This Simple 2-Step Approach Helped Me Reach 1 Million Customers Some think a massive marketing budget is the key to getting a large number of customers, but in reality, it's much simpler than that.
By Anna Harman Edited by Mark Klekas
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It might sound counterintuitive, but if you want to hit one million customers, don't think about reaching one million customers.
Instead, think about converting your first because the key to attracting people to your business — whether it's 10, 100, or one million — is offering a service or making a product that people actually want and will pay for. After all, you won't get to one million customers if you can't get to 10.
I used a two-step approach that helped me grow my business, and you can, too. Here it is:
Step one: Create a product or service that people truly need
This strategy is how my co-founder Lisa Bubbers and I have scaled our startup Studs — a brand that is reimagining the ear piercing experience — into a fast-growing business. To date, we've reached over one million customers by delivering a consistent, high-quality experience to everyone who interacts with us, whether they're shopping our jewelry products online or getting pierced at one of our brick-and-mortar locations. We've grown our business steadily by focusing on what customers need.
Although some people may think a massive marketing budget is the key to reaching a ton of customers, in reality, it's simply finding customer demand and offering an incredible service or product to meet that demand and appropriately getting the word out about that product or service. Marketing is the amplification of your offering, and if what you're selling isn't meeting a true market need, the customer isn't raving about it and the experience isn't consistent, that amplification is ineffective or, at worse, detrimental.
More from the author: I Built My Company to 23 Profitable Stores. Here's My Advice to Small Business Owners Who Want to Grow Their Retail Presence.
Maybe you're an aspiring entrepreneur reading this, wondering, Okay, how do I know if my product or service is something people are going to like and want? Create your minimal viable product and get real feedback from the customer via surveys, reviews, testimonials and user testing.
In our case, before we launched Studs, we offered piercings in a rented office for five days. We talked to people about their past experiences with piercings and earrings, what they would want out of their ideal experience and why they wanted to get pierced with a needle rather than a gun. This exercise gave us a real sense of the demand for the service we were creating and how we could best meet our customers' needs and fill the gap in the market.
Over the course of those five days, we spoke with and pierced about 30 to 40 people, some of whom were friends and family, and some were people we didn't know. The people we didn't know ended up being the most important group to us because they reaffirmed that real customers wanted the thing we were creating. Of course, the job isn't done once you create the thing people want. Then, you need to be able to execute it well, refine it via data and insights, and replicate the experience for your customers at scale.
Which brings me to step two: Make your product or service consistently great.
Set a goal for customers that, for your business, means you've achieved product-market fit — let's call it 10,000. Once you've reached that goal, it becomes an execution game.
Now that a large group of people want the product you've made or the service you're offering, you can extrapolate the number of people who will want it as well, and that's your addressable market. But now, you have to keep making that product or offering that service at scale, and it needs to be just as good for the first customer as it is for the 100,000th customer, the 500,000th customer. In the services business, in particular, operational excellence is even more important.
I think Drybar is a really good example of this. Essentially, the Drybar of today is the same as the Drybar I experienced back in 2010 when the brand first launched. When I go today, I have the same great experience as I did back then. One thing in particular that it did so well was develop a distinct scent for its product line, so you immediately know when you're having a Drybar experience. It's a great signature, and when you can create these experiences and execute them at scale, people will keep coming back for them because they're repeatable and familiar.
To summarize, first, you have to make something people not only want but need. Then, you have to make something that enough people want and consistently deliver a great experience. That's what we did at Studs, and it helped us scale effectively. We were never focused on hitting one million customers, it was just a byproduct of our mission to bring an excellent product to the market.
