How to Get Your First Customers | Startup School on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2023–2025.
talk · intro · evergreen
A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.
Commenters recommend the whole talk as practical, tactical advice for early customer acquisition and outbound sales.
“The entire video is really good actually I recommend watching the entire thing.”
3 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
I watched this just yesterday ▶ this video The entire video is really good actually I recommend watching the entire thing.
in “Ask HN: What is your base template for first time communication with a prospect?” · View on HN
I spent the first chunk of my career doing sales (2nd half spent in software engineering). Theres a lot of good books out there but you're going to find a lot of the direct advice to be non-applicable (as I'm sure you can pick up from the comments). Most of the Literature out there is directed at professional sales people, who for the most part are non-technical, have the backing of a marketing org, and are also different than a founder. Anyway, heres a reading list. Most of the trainings I've been a part of were custom built to the org or market, and frankly I learned more from Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss. I did enjoy "the Wedge" training by Randy Schwantz... that one you should do the video not the book. It also sounds like you could use some marketing stuff so I'll throw some of that in there too. In no particular order, and please keep in mind this is off the top of my head: * Influence (the classic) * YC videos (e.g. [link] , [link] , ▶ this video , etc) * Thinking Fast and Slow * Purple Cow * Clayton Christensen stuff * Spin Selling * Challenger Sale * Guerrilla marketing (for the mental muscle) * Jeffrey Gitomer (basic but useful) * Lean Startup (for positioning) * Charisma Myth * Minimalist Entrepreneur (bits and pieces) * The presentation secrets of steve jobs (just a good book on presentations, framed around Steve Jobs to sell more) For what its worth this question comes up fairly often. It seems like technical people would like a "technical people" guide on how to
in “Ask HN: Resources to get better at outbound sales?” · View on HN
Not sure if this is YC company, but YC has been using this recently on their YouTube Startup School videos; for example, look at the description of this video: ▶ this video
in “AI Generated Section Names and Links for Existing YouTube Videos” · View on HN