1/ Getting my first 100 customers always felt like a puzzle. The next 1000 seemed unreachable. Besides, how can you get feedback to make the product better w/o users? After many years, we ended up w/ 6,000+ paying customers. It was a grind to get there.😩 Here's what I Iearned...

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

2/ This 1st lesson comes hard learned for most engineers: get up — away from your monitor—and talk to your users! I know it’s safer & comfortable to just email people but it’s also easier to ignore you. Your first 100 customers are usually acquired as a result of YOU selling.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

3/ Find clever ways to find groups of like-minded people. Early on, I wrote an early Twitter script to follow a person’s followers. That person often blogged about the problem we were trying to solve. We found 100s of customers this way that were happy to try our product.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

4/ You should put as much energy into the first 3 steps of your product (including your landing page) as you do your entire product after those steps. If people don’t get past step 3, your whole product didn’t matter anyway. It’s easy to get caught up in building the other stuff.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

5/ Get involved in communities of people you already know. Often they can easily become your first customers. In our case, we gave our product away to all the @ycombinator companies to get feedback. We had made in-roads with many Facebook app developers & asked them to try it.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

6/ Put yourself out there: @justinkan wore a camera on his head live-streaming his life to get distribution for https://t.co/Gk69N0gm5F. Sal Khan grinded as he narrated & taught the lessons for Khan Academy. Elon went toe-to-toe with rocket scientists publicly before he was one.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

7/ Find a niche of customers instead of trying to be something for everyone. FB started w/ elite colleges. SoundCloud started w/ bedroom producers collabing. Airbnb w/ spare bedrooms. It’ll be easier to explain your product making it easier to convince the right early users.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

8/ A common mistake people make is that they focus on trying to achieve viral growth early on. Your 1st few versions of the product are probably bad (our 1st versions were terrible!) & you likely lack the retention needed to sustain viral growth. Focus on making early users happy

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

9/ Get early customers on chat. A few reasons: (1) a great way to get them to follow through on using the product because you can hold their hand & (2) invaluable way to get feedback & troubleshoot their issues to fix later in the product. I did this w/ the first 200+ customers.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

10/ Important reading that influenced me: The next feature you make will not make everyone use your entire product. https://t.co/yXBaNumqSi

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

11/ Acquiring your first users/customers requires creativity, resourcefulness, and, often, a lot of manual hard work in the early days. There's no silver bullet. Roll up your sleeves & make it happen. Here are some unique stories of how friends of mine did it...

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

12/ @billclerico at WePay on his first customers: "We were building group payments so we hosted a poker tournament at our house & collected payments only w/ WePay. Then we hosted a barbecue for fraternity treasurers at San Jose State & helped them do their annual dues collection"

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

13/ @garrytan at Posterous on getting his first users: "The first 100 were just my friends. But for my first 5000, I followed their public blogs & left personal comments for users to let them know I was thankful for them using Posterous. It was like Tom from MySpace except real."

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

14/ @eshear at https://t.co/K6ynJ4jwEc on getting the first set of gamers: "Our first conversions for Twitch were from customer interviews where we were trying figure out our product." Ask people how to solve a problem that they deeply want to see solved but don't have the means.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

15/ @benrbn at HOUSEPARTY on getting first 1000+ users: “We went to college fraternities/sororities & did a presentation to convince them to dl the app. We targeted 10 of them in Michigan, flew there, & pitched them week by week. That created product iteration machine for 6 mo...

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

16/ @benrbn at HOUSEPARTY on getting first 1000+ users: "...It kept growing to the first 1M users just through colleges but I believe we directly talked to 10k students over a year."

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

17/ Finally, while this will be challenging, it's also one of the most valuable moments for you to learn about your customers, fix their problems, & figure out the obstacles you'll face. It's all part of the journey. If you just took off, you'd shortchange your own knowledge. 🍕 pic.twitter.com/zVHVtH73AY

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

In case you missed it, check out my last tweetstorm on what to do during the first 18 mo of starting a company: https://t.co/4qxEQiFmtX

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

Widely applicable thread. @Suhail is consistently putting out solid stuff https://t.co/v2IA3cQgin

— Evan J Zimmerman (@ejzim) June 21, 2018

Damn @Suhail, you're consistently spitting fire. Thank you! If you read these threads with a rhythm and publish it as a rap album I'll totally buy it.

— Roby Kurian (@RobyKurian) June 20, 2018

Yo man
I be spitting tweetstorms all day like fire
I was young once, I wanted to climb higher
But, look
All this shit takes alotta time
Don't be like Elizabeth Holmes
No crime
Most importantly, it's critical to figure out how to be patient
Why?
Your dreams, early-innings
Latent

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

Hi @Suhail .. awesome and insightful posts as always.. do you have it on @Medium or something similar where we can easily read your thoughts on all these?? Thanks again cheers

— Olawale Fabiyi (@Fabiyi_WaleTaza) June 20, 2018

Learning a lot from @suhail . This thread 👇🏼 is a good read for entrepreneurs https://t.co/251DWJ5qBJ

— Daniel Fasanya (@danielFasanya) June 20, 2018

Great thread on the first 18 months of a Company’s life. These are critical issues given the binary outcome. Thanks @Suhail https://t.co/7eJX4cTrri

— Duncan A. Seay (@duncanseay) June 20, 2018

Great advices from @Suhail founder of mixpanel, on how to get your first customers. https://t.co/ZqyY0a0ZPd

— Ahmed (@Steganer) June 20, 2018

Solid reminders, enjoyed the reflections and the sagicity.

— Dr. Mark JS Miller (@docmmiller) June 20, 2018

.@Suhail literally is sharing things you can never learn at school. Thank you. Another amazing thread on #startups #learning https://t.co/NWNeWbcPOo

— Daniel Craig (@dwcrg) June 20, 2018

Very valuable advices from @Suhail founder of @mixpanel 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 https://t.co/z3uUGovdYS

— Maged 🇹🇳🇲🇦🇪🇬 (@MagedMorsy) June 20, 2018

New Accelerator model idea: Timebox 8 weeks where early stage startups all get in a room together every day and scroll through @Suhail tweetstorms and then discuss. $40k for 6% equity. I’ve got the projector. Who’s in? 😆 Seriously, every startup founder should follow Suhail.

— Aaron Horn (@HornIT) June 21, 2018

Early stage customer acquisitions needs to be smart and @Suhail has shared one of the best secret and they key is to know who is talking about the problem you are trying to solve and where are they talking about it.#entrepreneurs #early #sales #customers https://t.co/y7Jv7KYKaV

— prashantsachdev (@prashantsachdev) June 21, 2018

A startup founder I follow who chewed through nearly $80M in VC funding over several years to create a messy and still-unprofitable business is tweetstorming his growth hacking tips & tricks this morning.

— Blair Reeves (@BlairReeves) June 20, 2018

Since people are guessing it's me. Fact check time: 9.5 yrs in we've raised *only* $77M & still have ~70% of it the bank. We've been profitable in the past for many years & could turn the ship to be profitable if it was helpful. Steadily closing in on $100M. Zero interest in VC.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

I have no interest in a twitter fight today. Bravo on building Mixpanel.

— Blair Reeves (@BlairReeves) June 20, 2018

Thanks. Please stop hatin' on us. You've been doing it since 2017 (I looked at some history).

Consider doing something productive with your energy. Did not appreciate you saying I am "failing up" & assuming the worst of my intentions while writing.

I've done nothing to you.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

Mixpanel is amazing product and you guys are doing great ...I RT'd Blair without knowing the thread of people involved, purely bc growth hacks are garbage marketing and all of us are so much better than that.

— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) June 20, 2018

Fortunately, my thread is basically like: "Work hard. Growth hacks won't work. Keep at it."

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

All of Suhail's tweetstorms DO NOT have a "growth hacking" ethos

— Kiren Srinivasan 🚀 (@srinitude) June 20, 2018

Btw the growth of the consumer stuff is way different than B2B imo. Like idk that including the house party app on your thread is instructive for the products we work on. This is a bigger discussion than just twitter we should all do podcast or something.

— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) June 20, 2018

I added consumer-focused founders' perspective to balance my thread for others since I have a very B2B bias. It may not have been meant for you.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

Got it. I still think the b2b stuff so much more interesting having worked on several marketing automation companies in early stage & now enterprise stuff. So few understand the markets/buyers/pain points or how to drive organic and paid properly. SV undervalues good marketers.

— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) June 20, 2018

Glad to hear and I've never seen hacky marketing from your team btw.

— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) June 20, 2018

Last but not least. Since he didn't disclose it, I will. Disclosure: @BlairReeves co-wrote a book on "Building products for the Enterprise" with a Group PM who makes products at our incumbent: Adobe Analytics. 🤷🏾‍♂️

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

Suhail, you got me. I am so threatened by MP as a competitor that I am engaging in super-sneaky guerrilla marketing to undermine your customer base. 🤔

— Blair Reeves (@BlairReeves) June 20, 2018

I get why this is personal to you. MP is your baby, right? Rest assured, it is not personal to me. MP is just some company to me. And I’m just not that impressed with it.

— Blair Reeves (@BlairReeves) June 20, 2018

But look - who cares about my reasons? You’re an ex-founder millionaire with tons of free time now! Go have a margarita, man! I’m just some idiot working schmoe on twitter. Why are you blowing up my DMs like this? Why do you care?

— Blair Reeves (@BlairReeves) June 20, 2018

As I said earlier - I am busy. I have no interest in manning the twitter barricades to argue with you.

That said, go read our book! Based on my experience with MP, y’all could probably learn something.

— Blair Reeves (@BlairReeves) June 20, 2018

As an outsider to this quarrel:
- Blair you seem pretty biased and clearly you have a dog in this fight (should have disclosed)
- Calling Mixpanel messy seems pretty unfair to say the least

— Ernesto G.M. (@EGMontesano) June 20, 2018

4 tweets in a row definitely communicates how little you want to argue on twitter

— Patrick Mathieson (@pmmathieson) June 21, 2018