The Fastest Way to Grow

The fastest way to grow — really, the only way to grow — is to make your first customers wildly successful. To make them so successful they’ve just got to tell their friends about you. That’s how early growth works. Every other form of growth is too expensive or time consuming.

If we aren’t able to quickly make our first customers successful, they won’t help us grow and we’ll probably limp along for a little while but the weight of customer acquisition will eventually crush us. We need our first customers to take a huge chunk of the customer acquisition burden.

Using this (the goal of making your first customers wildly successful) as a north star is a useful customer filter. It requires you to choose a first customer that meets a few conditions:

1. You know what “wildly successful” would be for them

2. You have some sort of secret that’ll facilitate that wildly successful scenario

3. That successful customer will talk to other potential customers

So, from our end, we need to focus on a four-part process:

1. Describing the Big Outcome - what does it look like when the customer reaches their big, long-term goals? How can we put that in a few words?

2. The Wedge - what are some early, hyper painful, hidden problems that we can zoom in on and solve to build trust / build some word of mouth?

3. Speed to Success - what’s the timeline for the feedback loop? How long until they know we’ve helped them? How can we make sure the feedback loop for our wedge is as quick as possible?

4. Stickiness - how can we translate the wedge success into the broader product success?

Here’s how it looks.

My friend is building a training app that helps “super busy” people exercise 4x / week. The customer’s eventual goal — their big outcome — is to become the type of person who prioritizes exercise and never misses a workout.

The wedge problem my friend found is scheduling. These busy people always pushed their workouts for more “urgent” things - usually, their jobs.

So, his first “product” is a workout group with eight people in it. Each Sunday, all eight Venmo him $250. They then send pictures to a Slack group channel of themselves sweating in the gym 4x. If they don’t do that before the next Sunday, their $250 gets divided up and sent to the people who did work out all four days.

The first program is 3 months long, and 90% of his customers don’t miss a workout during that time. He’s made them wildly successful. And they tell people.

Eventually, he has lots of ideas about the type of exercise they’ll do, and an app with videos, etc. etc. But the first barrier to being successful is consistency, so he focused on that.

It’s not a perfect example, but it might get your wheels turning a bit.

How can you make your first customers successful enough that they’ll tell people?