Blog | Tomorrow Now

Your first 100 customers define your company. They shape your product, validate your positioning, and create the foundation for everything that follows. Get this right and you have a business. Get it wrong and you have an expensive hobby.

Getting there requires a deliberate strategy, not just hoping the right people find you. Hope is not a go-to-market strategy.

Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

Before you can find customers, you need to know exactly who you're looking for. And "SMBs who need productivity tools" isn't specific enough. That description fits millions of companies, most of whom will never buy from you.

Get specific. What industry? What company size? What role makes the buying decision? What trigger event makes them ready to buy? What pain are they experiencing right now that makes your solution urgent rather than nice to have?

A strong ICP reads like a person, not a demographic. "Marketing directors at B2B SaaS companies with 50 to 200 employees who just hired their third marketer and are struggling to prove ROI on their campaigns." That's specific. That tells you where to find them, what to say, and why they'd care.

Your ICP will evolve as you learn. But starting with a hypothesis lets you test and iterate. Starting with "everyone" means you're targeting no one.

Choose Your Channel

Most startups fail at GTM because they try to do everything at once. They run paid ads, write blog posts, attend conferences, do cold outreach, and post on LinkedIn. They spread thin, do everything poorly, and wonder why nothing works.

Pick one channel and master it before expanding. Go deep, not wide.

For B2B startups at the early stage, your realistic options are founder-led sales through direct outreach, content and SEO to drive inbound interest, community by showing up where your customers already gather, or partnerships by leveraging existing relationships.

Each channel has trade-offs. Founder-led sales is fast but doesn't scale. Content and SEO scales but takes months to show results. Community builds trust but requires consistent presence. Partnerships can accelerate growth but you're dependent on others.

Choose based on your strengths, your market, and your timeline. If you need revenue in 30 days, content isn't your answer. If you hate cold calls, outbound probably isn't either. Be honest about what you'll actually do consistently.

The Founder Sales Imperative

For your first 20 to 30 customers, the founder should be doing sales. Not because you can't afford salespeople. Because you need to learn.

Every objection teaches you about your positioning. If prospects keep asking "how is this different from X," your differentiation isn't clear. If they love the demo but won't buy, you haven't established urgency. If they want features you don't have, you're either talking to the wrong customers or missing something important.

Every lost deal reveals gaps in your product, positioning, or process. Track why you lose. After twenty lost deals, patterns emerge. Those patterns tell you what to fix.

Every won deal shows you what actually matters to customers. Often it's not what you expected. The feature you thought was your differentiator might matter less than the integration you almost didn't build.

This learning is invaluable. It can't be delegated. It can't be read in a report. You have to feel it yourself. When you eventually hire salespeople, this experience lets you train them, evaluate them, and iterate the process.

Build Your Sales Motion

Document everything from day one. What messages get responses? What subject lines get opens? What questions come up in every call? What objections can you overcome, and which ones kill deals?

Create a simple tracker: prospect name, source, stage, next action, notes. After every call, write what happened and what you learned. This feels tedious. Do it anyway.

This documentation becomes the foundation for scaling later. When you hire your first salesperson, you'll hand them a playbook, not a blank slate. They'll ramp faster because you've codified what works.

Your sales motion includes your outreach templates, your discovery questions, your demo script, your follow-up cadence, and your objection responses. Build each piece as you go. Test variations. Keep what works.

The Numbers Game

Early-stage sales is partially a numbers game. You need enough conversations to learn and enough opportunities to close. But quality matters more than quantity.

A rough framework: for every 100 prospects you reach out to, expect 5 to 15 responses. Of those, 3 to 5 will take meetings. Of those, 1 to 2 will close. Your numbers will vary based on your market, your outreach quality, and your product fit.

Track your funnel from first touch to closed deal. Where do prospects drop off? If you get meetings but don't close, your demo or pricing might be the problem. If you can't get meetings, your outreach or targeting might be off.

Don't chase metrics for their own sake. The goal is learning and revenue, not impressive activity counts.

From 10 to 100

Once you've closed your first 10 customers through pure hustle, you can start building systems. Create templates for outreach. Refine your pitch based on what's worked. Start testing channels that could scale.

At this point, you should have clear answers to: who is our customer, what do they care about, why do they buy, why do they not buy, and how do they find us?

From 10 to 100 is about repeatability. Can you do what worked ten times and get similar results? If yes, you have the foundation of a scalable business. If no, you got lucky and need to figure out why before you can grow.

But never lose the feedback loop. Your first 100 customers are still teachers, not just transactions. Stay close to them. Understand their experience. Use what you learn to improve the product and the sales process.

The companies that nail their first 100 customers build a foundation that carries them to their first 1,000. The companies that rush through it often have to reset and start over. Take the time to get it right.