How personal should selling really be in the first 100 customers?

Entirely. Phone calls instead of forms, real conversations instead of surveys, and a manual record of every no. This stage is the learning phase; the more personal it is, the faster you learn what to scale later.

How do we know it's time to automate?

Three conditions: the sales process hasn't changed in two months, the same task repeats more than twenty times a month, and you can write down precisely what's supposed to happen. Before those three, automation only speeds up being wrong.

Should we advertise to acquire the first 100 customers?

Referrals and direct selling first. At brand-zero, paid ads are the most expensive route, and referrals from satisfied customers are the cheapest. Ads make sense once the right message and audience have come out of the first conversations.

The First 100 Customers: What Works and What Doesn't

By Hassan Saber · 8 min read

At the start, the non-scalable work has the biggest effect. Why, and how to do it.

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