The Right Way to Get Your First 1,000 Customers

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2019

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thales Teixeira, associate professor at Harvard Business School, believes many startups fail precisely because they try to emulate successful disruptive businesses. He says by focusing too early on technology and scale, entrepreneurs lose out on the learning that comes from serving initial customers with an imperfect product. He shares how Airbnb, Uber, Etsy, and Netflix approached their first 1,000 customers very differently, helping to explain why they have millions of customers today. Teixeira is the author of the book "Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption."

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you work with early career professionals, my colleagues at
0:03.8	HPR have a great new podcast for you. It's called New Here. Think of it like the
0:08.4	Young Professional's Guide to Building a Meaningful Career on your own terms.
0:11.9	Share New Here with the Young Professionals in your life. a meaningful career on your own terms.
0:12.8	Share new here with the young professionals in your life.
0:15.9	Listen for free wherever you got your podcasts.
0:18.6	Just search new here. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. A lot of the advice for budding entrepreneurs goes like this.
0:49.0	offer something that is ten times better than what's on the market.
0:52.0	Build network effects, put in place a technology
0:55.2	infrastructure, and own the end-to-end customer experience.
0:59.9	And when you look at successful disruptive businesses like Uber and Airbnb, those lessons
1:04.7	ring true.
1:06.1	But our guest today believes many startups fail because they try to do all that from the
1:10.6	get-go, and that that's a big mistake. He says a key reason Airbnb and Uber
1:16.0	are expected to go public soon is because they ignored some of those truisms
1:20.3	early on and that how they approach their first 1,000 customers
1:24.6	differently helps explain why they have millions of customers today. Our
1:29.2	guest today is Tollis de Chera. He's an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and he's the author of the book,
1:35.3	Unlocking the Customer Value Chain, how decoupling drives customer disruption.
1:40.2	Tollis, thanks for coming on the show.
1:42.2	Thanks for having me, Kurt. I want to talk to you about these early stage companies because you focus on that in the
1:58.9	book taking your business from zero to 1,000 customers.
	...

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