What has helped you get to your first five customers will not help you get your next 50 or 100 customers.
When you are a scrappy startup with new solutions it takes a lot of hustle to get your first few customers.
You don’t know what pitch will work, what is the idea customer profile or target segment or even if your pricing makes sense.

You end up using everything in your arsenal:
• Sheer effort, resourcefulness, quick to learn and change
• Banking on your friends, family and business associates to test, sign up, open doors
• Figuring out the pitch, pricing and positioning with some amount of trial and error
• Most of all you continue to listen and adapt
This works well for the first 5-10 (in the case of b2bs) but it could be highly counterproductive and time consuming when used for getting the next 50 or 100 customers.
This is one of the hardest shifts to achieve. How do you go from near chaos to a structured approach to building, marketing and selling?
It requires the use of frameworks, methodology and well defined processes for learning, adapting and scaling across all areas of the business:
• Starting with product – you need a clear product strategy and roadmap
• Design thinking – you must create well defined user persons and use cases
• Marketing and selling – you need well defined buyer personas, a crisp value proposition, key messages by roles, differentiation and a sales playbook
Are you ready to scale?