Apparently Your Startup’s First 100 Customers Don’t Actually Matter (Aaron Dinin, PhD @ Medium)
Early customer acquisition may not be as valuable a metric as most investors and entrepreneurs think
Investors have learning curves. By that I mean most of them don’t just magically pick winners the first time they write a check. Instead, many of their earliest investments don’t pan out, and, like entrepreneurs, they use what they learn from failure to improve their strategies and try again.
As you might imagine, it can be a costly learning process. I witnessed it firsthand during a lunch with a friend who’d made lots of money selling real estate and had recently begun angel investing in tech companies. Earlier that morning, he’d just gotten final confirmation that the first startup he invested in was shutting down.
“That was an expensive lesson,” he said as he shared the news. “It cost me $100,000!”
“That is expensive,” I agreed. “What was the lesson? What’d you learn?”
“I’m honestly not sure,” he complained. “I was certain I’d found a winner. I took my time to make sure I’d found the right company and a great deal. The product seemed solid, the founders were real grinders, and they’d ...
