What Works for Your First 100 Customers Won’t Work for Scaling — Here’s Why
And ignoring them = Failing your startup.
When I first started my journey in Jetpac Global, we were at the very beginning stages. We’ve been running this product as a local roaming product in Singapore, and it had proven effective with huge potential to scale beyond our home market. And that’s when the real challenge started. We had an ambition to go global, serve customers from all over the world. Yet, in the team, no one had global experience. We had to do it anyway.
Did we start with zero global customers? We sure did. And the early-stage marketing methods were drastically different from anything we’ve ever done. But we made it happen. We got our first 10 customers, and slowly, 100 customers, and it never stopped growing since. How did we do it, and what clicked for our first 100 customers? Here are some of my top learnings.
The Key Difference Between Early-Stage Marketing and Scaling
What we first need to understand is the fundamental difference between early-stage & and scaling focuses. The types of marketing you’d focus on are different because early-stage is all about validating the product idea, building innate trust with a targeted segment of customers who have given you their trust, and learning what messaging actually fits them. This in itself takes up the majority of the initiatives and time. We spent alot of time experimenting with channels, messaging, landing page optimisations and so forth, as well as talking to actual customers who bought into the product at the early stage to get insights. The idea of big budgets, big teams. big activities weren’t even in our horizons. It took us almost 9 months before shifting our focus to efficiency, automations and putting budgets into performance marketing channels for customer acquisition.
Be quick in Rapid Testing vs. Using Proven Strategies
Firstly, one of the key principles in marketing strategies for startups personally for me is that you actually don’t know anything. Forget about the fancy frameworks or what you may have learnt in theory, because they won’t apply at the very beginning. And hence, experimentation is key — try different messaging, platforms, and offers to understand what resonates with your target audience. The whole premise of testing and learning applies 10x at this stage because among the top 5 activities you attempt, it’s likely that only 1 will resonate with your potential customers. But in order to even identify the top 5 activities, you will first need a laundry list of 10–20 hypothesis, ideas derived from insights and more to be able to dive deeper. And we may not like to hear this, but speed is of the essence in this case as well. As technology advances and information is obtainable from many different sources down to AI, every minute counts here because a competitor might be well picking up their pace without you knowing.
We quickly learned, with several tests done, that Instagram was a place for us to scale versus the other social platforms, as well as what types of messaging were working for our global audience versus the original home audience. All these were then compiled to ensure we were consistent as we continued to execute more tests. Only when we found the ‘sweet spot’, we then focused on replicating what works at a larger scale and optimizing campaigns for better ROI. And even then, we continued to put other tests into the pipeline continuously.
Start with Community Building vs. Brand Awareness Spends
Now, one of the easiest ways big companies can scale, is through spending on Brand Awareness. Seems pretty easy for them because they can easily pump up their marketing spends to $1mil, $2mil anytime. For a startup, you can’t simply pull budgets out like this without a huge sacrifice to other aspects of the business. Hence, you can only start with building a simple, small but closer community of people by engaging with them, responding to feedback, and fostering relationships. The level of understanding towards your first 100 customers will go a long way for you in the long run where you find yourself being able to rely on your early adopters for feedback and ideas.
Of course, with that being said, maintaining a community’s one of the hardest to do and it does come with its own challenges. But at the bare minimum, you can simply start by reaching out to these customers personally to ask for feedback and strike an authentic brand presence with them right from the beginning. We were doing customer calls frequently and personally, checking in on their experience, and getting feedback on how we could improve our services for them.
And when you’re breaking out of the initial phase, that’s when you will shift towards broader brand-building strategies such as PR, brand partnerships, and performance marketing to grow reach. That took us almost 8–9 months as well.
Your Customers are Kings and Queens
I’ve touched upon it lightly in the previous point about customer feedback, and I’ll keep emphasising this point because it truly matters. As a new startup, you may have some hypotheses and ideas as to what you’re solving for your potential customers. But once you kick off the machinery, the most integral part is getting absolute clarity from your first 100 customers. Feedback from these customers will ultimately help shape your product further and refine your marketing messages to reach out to similar audiences. The idea of going personal works really well here to get quality feedback and inputs.
I remember distinctly talking to some key customers who gave me insights I never thought of, such as how our lounge access feature was a game changer for them (it never really mattered to the home audience), and who these customers were (they were largely the trip planners) and why such a product mattered to them. The more I spoke to them, alongside doing research, the more I identified more ideas and potential tests to execute. When the time is right to scale your business, that’s when your focus shifts to gathering such customer metrics at scale (e.g., surveys, analytics) for trend insights rather than individual opinions because the volume simply can’t be handled on a personal level. Even so, you’re able to still collect qualitative inputs from the comments, support tickets and etc to improve.
Why the First 100 Customers Matter Most
For a simple reason: These customers are your foundation. They provide real-life testimonials, case studies, and important insights that will drive future marketing strategies. Scaling becomes easier when your first customers are promoters of your brand and have an attachment. So, don’t neglect your early adopters, because they will play the most important part of your startup.