Watch this to get your first 5 customers

In this video, I'm going to walk you through how to get your first five customers. I'm going to show you different methods to do it completely for free, and then a couple methods you can do that are paid if you want faster results. Now, most startups die before they reach their first five or even 10 customers. So I made this video for you if you are an entrepreneur launching a brand new service, a brand new product, or a brand new offer. These are suggestions for different ways to acquire users. They're not mutually exclusive. You can try five different paths, see which one works and double down on the winner. So the first one I'm going to start with is reaching out to your existing network. A lot of people don't do this. For example, I didn't do this because I literally didn't know any content creators or influencers in my network. But if what you're building or what you're offering could appeal to friends, family or even past colleagues, then this is definitely an avenue I suggest starting out with. Now this can be tough for some people because these friends and family can be the same people who kind of judge you and don't understand what you're doing or why you're doing it. So funny enough, I do not use this acquisition path at all. I just completely skipped talking to friends, family, and past colleagues because I didn't want to deal with explaining. But if you have an offer, a product, or a service that your friends and family or past colleagues could resonate with, then this is definitely... a decent one to start with at least to get one or two folks using it. So for example, I know many consultants who started with a referral from a friend or family member or a referral from a colleague and you do that work, you do that initial work and then build a case study or testimonial from that warm relationship and then you can leverage that into your sales process. You can put it on your website, put that testimonial there. use that to reach out to more folks. It also gives you confidence because then you've actually tried implementing your product or service for a real person and you figure out a lot of kinks in a warm relationship. Because if it's, let's say you're a consultant, you're delivering for a cold client you've never met, you're going to feel like a lot more pressure to get everything right the first time. But if you're working with someone who's warm, who already kind of knows you or trusts the referral you came from. right you have a little bit more leeway to kind of figure things out and be transparent that you're at a very early stage of your offer so that's number one a lot of people skip this but again if you have a product or offer that could be relevant to folks in your warm network definitely tap into this number two a lot of people overlook this but sending dms directly on social media platforms especially platforms like instagram substack twitter and linkedin for example these are the platforms where i do occasionally check dms and i'll give you a real example of this from the past month so on linkedin i made this post which was not a call for uh agencies or video editors it was actually just sharing feedback from my husband about my youtube videos needing a little bit more polish right so this was not a call to hire people but he commented saying hey i really understand your channel and i made you a sample edits check it out if you have time he also dm'd me directly just in case i missed it on his comment so i'm going to show you that here loading here So this was January 15th, like literally one month ago. I re-edited one of your videos. He even made a before and after, right? So I don't know if this is still up. Okay, yeah, so let's just watch this. Okay, yeah, this mini-me definitely got, I don't know if you guys can see that in the screen recording, but this mini-me definitely got me over here. But yeah, so he just cold DM'd me this. So I said, pretty good, but too excessive, what's your rate? And then blah, blah, blah, we just engaged. back and forth and I ended up hiring him. So he's one of the folks I work with to edit my YouTube videos. And that was completely from a cold DM. Like I don't even really know how he found my LinkedIn post where I shared that, but it was highly relevant to that particular post. He commented on the post, then he cold DM me a sample of what he can do. I hopped on a call with him literally the next day. We really, really got along. He has an engineering background, hired him on the spot. And so the other... The aspect of DMs is you can use DMs to automatically follow up with people who expressed interest in your post. So this is an example of like kind of a one-to-one DM. Like he's actually doing the work finding influencers like me and creating samples for us. Another way to use DMs on social media is to create some kind of social content. and give people a lead magnet like, hey, comment this. So here, I was just having fun. So this is like an emotion I frequently hear from people. You want to make videos, but you have no idea where to start. You feel overwhelmed and crippled, and it's been a year since you said you wanted to start this, but you haven't yet. So I made this video, and then this is just like the visual hook, and then it transitions to... Hey, by the way, I can help you make these types of videos. Comment this to get the free template. And then I say this in the description as well. And you can set up automations with tools like ManyChat to basically automatically DM every single person who replies. So even though this post actually, I don't think it got that many likes, but it has almost 3000 comments. And this post is from yesterday. So imagine like 3000 people raising their hand saying like, Hey, I want this. Can you send it to me? So Instagram's really neat because it has integrations with many chats so that you can automate this. Like I'm not sitting here replying to people. It's completely automated in my backend. You can even customize it for each video. So let's say you're testing different offers. Like one video could be, hey, I'm looking into AI SEO. Comment SEO if you want my playbook. In fact, I think I have one. Oh yeah, this one. So this one has 2000 comments. This is my social SEO playbook. right? So 2,000 people interested in that, 3,000 people interested in faceless video, and then you can imagine some kind of third offer. Hey, raise your hand. And so that's another way to use DM automation. And even if you don't get 3,000 comments in a day, right, if you got 30 comments, like 30 people who raised their hands interested in your product or offer, that's huge. That is all you need to start with. So don't think you need like thousands of people. You actually just need one person. Five is amazing. Ten is like amazing when you're first starting out. Okay. So that's another way to use DMs, right? So you can DM people and be like, I want to like offer this or sell this. Or you could have people DM you. And I'll show you another example. So I literally went on Instagram. I searched my followers. And I was like, is anyone in the mortgage industry? Because I'm like exploring whether this could be an interesting niche. I just DM this guy. Hey, why don't more brokers post on social media to generate clients and referrals? Okay. He asked me a clarifying question. I said, well, mortgage brokers. He answered. And then I replied, well, I'm testing a value prop for mortgage loan officers. Post consistently, blah, blah, blah. He said, what about turning that into carousels or videos? And then he was like, yeah, I think I saw your post about it. And he's like, is this really Sabrina? And I'm like, yes, blah, blah, blah. Your platform looks interesting. Yep, I get it. But my point here is like, I DM people, they respond. You'd be surprised how often people do respond if you're professional and not super salesy. If you look at my original DM to him, it was literally like, why don't more brokers post on social media to generate clients and referrals? And if you look at his profile, he coaches. mortgage people to get clients and leads. So I just like thought of a question and asked him and then they replied. But yeah, people are human at the end of the day. It's like, just keep that in mind. Like when you're reaching out to people, like when he reached out to me, super professional, incredibly high value, right? Like before and after, like he could not make it any easier for me to click this and be like, oh, this is awesome. Let's hop on a call. So a lot of people kind of like skip over this one as well, but it's huge. Like I check my DMs, I check people who are willing to offer value. I check that all the time. But most people don't ever want to give value initially, they just want to DM and sell. I'm not saying that can't ever work, but it's a harder approach than just offering a little bit of value first, especially if you don't have a brand and credibility built up already. So number three. seems obvious but posting on facebook school except for our school group and whatsapp groups so i'll show you a real example of this so for marketing my app i'm in a couple facebook groups um i honestly neglect this path but every time i do it it works great like i get new users every single time so i don't think i've done it since october but there are a couple facebook groups around ai automation that i'm part of and i literally just copy paste this from my help docs, right? Like this, this is the description of what this automation does. Here's how it works. And then I posted the template in the comments, right? So this goes directly to my product help docs. And if people want to set this up, there's a tutorial how to set it up and they will use my product if they want to set it up. Didn't go viral or anything, but in these types of communities, every single person is like highly qualified because they are in a very niche Facebook group. for developing any. So even though it's not huge numbers, more people than this saw it, it's probably like thousands of people in the group saw it. These people also, you know, share automations with other people. And so it's just like a really targeted, focused group. And I have lots of other posts like this as well within that community. And so a lot of people kind of neglect this or they spam a little bit too much. It's like similar to number two. It's like, I'm going to post and I'm just going to sell, sell, sell without offering any value at all. But within these same communities, I just give a lot of automations that have nothing to do with Blotato. I also answer lots of questions and stuff. And so just keep that in mind whenever you're in any type of group. Don't try to sell hard all of the time. But if you become a very authentic member of that community, then when you do make your post, you get... people just supporting it, number one, sharing it, number two, liking, commenting, etc. Number four, obviously I talk a lot about this and I'm very biased, I think everybody should do this. Number four is post short content slash videos on social media. I recently launched a literal step-by-step tutorial on this, so like exactly everything you should do, I'm just looking for it here. like choosing a niche, copying hooks. This is the most important thing is number two. People try to be too clever, I think, in their hooks. Even I fall into this trap all the time. But if you scroll Instagram and you see a bunch of AI stuff, you're going to see the most viral content because Instagram, TikTok, they're trying to push you content that they know you will watch. So if thousands of other people watched it... they have good data on that then they're going to show it to you too so just use the same hook and by hook i mean like the title how everything's positioned so this was one example i gave this has 250 000 likes which means it has millions of views he's just sitting in a car very normal and this is the hook so just copy that like literally copy that hook copy the positioning don't try to be clever don't change the colors don't change the font don't shrink it like i know when i say copy hook and then people change a billion things don't do that try to look as closely as possible as the original video and then engage in the comments so i know a lot of courses say like engage engage believe in that for the primary platform you're focused so like if i decide to hunker down on instagram That would mean I have it on my phone and after I post a video, I'm going to engage for like that first hour. It does make a difference, especially when your numbers are really small to begin with. So I do encourage it, but people go way overboard on this. Like you do not actually need to engage ever in order to go viral. Like on Instagram, I didn't engage forever. Like I didn't even have a DM automation until like maybe. three to six months ago, which is sad. But it's not going to make you go viral. It's not going to 100x your results. But for videos that are good, it will give it a little bump if you engage in the first hour. If you notice one video is starting to be picked up, like it's getting more views than usual in your first hour, then double down just on that video. So how I do this, if I post a TikTok video and it gets more than, let's say, 10,000 views in the first hour, that's the one I'm going to double down on. I'm not going to like comment on all the other videos. I'm just going to like reply to the comments in that particular video. And that helps bump it up. But like, I can't reasonably do that for all videos across all platforms. So just choose which is your primary platform and engage just. And then, oh yeah, the other website I love pointing out, especially if you are building consumer apps, consumer products. Honestly, even if you're not, this website curates viral TikTok videos. And it's just always mind blowing to me all the different creative ways people are using hooks, text hooks, visual hooks to go viral and promote an app or product. So I personally learn a lot from this, even though my product is not consumer facing strictly, right? It's more B2B-ish, but there's just so much inspiration from like the types of content people watch and how it goes. So this one is like a book talk. app. And I don't know if they have samples here. So like 30 million views. The hook is y'all were not kidding when you said they made a BookTok app. So literally every single person on this call can make a video like this. Like there's nothing in particular special. It's not fancy editing, I guess is what I mean. It's not 20 years of domain expertise. So like there's nothing stopping you or anyone else from making a video just like this. And this got 30 million views. Like, I see this and I'm like, dang, there's so much room to improve as a content creator. Like, even for me, I get inspired by just like crazy hooks, creative ways to do things, etc. So this is my favorite website. I am subscribed to their newsletter and it's completely free. I don't pay for a subscription, but honestly, I would be tempted to for a month and just like binge all of the case studies. But yeah, I love their newsletter. It's like one of the only newsletters I actually look forward to reading every single week. And it is just... mind-blowing to me the types of videos that go viral and how they go viral. Okay, so that's number four, post short content videos on social media. Number five, I made this a separate item because it's a totally different type of work. I think making long-form YouTube videos compared to short-form videos, at least for me, like my short-form, very raw, authentic, and like unscripted. My long-form YouTube for the longest time was just completely unscripted. and off the cuff but now I'm experimenting more with like actually having an outline before I talk like that's what this is this is the amount of preparation I put into this which is going to become a YouTube video but now I have an editor right so he's going to be able to like take this and make it so here's an example though so if you are going to post long form YouTube videos I recommend like posting the videos that showcase your expertise so whatever space you are in like post a long form YouTube video that illustrates you as the expert and build your authority in that way. You can also post tutorial videos with your product or tool. So don't think of it like how to automate content creation. That's the title. And then your product or tool is naturally embedded in. So it's not like a use Blotato to do this title because no one would ever click on that. They don't know what your tool is. They haven't heard of it. but people want the outcome. So just think about for your school product service offer, like what is the end outcome? Is it understanding how to use cloud code, right? And maybe you have like a course or community specifically focused on that. Well, like don't mention that, just say how to use cloud code like a pro. And then you can plug your community within the video, you can put it in the description. So just think about what is the outcome that people want. And that's your title. Like that's how you get people to search for the thing and actually click on your video because you're claiming to teach them how to achieve the outcome they want. So here's an example. This is a pretty recent one. So I launched like any then AI automations course. So this is like how to build AI agents automations in edit then and like the very first video you're going to be using. Blotato to create a content automation. The second video, you're going to build your first AI agent that also uses Blotato tools, right? And then the third video is like logic and error handling. And there are going to be a couple more videos in this, but in every single video, like my product is basically embedded. So like that's one way to do it. And it's like... you know as long as people are learning massively right from your content and your tool is naturally embedded like that's that's a great thing in my opinion number six sending cold email so a lot of people don't like to do this but for my first startup it was all outbound sales so like i'm pretty familiar with cold email what you can do nowadays is use ai and automation to scrapes for example let's say you're targeting local small businesses in your area like literally scrape google business reviews within the zip codes near your area and then get their emails right and then send the cold email this one i think is underrated like cold email is it's free to send email and now that you don't have to put an unsubscribe link in your email basically like some things changed in the macro this can be really effective like i still open cold emails which might surprise people but i'm always interested in like things that could improve me improve my results etc so if a cold email proclaims to do that and they can back it up and it's the right timing i think that's a very difficult part but like sometimes i'll open a cold email from three months ago but there was a cold email i received literally three to four months ago from another video editor saying like hey i edited for this big brand name and at the time four months ago i was like no way i'm not going to do any youtube video editing like completely raw, unedited is my jam. But then fast forward four months later, I was like, you know, maybe I should experiment with like cleaning up my YouTube videos. Maybe they would get more views. So it took four months, but I replied to the same cold email thread and said, hey, are you available now? Like that was it. So I hired him as well. So he's great. So like, believe it or not, this, this can very much work. It's just the timing. is difficult to get right, which is why people send a couple follow-ups to stay top of mind, but you never know, right? So don't ignore cold email, even though it has a bad reputation. Again, if it's done well, like you're professional, you provide a ton of value in your first or second email, like people are open to it. People do open cold emails still. Number seven is submitting to directories. So there's startup directories like product hunts. This has been around, I guess, over a decade. I remember launching on it like a very long time ago. Oh here, view one launch. Oh that's so cool. So this was back before everybody had AI note takers on a call, believe it or not. Like the biggest objection I got was why would we want AI recording our phone call, which is so funny. So you can launch your product here on Product Hunts and if you get lucky, I think we got number three of the day. But we did get... thousands of people checking out our site. So this is a nice way just to get that initial set of users in. One of the techniques now is to launch regularly. So not super frequently, but launching twice a year when you have like major product updates. So you'll notice a lot of tech startups that are further along still launch on product hunts when they announce like new features or new product lines. There's also other ones such as there's an AI for that. So this is another directory you can launch on. I think it's paid though if you want to launch here so I didn't include it on the free list. And then there are tools, so I have not used this particular one, but there are lots of tools that will submit your startup to many many directories so that you don't have to do it manually for each one. So the value prop here is obviously saving you a ton of time so you don't have to like sit there and submit manually to each directory. and also building backlinks from credible sites. Because when you submit to these directories, which have been around for a long time and have good domain authority, then they link to you so you can start to get picked up by Google as well, and that helps your SEO domain authority. So I have not used this one, but there's lots of alternatives with the same value prop. again, submit your startup to many, many, many startup directories at the same time. Number eight is revenue share with affiliate partners who have a relevant audience. So this one is a little bit harder if you have like zero credibility and your product has zero successful case studies, right? Because if you think about it from the affiliate partner influencers, point of view it's like why would I share your products which may or may not work and may or may not be useful to my audience that I have carefully curated over the so this one is a bit harder to be honest if you have nothing. So you have no successful case studies, you have no credibility as an entrepreneur, you haven't built a startup or done big things in corporate. But it can still be possible, especially if you offer a really large revenue share and also offer custom support. I am going to absolutely focus on every single person of your in your audience and take care of them kind of level of support just like insane level of customer support so it can still work i recommend this after you've gotten your first like let's say 10 very happy paying customers because you can take those 10 customers create testimonials from each one and then go to affiliate partners saying i think this would be such an amazing fit for your audience it's already saving time for xyz person it's already helping this other person make money blah blah blah like you have real case studies you can share and honestly you're going to feel more confident when you pitch it because it's actually working for real people and it's not just like paperware but yeah this is very powerful one though especially to scale up. Like for me, for Bloatato, obviously affiliate partners have been a big part of that. On YouTube, making tutorials how to use Bloatato. And it's gotten to the point where like lots of random people I don't know make tutorials on Bloatato and I have no idea about it. And it's crazy. Like I'll just watch TikTok videos and I'll see. my product in their video. That's how I find them. It's like, I'm not like I see their, hey, have a blowtato thing within their TikTok video and I DM them and I'm like, hey, did you know I made that app? And they're like, wait, what? But yeah, and then I work with them and that's how the engine kind of keeps growing. Like affiliate partners at the top make tutorials. It inspires other people to also try it and make tutorials. And so it can be a really, really, really powerful growth engine. But very hard, I think, if you're starting from absolute zero. So just as a caveat. Number nine, kind of related to number three, but a lot of people don't think about product forums. So every major product you use, 99% of all the products you use have their own forums. So as an example, like Salesforce has its own forum. Airtable has its own forum. And it's just like, all these really niche questions about how to use Airtable for different use cases. And so I think Zapier famously started from a product forum where somebody was asking, like, when something happens over here, update Salesforce, something like that. And the founder of Zapier just like reached out to that person through the forum and was like, hey, if I did this, would you pay me X amount of dollars? And that was the birth of Zapier, like from a product forum in PainPoint. But the neat thing about product forums is like people share their pain points. How do I do this with X products? So if you go to Airtable's forum, if you go to Notion's forum, there's going to be like tons of questions. How do I do this? So a real example for my product is if you go to the N8N forum, make.com forum or Zapier forum, how do I post to TikTok? And if you see the answers, it's like you have to apply for a TikTok developer account, you have to get your app approved, you have to build this and that just to be able to like post the TikTok. That's a signal of a pain point that could be solved with like your product or service. And so I'll give you a couple examples of like NNN for example has a huge template library with over 8,000 workflows. If you search for my app, you'll see 45 different results. So many of them are from other people. I'm trying to find the ones from me. So that's me submitting my own template to the NNN forum. And I try to pack in keywords, right? Like social media carousels, social platforms with Google Sheets, tech news with your AI avatar, nano banana. And so people who are searching for this kind of thing can just find it in the forum and then download it. And here's another example. So this is the actual community forum for N8N. So it's separate from their templates list. This is their community forum. If you search for Blotato, you'll see a bunch of hits here as well. But when you're starting out, like I would search for pain points that people are trying to, it might be like posting to social media, might be automating social media posts, it might be a scheduling API, like think of those keywords and pain points. right and search for those and reply to them or make posts about how you solve that pain point with your tool number 10 is ranking an ai seo for a specific keyword so what i mean by ai seo is showing up in chat gpt's answers gemini's answers etc what's been really interesting is i recently put a onboarding survey in my app and i asked people where they come from and i i seriously didn't think people would come from like gemini i didn't even put that as an option to select but people kept typing other and typing gemini chat gpt so it's not a significant amount of traffic compared to other sources of my traffic but it's it's a non-trivial amount and i haven't optimized for it at all so i do not have a blog for my app like i don't do anything really related to ai seo or programmatic seo um but i think this is a really powerful avenue especially if you just initially focus on keywords like competitor name plus alternative. So in my space, it would be like air share alternative or cheaper alternative to blank competitor. That way it's very, very targeted because the people searching for that keyword are bottom of funnel buyers who are super serious. Like they're so serious. They have explored a company, a tool, and they're already looking for alternatives. Maybe something that's slightly cheaper. something that's easier to use, something that has a certain integration, whatever it is, but they're searching for alternatives. So if you're going to do this one, I recommend thinking strategically about what are those few keywords that you want people to find you for, and then create a bunch of blog posts with different variations on that keyword. So for this, it could be listing 10 different competitors. And then the keywords are going to be air share alternative, competitor two alternative, competitor three alternative. But yeah, think, just think about what that is and then create blogs and content that help you rank on that specific keyword. This will take time to build because if your website is brand new and Google, like you have zero domain authority, basically, it will take time to build this up. but it's definitely still a way to get again you only need like 10 customers to really help validate what you're building number 11 is to build free public lead magnets so For example, this could be a Notion spreadsheet or an Airtable spreadsheet or a Vibe-coded directory. So like this one, funny enough, right before this call, I loaded this. I haven't checked this in forever, but it was down because my Supabase powering this kept hitting all of its quota limits because there's literally thousands of people every month visiting this directory that I whipped up like in an hour. And so how do I promote here? So one obvious way is to have a link to your product. at the top right social media api i guess where that goes to um another way is to embed it naturally in the experience so let's say you're doing a directory of tools you could have your tool listed there in the directory and it could say you know featured or brand new right you could even pin it to the top of the spreadsheet right so it's a little bit of marketing for you and can drive people to your app who are looking for that specific thing So here, for example, if I'm looking for content creation, then some of these will include bloatato. Some of them won't. A lot of these don't include bloatato, but these that I put featured, they do include bloatato. Whereas if I'm looking for customer support, none of these are going to include bloatato because it's not relevant to someone who's looking for customer support, right? So this tool... is valuable on its own and your product is naturally embedded if someone is interested in the thing that you do so that's that option and then like i said in the first option you could also just put links at the top you can also gate access so it could be like you you see 1 000 things for free and if you want 500 more you have to put in your email or something right like so you can gate access in that way and ask for something in exchange so another example of this might be like, I curated 500 viral hooks for SaaS founders. And it's like literally a spreadsheet of hooks. And it could say, hey, if you want 500 more hooks that I've curated, put your email here. So that way you have the person's email. And if they're a good fit, you can DM them directly through what we talked about here, LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera, if they look like they'd be a good fit for your product. And so this is just one example of a free public lead. So people love like spreadsheets, curated things. People also love playbooks you could write one up in notion and offer that free right and you could just say hey if you are interested in this type of thing like click here or like contact me here so right now on linkedin for example i see a lot of seo playbooks or ai seo playbooks and then embedded within those playbook is like a lead magnet like hey if you want me to check your website and how well it appears in chat she beats like book a demo call or like it'll take or it'll take you to a website that will run the analysis and you get emailed the report so like that's like a whole other example of like a lead magnet funnel getting people to book a call with you so if you're doing like ai seo consulting number 12 is to offer influencers to host some kind of webinar or masterclass for their audience. So what this would look like is, let's say you run a school community in Vibe Coding, and I came to you and was like, hey, I noticed you run a school community. I can teach your school community all about Claude Code. Would that be useful? And then they'll be like, yes or no. Most of the time, they'll be like, yes. And I'll explain why later. But so then I would go, I'd show up and be like, okay, everybody, today we're going to learn Claude Code. And in the example that I'm going to show people in at least one of the examples, I'm going to embed my product. For example, I would say, okay, I'm using Cloud Code. Now I'm going to use Cloud Code to make a content creation agent. And one of the things it's going to do is publish to social media. and guess what i'm going to use i'm going to use my own product so people don't mind that as long as it's like 95 super incredibly high value the other thing too is like when you're building these types of real world systems in order for them to do something useful oftentimes there is some kind of paid service you're paying for. So if you use N8N or Make, they're not useful if you don't have subscriptions to anything. The whole point is that they connect your different subscriptions. So the reason why I bring that up is because people who are serious about building this kind of stuff, they're already paying for lots of... So don't feel bad that you're demoing something with your product that may require a subscription. Because people are kind of used to... As long as it solves a problem really well, well for a price that is fair. I don't feel bad about that. The other reason, so I was mentioning why would an influencer let you host a webinar masterclass when you don't have an audience and you don't have credibility yet with your product? I've been thinking about this a lot, but one of the things I've noticed is influencers are, we're just always on a treadmill and it's actually really tough because there's new stuff all the time, feel behind all the time. So influencers to kind of stay relevant are always looking for ways to like add value to their audience. So if you can come in and be like, I know a bunch of things about Claude Code and I'm going to teach it to your audience for free. That's a huge like boost to that's influencers audience because you're adding a ton of value to their audience completely for free and they look amazing because they were able to set it up so like so if you're shy about reaching out to influencers you know just you'd be surprised especially if you can cover a very hot trending topic so like clod bot right open claw super hot topic clod code is a hot topic clod co-work is a hot topic etc but yeah people are very much interested in learning this stuff and that's a really great way to get in front of an influencer's audience without having to pitch them to do like a revenue share if they promote your product directly. You're basically like getting access to their audience and promoting your own product within their audience. But again, the trick to doing this well is to give so much value that nobody cares that your product is there. Like so much value. So don't try to just like sell people on your thing because like that just turns everybody off and you won't be invited back. Number 13 is a reverse job board with Upwork. So if you're not familiar with Upwork, it's basically like a huge freelancer marketplace. You can post jobs on Upwork. You can hire freelance talents on Upwork. So it's pretty neat. And what I mean by reverse job board is you can basically look for job posts that contain the problem you're trying to solve. And then you can pitch. solving the problem with your tool or service. For example, let's go back to AI SEO as an example. So I would search Upwork for jobs related to SEO. And then I would craft a personalized, you can use ChatGPT to assist you, but you always want to put human touches because it really, really stands out on Upwork. Like everyone's trying to just like automate everything on Upwork. Don't do that. Put like 80% automation, 20% human touch in your proposal. And your proposal, should be tailored to exactly what it is they're looking for. And then you say, I'm pretty sure I can do this better at a fraction of the cost and time. Are you interested in learning more? And within your proposal, obviously build some credibility by reflecting that you understand their problem. So if their problem is like, we just opened a new restaurant and we're trying to rank on Google and like show up in results, but like nothing's happening. I don't know why. I don't know if it's a technical problem or like we're not making content. the right way or what we're missing. So you're going to reflect that you understand that by just parroting back some of the things they're talking about. Say, hey, these are the three things I would initially look at to diagnose the issue. And if it's one of these issues, I truly believe I can solve this for a fraction of the time and cost it would normally cost you to hire an SEO agency. Would you like to learn more? That's the pitch. That's what I mean by reverse the job board. Because the client is posting a job on Upwork and expect you as a freelancer to apply. But since they've posted that, you know that they have a very real pain point. You can even ask them more information about their pain point, even if you don't get the opportunity. Even if you don't get them to use your tool or use your service, you're going to learn a lot just by talking to them about what their SEO needs are. And you're going to understand whether your tool or service can help them solve their problem or And if it can, great. So that's one customer already, right? And then you turn that customer into a testimonial, and then you can do some of the other things as well on this list. Number 14 is creating a free custom GPT. So just keep in mind, ChatGPT's GPT store is used by millions and millions and millions of people. people. The distribution is insane. So for example, this was a very random GPT I made in like five minutes. I honestly didn't expect that many people to use it. I think it's over 25,000 or 50,000 people are using this. And it's really awesome. It's loaded with over a thousand viral hook from TikTok and Instagram. And when you download it, it says Bloatato everywhere. Like ready to scale? Bloatato. Viral hooks made by Bloatato. So this is just like free marketing and awareness for your tool or service. And it's distributed to millions of people. So, but again, you don't even need millions of, you're just looking for like five or 10 customers. So if I was super early on, I might say something more hands-on. Like if you need personal support for this, go like something very personalized to attract someone who really wants your help and really wants your service. If I could clone myself, I would just like have someone sit there and make a crap ton of custom GPTs for content creation and then plug my product naturally in the process. And then number 15, so this is not something I have done for my product or service. I think this works really well for any kind of consulting type of offer. So like building local relationships, for example, if you want to teach people how to use AI through AI education or workshops or consulting, reaching out to your local chamber. commerce because that's where like all new businesses kind of have to register and they lean on the chamber of commerce or similar resources. Maybe they are called different things in York, but think about a new business starting up. in your area. They're going to be like registering with different entities. They're going to be Googling online, like best practices, start a business in this area or in this zip code. Like there's going to be local resources that help that business get off the ground. Those are the things you can plug into to build relationships because they know all of the businesses in your area. Another alternative is local Facebook groups. So this is very, very underrated, but my local Facebook groups are insanely active. Like people are always sharing, hey, do you know someone who can mow the lawn? Hey, do you know someone who can babysit? Hey, do you know someone who can dog sit? Like, it's just really, really active. There's like, you're probably in a town or city with at least 10,000 people. So think about local relationships. This works especially well for anything that's very people heavy so ai education ai consulting ai training okay so that is a list of free ways to acquire customers and i recommend everybody start out with freeways before spending a lot of money on paid ways but it also depends on whether you have budget and like how fast you want results i still recommend to not underestimate all of these free ways to get customers and at the end of this i'll show you all the ones that i actually use and then the ones that I don't use and then the ones I want to use but haven't gotten around to using so that'll be a really interesting list. On the paid list number one on the paid list is paying for leads and emailing them with tools like Apollo and I have seen this startup grow from the very very very beginning like I said I used to do outbound for my first startup so outbound email outbound sales outbound linkedin apollo has grown incredibly since then and i'm not saying this is the only tool out there but you want a tool that makes it as easy as possible so why i like this one is because you can get access to all of the leads in one place and email them in one place so you don't have to pay for like one tool for buying the lead list and then another tool to actually contact This is all included in one platform and the pricing is reasonable as well So like when they say 48,000 credits here to look up a leads email is one credit There's some other things as well that will consume credits But even on this $80 plan you're talking about reaching out to thousands of potential leads per month like easily on this $80 plan and it includes all of the email sequencing and nurturing so you can follow up and hit them up multiple times so yeah that is a really cool tool there again others like it right you know if you're short on time you don't want to have to like set up multiple tools and coordinate them I think this is a really great alternative to hit the ground running and basically start sending anywhere from 1000 to 5000 emails to new potential leads per month. So one of the pitfalls, though, for outbound email is like it can be really tough if you have no idea who should use your product. Right. So outbound email works super great when you have a clear idea who should use your product and a clear idea of what value prop will resonate with them. If you. have no idea yet you know you probably don't want to start with a thousand emails out of the gate you might want to test smaller segments so let's say you have a list 300 small businesses of a certain type let's just say like restaurants to make it easy so 300 restaurants in new york city That's what you're going to be testing. And then what you're going to do is you're going to A-B test the email subject line. You're going to test the core value prop in the email. Make sure in the first email you send, you don't include links, images, videos. Like don't send sketchy stuff. Like just text in the first email. Probably in the second email is maybe a link in the third email. The truth is like if people are interested in your thing, they can just Google it. Like if I send an email with my app's name, A person who's interested can just Google it. if they're if they are really interested in learn more or they can reply to you being like hey let's set up a book that's that's what I did that's why I started this video is like showcasing real examples of two people who cold emailed me and I was like okay so one was a cold LinkedIn DM and the other was an actual cold email but it works especially when your message is like highly targeted highly relevant value prop is clear you're not super spammy you're not super salesy and you make it easy for someone to reply back to you number two is spinning up a Facebook ads funnel to a landing. So you may have heard of things like VSL or video sales letter. You don't necessarily need a video, but that term was popularized for a long time. So what this means is running Facebook ads that direct people who are interested to some kind of landing page. Your landing page could be your product where they can sign up immediately, but it also could be a landing page where they just book a meeting with you. So it depends how early on you are in your journey. So like if you haven't built anything, you can actually still use this. Just have them book a demo or book a meeting or book a call and then hop on the call with them and ask them about what their problems are. So like you can obviously achieve the same thing for free up here, but if you have the budget and you want to shortcut the time, you want to compress the time to like learning these things about your target customer, this is actually a pretty decent way to do that, especially because you can control the targeting a little bit. So one dimension we haven't really talked about is like, to what extent can you control the targeting in some of these channels? So for example, when you post a TikTok, it's very hard to control the targeting. Like you can put hashtags, you can put keywords in your video and your description, but like at the end of the day, you have no idea who's watching your video. Like the data they give you is very, very basic stuff like age, country, and that's about it. Whereas in Facebook ads, you have a lot more control the targeting so you can test different groups so let's test if our value prop resonates with restaurants in new york city maybe it resonates with restaurants in la so those are two different segments and with facebook ads you can actually not completely control but kinda control who your ads are being shown to so you have like clearer data on which segments are resonating with your value prop. So for example, in my case, like if I had to make an example with my product, like I would test in ads to N8N users and also ads to Make.com users and also ads to Zapier users and actually see if any of them like have a much stronger response in Facebook ads. Like that's an example you can segment. And how do you know that they're N8N or Make or users? it's in Facebook, you can select things by interest or if they like certain. So it's not perfect, but it's like a better proxy than what you get with typical social media, which is that you can't control it at all. So yeah, that's that's one nice thing. But you know, this can get expensive really fast. So like if you're looking to seriously do this, like it's going to cost at least $500 right to get enough data to get people in your funnel, you're gonna probably mess up right with that doesn't convert, meaning like stuff people don't want to click. Right. And so it does take money. So it just depends how far along you are in that journey and how much budget you have. And I'll just say again, like the results you get from paid, you can also get the same results from the free sources. So it's not like you have to go with these paid routes, but I'm just giving different examples. Number three is vibe coding small apps and tools to drive traffic to your site. So one example that has done this really well for a long time is Tapleo, which you may have heard of as like a LinkedIn writing tool. So if you scroll all the way down here to their free tools list, they have a LinkedIn post generator, video downloader, headline generator, profile. These are really specific niche tools. where you just put in your URL, you put in the email, and then you get a report. For the headline generator, like describe what you do, and then you get a report. Profile optimization, but this is a newer one. But yeah, this is a micro tool. And like the entire point of it is to attract people who are trying to play the LinkedIn game. Because like, who else needs this? So it's very much geared towards like creators who are very serious on LinkedIn, which is their target buyer. It's actually not too bad now, but it used to be more expensive than this, I remember. And the reason why I this as paid is like realistically if you are vibe coding a lot of these tools you will need to pay for some kind of vibe coding tool and also hosting the tools but you know it depends on your technical ability as well if you're pretty technical you could also do this like entirely free as long as the pool doesn't cost money to use. So for example, if your tool generates AI images and videos, that is going to cost you money, right? So that would be an example and you have to host it as well. But I generally put this in the paid section because like realistically, you're going to probably pay for some vibe coding tools and hosting to make this happen. But this is a really, really powerful way to generate leads. Like people are searching for this specific thing. How do I optimize my LinkedIn profile? How do I generate a viral post on LinkedIn? Right? So this is a free tool to do that. And then people who like this kind of thing, like your tool, then they'll be introduced to your product like pretty naturally here. Number four is getting micro press coverage with Haro, which is help a reporter out. an AB Newswire, which is something I'm starting to experiment with but don't really... have any results yet. It basically allows you to answer journalists calls for quotes. So journalists will be writing a story, let's say it's about like AI in the C-suite, and they'll put out a call for quotes. They'll typically specify the background of the person. So it might be like somebody in AI, like an AI educator, or if it's a more technical thing, maybe it's like a CTO. And then basically there's a database and you can apply to be quoted. So I have used this. I use this in my first startup and I think we got in like Business Insider and some other notable publications and it's literally just like one quote from you, your name, your title and like a link to your website. So it's also great for backlinks. But yeah, so this is paid because I'm pretty sure you need to pay to be able to like access the database on a daily basis. But this is nice, especially to build up your SEO as well, like having your company name or product name like appear in these publications because you can say Sabrina Romanoff, founder of blank, right? And then that will be, that will help towards SEO to build credibility. Another one is called AB Newswire. So this one just starting to experiment with it. And I really had never heard of it. I found out about it from watching an Instagram where the guy was like, we paid for an $80 AB Newswire press release. And we started showing up in chat GPT AI answers for this particular keyword. And so this is something I'm experimenting with now, but basically you pay for each. press release you want to do, you kind of want to target it around a keyword you're trying to compete for. So in my case, it might be social media scheduling API. So the press release will just be like, we'll just mention that all over the place, like social media scheduling API, social media scheduling API. And then this will go out to a bunch of news outlets and hopefully drive traffic to your site. And the one I'm testing is just this $80 one, right? Like I'm not even looking at all of these, but if this works, that would be super. super, super great. But yeah, I just wanted to list this here because it is an option to get a little bit of press coverage and backlinks to your site and help also build up press mentions of your product. Number five is listening to social conversations and engaging naturally. And there are lots of tools to do this. One of them is called OG Tool. I have not tried this myself. right? So there are lots of tools to do this. I am just sharing one particular example. But the goal here is to use some kind of AI or automation to listen to all of the conversations that are actually happening on social media, for example, Reddit, and then surfacing the ones that are most relevant to your product or service. And then once you have those, let's say every single day, you get an email with like the top three Reddit posts that are highly relevant to the pain points you solve, then you go in there and reply. And like your reply there, you know, will be indexed by ChatGPT and other LLMs. So you can also build up your credibility with the AI engines that way. But most importantly, like if you're discussing a pain point in a Reddit thread and you come in there with a really authentic, high quality answer, people may DM you, right, about your product, service or offer. Or if you figure out a way to like weave it naturally in the post. people can also just go look up what your product or service is. So the concept behind this is like using AI to listen to what people are actually talking about right now. And then AI surfaces those conversations to you so that you can reply naturally. And what people kind of mess up with this is they try to also use AI to reply. I don't think that's as effective as like, you can use AI obviously to draft a reply with the common things about your product or service, especially if you've trained a GPT or something that knows a lot of context about your offer, that's great. But you really do want to take that little bit of time to add a human touch and just be real because people appreciate that and it stands out like crazy. And I don't mean just make a typo just to look like a human wrote it. I mean, if someone's sharing a personal pain point, you share something personal too. just be a little bit vulnerable like you know it just makes a really big difference so i'm a big fan of using ai to like sift through all the noise and find signal right? Like find the top three most relevant conversations to my product, service, or the pain points we solve. But then, you know, just be a human when engaging in those conversations and you're going to get far better results than like trying to automate the entire thing from start to end. And then the last one I'll mention, I think that was already 20, but 21 was sponsored niche newsletters or micro influencers. There are lots of platforms to do this. And honestly, you don't even need this platform. You can just DM influencers. right. You can just email the newsletters. They all will take your money, right? But I'm just giving an example of a platform that streamlines the process. So this particular platform has like a whole curated directory of influencers and you can like see their price points. You can reach out to them to do sponsored posts, like all of these different things. So if you're launching your new product and you have budgets, this is just a streamlined way. It's not better. It's just more streamlined. because it curates a bunch of influencers. So you can just search in one place. So for example, let's say I'm looking for AI influencers with less than 50,000 followers who have a LinkedIn, who have a newsletter and who have an Instagram. And then you're going to get that list of influencers fit all your criteria. And then you can message them directly and negotiate a custom package for your launch or for your promo or influencer videos. With that said, you don't need a platform. platform like that, you can also just DM micro influencers in your niche. Where people go wrong with starting with influencers is like trying to get the big ones first. You really don't need to because someone with 1000 followers on TikTok has the same likelihood of going viral as someone with a million followers, especially on TikTok where it's like very democratized. And so what you want are micro influencers who understand your audience really well. And it doesn't matter if it's like 1000 followers or 50,000 followers. I mean, it matters to your bank account. but it's unlikely to matter in terms of performance, in terms of actually attracting users to your app. You just want people who really understand your space and understand your product so they can communicate it in the right way. One of my biggest challenges with influencer marketing early on is, especially for the API side of things, non-technical influencers do not understand the product. And so those influencers who couldn't understand it could not communicate what it does. And even when they tried, It was very inauthentic. And so just keep that in mind. So you're looking for micro influencers or micro newsletters that just really understand the pain point you're solving and they understand what you're building and why it's different from other stuff out there. If they can understand that, then they can articulate that in a way that is like truly authentic to them and their audience. And when you're starting out, I recommend just sticking to micro influencers because you'll. likely have a smaller budget and that's okay. Like just start with micro influencers. Again, you don't need like 5,000 customers. You just want to get your first five customers to start with. The last part of this is I'll show you what I've actually done for my app versus plan to try out versus haven't done at all. So things in green are the things I have actually done for my app. Things in yellow are things like I'm kind of in the process of doing kind of slowly but not high priority. And things in red are just things I haven't done at all. That doesn't mean I'll never do them. Here I'm just trying to illustrate the real picture of like just things I've done that work, right? And things I just haven't done, haven't gotten around to. And things that I want to do but just, again, haven't gotten around to. And you'll notice is like a lot of this is green. because like I try a lot of stuff, especially like these that are content related are very complimentary, right? Like I can post a short form video on social media, grab the transcript and then post it on Facebook or post it in a school group. I can take an affiliate partner who made a video about my product and riff off of that video and make my own short form video or make my own long form video. I can take a template from one of the affiliate partner, riff off of that template and make my own template and post it in the forum. I can take a lead magnet like this and create a GPT out of it. In fact, I did that. So I had a viral hooks database of over a thousand hooks I scraped from TikTok. I made it a public lead magnet and then I loaded it up into a custom GPT. And now it's used by thousands and thousands of people. This one I've done and lost a lot of money on, so be careful with that one. And then vibe coding, you know, little apps, little tools. I do that as well. I actually have been wanting to do this a lot more, but it's just, it's just like time, honestly. And then these things in yellow just haven't gotten around to, like I plan to. do all this. I just haven't done that. This is something I'm actively doing right now, but it's still like not that high priority. This is something I want to try. So I literally just hired someone who is a Blotato user and affiliate, but their expertise is also email marketing. And I was like, oh, okay, well, why don't you just like try this for me? We'll just try it for three months and see how it goes. And then this also starting to try this with AB Newswire and stuff. And then Reddit is just stuff I haven't done at all. I think I just don't have like that many friends. I don't know. I was like, I don't even know who I would reach out to for this one. I don't know. So if you feel like you have no friends, you know, that's okay. Me neither. So it's fine. And then sending cold email. I really haven't done this. I think I was so scarred from cold outbound for my first startup. I really avoided it, but I see the power of cold email. Like if you can really get your targeting right and your value prop, right? I mean, it's, it's incredibly cost effective as well. I don't really do this, right? This would be a bit too. manual at my scale and then i don't really do local relationship or blowtato but that's because i'm introverted so i just don't like talking to people and then listening to social conversations this is something like on my to-do list like it would be nice but i just i just haven't gotten around to it i see the value in it i just like haven't gotten around to it because i i have so many comments and stuff coming in every day like i don't want more conversations i guess but yeah so i just thought this was interesting to put together just so you guys can see all the different things that I've tried and that I do. Like, it's not just one thing. I try lots of things and then I kind of double down on the things that seem to be working. So hopefully this was helpful. My advice in... thinking about this list is to identify just a handful that you think would be a really good fit for your audience, for your particular product, service, or offer, and then try those out. You don't have to do all 20 of these at the same time. Just try a couple of them out, see what works, get the data, double down on the winners. That's generally the process. And it's okay if one doesn't work. Like I have poured a crap ton of money, like more than a hundred thousand dollars just on this one. And it's been very negative ROI. And like, that's okay. Just move on. Right? It's okay if you do something that doesn't work. Honestly, like there's so many free ones that are underutilized. Like even in the process of coming up with this list, I realized, oh, I should do this more often. Like why was my last post? on October, you know, like, shoot, I should do this. I haven't even started doing AI SEO. Like, oh my gosh, I'm like way behind. But yeah, I just really wanted to illustrate that there's so many different ways to get users. If you do not, for whatever reason, you don't want to post content on social media, that's okay. There's all of these other avenues to getting your first 5, 10, 50, 500, eventually 5,000 users. And that's kind of the crazy part about this too. Like growing from zero to now over 5,000 customers. like and I'm still doing these things like it's not like any one of these things just stopped working that previously were working in fact that's really interesting the ones that the channels that are still working are still working like 100x more users later and it's just about like doing more of it doing it better but it's not like i've tapped out any particular so if you're looking at this and you're like well i tried this for a while but i think i tapped it out like 99.99 percent of the time you absolutely did not tap it out right there's plenty of other groups there's plenty of other communities there's like at least 10 social media platforms i haven't even tapped out social media platforms for my own brand because there's like at least five major ones that I'm not even on. So just just keep that in mind. Each one of these has a lot of depth to it and just because you tried it a few times maybe it didn't work that's okay. Like keep trying that same thing or try another thing but don't give up. Don't think that you can't get users or like it's too hard to get users. There's so many different ways to get users even if you don't have a personal brand today.

Watch this to get your first 5 customers

In this video, I walk you through exactly how to get your first five customers for your new product, service, or offer. Most startups die before they reach their first five or even ten customers, so I made this guide specifically to help you cross that crucial milestone.

I break down different methods to acquire users completely for free, along with a few paid strategies if you want faster results. You don't have to use all of them—just try a few paths, see what resonates with your audience, and double down on the winner.

In this video, we cover:

👉 Free Strategies: Tapping into your warm network, sending automated DMs on Instagram and LinkedIn, ranking in AI SEO like ChatGPT and Gemini, submitting to startup directories like Product Hunt, and building free public lead magnets.

👉 Paid Strategies: Paying for targeted leads with Apollo, spinning up a Facebook ads funnel to a landing page, securing micro-press coverage, and sponsoring niche newsletters.
Real Examples: How I hired my video editor from a cold social media DM, and a transparent look at the exact strategies I've used to grow to over 5,000 customers.


Whether you are launching a B2B SaaS, an AI tool, or a consulting offer, these customer acquisition channels will help you get off the ground even if you don't have a massive personal brand yet.

00:00 - Intro & Free Strategy 1: Tap Into Your Existing Warm Network
02:35 - Free Strategy 2: Automating Value-First Social Media DMs
09:16 - Free Strategy 3: Providing Value in Niche Communities & Skool Groups
11:01 - Free Strategy 4: Using Viral Hooks for Short-Form Video Content
15:36 - Free Strategy 5: Building Authority via Long-Form YouTube SEO
18:13 - Free Strategy 6: The Right Way to Send Targeted Cold Emails
20:19 - Free Strategy 7: Launching on Product Hunt & Startup Directories
22:10 - Free Strategy 8: Revenue Sharing with Affiliate Partners
24:43 - Free Strategy 9: Sourcing Leads from Product Forums
27:20 - Free Strategy 10: Ranking in AI SEO (ChatGPT & Gemini)
29:31 - Free Strategy 11: Launching Free Public Lead Magnets & Directories
32:38 - Free Strategy 12: Hosting Free Webinars for Influencer Audiences
35:54 - Free Strategy 13: The "Reverse Job Board" Upwork Pitch
38:23 - Free Strategy 14: Driving Traffic via Free Custom GPTs
39:30 - Free Strategy 15: Building Local Relationships & Chamber of Commerce
41:15 - Paid Strategy 1: Buying Leads & Emailing with Apollo
44:29 - Paid Strategy 2: Building a Facebook Ads Funnel to a Landing Page
47:26 - Paid Strategy 3: "Vibe Coding" Micro-Apps for Organic Lead Generation
49:25 - Paid Strategy 4: Securing Micro Press Coverage (HARO & AB Newswire)
51:33 - Paid Strategy 5: Using AI for Social Listening & Authentic Engagement
54:16 - Paid Strategy 6: Sponsoring Niche Newsletters & Micro-Influencers
56:56 - Final Review: Which Customer Acquisition Strategies Actually Work?

--

I'm Sabrina Ramonov. I'm on a mission to teach 1 million people AI. I'm also the solo founder of Blotato.com. It's a SaaS app for creators/entrepreneurs to go viral faster with AI, just like me (0 to 500k+ in 6 months solo).

How I got here…

0: Born in Quezon City, Philippines 🇵🇭
22 yrs old: Graduated UC Berkeley with degrees in Computer Science and Physics... and $250k in student loans.
23 yrs old: Started Qurious, as Founder/CEO, doing natural language processing (AI) in healthcare.
25 yrs old: Closed pilots with billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies, but failed to reach product market fit.
26 yrs old: Pivoted Qurious a lot, then settled on real-time call guidance for sales and customer support, combining streaming speech recognition (AI) and natural language processing (AI).
28 yrs old: Made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, while living in a living room of 2BR San Francisco apartment.
30 yrs old: Sold 100% of Qurious to Pegasystems (NASDAQ: Pega) in cash and stock deal ($10M+ total).
31 yrs old: Integrated Qurious with Pegasystems Customer Service to launch Pega Voice AI, now used by 1000s of support agents.
32 yrs old: Started angel investing in VC/seed funds, crypto, and passion areas 🍄 while recovering from burnout by hiking, skiing, and reading. Dropped 50 lbs to get back in shape.
33 yrs old: Started making free content to teach 1 million people AI.
34 yrs old: 0 to 500k+ followers in 6 months with $0 budget, 0 team, $0 paid ads, 0 masterminds.

Today: Started https://Blotato.com to distribute 100+ pieces of content per week. 1000s of creators & entrepreneurs use Blotato to go viral faster with AI.

Get FREE AI prompts, playbooks, and agents 👉 https://sabrina.dev/p/free