Mark Bouris: How to get your first customer

If you want your first customer, the first thing you need to understand is that waiting around has never worked for anyone.

I see it all the time, where people spend months perfecting their logo, tweaking their website, and agonising over fonts and colours, asking Claude or ChatGPT a million questions, and the whole time they haven't made a single phone call, knocked on a single door or asked a single person to buy what they're selling. They're so busy building a brand that nobody knows about yet that they completely forget to actually build a business, and there is a very big difference between the two.

Here's the truth that nobody wants to hear, and it's a simple one. Your business does not exist until someone pays you for something, not when you register the ABN, not when you print the business cards and not when you launch the Instagram page, because it only becomes real the moment money hits the account, and everything that happens before that moment is just playing pretend.

So how do you actually land that first customer? Do whatever it takes. Go old school, pick up the phone, walk into a business, talk to the people you run into at the school gates, at the gym and at the cafe, and tell them exactly what you do and how you can help them, and then look them in the eye and ask for the sale. Go new school and use the internet, social media and AI to find your audience and potential customers.

But while AI can handle a lot of the mundane stuff in your business, it will never be able to sit across from someone and close a deal, because that is a human skill that only comes with practice and the only way to get that practice is to be out there doing it every single day.

Most people avoid this because they're terrified of hearing the word no, but rejection is not the end of the conversation, it's actually the very beginning, because every time someone says no you learn something about your pitch, your offer or your timing that gets you one step closer to someone who says yes.

When that first yes finally comes it changes everything, because you will learn more from a single paying customer than you ever could from a full year of planning in your bedroom. You find out what people actually want, what they're genuinely willing to hand over money for, and exactly where your pitch falls flat, and that kind of real-world feedback is pure gold that you will never find inside a business plan sitting on your laptop.

Your first customer is out there right now and they’re not going to come looking for you, so stop waiting and go get them.