Go Fishing If You Want to Catch the Big One

Everything you need to know about scaling a business you'll learn from your first 1,000 customers.

IN THE FALL of 2015, my recently launched New York City-based presentation software startup, Slidebean, hit a milestone two years in the making: We reached 100 customers on our platform. Whooo! For a team of sleep-deprived, broke co-founders, this was surely the milestone that would prove to investors-unequivocally-that we had "figured it out." The celebration, though satisfying and psychologically needed, was premature.

Getting 100 customers is not easy, and I felt good about hitting the marker, of course. But 100 customers didn't prove we could do that 10 times againand in a third of the time. It might have meant we were lucky, or that we had a strong network, or that we created a TikTok post that went viral. We needed to scale the concept.

So we set our sights higher, to 1,000 customers. To do so, we focused on unit economics. That is, we had to determine whether we'd still have a thriving company on our hands after assessing our expenses. We asked two questions: How much does it actually cost to convert a new customer? And what's the dollar value of that customer over a lifetime?