To start a new business is a challenge as you have to convince the people to buy your products and services for the first time. It is a difficult job to get the initial few customers for any business.

Forbes contributor Jia Wertz has shared case studies of five entrepreneurs who reveal how they acquired their first 1000 customers.

Wertz says, “Elana Reinholtz, Founder of Bird + Stone, a made-in-the-USA jewelry company that supports social causes, leveraged her company’s first 100 customers to gain knowledge on potential future consumers. “In order to reach our first 1000 customers, we carefully and manually scraped the public social profiles of our first 100 customers to get a very granular sense of their psychographic and behavioral characteristics. We used that information as a pool to begin growth-hacking and later on – digital advertising to find more like them.”

Customer segmentation is critical when reaching out to a target market because it allows companies to reach the right customers with the right message. It also optimizes marketing spend because efforts and dollars aren’t spent marketing to consumers who are unlikely to convert. Psychographic segmentation divides your market into segments based on things such as personality traits, lifestyle, values, attitudes and interests.

When researching the characteristics of her current customer list, Reinholtz looked for things such as urban versus suburban locations, age, education level, and career type. She used LinkedIn to obtain career information and open Instagram profiles for more granular interests and lifestyle data”.

5 Entrepreneurs Reveal How They Acquired Their First 1000 Customers

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