Dear SaaStr: What Should a Bootstrapped Startup Focus on during the Initial Stages of Revenue Growth, Getting More Customers or Making a Few Customers Really Happy?
It’s a question I hear all the time. Especially bootstapped startups have so few resources. Should we put them into the few customers we have, or into getting the new customers we need?
The Answer is … Yes.
You must close every customer you can, and treat every customer like they are the King/Queen.
Even the tiniest customer must get every hour of attention they need, want, or could desire.
Both.
You don’t get that many chances, in the early days. Make it so. Make them happen. There are never enough leads in the early days, nor enough happy (or at least engaged) customers that you want to lose any of them.
10 Happy Customers are a gift. They may not amount to that much revenue, but they will show you the path to the future. To how to get to 20 happy customers, and 50, and 100, and even 1,000. And they will be your #1 source of word-of-mouth. Which will get you more customers.
All the way to $1B ARR, 33% of HubSpot’s customers came from Word of Mouth, for example:
A bit more here: https://www.saastr.com/the-10-ye…
(image from here)
