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Edward Cederlund

How did you get your first paying customers?

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Hi everyone 👋 Would love to hear what you did to get your first paying customers outside of your family and friends group. We’re about to roll out our product and I’m curious what has worked for you. Thanks for sharing 🙏
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Aliaksei Saskevich
I would like to tell not about my first paying customer, but about first payments I got from my pet-projects. I started my tech career with creating custom add-ons to Minecraft. After completing the first version of one of them, I started to publish it through author-content-delivery systems. But the launch is not only about writing code and publishing release. It is also about marketing and support. So I started to write on different forums, chats, groups... And after the first month of hard-working, I got my first payment.
Edward Cederlund
@asaskevich boom! 👏
Sreenatha Reddy K R
Hello Ed, I got my first paying customer way back in 2004 through odesk. Later, They renamed the platform to upwork.
Edward Cederlund
@sreenatha i remember the days of odesk! golden times. what exactly did you do on odesk to get your first customer? thanks for sharing
Udit Tehri
It was 1 January. Got my new year present
Edward Cederlund
@udittehri nice. started off the year on the right foot, congrats! you mind sharing how did you get your new year present?
Ashok Singh
through personal network connections
Edward Cederlund
Albin Aronsson
Cold reachout > demo meeting > pilot > paying
Edward Cederlund
@albin_aronsson smooth :)
Nikhil Sharma
I got my first paying client, some one of colleuge refer me for web analytics tracking and data reporting through looker studio by adding sources like MySQL, Google analytics, event tracking through GTM
Denis Ciccale
In 2004 I created a post in a couple of forums of back then, offering web development services in Argentina. I was 16yo, still in highschool, and someone contacted me through the forum, later by landline telephone, and it became my first customer. He lived 400km away from me, and needed a website for his hardware store. flash intros where hot back then, it's a pity because unfortunaley I don't think I can recover any of that website or anything I did back then, the computer was my parents' and they have switched device meanwhile, funny thing is that when I asked my mom if she formatted the disk before giving her computer away, she didn't understand what I was asking, so I like to believe that those projects of mine still exist somewhere. Finally, I had 100% profit because I would use a combination of free services like, hosting providers, dns providers, and local domains in Argentina (.com.ar) were free back then, so I did not have any cost for hosting the website and keeping it online.
Edward Cederlund
@tdecs haha wonderful story! where in argentina were you, and where was your customer? love that place :)
Denis Ciccale
@cederlund I was living in Buenos Aires province (city called "Pilar") and my customer was somewhere near "Mar del Plata" (in the coast). Eeither between "Chascomús" (200km away from my address back then) and "Mar del Plata" (400km away) is what I remember. The store was called "Pixel Computación" and he paid me through my dad's bank account, I charged 30$ ARS (or Argentine pesos) for the entire website, minus 4$ of the transfer cost which I didn't know that was gonna be paid by me, so I received a total of 26$ (ARS). which at the current conversion would be equivalent to 0.14 USD anyhow I was so happy about this transaction a part from the story, what I am trying currently to get a first paying customer, in very early stage is working closely with whom could be my potential customer, understand what I could solve for them in order for them to switch or to start using my product or service. however the "working closely" looks like, could be me being their customer if I am offering a competing tool they currently use, or me doing free work for them and learn if my product/service does fix some problem they would pay for solving.
Edward Cederlund
@tdecs ahh what a wonderful memory. i love your country. i used to live in buenos aires and spent a lot of time around merlo (en el oeste). 2004... back then 26 pesos was good money!
Artem Holub
It was tough, in general through pain😂
Edward Cederlund
@artem_holub_v hahah. no pain no gain uh
Andrew Apell
Listing on the Google Workspace Marketplace made users find Flookup before I had really started looking for them.
Edward Cederlund
@getflookup that's interesting. did they have to search for something specific for Flookup to pop up?
Andrew Apell
@cederlund Yes! When they searched for words that are related to data cleaning and fuzzy matching, Flookup would appear amongst the first results. All my SEO efforts built up from there.
Vladimir Nikolic
I will just be watching, as I want to know the same :) good luck on launching!
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