You can’t call it a business if no one’s buying.

In this episode of Unsexy Entrepreneur, Charles Harris and Dr. Seth Jenson get real about one of the most important (and most avoided) moments in your entrepreneurial journey: getting your first customer.

If you’re stuck in “planning mode,” endlessly building, tweaking, and perfecting your product—but haven’t made your first sale—this episode is the kick in the pants you need.

🎯 You’ll Learn:

• Why getting your first customer is the true moment you become an entrepreneur
• The difference between wantrepreneurs and real founders (and how to cross the line)
• How to find your first 5 clients using your existing social capital
• Why building a product before selling is a recipe for wasted time
• When to use Facebook Marketplace, Meta ads, or just walk into businesses
• The power of hand-to-hand combat (aka: doing what doesn’t scale)
• How to ask better questions and get real customer feedback
• When to discount your early customers—and when it’ll cost you in the long run
• Why your first customers should be obsessed with you
• Organic growth strategies better than throwing money at ads
• How to piggyback off influencers and niche groups—for free

Whether you’re starting a cleaning business or building SaaS, this episode is packed with practical, real-world advice to get your first sale and build momentum—without hype, jargon, or startup theater.

Got questions for Charles and Seth? Submit them HERE.

Welcome to the Unsexy Entrepreneurship Podcast. I am your host, Charles Harris, and as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Seth Jensen. How are you today, Seth? ⁓

Good, good, was one of those nice, long Thanksgiving breaks. So feeling rejuvenated, feeling alive, feeling ready to talk about the least of all the sexy entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship out there. How about you, how was your break?

you

It was great. I had to get mad at my employee today because she was jumping on over the weekend and I told her to get off. But I mean that's a great problem to have when your employee cares and actually wants to do their job. Always a fun morning.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Ha ha.

No, I

got a bunch of emails over Thanksgiving break and I was like, that is the most egregious sin that you could possibly commit in the workplace is to send non-essential emails over Thanksgiving break. mean, capitalism has just corrupted their souls.

They were just catching up.

It's

that scheduled send. Everyone needs to use scheduled send so that Monday morning it all goes out. I I hate sending people emails on Saturday and Sunday and that's always my cheat code.

Yeah.

If I ever do it, I always have like all caps like don't read until Monday or like I'm so, so sorry. Because yeah, you gotta you gotta have boundaries and and it's just far too common. Far too common.

All right, so today we get to talk about some fun stuff. And if you're starting your own business, now is the perfect time to find your first customers. And so we're gonna talk about how to find them. Because they're not hiding under a rock. I wish you could just go outside and pick up a rock like a hide a key and suddenly there's a customer there but doesn't seem to work that way.

Hey, that's basically what happened to you, Charlie. Let's be honest. your first customers leapt into your lap, essentially. if they... It's like that... This is a deep, deep cut, but it's like that strong, bad, home star runner cartoon from all of our millennial glory days of like, hey, fish get in the boat and the fish are just getting, you know, in there. That was basically your experience. So don't want to hear any of it.

It is.

Yep.

Hahaha

Yeah.

Yeah, no, I'm super lucky. Right, we've talked about it before, but like finding the areas where it's in high demand, where there aren't as many people, not as much competition. Because yeah, it still feels like I just tell people I'm alive and people come out of the woodwork, which is great. But it's not always that easy, I can't imagine.

Yeah.

For sure, no, there's definitely some legwork that has to be done. And I feel like this is a really crucial, like I'm glad we're doing an episode on first customers because A, there's a little bit different approach than maybe your, you know, what your customers look like 10 months into your business. And B, it's a really important transition as an entrepreneur. The phrase I hear a lot, it makes me sad. So don't say it very much, but there's some accuracy to it.

but that most people are wantrepreneurs instead of entrepreneurs. They aspire to be entrepreneurs. They're doing things that feel like business building. But the reality is until you have paying customers, you're not an entrepreneur. You're not a business owner. Like that is...

the fundamentals of what makes a business is having people that want to pay you for your product or service. But the good news is as soon as you have that first customer, congratulations, you're a business owner. It's that simple. It's not complicated. People sometimes don't give themselves the right to have that identity until way too late in the process. So it's an exciting transition point for any builder and any entrepreneur.

But there's, like all things, some things that can really save you heartache and headache in these early moments. I'm glad we're kind of focusing on this.

Okay, so how do you usually tell your students where do they find their first customer?

Yeah, so I think a lot of the time you want to find your easy, ideal customer. So this is not the time to go get the hard sell.

And try to start with the most difficult customer because that probably isn't your ideal customer, right? Your ideal customers always the people that are gonna be obsessed with you And so go find those people that are gonna be obsessed with you get the low-hanging fruit first. Don't complicate it You want to get that first customer with as less little friction as possible so you can focus on that relationship and your product and their response instead of necessarily the process of landing them

And so I love the idea of like, get that first one kind of in a hand to hand combat way that kind of do things that don't scale is how they're often said. Right. And so you don't need to have to, you don't need to build out this big magical, sales channel right out the gate. If this is really the first time your product or service is interacting with a customer, then make it easy on yourself and focus in on that customer is that's going to give you the best feedback.

about what you're trying to provide. So the good news is there's like, it's not hard, it's not complicated. Just go out there and make it happen. That's the most important thing because I think people wait too long. They, again, we've talked about this in previous episodes, but they're just building constantly. They're preparing, they're perfecting. And the reality is if you've got that MVP ready, that minimum viable product, sell it as soon as it's ready. Go out there and get that first customer, get it in the hands of someone that can give you good feedback.

So something you're saying there is kind of interesting to me and I'm curious to dig into it more because you're saying that customer needs to be able to give you good feedback. So if I'm starting a home cleaning business and my first customer is my mom, that's not going to give me good feedback, right? Like that would be an issue.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, I don't think there's anything wrong with taking the easy money from your social capital and your relationships, you know? But you're right. In those cases, you might have to discount some of the feedback. And remember that feedback doesn't always necessarily mean, okay, and here's my post survey, please fill out these 10 questions about what you think of the product, right?

Yeah, no, I agree.

Right.

it can be watching them interact with your product or service, right? Watching whether their eyes get big when you tell them how much it's gonna cost or whether they're like, sweet, and they feel like you left money on the table. All of the interactions that your product or service have with them count as feedback. And this kind of speaks to a really important question about this or aspect is you wanna come to this first relationship.

and I like thinking about her as a relationship, each of your customers represent one little relationship with your product, with your business. ⁓ but you want to come to this relationship with questions already primed and ready to go. Like you don't want to just, okay, I built something. I'm going to send it off and then, you know, all right, now let's go to customer number two, number three. You want to be, have questions ready in your mind that you're looking for the answers. So is the price point right?

And how am going to tell, you know, is this feature most important or are they actually buying it for something else? Right? Like we've talked in the past about having that value proposition and thinking about it as a hypothesis. This is the first time your value proposition is meeting the real world and finding out whether it's, it's what you think it is. So you want to have those questions ready. And like you say, you want to find that first customer ideally to be someone who,

can provide accurate responses to that. So maybe your mom would be customer like 0.5 in some cases, and it's like, for sure, go get that. Again, we've talked about sales in the past. It's good for bandwagoning to have those easy customers under the wing. But yeah, that ideal customer, that's that first one, should be able to give you the answers you need related to your value proposition.

Yeah.

Interesting. So it's more about value proposition. And I would argue like, boy, I'm still working on that. I had a client or a potential client last week turned me down because I was too expensive. But then at the same time, someone said, you're so cheap. Like, right. And so it's hard always to balance those acts and to figure out the right positioning. And I think it's something we always need to work on.

Yeah.

I think that's a really good point in the sense of a mistake that can be made in these early moments. And we talked about this in the kind of Lean Startup podcast. You can become a slave to customer feedback.

And that's never what you want to do, right? You want to be open and learning. But if they say, man, that's way too expensive. That's great data, but it's data about them as a customer, as much as it is a data about your product, right? And so like you say, customer number two might say, my goodness, this is cheap. Like I can't believe you're doing this for free. And that's more data. Okay. And it's telling you about that type of customer. It's telling you about either. So it's not, you don't want to say, my first customer said it's cheap.

And so I'm going to raise the price and assume that every customer is going to be like that. So you've got to be scientific about it. You've got to think logically about it. But if you're not asking the questions at all, then you're not receiving any data and you can't adjust accordingly. And so it's about that openness. It's about honing your expertise throughout every stage of the process, but especially as your, as your product or service meets reality for the first time. But yeah, I love that. I love you bringing that up because it's really important. There's

thousands, if not millions, hopefully billions of potential customers for your product. And so you've got to learn from all of them and not assume that anyone's feedback is the gospel.

All right, so getting into the nitty gritty, we've talked about, we need to get our first customer. How do you recommend doing that, Seth? Do you go out and walk into businesses and say, hey, I'm an accountant, please, ⁓ here's my service. How do you recommend people find that first client?

Mm-hmm.

lot of the times, and you brought up your mom, and that's a great example. Using your social capital in those early moments is great. ⁓ Because again, you want this to be easy. So if there's someone you know that would be that ideal client in your network, start there. It's a great place. Because usually they're in your corner. You can be up front with them and honest. And so yeah, feel free to spend social capital to get that first customer. And if it's a tight relationship, that's great.

If you're like, and again, remember there's levels to social capital. So level one might be, know someone that's a perfect customer and they know me and that's, we're going to, it's going to be easy to set up this relationship. Level two might be, I know someone that knows someone, right? So you've got that warm introduction that might make it easier to land that first client. but after that, you know, again, it's, thinking through making a list of, all right, these, this is my ideal, you know, customer profile.

Here's all of the potential, if it's B2B firms that fit that kind of profile, if it's individuals, if it's cohorts or groups or communities. And then honestly, just try it, right? Again, people are scared they're gonna like burn a bridge or something like that. there's that few customers available to you, you've got your own problem, right? It's okay to burn three or four bridges landing that first customer, knowing there's gonna be plenty of bridges to come.

⁓ but, but yeah, whatever is, whatever is easiest, lowest hanging, start there. because again, the nice thing is once you've got those first couple of customers under, under your portfolio, it makes that much easier to kind of snowball that and sell, get referrals, bandwagon, potential sales say, Hey, I'm already doing this with three of your competitors. This is why you should, you should sign up for me. So make it easy on yourself because once you have those first customers, it'll be.

easier to sell their moving forward.

All right, so this brings up a really interesting question. Do you know Chris Kerner by chance? ⁓ Okay, he's been on my first million podcasts, I think two or three times he's been making the circus on the podcast. You've probably heard him. ⁓ He's a serial entrepreneur who loves the zero to one. He's not as much of a.

I don't.

then I've probably heard it.

Ha.

Next billion dollar company, right? He he's more of, get it to a million or two and then sell it off and then start again. That's what he loves doing. and so something he always talks about is doing Facebook ads, Facebook marketplace to kind of prove out your theory, your test of concept. I'm curious from your perspective. Do you

Mm-hmm.

Do you agree with that approach? Do you think it's good idea to spend money in that way? Or are there better avenues of going about it?

Yeah. So there's kind of two sides to that question. If there's a cheap, easy way to just experiment and see if something works, by all means do it, right? Like if it's as simple as posting on Facebook Marketplace about your services or something like that, that's a...

which I think is what he's really doing, yeah.

a 30 minute experiment that doesn't cost you anything, like absolutely, right? That's easy. if you're getting a lot of bites, then you know you're onto something. So if it's a cheap experiment, and we talked a little bit about this in the validation episode, but you want to be running those as much as possible.

If you're talking about setting aside $50,000 to plug into ad spending to try it, because you can do that, venture capital firms will sometimes do these different things where it's like, okay, let's see if this idea is lagged by pretending it exists and posting a bunch of ads. And then when people click through the ads, the link's broken or something, but they can see how many people click through. That's nice if you've got...

Yeah.

10, 20, $30,000 to be able to spend on it. But the reality is most entrepreneurs don't because it's really kind of a, it's an expensive experiment. You might find out the answer is zero and you could have also found that other ways by interacting with clients by other means, right? That would just be more time intensive. So it really depends on your resources. It depends on the nature of your question as well.

because I think a lot of the time these entrepreneurs that are wanting to spin out million dollar businesses quickly, they're looking for rinse and repeat channels that they feel comfortable with, which tend to be meta spend, like it's buying meta ads. And they're like, if it's not going to work on meta, then I don't want to do it at all because I like that formula of just spend, get clients, spend, get clients. Now, not all of us have businesses that are going to sell well on Instagram, right? Or have our clientele there. So,

Yeah.

It depends on your channels as well. If your channel is gonna be Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever it might be, and you know that's where you're gonna have to drive your clients, then it doesn't hurt if you have the funds to do some testing in those early days. But if you're ultimately gonna have other channels, then spending a bunch of money on online ads could just literally be burning money. So that might kind of, to summarize, if you've got the money,

And if those channels you're testing on are ultimately the channels you're going to use, then it can be a great thing to do. but if you, if either of those aren't true, don't feel bad about not being able to do that because there is more hand to hand combat and the weeds ways for you to get clients learn all the same lessons. In fact, often richer, lessons. and, and so you don't need to feel bad if that's not in your, in your wheelhouse or a budget.

Interesting. Yeah, I think to Chris Kerners point, it's usually Facebook marketplace. I don't think he's paying for ads. ⁓

Yeah.

But a lot of people do a lot of people that is their first pass at things is they're like, all right, I'm to blow $10,000 on, on ads and see, you know, what the appetite is and things. And, again, there's just a lot of, sounds simple, like a great way to get things, but are your ads good? Right. Is it because the demand isn't there? Or is it because your ad didn't hit right? Right. Because there's a lot of experimentation that you have to do to get the right ads anyway. And so what I, what I like about getting your first customers and kind of this

Oof.

Right.

More, again, hand-to-hand is the best way I can say it, more personal, you're in the weeds, you're actually doing the selling type thing. What I like about that is you're gonna learn a lot about your customers, you're gonna learn a lot about your product, you're gonna learn things that you couldn't in any other way. And just blasting Instagram with ads, you're not gonna know. So if you start in the hand-to-hand, you might learn lessons that make your ads more effective when it does come time to buy meta ads or whatever, or Google ads or whatever it might be.

Right.

So that's why I usually say, get your first five customers the ugly way and then turn that into lessons that help you get at the slick rinse and repeat way later.

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. Because I think I've seen that quite a bit from my perspective is clients that are just trying to get going and they're like, I know I need to spend money on marketing. I'm just going to shovel money over here because I'm told that this works either Google ads or Facebook ads or even just SEO, right? I've seen seen people spend a ton of money on these marketing tools, but they don't really understand them and they don't really work for them.

you

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

It's kind of a spray and pray

method, right? You're just shotgunning it, hoping something hits. Which again, hey, if you've got tons of money, you're okay blowing it. Like, it can work, right? It's kind of like gambling a little bit.

Yeah.

Right, you'd learn.

Well, something that is maybe more applicable to, well, an accountant influencer told us or that I listened to mentioned to find the influencers in your space and attach your brand to theirs, right? And you can do that for free. You can also pay them technically, but again, I wouldn't at first, I would just attach yourself to the influencer, right? And so from my perspective,

I found a bunch of influencers that I follow and then anytime they post anything, I make a comment. Right. And so that has been a huge driving factor in my business, which is so silly. takes a little bit of work, but it's really beneficial and I'm piggybacking off their reach. But I think you could do this for most things. Right. So if you can get into a Facebook group for

local Facebook group right like I think one that's near near me is moms of Flower Mound or something like that or women of Flower Mound and it's supposed to be a very toxic environment and very cutthroat but if you can get in and get a good review from there you can get a ton of work from there I've seen that from a lot of local businesses but I think that's a better avenue and cheaper than spraying and praying

Hahaha

Well, and in some sense too, if you can't do it organically with, you know, thought out, well thought out posts or connecting or these types of things, then you, again, it's not likely to work on just kind of a add their scrolling past either. So, you know, starting with a social media following or strategic posts or just being clever about it. The, an example I like recently from a good friend of mine, they just launched an accelerator. This is a venture capitalist friend that I work with quite a bit.

And they launched an accelerator to go along with this venture capital, of an early stage deal flow into their venture capital pipeline. And, ⁓ and basically their launch was, know, they could have put a bunch of ads out, Hey, new accelerator, like apply here type thing, and just kind of spent a bunch of ads. But instead they just had a really thoughtful LinkedIn post about, this is why we're doing it. This is what's different about it. Like it was a very like, Hey community, I want you to be part of this and aware of this.

And that LinkedIn post, I don't know the numbers, but I'm very confident, ⁓ gave them a huge burst of applicants to this brand new, because it's hard to get a brand new accelerator off the ground, You don't have to, they have a solid brand, but you know, it's the first time they're doing it. And I think it was just such a good example of that, of, instead of going straight to ads or whatever else they might do to try to source deals, they're just using that organic, genuine post. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

But again, when we're talking about first customers, I'm sure, in fact, I know they made some specific invites before even doing that, right? Like that was really the second tier of customers. And so again, that number one customer, this first, second, third customer, go take them to lunch, go have it be an individual meeting. If you're selling a product, this could look like,

a farmer's market or a pop-up market or something like that where you're selling your goods, whether it's t-shirts or battery packs, whatever it might be, you're selling them individually, you're watching people handle your product, that's feedback that you can't get in any other way. And so there's always an easy first pass and take that easy route so that you can learn as much as you can.

Yeah, and then from an accounting perspective, boy, break even on those first few customers. Figure out how to do that. And then hopefully you make a little bit of extra money and you can use that for a marketing spend would be my suggestion. Just because I think that's, it's gonna make your life better long term.

Yeah. And it's tricky too, because if you're saying the product space, you might be making factory orders with minimum ⁓ order quantities. And so you're like, man, I've got a

order 500 of these, right? And so it's tricky. And so what, know, in those situations, your first customer, you're literally might just be selling your prototypes, right? The ugly version of your product and just getting a little bit of feedback before you take the big plunge of getting that 500 quantity order, whatever it might be.

Yeah.

Again, a lot of times you might do a local run before you do international manufacturing. Or like, I'm just going to get a local manufacturer to do 50 of these. It's not the perfect way. Maybe they don't have all of the molds or techniques I need, but it gets me enough there that I can sell them and learn. 3D printing has been really nice for.

Yeah.

⁓

physical products. But you mentioned kind of the economics of it and I get people that ask me a lot, should I discount my first customer in order to get them? And it's a great question because I think a lot of the time that's...

Yeah.

Our inclination is to do it. was like, Ooh, like I want to, I want to be successful getting this first customer. Maybe if I know them personally, I want to be able to offer them a discount. So I think the answer is it can be a great thing to do. but just remember that a discount doesn't what I, what I don't do it at cost. People always say, I'm just going to do it at cost for my first customer. Try to make a profit at all. ⁓

if you can, because what you'll find is at cost usually means at a loss a lot of the time in those first initial moments, especially with services, but also with products as well, because it's like, and then there's shipping, and then there's the follow-up with the customer and these different things that, you know, returns. So I rarely, rarely, rarely would ever suggest to someone to do it at cost. And remember that a discount can be a discount.

without being a discount. You can say, hey, maybe you're planning on selling this for a hundred bucks. Your discount can be, hey, you know, this is the classic Black Friday thing to do. And I know it can feel a little sleazy, but remember that pricing is an art. So you can say, hey, you know, usually I'm going to sell this at 150, but for you, going to do it a hundred. Because if they're doing it for significantly less than what you're actually planning on selling it for,

then you're not going to know whether they would actually pay full price. so when possible, sell it at the price point you're trying to sell it at. you can, again, that can mean including a discount of some kind. Now, let's say you're doing a software business and you're trying to have Google as an enterprise client or something like that, right? And there's these kind of beautiful co-creation opportunities with first clients sometimes where it's like, hey, I'm going to do this super cheaper at cost.

But it's because we're going to have a 10 year expectation here where you're one, two, and three, at cost is just fine because you're for, you're already agreeing in advance to pay me $10 million a year or something like that. And then we've kind of become codependent. They fully integrated with you. Exactly. Yeah. So if you've got those co-creation opportunities, that that's maybe a different thing. And if you can create codependencies in those early stages, then at that point, it might totally make sense to do it heavily.

Right.

Right, but that's a different pricing model.

and

Yeah.

discounted.

Well, and from my perspective, before you sell your first product, you need to know your expected advertising spend. You need to know your expected revenue per product and you need to go through all of these things. ⁓ So I think to your point, I think that makes perfect sense for those first few clients, maybe discount them the marketing you're planning on spending. instead of 20 % on marketing, right? You're giving that to them as a discount.

Absolutely.

there are other avenues you could do too, but just make sure that you have that built-in profit and you're gonna keep it, because it's just gonna make your life better. And I love your point of selling it at cost is usually at a loss, ⁓ because by the time you put in the hours, the work, it really is a losing proposition if you're just selling for cost.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And then there's that awkward moment where you're like, and so if you are giving a discount and especially if it's a service or something like that, just set expectations with them and say, Hey, this, first six months, you know, are going to be 20 % off. and then it's going to be this, ⁓ you know, ⁓ which is still a crazy deal, right? You don't have to, but setting those expectations at the, at the offset are really important. because a, means when they buy. Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's what I did for some of my clients. said, Hey,

10 % off the first year as I'm starting to get my feet under me. and then after that tax season, look, your price is going to go up. just the way it is.

Yeah. Awesome.

And I think people understand

it and they get behind that too, right? People are not out there trying to rip you off. They want you to be able to live too.

And it goes back to where we started. Your first customer should be the ones that are obsessed, right? Like they should be so excited to have that product in their hands or to have your service making their life easier, right? If it's kind of a, okay, fine, I'll do it. Then it's like, that's a negative signal off the gate, right? Like make it, you should be having the easiest customer to sell and the one that's gonna be most obsessed with you. And you can use that momentum and that feedback to really launch yourself in a great trajectory. And so...

Yeah, find the people that are like, yes, take my money. that, you know, they're not even thinking about the cost. And you know, you're golden.

Well, thanks so much everyone listening to the Unsexy Entrepreneurship podcast. I hope you join us again next week. Thanks, y'all.