A Thing That's Worth Buying: Lessons from Attracting My First 1,000 Customers

1) A Thing That's Worth Buying

There are two kinds of things people buy:

A. Things that are good and worth buying

B. Things that are terrible and not worth buying

Sounds simple enough, but there are SO many things you can buy right now that are not worth buying.

Two years before I started a company, and years before I knew anything about E-commerce, I was building a tool that solved my own problem.

For context: I built software that makes old, slow trucks go faster and run smoother.

My pursuit was purely selfish; I didn’t like the way my old truck ran, and all the other solutions I bought to make it better came with more problems, so I made my own.

And I talked about it… a lot.

In the first 12–18 months of learning how to build this software, and because I never shut up when I'm excited, I met quite a few people who had the same problem as me and were just crazy enough to let me test my ideas on their trucks.

Put simply, I unintentionally built a thing that other people wanted by building a really good thing that I wanted.

So, ingredient one: How I found my first 1,000 Customers! I spent years building a thing worth having before trying to sell it to anyone.

2) Enthusiasm Sells

I mentioned above that my constant pursuit of building something I wanted (and inability to shut up about it) led me to meeting people that liked my kind of weird.

This wild enthusiasm of the creator (me) not only drove the wrong people away, but it was like gravity for the people who would want to buy my software. It also drew in talent, the people who wanted to be part of what I was building by helping to sell the products.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about:

When we would take packages to the carrier, we would take a selfie of some kind while at the store and send it to the customer to let them know the package was on its way.

This is a picture of me (in the back) and my friend/first employee (in the front) after taking a package to FedEx.

Note: this was an actual picture we sent to a customer.

People feel that passion and care and ASK to support you when you are willing to show it.

It is definitely strange, but it also works. I believe it works even better now. Even when the only way people interact with screens is to buy things, the physical association with other humans is powerful.

Ingredient two: We shared a strange and wild passion for what we did, and it made people want to be part of it.

That's the simple lesson for today!