Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strongly disagree for the first few customers. If you're going B2C or B2SmallerWebsites then you're aiming for much less per sale, and therefore to get legs you'll need to be able to sell to a lot of them. So potential sales targets are all around. You won't be able to find them in sufficient volume to make a difference until after you have advertising turned on. But you still need to figure out your business. And ta…
When your customer is anybody from a forum on toyotas to donuts, how do you find them. I am currently advertising, not with too much success. I'm just following the points of this article that you don't know whether it's bad ad copy or product.
If you're selling a horizontal product targeting customers where their existing technology they use could tip you off (e.g. companies that use Marketo and Mailchimp), LeadLander and BuiltWith are useful.
Once you get a list of target companies, the next trick is finding the right person to sell into. If you know their title, search Google like this:
site:linkedin.com "Company Name" "Title"
That works well since it lets you plow past Linkedin's limitations on searches outside your personal network.
Once you figure out your customer's company, name, and title, head over to email-format.com or data.com to look up the email format for the Company. With Rapportive for Gmail, you can take a few guesses and usually find the right person. Or read this post: http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anyb...