Trust and Startup Sales
We’re deep in the sales cycle for Flyflow, trying to close those first 10-20 customers. This is our third product (probably my 5th or 6th total in startup life), and not our first rodeo at startup sales. After we’ve exhausted most of our warm channels, we’re turning to things like cold outbound to get the first customers.
There seems to be this trough between your first sales, customers that will try you no matter what, and your first 10-20 sales, customers that just hear about you, find you, and like you.
I was trying to put words to why this hard, and it came down to one thing: trust. The first few customers that have tried us know us, actually very well. Our first three customers: a friend from college, a friend we met at a dinner and helped for a long time with our previous product, a *super* warm intro to a big company that *really* needs our services, and a few more smaller ones. None of this was hard. The trust us because what we’re selling to them isn’t really the product, it’s *us* as founders, and trusting that we’ll make it work.
What’s hard is convincing someone from a cold message, that gets 10 similar messages a day, that they should use your product. This is because by trying a new product they’re taking a significant amount of risk:
I don’t know Carl
What if championing this in my company makes me look bad because it’s a bad product?
What if xyz goes wrong?
This is the 10th YC startup pitching me
Put plainly, it’s not worth the risk for any (big or small) company to use a product that isn’t proven. They need to trust us before they use us, even if we’re in YC.
For those first customer’s it’s easy, they know who Carl is and can trust him to deliver something good. For the first 5-20 it’s harder because that trust isn’t established, you need to earn it.
I keep asking myself: why is it hard, *we literally invented a product that allows AI to talk to anyone anywhere? Isn’t this magic?* It’s because no one else in the world really trusts us to deliver a magic experience for them, and we need other ways of earning that.
What’s the takeaway? My theory is that the first 5 are easy (they know you), the first 5-30 are hard, and the first 30-infinity get a lot easier (because they can trust the judgement of the first 30). This is regardless of product. The equation really just comes down to how they trust us to deliver for them, make them look good within their company, and give them a product that actually performs.