Your choice of first customers is one of the most underappreciated, important decisions in the early life of a startup. It’s a one-way door, and one-way doors are expensive (it can be excruciating to turn back the clock once you start serving customers).

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One way to think of it: your first customers are your first hires as marketers. You want them to be as good at their job as possible.

Imagine all your customers as you did before (in terms of how valuable they’ll find you, and how easy they’ll be to attract). Then, consider that some of them have influence on others. You’ll find pockets where one kind of customer influences another, and some customer classes who are widely influential, or influential to several important adjacent customer classes.

Think of this as a gradient of influence among your customers.

You want to target a class of customers, at first, who are as high up on that gradient as possible — even if they’re harder to attract (as I imagine security agencies were for Palantir) or you make less money from them (as OUYA did from its Kickstarter backers, where it priced the product as low as possible before knowing the cost to serve each customer).

Often, the type of customer who will ultimately pay your bills is not the best first customer, and that’s counterintuitive.

Notice I’m describing customer classes vs. individual customers. Many startups overweight the value of that one Fortune 50 logo, vs. the value of being known for serving one class of customers well. Better to dominate some initial market and then expand, than to have dispersed pockets of usage where each customer is famous.

There are many ways to slice the universe of potential customers into classes:

Industry — “tech companies”

Function — Bloomberg got its start focusing on bond traders

Reputation — “Top 100 best places to work companies”

Community or event — Foursquare sparked a fire at SXSW

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Think about it like this: what’s the class of customers most admired by the entire universe of customers you might have? Define that admired class as narrowly as possible, to make it easier to find and serve them, and to get critical mass in at least one market.

http://also.roybahat.com/post/84933343626/picking-your-first-customers-the-gradient-of-influence