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How do you get your 10 paying clients?
Greateful for your thoughts.
So the answer may be: you don't do SOC2 clients unless you already have connections. I could be wrong but I sell in SMB space so I may be biased.
Oh and you have to do it manually regardless. No ads. No content marketing etc. Talk to those potential customers.
If you want to go enterprise right away, you need lot of dollars in my opinion or you need to have internal connections at a big ticket company. Otherwise, start small. Go for companies that are not looking for SOC2 (SMBs could be good to start with). So the answer may be: you don't do SOC2 clients unless you already have connections. I could be wrong but I sell in SMB space so I may be biased. Oh and you have to do…
These 10 clients, are also the ones that are going to allow me to raise capital from a VC.
It's quite brutal to be honest.
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/74462352/behrens-when-...
Their original business idea was to build a usable API wrapping existing APIs for shipping, and sell it to mid-large ecommerce merchants. But they didn't have any existing customers and none of these larger customers wanted to buy their service as they didn't have proof of being able to handle volume. Instead they decided to target a different market niche, tiny ecommerce businesses -- but the problem with those customers is that they have no idea how to use an API, so Shippo had to build a shipping UI on top of their original API offering, and they'd sell the UI to tiny customers, until they built up enough volume and credibility to start winning some API sales to the original market segment they wanted to sell to.
If you want to go enterprise right away, you need lot of dollars in my opinion or you need to have internal connections at a big ticket company. Otherwise, start small. Go for companies that are not looking for SOC2 (SMBs could be good to start with). So the answer may be: you don't do SOC2 clients unless you already have connections. I could be wrong but I sell in SMB space so I may be biased. Oh and you have to do…
Yes indeed. This seems the only solution that emerged from everything I tried and I wondered if I'm doing something wrong. These 10 clients, are also the ones that are going to allow me to raise capital from a VC. It's quite brutal to be honest.
Be careful -- that is a common(?) way for VCs to also say no -- "come back when you have 10 clients" which next time becomes "come back when you have 50 clients" and it goes on forever. Not saying that is the case here, but, don't put all your eggs in one basket that you will be ready to raise when you have 10 clients.
In my experience selling to the enterprise things like SOC2 and ISO270001 simplify and reduce friction in the sales process, but they're often not showstoppers.
When you pitch your product to your business sponsor, they're buying based on the value you deliver, a trust in you as a seller, and a conviction that the product will solve their problem. And then once they start to involve IT and procurement and security, then all of a sudden the focus shifts away from value and towards risk and cost management.
By having SOC2, a rock solid pen test report, ISO270001, etc. you can fast-track a ton of these processes. But otherwise, as you note, they'll throw big Excel sheets at you with questions for which many of your answers will likely be "No".
Answering "no" on questionnaires is not a showstopper. Your response on financial questionnaires will most definitely raise business continuity red flags. Your response to the security questionnaire will definitely raise data security red flags. But ultimately these questionnaires are an effort to get a full picture of the risk profile of working with you, not a test where you need to score 100/100.
So in your case, your focus needs to be on the business sponsor. They will be presented the risks from your security and financial reviews, but if you have adequately articulated the value of your product, presented an aura of business stability and growth, operated from a customer-focused mindset, then they will have the conviction to accept the risks presented by the other teams.
And sure, sometimes one of your answers will be a showstopper. So then it's up to you to look into whether you commit to fixing that showstopper as part of the contract. One of my contracts required us to get ISO270001 certification within 2 years - but we were still able to close the contract.
We closed a contact for a business critical system with one of the top 50 companies in the world, who demanded a financial review when we had months of runway.
There's always a path.
Feel free to email me if you have more questions.