ฝึกพูดภาษาอังกฤษด้วยเทคนิค Shadowing จากวิดีโอ: How to Get Your First 10 Customers
กำลังสร้างบทเรียน...
1
Hi, I'm Max, a visiting partner here at Y Combinator.
2
Today I want to talk to you about something I constantly hear from YC founders, which is I think I know who my target customer is.
3
Now, how do I actually go find them and start a conversation?
4
- YC Startup School already released a lot of good advice on the strategy of early stage sales.
5
doing things that don't scale, founder -led sales, making sure to charge for your product.
6
That advice is all great and you should definitely internalize it, but today I want to talk about the tactics of getting your first 10 customers.
7
A few weeks ago, I made a post internally on Bookface, YC's internal social network, asking founders how they actually got those first TED customers.
8
Dozens of founders responded and wanted to share their experience.
9
This video is a compilation of all my learnings.
10
So let's get started.
11
Before you even touch a tool or pick a channel, you need to answer one question.
12
Where does your target customer actually spend their time?
13
- Most founders default to cold email and LinkedIn outreach.
14
This is because it's easy.
15
You can do it from your laptop.
16
It feels like you're working.
17
And there's a ton of automation and tools that you can set up for all this.
18
And for some buyers, this actually works fine.
19
If you're selling sales software to a sales leader, for example, email and LinkedIn actually make a lot of sense.
20
The buyer, who is a sales leader, lives on a computer.
21
They spend a ton of time on LinkedIn.
22
It's going to work for them.
23
But a lot of times you might be selling to a school district administrator or property manager an insurance agent, or a truck dispatcher, A lot of people don't sit on a laptop all day,
24
and a lot of people don't have their inbox as the most important surface in their work life.
25
You can blast them with cold email all you want, and and you're just gonna conclude that outbound sales doesn't work for you.
26
One recent YC founder spent months on email and LinkedIn outreach to a legacy industry.
27
His open rates and reply rates were terrible.
28
When he finally decided to actually go to an industry trade show and walk the floor, he closed more in three days than he had in three months of sending cold emails.
29
His customers were on job sites, and sometimes they went to conferences.
30
They picked up the phone.
31
In hindsight, any amount of time he spent refining the subject line
32
or his email copy ended up being a waste of time.
33
So before you do anything else, sit down for an hour and answer some basic questions about your buyer.
34
What does their average day look like?
35
How often do they check their email?
36
Do they go to conferences?
37
And which ones, if so?
38
Are they on Reddit?
39
Are they on LinkedIn?
40
Do they pick up the phone?
41
Do they mostly ask their friends for recommendations for new services and software to use?
42
Or maybe there are industry newsletters that they read.
43
If you can't answer most of these questions concretely yet, that's a sign you haven't spent enough time with real customers.
44
Go fix that before anything else.
45
All right, now it's time to actually start talking to customers.
46
Before you touch any email automation or prospecting tool, you have to start with people you already have some connection to.
47
The first two or three customers, almost without exception in these founder stories, came from one of these sources.
48
Friends in the industry, former colleagues, classmates from school, or more generally, people one introduction away.
49
The reason your warm network matters isn't that intros are some magic sales trick.
50
It's that the people buying your product early are buying because they trust you as a founder, because of the quality of the product.
51
If someone's gonna take a bet on a new product from a new company, they at least need to trust the person building it.
52
Your first degree and second degree network are the easiest people to take that bet on you.
53
So before you go outbound, work through a few sources in order.
54
First, your personal network, former colleagues, classmates, friends in the industry.
55
These people will trust you the most, so talk to them first.
56
Next is your second degree LinkedIn connections.
57
Look at who your connections know and ask for warm intros.
58
One recent YC founder told me she got intros to about
59
half of the customers she closed during her YC batch via LinkedIn intros.
60
Third, there are a bunch of AI -powered network search tools.
61
Happenstance, for example, is a recent YC company that lets you search across your whole extended network in natural language.
62
You can ask things like, find people who work on notification systems at big companies, and it'll surface relevant people from a much wider net than you can scroll through manually.
63
When you ask for an intro, be specific.
64
Tell them who you want to meet, why they specifically would care, and what to say in the forwarded email.
65
The easier you make it for them, the more likely the intro actually happens.
66
One pattern I want to call out.
67
Prospecting tools only start to matter once you have 10 to 20 quality customers.
68
Tons of founders spend weeks setting up outreach tools
69
when they actually have a lot of second degree connections they haven't messaged yet.
70
If you haven't worked your network, you're skipping the lowest hanging fruit.
71
One of the most surprising things that came up in those YC Founders stories is that so many of them, to close their first few customers, actually showed up in person.
72
They didn't just settle for getting on a Zoom.
73
"They got into a room." They made it their mission to be in the same room as the buyer.
74
A lot of people don't want to do this tactic.
75
It's slower, it's awkward, it might cost money if you have to travel somewhere, and you might get rejected to your face in real time.
76
but it also happens to work better than basically anything else.
77
First, fly out to close them.
78
One recent YC founder flew to a single executive buyer four weeks in a row.
79
The buyer kept rescheduling.
80
but he kept showing up and eventually closed them.
81
Another founder regularly showed up at customer offices uninvited and got asked to leave most of the time.
82
One time, he actually flew to Hawaii to meet a customer who kicked him out after eight minutes of conversation.
83
And that customer, through some persistence, became one of his biggest accounts.
84
Another learning was that small conferences tend to work really well.
85
The conversion rate from one real conversation at a small industry
86
-specific conference can be much higher than trying to cold email that same person.
87
Here's a mini playbook on conferences that multiple founders used.
88
You can set up a Calendly and put 15 -minute slots back to back across every day of the conference.
89
Before the event starts, email the attendee list a couple of times and fill as many slots as possible.
90
Email them again during the event to catch the people who didn't open the first email.
91
Stack meetings the whole day, and that'll make sure you get the most out of the conference.
92
Another tactic is micro events.
93
A few founders I spoke to ran founder dinners or happy hours for their ideal customer profile, something like six to 10 people, maybe 50 to $100 a head.
94
A lot of founders consistently said that this converts way better than large events.
95
Once someone's eaten dinner with you, it's very unlikely they're going to ignore your email afterwards.
96
And sometimes they'll even go out of their way to help you.
97
For the first 10 customers, there really is no tool that can replace being in the same room as your buyer.
98
If you're building a consumer product or a product for small businesses, there's often a place online where your future customers are already complaining about the problem you solve.
99
Your job is to find it and then show up there as a real person.
100
For a lot of founders, that place has actually been Reddit.
101
A common Reddit story looks something like this.
102
A founder posts a video of their product on Reddit.
103
A lot of the comments start ripping them apart, and the person thinks their launch is a disaster.
104
But then there's a couple hundred lurkers, the people who never would comment, who might quietly sign up for their product.
105
Another founder told me Reddit was the source of his first 10 customers.
106
He'd find old threads where people complained about the exact problem he was solving, and he would DM every commenter one by one.
107
A healthcare founder said that responding to Reddit and Facebook complaints was basically her whole job for a couple of months.
108
She was doing two to five posts a day.
109
She did get shadow banned from a few subreddits along the way, but she also got a bunch of customers.
110
This principle is broader than just Reddit.
111
You've got to find the place where the pain is being expressed in public.
112
For consumer products, that's often Facebook groups, Discord, or YouTube comments.
113
For some B2B niches, it could be industry -specific forums or trade association message boards.
114
The nice thing about Reddit is that threads get pulled into Google search and persist for years, so the work you do today will keep paying off for a long time.
115
Okay, you've worked your warm network, you've showed up in person, you're active in the communities where your customers complain, and at some point, you're going to need to go actually outbound the people who you don't know.
116
Your job is to find companies that match your ideal customer profile, find the right person at each one, find their contact info, and reach out.
117
Here, I'll talk about a few tools that are most common and that you might want to try.
118
Apollo was the most common starting point for the founders I talked to.
119
It's basically a lead database with email finding capabilities and a basic sequencer.
120
Their free tier is generous enough for you to build your first list.
121
For most founders at this stage, Apollo alone is enough.
122
Clay is another really popular tool.
123
It lets you build research and enrichment workflows with AI on top of your prospect list.
124
It starts to matter when you want to qualify leads on something very specific, like what software your prospects use, who's been hiring, or who posted about a topic recently on LinkedIn.
125
LinkedIn Premium is the richest source of fresh professional data.
126
Oftentimes, you'll want to send a connection request without a message, followed by a short DM once they actually accept you.
127
this way.
128
And that was his highest converting cold outreach channel.
129
Great.
130
Now you have your outbound lead list.
131
It's time to decide how you're actually going to communicate with these prospects.
132
One of the most interesting patterns I saw is that for a lot of founders, the most effective early outreach wasn't actually framed as a sales pitch.
133
It was framed as something else, maybe asking for advice or for mentorship or asking for a product review or for a whiteboard session.
134
To be clear, you shouldn't mislead people.
135
If you're not actually open to learning from them, and you're just trying to disguise a sales call, don't do this.
136
But if you genuinely want to learn and invest in building a relationship with these people, this framing can often be a real foot in the door.
137
Here's a few examples.
138
One founder reached out to dozens of CEOs in his space, asking if they'd be his mentor.
139
His messages were short, they were real, and most people were flattered.
140
A couple accepted and a few of them eventually became customers.
141
Another founder talked to 200 salespeople before her team even built out the product.
142
Every week, she'd max out her LinkedIn connections with one specific hypothesis she was testing that week.
143
Basically, user research on steroids.
144
She said about 50 % of her connection requests were accepted, and she converted 20 % of those into calls.
145
By the time she had a product, she already had a pipeline of people who told her exactly what they needed and she could go reach out to them.
146
A DevTools founder offered startups free whiteboarding sessions on their agent architecture, and then offered to open up a shared Slack channel so he can help them implement it.
147
The trick was the architecture just happened to acquire his exact product.
148
And here's one really creative variation from another founder.
149
He was selling to lawyers, and he actually offered to pay them $100 to $200 an hour, basically a portion of their hourly fee, in exchange for product feedback.
150
About 30 % of people he reached out to accepted that offer.
151
The math sounds expensive, but the conversion rate was high enough that his customer acquisition cost ended up being quite reasonable.
152
This kind of approach can especially work in markets with high contract values.
153
Once you've decided on your framing, it's time to actually write some outreach copy.
154
In my experience, the exact copy matters less than people think.
155
But a few things really do matter.
156
First, keep it under 75 words.
157
Long emails tend to just get ignored, and they'll assume you used an LLM to write it.
158
Second, the single most important line is a clear call to action.
159
What do you actually want from this person?
160
Do you want to reply?
161
Do you want to call?
162
Are you offering a 15 minute demo?
163
Make it really clear.
164
Otherwise, they'll assume the worst, basically that you're going to eat up a bunch of their time.
165
Third, there's a very easy test that a lot of people don't do to check whether the email sounds human or not.
166
Find a friend and just read your email out loud to them.
167
If anything sounds like something you wouldn't actually say to a real person, rewrite that part.
168
This is basically a one minute sanity check, and it'll help you remove most of the AI sounding lines that end up ruining cold emails.
169
One last tip here.
170
Some founders said that their highest converting outreach gave the prospect something before asking for anything.
171
For example, an API security company can do a quick vulnerability scan on the prospect's public website.
172
and show them what they found.
173
If you're a mobile onboarding tool, you can walk through the Prospects app and send a couple of specific suggestions.
174
One example from the YC founders I talked to was a compliance startup
175
that prepared a short audit note specific to that prospect's product.
176
And then they asked each one for a meeting to go into more detail.
177
Now, this kind of work is not sustainable at scale.
178
And that's kind of the point.
179
You're not trying to do this at scale.
180
You're trying to get your first 10 customers.
181
20 minutes of work before asking for 30 minutes of someone's time is actually quite a reasonable trade.
182
And one last thing here.
183
Don't forget to follow up.
184
Something like three or four times over a couple weeks is perfect.
185
I want to leave you with one frame.
186
that I think is a really useful way to think about this whole phase.
187
Customers one through three almost always come from your personal network.
188
Again, friends, former colleagues, people one intro away.
189
In my founders survey, there were basically no counterexamples to this pattern of how people found their first few customers.
190
For customers four through 10, they come from doing things that don't scale.
191
Flying out to customers, sending Reddit DMs, a small dinner for six prospects, personalized LinkedIn DMs, or free consulting sessions.
192
This part is going to be tedious, and it's going to be manual.
193
And it's a really good way to learn before you automate.
194
Then customers 10 through 50 are where the playbook starts to shift.
195
By this point, you'll probably have a refined pitch, case studies, and you'll have a really good grasp on what resonates about your value prop.
196
And that's when Apollo, Clay, email sequences, all these higher volume outreach tools actually start to make sense.
197
Now you have a message that's worth scaling and we'll get you results.
198
So as a reminder, the reason this messy middle phase from four to ten customers works is that you personally, the founder, are doing it.
199
When a founder shows up at someone's office, DMs someone on Reddit, or sends a really researched email that only somebody who studied this problem knows about,
200
it signals something no automation tool is going to be able to fake.
201
That you care enough about this problem to put your own time into it.
202
That's your advantage right now.
203
It's the one thing you have that established companies in your space won't.
204
So you have to really lean into that.
205
So in conclusion, the first 10 customers will likely not come from a tool.
206
They're going to come from you manually tapping into your network and showing up.
207
You don't have to be an amazing salesperson to do this.
208
You just have to be willing to do the unscalable things that most salespeople and founders are not willing to do.
209
Good luck, and I can't wait to see what you build.
📺 ช่องเดียวกัน
B25
How Pitching Investors is Different Than Pitching Customers - Michael Seibel
Business EnglishInterview EnglishUniversity Students
C11
Garry Tan: Own Your Intelligence
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
Dot Plots: How to Actually See What Your Users Are Doing
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1How to Build an AI-Native Services Company
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
✨ วิดีโอแนะนำ
B23
161 ประโยค
Alex Hormozi's Advice on Cold Calling
Business EnglishInterview EnglishWorking Adults
B23
63 ประโยค
How To Land Your First Junior Dev Role
Business EnglishInterview EnglishUniversity Students
B21
162 ประโยค
If I started a YouTube channel from scratch, I’d do this
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
107 ประโยค
Why Smart Entrepreneurs Start Before They’re Ready
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
125 ประโยค
How I Made My First $100,000 at 22 as a Real Estate Agent
Business EnglishInterview EnglishUniversity Students
B21
161 ประโยค
Advertising 101 - How To Advertise For A Small Business
Business EnglishWorking Adults
B2171 ประโยค
I built an app and no one's using it
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
34 ประโยค
Sales Tutorial - Customer problem-solving
Business EnglishWorking Adults
B21
264 ประโยค
Inside a YC Startup Disrupting a $900B Industry That Runs the US
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
151 ประโยค
How to Drum up New Business
Business EnglishWorking Adults
สถานการณ์ที่เกิดขึ้น
ในวิดีโอที่เราพูดถึงนี้ เราจะได้เรียนรู้เกี่ยวกับการหาลูกค้าแรก 10 คน สำหรับผู้ประกอบการใหม่ โดยการทำความเข้าใจว่าลูกค้าของเรามีพฤติกรรมอย่างไร และพวกเขาใช้เวลาอยู่ที่ไหนในชีวิตประจำวัน การสร้างความสัมพันธ์กับลูกค้าตั้งแต่แรกเป็นสิ่งสำคัญมาก เพราะพวกเขามักจะเลือกซื้อสินค้าจากคนที่พวกเขาเชื่อมั่นและไว้วางใจในตัวคุณ
กลุ่มคำและการใช้วลีที่มีประโยชน์
- ค้นหาลูกค้าเป้าหมาย (find target customers)
- การตลาดแบบออฟไลน์ (offline marketing)
- ความไว้วางใจจากลูกค้า (trust from customers)
- การมีส่วนร่วมกับชุมชน (engagement with the community)
- สร้างความสัมพันธ์ (build relationships)
ความท้าทายในการฝึกพูดของคุณ
ตอนนี้ถึงเวลาที่คุณจะได้ฝึกพูดภาษาอังกฤษกันแล้ว! ลองเลือกหนึ่งในกลุ่มคำที่เราได้แนะนำในข้างต้น และสร้างประโยคที่เกี่ยวข้องกับประสบการณ์ของคุณเองในการหาลูกค้า หรือในการเชื่อมต่อกับคนในวงการที่คุณสนใจ จากนั้นให้คุณฝึกพูดซ้ำ ๆ โดยใช้เทคนิค shadow speak ผ่าน shadowing site ที่เน้นการฝึกพูดภาษาอังกฤษ คุณจะรู้สึกมั่นใจมากขึ้นทุกครั้งที่ฝึก!
อย่าลืมว่าการฝึกพูดนี้จะช่วยให้คุณพัฒนาทักษะการสื่อสารได้อย่างรวดเร็ว และสามารถนำไปใช้ในสถานการณ์จริงได้! ลุยกันเลย!
ไวยากรณ์ในวิดีโอนี้
โครงสร้างที่ผู้พูดใช้บ่อยที่สุด พร้อมคำพูดจริงจากวิดีโอ:
| โครงสร้าง | ในวิดีโอ |
|---|---|
| Relative clauses who / which + อนุประโยค — ข้อมูลเพิ่มเติมเกี่ยวกับคนหรือสิ่งของ | founders, which is · people who work · people who didn |
| Present perfect have/has + กริยาช่อง 3 — เหตุการณ์ในอดีตที่ยังเกี่ยวข้องกับปัจจุบัน | haven't spent · haven't messaged · haven't worked |
| Passive voice be + กริยาช่อง 3 — เน้นสิ่งที่เกิดขึ้น ไม่ใช่ผู้กระทำ | being expressed · wasn't actually framed · was framed |
เทคนิค Shadowing คืออะไร?
Shadowing เป็นเทคนิคการเรียนรู้ภาษาที่ได้รับการรับรองทางวิทยาศาสตร์ พัฒนาขึ้นสำหรับการฝึกนักแปลมืออาชีพ วิธีการนี้เรียบง่ายแต่ทรงพลัง: คุณฟังเสียงภาษาอังกฤษจากเจ้าของภาษาและพูดตามทันที — เหมือนเงาที่ตามผู้พูดด้วยช่วงเวลาห่าง 1-2 วินาที การวิจัยแสดงว่าเทคนิคนี้ปรับปรุงความแม่นยำในการออกเสียง ทำนองเสียง จังหวะ การเชื่อมเสียง การฟังเข้าใจ และความคล่องแคล่วในการพูดได้อย่างมีนัยสำคัญ