[goodJobWalrus]

In the interview, you said that you had 10 paying customers before you even started coding or had a company. My question is:

How did you get those people paying you, and how much they paid? Since you have a monthly service, surely they haven't been paying your usual monthly fee for all that time while you were coding?

[malcolmocean]

I reached out to some friends of mine, pitching them something like "I'm developing a system to help you achieve your goals. It's based on daily planning and reflection. Paypal me $10 for the first month if you're interested." The actual conversations were much longer than that, in which I explained a bunch of the high-level thinking behind it, mentioned that I was looking for some beta testers, etc. I probably also mentioned that I'd trialed the basic system myself and informally with another person.

One of the nice things about offering "I'll help you achieve your goals" is that pretty much anyone wants it if you can actually do it. The latter part is of course hard. But yeah, because of this I probably asked only 15-20 friends and got 10 to pay based on that. It also helps that I have friends who are willing to experiment and who trust me not to just run off with their money.

Part of what also helped, I'm sure, is that I reached out to people I knew individually and they got to have the sense of being part of this early group of testers.

I followed the "do things that don't scale" approach. At the start, I didn't have custom software, but I queued up emails manually using Boomerang, to bug people each day at the time they specified, to plan their day and reflect. They replied, and I put their data into a spreadsheet and elsewhere. I spent about an hour per week for each of those users at the start. I was giving them value manually/personally, rather than with software.