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15 HR Tech Founders
Early Customer Acquisition Lessons
Sell the Idea Before You Build the Product
Nitzan was direct about the choice that kept his company alive: “We had two options. Either we go and build them or we go and sell them. Now, if we would go and build them, even an mvp, you would have a different guest on this show today, because the company would have gone bankrupt.” The sell-first approach meant going to market without a finished product and committing to delivery only after a buyer said yes. It also meant being honest about what validation actually requires: “We always start by selling and getting someone to pay for what the value is. Because when we do a survey it doesn’t work. It’s very different to ask for the money.” Nitzan closed the first deal with a page built five minutes before the meeting, which taught him that buyers who have a real problem will say yes before the product is ready.
Convert Validation Conversations Into Your First Paying Customers
BrightHire’s earliest customers came from conversations that had started long before the product was ready. Ben described how “a lot of the early, great clients that we brought on board started pretty early in our company formation process” as people the team talked to in order to “validate the concept, to get feedback as we built the business and built the product.” By the time there was something functional to put in their hands, those contacts “were already bought in.” Ben also pointed to the dual benefit of this approach: “we had validation from the market before we invested a bunch of time.”
Watch How Customers Use the Product to Find Your Next Market
Wingspan’s move into enterprise didn’t come from a top-down strategic decision. It came from watching how customers were actually using the product. “During COVID we saw lots of freelancers working together in effectively many agencies,” Anthony said, “so we built split payments so one invoice could be distributed across a network of freelancers working together.” That feature, built to serve a behavior that was already happening, opened a door they hadn’t planned for. “That led to the technology being able to service really large corporations. So we got our first B2B customer, I think it was in the summer of 2022, and we realized that model was a lot more repeatable, especially for a venture backed business.”
Give Free Access to the People Who Influence Your Future Buyers
Before Arist could sell into enterprise accounts, Michael needed credibility and data that only real usage could generate. His solution was to remove the price barrier entirely for the people most likely to shape opinion in the market. “Our decision to make Arist completely free for all analysts, for all consultants, and for all nonprofits was a decision that we made during COVID,” he said. “We essentially said, hey, if you are a nonprofit, including a university, if you are a consultant or analyst, we will make Arist 100% free for you, and you should just sign up and try it out, and we will help you along the way.” The results were immediate and compounding. “We got so much phenomenal early data and so much phenomenal early goodwill because we made it very easy for folks, the early adopters, even before enterprise, early adopters in learning more broadly, to really give it a shot.”
Track Inbound Velocity as a Signal of Repeatable Demand
After launching a basic website, Remote was immediately overwhelmed with inbound interest. “We had over two months back to back sales calls,” Marcelo recalled, and the queue kept growing. Prospects who could not get a slot were going around the process entirely, with people “reaching out on LinkedIn saying, hey, I want to buy from you, but I only have a scheduled call in like, two months. I need it faster. Can you make it happen?” Marcelo connected this volume directly to confidence in the trajectory ahead: “We knew because if this was happening then with the growth and the trend of remote work growing, it would just get better.” When buyers are working around your sales process to give you money, the demand signal is worth paying attention to.
Follow Up With Discovery Participants When You Ship What They Asked For
Prem Kumar ran 55 structured discovery interviews before launch, tracking each respondent by industry, demographic, and pain point: “I have a spreadsheet, I think that initially, so we did about 55 that I kind of deep dived into. I had a spreadsheet that broke them out by industry, by type of demographic, by pain points.” The interviews weren’t just research. He kept the list warm and came back to those same people once the product was built. “The other benefit of doing these research early is some of them actually turn into customers later. I can come back three months later and say, hey, that thing you said you really wanted, we’ve actually built it now. So that was helpful from a lead gen standpoint as well.” Discovery done right seeds your earliest pipeline before you ever open a sales cycle.
Turn Customer Discovery Into a Supplier Acquisition Engine
Before building out the supply side of their marketplace, Jason interviewed employees at target companies to understand what they wanted to learn and who they wanted to learn from. “Early days, I went to the employees of different companies and just get our first wave of ideas for content. And we said, who are people that you would like to learn from? What types of content do you want to learn?” The same conversation that surfaced demand also surfaced specific teacher leads. “One woman said, I want to be a better negotiator. Awesome. Who would be the ideal person to learn from? And she said, oh, I just watched this documentary on Netflix called Waco. And the FBI agent who led those negotiations was this amazing listener. I’d love to learn from him. And so we ended up reaching out to Gary Nessner, and now he teaches an Electives on listening.”
Target Markets Where Structural Disruption Is Making Buyers Receptive
Sid’s approach to early customer acquisition started with identifying an industry in the middle of a structural shift. The 2008 recession had fundamentally changed how realtors operated, and buyers were already looking for something new. That kind of disruption inside a market creates a window that stable, satisfied markets simply do not offer. The play, as Sid described it, was “finding a community or a group of niche customers that were really receptive to this very different thing that we were doing. Whether you’re forming a new category or whatever the case, and then really going out and seeing how they’re organically using this.” Structural change in a market is a signal worth hunting for before you decide where to go first.
Prioritize Belief Over Fit When Closing Your First Customers
Jennifer Dulski’s first customer was not the obvious profile for a tech platform, but that didn’t matter. The account came through an introduction, and what closed it was a CEO willing to take a chance. As Jennifer described it, “sometimes it just takes a passionate early adopter and you wouldn’t think necessarily of a bank as being an early adopter, but in this case they had a CEO who said, yeah, I really see the potential here.” She connected this directly to a framework she believed in: “it’s kind of the Crossing the Chasm book. You just need some of those early people to take a bet on you. And they did.” From there the account did exactly what early adopter accounts are supposed to do: “we started with a pilot. The pilot went extremely well. Then they rolled out to, you know, more of their organization and within, I think under six months, they decided to push it out to the whole company.”
Diversify Your Early Customer Base to Stress-Test Your Market Assumptions
Being part of Y Combinator made signing up fellow startups trivial: “We were part of Y Combinator, so it was really easy to actually go around and kind of tap the shoulders of our friend in YC and say, hey, you need payroll. How many do you pay yourself? Let us go help you and be one of our first customers.” But Tomer pushed deliberately beyond that: “We really tried hard to find customers in the early days that were like a bakery or like a cupcake shop or like a swim lessons club and things like that to kind of get that diversity.” The goal was to find out early whether the product was genuinely generalizable, before committing to a segment assumption built entirely on the customers who were most convenient to reach.
Treat Every External Conversation as a Potential Sale
Guideline’s first paying customer came from a conversation that was never meant to be a sales call. Kevin approached Plaid looking for a capability his product needed, and in the process of explaining what he was building, the dynamic flipped. “I went to them and started telling them what I was building and what I wanted to do and connect to other retirement accounts. And they didn’t have the ability to do that. And I was telling them what I was building. They went like, we really want this account. We really want this product that you’re building.” From there, the timeline moved fast. “They wanted it by the end of the year. We ended up really hustling getting a product out the door.” What started as a vendor evaluation ended with a signed customer.
Mine Your Immediate Network for Your First Customer Insights
John Kim didn’t go searching for a market. He and his co-founder were already embedded in one: “my co-founder and I at the time were surrounded by a lot of early stage founders. The YC, I think summer ‘22 or ‘23 batch was finishing up, and a lot of our friends were, hey, we really need to recruit founding engineers. That was our number one problem.” Rather than treating that signal as casual conversation, they followed it. They mapped out every method those founders were already using to solve the problem, and as John put it, “we just assessed all these methods and none of them seemed like slam dunks. So we thought there needs to be a new approach.” The community didn’t just hand them the problem definition; it handed them the first customers at the same time.
Run Free Pilots to Clear the Conceptual Barriers Blocking Conversion
Siadhal explained why Metaview’s first customers weren’t paying: the friction wasn’t price, it was a conceptual hurdle that needed to be proven out first. As he explained, “the biggest friction to adopting Metaview back in 2019 was conceptually recording interviews. That was a really big hurdle.” Rather than pushing for early revenue, they ran free pilots and let usage build the proof. “Getting people to pay for it was almost just once we were ready and once we had enough customers that had proven that and enough candidates that had proven they didn’t have an issue with being recorded, it was almost just like charging, starting to charge some of our existing customers.” The pilots didn’t just validate demand. They eliminated the objection that was blocking conversion entirely.
Let Early Inbound Demand Tell You Where Your Market Actually Is
Cobrainer was building a platform for university students when an enterprise company came to them directly. “A large enterprise company here from Germany, where we’re based, approached us and said, hey, we actually want to work exactly the way you’re advocating for with your platform.” The ask was concrete and came with real money attached: “our first customer basically said, what you guys are doing for your university, ee want to do that in the organization and just build that for us. We’ll give you €100,000.” Hanns didn’t run a process or validate the opportunity against a framework. “We just started building based on their initial inquiry.”
Dominate a Narrow Market Before Expanding to a Broader One
Jeremy built Andela’s early traction by going narrow on purpose. The company started in Nigeria only, then expanded country by country rather than trying to serve a broad market from day one. Being country-specific allowed Andela to identify “really talented people who didn’t have paths into the former global economy otherwise” and in doing so, “surprise companies who just didn’t realize or see that Nigeria could be part of their strategy.” Jeremy was direct about why this sequencing matters for any marketplace founder: “broad is really hard. The more specific you can be and the more your initial customers are just obsessed with using you like you are the best thing by far for solving their problem, the easier the next couple of years are going to be.”