How We Got Our First 100 Customers (No Bulls**t, Specific Details)

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
And then we were like, all right, fine, deal. Like that's, you know, this business is so fricking hard. Like, let's try this. And in the end, I don't think it ever ended up working.

**Sam Parr** (0:06)
But you got the customers, and that's the point of the episode. Yeah, we got it.

**Shaan Puri** (0:11)
The subsequent failure is irrelevant, okay?

**Sam Parr** (0:14)
Yeah.
All right, we're live. Shaan, we're gonna do a Q&A session today. We got a bunch of questions. I have a feeling we're gonna spend most of the time on one question. But the question is, how did you get your first 100 customers in your businesses and what are the best ways that you've heard of? So I'll ask you, Shaan, but I personally have grown, I think, five things to a million to 10 million in revenue. I've grown one thing to well north of 10 million in revenue, multimillion dollars per month. I've grown a bunch of stuff to thousands of users. I've grown a bunch of stuff to hundreds of thousands and I've grown one thing to millions.
And we'll go through examples and you've done the same. How many did Bebo have or Blab?

**Shaan Puri** (1:01)
Blab had like four million users.
Yeah, basically we've done this a bunch of different times and a bunch of different ways. And so when we get this question, how did you get your first 100 customers? I actually really like this question. This is a very different question than like, what's your advice?
It's like, forget the advice. Let me tell you literally what I did when it comes to how we grew our businesses at the very, very start. Because if you're at the start, it doesn't matter what somebody did to get to 10 million in revenue. What matters is how they got to $10 in revenue. How did they get the ball going? How did they get the initial momentum? Because if you don't do that by definition, you don't really get to step two unless you've done step one.

**Sam Parr** (1:38)
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Now back to the podcast.

**Shaan Puri** (2:28)
And so this is the step one of so, and I thought it'd be fun if we take the, our own, just all the different projects that we've done, and just try to label the method that we use to go and get those first 100 customers that got the ball rolling.

**Sam Parr** (2:44)
Do you want to go back and forth?

**Shaan Puri** (2:46)
Yeah, let's trade off.

**Sam Parr** (2:47)
All right, so the first thing that I grew, I'm actually not going to talk about it a lot because I didn't realize it, but I was breaking the law. But it was, I had an e-commerce store and I originally got my first 100 customers by posting in forums, but I'm not going to mention that.

**Shaan Puri** (3:00)
Statutory limitations, by the way, is that a real thing, the statutory limitations? Like is there a real thing?
Maybe we need producer Ari to let us know. By the way, show her in her sweater, fantastic sweater. Okay, it's not a thing. All right, so correct. Do not tell people what you were doing. I thought after 10 years, everything's forgiven.

**Sam Parr** (3:16)
No, I'm not going to mention that.
But all right, my first business was called Bunk. It was like my first like actual startup out of college. It was called Bunk. It was a roommate matching app. It was Tinder for roommates, which I always say was stupid. We should have done Tinder for Tinder because this was right when Tinder came out. It was like swiping, like clicking yes or no.
But before it became an app, we actually just had a website that was built on Weebly. We probably did 50,000 in sales in a handful of months, something like that. And what we used to do is in San Francisco, it's mostly transient people. So people like me and Sean who moved there without knowing too many people, and you want to rent a one bedroom apartment, but you can't afford a one bedroom apartment. And so instead there's a four bedroom apartment where there's one room left and you apply to move in there. What a lot of people don't know is back then, and I don't know if it's this way now, but back then literally a hundred people would apply for that one bedroom.