Need Customers? Come Get Ten. We'll All Help.

​One of the hardest things we ever do as founders is find our first 100/1000 customers. Even if you have an incredible product, you need critical mass for customer referrals and product-lead growth to be possible.

​Getting to that critical mass isn’t something you can usually hire out to a marketing specialist either. Those folks tend to be optimizers, not guerrilla executors (No shade intended — can’t wait until Swell too is ready to bring on an optimizer).

​It’s up to us, the founders, to take those first 100-1000 steps —but you don’t have to take them alone.

​That’s why we’re coming together this Thursday!

​Goal: Get customers. Immediately. With very little money.

​Thursday is all about learning by doing, and doing as quickly as we can.

​What to bring: 5 ideas that you could test in 1 day for $50 or less. They don’t even have to be for your business! Just need to be adaptable to some business. Think it sounds too hard? It’s not, here’s 5 right now:

• ​A person in a cardboard brain mascot costume handing out “be kind to your mind” Swell free-session flyers outside a mall

• ​Stage tiktok interviews with guys outside a Starbucks about their girlfriend’s reproductive health. If they can name all 4 phases of the menstrual cycle, they get a free Bestie box to gift their partner.

• ​A referral program for AirBnB hosts to give out cards for $10 off 5 guidebook experiences (the host gets $10 everytime someone signs up)

• ​30 LinkedIn messages offering 3 months of free Affinna conference room software for privately operated coworking spaces.

• ​Wear a giant DIY’d pink mustache pumping iron around a college campus with a sign that says “Ask me about my Lyft”.

​You’re welcome to take any or all of those for free and figure out how to apply them to your own business — or you can come join the fun where we’ll all contribute, adapt ideas, and run real in-the-moment tests together.

​Agenda:

​10-11: Whiteboarding session. (Might go to 11:30 depending how many ppl come)

• ​Every participant who has a business introduces it to the group. Be prepared to explain in 2 minutes or less: your current product, who wants it, why?

• ​Each participant writes 5 ideas on the whiteboard (they don’t have to be for you, but they have to be things that you could do a test version of in 1 day with $50).

• ​Each founder picks 1 idea to try today. We can work as a group to help each other adapt the ideas to small testable concepts applied to that particular business

​11-12pm

• ​Supply run (we’re talking dollar tree)

​12-1:30pm

• ​prototyping (there’ll be at least 1 Canva expert on deck who can help fellow founders with making stuff look acceptable - it’s me, I’m the expert). As for huge attention-getting posters (or brain mascots), we all learned how to use scissors and glue in elementary school — we can do this.

​1:30pm-4pm

• ​test test test. By the end of the day, we should each have exposed our product to 50 potential buyers (ideally in our target demographics if we execute this right).

​

​If you’re a founder who’s serious about quick action to get to quick results, then this event is for you. Come one come all.

​P.s. no ones catering this, so bring a snack :)