14 steps for acquiring your startup's first customers:

1. Pay to interview people who've successfully grown a startup like yours. You can find them via LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

2. Ask them which 3 channels (ads, SEO, etc.) you should prioritize for acquiring customers.

3. Ask for examples of companies who run these channels well.

Some channels to ask about:

• PR
• Ads
• SEO
• Influencers
• Sponsorships
• Organic social
• Word-of-mouth
• In-depth content
• Referral incentives
• Product-led invites (think Slack, Zoom, Dropbox)

4. Reverse-engineer how those companies run their channels well:

A. Map each step the customer takes between the channel and becoming a happy customer.

B. Study what makes each step great: its pitch, its design, and its user experience.

Here's an example of steps.

• Someone sees your Facebook ad ← Channel
• They visit your page
• Enter their email
• Trial the product
• Pay for the product
• Stay engaged
• Refer more users

(Tools like Ahrefs + FB Ad Library show you competitors' ads and landing pages!)

I've helped 400+ startups acquire customers.

Here's the framework I teach them—for ads, content, referrals, and product.

Hope this helps! A thread:

Part 1. The growth trajectory

Steps I'm seeing startups follow in 2021:

1. Build an amazing product that naturally encourages word-of-mouth.

2. Then kickstart user growth with a scalable acquisition channel, such as ads.

3. In parallel, I'm seeing them spend most of their growth resources optimizing their user funnel + product experience.

At every step of the user's journey, they A/B test to maximize per-user revenue.

4. Once their funnel is profitable + efficient, they scale it.

They also start to experiment with many more channels until they exhaust all of them.

5. Over time, they switch their emphasis to more sustainable and cost-efficient channels, such as:

• Product-led growth
• Organic social
• Influencers
• Referrals
• Content
• Sales
• More

This removes their dependency on ads, which can be volatile.