What it really took to get my first customer

👋 Hi, I'm Jeff, a software engineer by day and an IndieHacker by night, building TattooSchedule. I embarked on this journey over five months ago, and only recently did I acquire my first customer. I shared this achievement on Twitter, and the post gained some traction. However, I felt the need to write this candid and unfiltered account of my experience to counteract any potential misleading perception of ease that might arise from that tweet.

I wanted to write this for people like myself, people who can get easily discouraged by seeing people post about all of their successes and then feel inadequate by not being able to have similar outcomes. I wanted to provide an honest background about how hard it was for me to get to this point and why I think anyone can get similar results if they truly enjoy the process of building and learning.

Enjoying the process

I think that the main reason as to why I got my first customer, and was able to endure 5 months of nothingness was due to the simple fact that I enjoyed what I was doing. That isn’t to say that I enjoyed everything (time zones are still my worst enemy), but for the most part I really enjoyed the process of it all. I learned to enjoy the small things like fixing an annoying bug, learning about tools to use, trying to work on SEO, getting a response from a cold DM, seeing page views increase, etc.

Getting out of your comfort zone

5 months ago I was scared to talk to a potential customer. I dreaded talking to them, so I did as most developers would have done, and I just continued to code while putting “Talk to potential customers” on the back burner. That was a horrible mistake, but as time went on I realized I couldn’t put it off any longer. I was making assumptions about features that I couldn’t have been more wrong about. So I called Tattoo shops, I sent over 200 cold DMs & 25 cold emails. This was the first time that I had to deal with rejection. I was out of my comfort zone and putting myself out there and not getting any responses from artists & shop owners. I failed at my first attempt underestimating the difficulty of cold outreach. So I went back to the drawing board and had to learn. After about the 100th cold outreach I started to not take the rejection so personally. I was starting to get some responses and even managed to get some artists to fill out a survey about some questions that I had.

Things I had to learn

I slowly realized that I had to learn a lot of stuff that I otherwise had no experience with. Some of these things include:

• Copywriting
• Marketing & Advertising
• Communication
• Cold outreach
• Social Media Advertising
• Social Media Content
• How to deal with myself (imposter syndrome, how I work best, when to take a break, how to avoid burnout, etc)
• Just Ship it (my SWE brain refused to let me push anything out that had the smallest edgecase that I had not covered. Even though not a soul was using the app. I also spent time setting up a staging environment)

Marketing First

After I realized that I should have done marketing and outreach before even writing a single line of code I put myself into a mandatory code freeze. The only code that I could write would be for marketing purposes. No new features that I assumed artists wanted. During this phase I tried all sorts of things, promotional videos on the Instagram page, setting up Facebook Ads, getting banned from Facebook Ads (twice, I didn’t do anything against TOS I just didn’t have a Facebook page and had to create one and I guess it looked fishy?), horrible converting Facebook Ad (Facebook gave my ad a D rating) SEO, & more cold outreach. This code freeze started on March 1st. It is now April 16th as I write this and I still haven’t coded a new feature. That is 46 days of failing to get a single person to signup for my app. 46 days of having to learn new skills and try to implement them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the journey to securing my first customer for TattooSchedule has been a rollercoaster ride of emotions, replete with challenges, lessons, and growth. The key takeaways from my experience are the importance of enjoying the process, stepping out of your comfort zone, continuous learning, and focusing on marketing first. By sharing this honest account of my journey, I hope to encourage fellow IndieHackers and aspiring entrepreneurs not to be disheartened by perceived ease of success or the fear of failure. Embrace the ups and downs, learn from each experience, and remember that success is often the result of persistence, passion, and an unwavering belief in your vision. So keep pushing forward, keep learning, and keep striving for greatness. Your breakthrough moment might be just around the corner.

Checkout TattooSchedule: https://www.tattooschedule.com/
Follow me on Twitter to follow along with the journey: https://twitter.com/jeff_codes