feedback. and they actually acted upon it. The interesting thing is, is that they think we acted upon their feedback, but most feedback is going to be similar.

18:17And somebody told us that three weeks ago and we worked on it. And so they thought, oh, they just started implementing it and they made it happen in a couple of days. No, we actually been working on it for some time, but because often very powerful feedback or feedback that is worth implementing is repeated over and over by your customers. This allows you to keep your customers. It makes customer retention so much easier, which is so important, especially at the start, because you don't want a leaky bucket, meaning you don't want to spend time and effort and money to bring in leads and to bring in customers and then for them to leave after a month or two, because you're just constantly filling the bucket and the bucket just keeps leaking water.

18:58You want to keep as many customers as possible, keep them happy, and of course, improve your product along the way. So to wrap up, getting your first few customers is crucial, but it's entirely possible you have this mindset of nurturing your audience, educating them, getting on your email list, understanding that there's a process where I need to show them the value and earn the sale. And then they try my product, they buy it, I listen to it, I see it as a partnership, I see it as, hey, this person's gonna help me improve my product. I make improvements and I tell them about the improvements.

19:31This is very important. You can't just make improvements and not tell anybody. A lot of people forget this part. But every time we made an improvement with Webinar Ninja, our software company, we made sure we told everybody everywhere. We told them in a newsletter, we told them inside the app with a pop-up, we told them on our weekly webinars and announcements because it actually has no value if they don't know it exists, right? So if you made an improvement, add a new feature, you fixed a problem, and you don't even say, hey, by the way, remember that problem people have mentioned or that you mentioned?

20:01You can just email that individual customer. We actually fixed it, and it's all working great now. You have to tell people when things get better because then they see the value. They're like, oh, wow, this is really good. But a lot of people that do this quietly, it has no value. It has no use to your customer. Make sure they know. Thanks so much for listening to the$100 MBA show. If you love what you hear and you have a question you want to ask, go ahead and ask it away. Go ahead and email me personally, omar at 100mba.net. I read every single email personally still after 10 years. It takes me a little bit to get back to emails, but that's okay.

20:35I'll answer your question. Make sure that I give you some feedback. And if you'd like, I could feature your question here on Q &A Wednesday. If you want to support the show, if you think the show is great and you want to say, hey, thanks Omar, thanks team at the$100 MBA, the best way to thank us is to subscribe to the show. Go ahead and subscribe, whether you're using Apple Podcasts or Spotify or any app, hit that subscribe button, hit that follow button so that you get our next episode automatically and you show the algorithm, hey, this podcast is all right. Thanks in advance for doing that. Before I go, I wanna leave you with this.

21:09The way I see marketing and sales is like building relationships. You just gotta build relationships at scale. You're building one-on-one relationships with people that vaguely know about what you do. They get to know what you do. They get to know you and the story of your business and why you built it and how you built it and the way you're delivering the service and the product. And lo and behold, they start to love you. They start to really enjoy getting emails from you. And to the point where they're like, hey, let me give this product a try. And when they do, they fall in love even more. And you deepen that relationship.

21:41You learn about them. You learn about their needs to see how you can improve the product through their needs and through their wants. And the relationship gets nurtured even more and more and more. At the end of the day, your job as an entrepreneur is to help other people to add value to their life through your product or service. And if you do that well enough, they're going to be willing to pay you handsomely. So that's what the name of the game is. Hope this helps. Thanks so much for listening. And I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

22:17We'll be right back.