Acquiring First B2B Customers

Transition from zero to your first ten paying customers through manual hustle and high-trust relationships.

Help the user with acquiring first b2b customers using insights from 7 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Assess network and trust - Evaluate the user's existing connections to identify the highest-probability early adopters.
2. Refine the initial pitch - Help craft messages for cold outreach or network requests that emphasize advice-seeking and problem-solving.
3. Design the partner program - Guide the creation of a design partner framework to co-develop features with early users.
4. Plan the manual rollout - Strategize high-touch onboarding and support sequences to ensure initial customer success.

Core Principles

Hyper-specific niche focus

Ben Williams: "They started with a really narrow, early focus. It was a single persona, single context, single use case, and what that meant for Snyk was developers building applications using Node.js who wanted to ensure that the open source dependencies they were pulling into their apps were secure."

Achieve early traction by solving a single problem for a narrow persona before expanding to the wider market.