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Getting Your First Customers

Your first customer acquisition will look completely different from later customers. Most open core businesses eventually target large enterprises, but these can be difficult to land initially. Don't be afraid to start with smaller customers or broader use cases while building your enterprise pipeline.

Key principles for first customers:

  1. Don't anchor on ideal customer profiles. Beggars can't be choosers—get your first customer by any means necessary.
  2. Let customers force product requirements. Ask: "What problem do you have that you're dying to pay money to make go away?" Let their needs drive your development priorities.
  3. Do things that don't scale. Once you land your first customer, provide exceptional, hands-on service that wouldn't be sustainable at scale but creates deep customer success and learning opportunities.
  4. Don't focus heavily on contract value initially. Getting reference customers and learning from their implementations is more valuable than maximizing early revenue.

Working with Large Customers Early

While challenging to acquire, large customers often provide the best product insights. They have sophisticated needs, domain expertise, and request features that smaller customers also want but can't articulate. These relationships can be worth pursuing even at lower initial contract values because they drive valuable product development.

Leverage the open source community

The communities around your open source project are your best source for identifying potential commercial customers. Look for the heaviest users—companies that have implemented your software extensively, contribute back to the project, or ask sophisticated questions about enterprise features.

These communities reveal not just who might pay for a commercial solution, but also what problems are most acute for real users in production environments.

Ask for customer intros

Be aggressive about asking for introductions to interesting companies from everyone in your network. OCV will introduce founders to connections in our network. We recommend using Happenstance and filtering to first-degree connections. Experiment with a few different potential ICP profiles and find companies that match those profiles from your connected networks.

When requesting an introduction, first confirm that your connection is OK with making the intro. Then send a self-contained email that the recipient can forward directly. Send a separate email for each request. For example, if you ask for 5 introductions, send 5 draft messages.

The email should include:

  1. Company description
  2. How the recipient can use your technology
  3. Your ask (Let’s schedule time, a demo, etc.)