8 smart tips to get your first 1000 customers

Eight tactics to move entrepreneurs in the right direction when it comes to customer acquisition. Anyone has more tips to share?

1.  Introduce a waiting list

Effective for mobile apps and innovative online services. Attract those early adopters that are anxious to try something new. Give benefits for users to register early, such as a free membership plan for a month or something.

2. Attract the influencers

Reach out to those bloggers, offer them to test your product and do a free giveaway contest. It a simple tactic yet a powerful one if you identified the right influencer for your product.

3. Work with early adopters

Reach out to these early adopters. These group of people are ideally your power users. Establish relationships and talk to them. You want to set up a constant feedback loop with them too.

4. Toy with suspense

Once you have generated certain buzz and traffic, mess a bit with people’s curiosity and build up suspense before the launch. Create a drip feed of information about your upcoming service and give away one bit of information at a time. The more you give away – the less anxious and excited the audience gets. Try to keep people intrigued without revealing too much about your concept, so that the audience won’t get bored.

5. Create valuable content

This is part of content marketing and it’s one of the most effective way to acquire your customers. Invite people to guest post and remember to share it on your social media channels. Also, if you don’t already know, getting other media channels like Business Insider and/or Life Hacker to republish your articles will stand a chance for massive customer acquisition.

6. Team up with other businesses

Think of companies that could indirectly help with promoting your product. Most importantly, the partnership should be a win-win situation in the long run.