[adamqureshi]

The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business, says MIT’s Bill Aulet, is a paying customer.

https://stripe.com/atlas

or use a paypal button.

Adapt this mentality. No investor will ever give you money.

Make sales. Learn. Adjust. Repeat.

Good Lucky! ;-)

[pavelshtanko]

I'm thinking more about support than money. I can run it for some time on my own for sure... But registering the company, talking about marketing, helping with sales strategy all these things.. I definitely need them more than money.

[jmngomes]

It'll be immensely easier to get a proper investor if you can generate enough sales to break even (i.e. to pay for your costs), because that's an important step to demonstrating viability and avoiding the "too early" argument.

So, given what you already know, how many customers do you need to generate enough revenue to pay for costs, i.e. what slice of the market should you address? Define that segment of the market, e.g. "kindergarten teachers in London" and devise the tactics to get them on your "Buy now" screen, and then to get them to click the "Pay now" button.

Sales strategy really depends on what space your business is in (especially B2B or B2C), but a basic first step could be something like "I'll create a Google Ads campaign for that target, measure how they respond to the landing page and integrate Intercom so I can discover/answer their questions when they reach the website". You'll learn new things about what customers think of your service - pricing, features, etc - that will help you define the next step.

If you haven't received a payment, I'd focus on converting those 14 prospects into paying customers and learning why they have or haven't purchased. Then, if you're a B2C business, focus on increasing that number x10, i.e. get to 100 paying customers, then 1000, until you break even. This is when an investor, in my mind, will be useful: to accelerate growth, and for that you need some sort of growth beforehand (which will also be your main argument when negotiating an investment).

When you are at this point, your premise will be "I'll use this money to hire a senior sales executive specializing in X to devise a proper sales strategy, and/or a senior marketing person to devise and run marketing campaigns").

[ryandrake]

When you used the word "support" I thought about something else too not to forget about: Customer support.

When I turned on a side project iOS app a while back, and actually managed to get customers paying for it, I soon found myself swamped with support requests. "How does this work? It crashed, help! I'm getting this error message!" Also, automated bug reports. The app was bringing in tens of dollars per month, not thousands, so how does supporting this even make sense? I thought: Well I took their money, so I kind of have to own this, but it was shitty.

Have a plan for customer support.

[scrollaway]

It's a simple game of numbers.

If you're getting an overwhelming amount of support requests compared to how much money your product generates, something is wrong.

1. If large amounts of tickets have a similar root cause, make sure those customers are picked up before they create a ticket. Maybe you fix the issue, implement the suggestion, have an FAQ you make sure they see, rework your app so that this no longer comes up, etc.

2. If you have a ton of free users producing a ton of support requests, and not enough revenue from the product, you might be monetizing it wrong. Could be a sign of a bad conversion rate, a bad monetization strategy, or simply a sign that you shouldn't have a support stream for free users.

3. (General advice) Do all the customer support yourself for as long as you can. This is the best way to know what they want and they'll be happier for it. It won't stop making sense to do this until you really are a big company. And even then I'd still advise to pick up support tickets whenever you can.

[neltnerb]

It sounds like an accelerator would be helpful for you, since they will be able to provide mentorship on marketing, sales, and legal advice if they're any good.

But I would be hesitant to pay (much) to join one, there seem to be a lot of faux-accelerators out there preying on small companies. Ideal would be one that accepts people based on merits. Paying a few hundred dollars a month is reasonable, but giving up 10% of your company is not. That mentorship just isn't that expensive to provide to you.

The founder of a startup must learn marketing and sales. This is unavoidable. You're the only one that deeply understands the product, and hopefully the market segment. If you don't understand the market segment, you must learn yourself. No marketing expert or sales firm will do as well as you yourself will.

Once you've figured out how to sell it, which a mentor can help with but not substitute for, then you can train a sales person to "replicate" it. Once you have some example sales, you can define your "customer profile" which any sales person will need to have in order to know who to target in outbound sales to develop leads. Then the sales person would mostly be working on qualifying those leads to see if they truly are a good fit to sell to, and ultimately mostly just following up with them to move the process forward.

Basically, assume that you are the lead sales person. That has to be your role now, there's no other option. Find the training you need, even if it's just an online crash course in sales. Don't hire a sales person until you feel confident you could clearly define not just that you need sales or vague ideas about who your target market is, but what characteristics of a customer to look for are.

Sales isn't really all that hard. But it's also not easy, it requires a lot of willingness to hear "no" and not feel bad about it or move heaven and earth to get them to say yes. They won't. You need to be methodical and persistent, not take anything personally ever, and try to eliminate leads from your list of possibilities as fast as possible if they don't truly look like they'll turn into a sale. That's the only way to do it efficiently.

(I am talking about enterprise sales, FYI. I don't know much about consumer sales.)

EDIT: I noticed elsewhere that your customers appear to be companies. In that case, I believe my advice above applies well. You're likely to have a modest number of customers, who are hopefully paying a fairly high amount per customer. This is the mode in which enterprise sales work best, since it requires a bit heavier a touch (i.e. calling specific people at a potential customer to followup) than consumer sales.

[contingencies]

Cool quote, added to http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup :)