Is getting 10 customers the hard part?

I’ve succeeded with my startup. Even though most of them have only used my free apps, I technically have millions of customers. My apps generate more than enough income to support myself. But I’ve been playing it safe. I continue putting my own time into it, but I haven’t been carrying out a strategic plan for growing and expanding my business. I need to put more effort into training others, and teaching them how to do what I do.

Starting today, I will take bigger risks: I will do what it takes to bring Greengar to the next level.

This thought was prompted by realizing how far ahead of most entrepreneurs I actually am. I read an article I found via Hacker News that argues that “getting 10 customers is all that matters.” Well, I’ve done that. I have millions of customers.

(click to see my apps in the App Store)

That’s a screenshot of my apps’ overall user counts, courtesy Flurry Analytics. I’ve passed the “get 10 customers” hurdle many times over.

“There are millions of potential customers, so it doesn’t matter what only ten of them think. I need to just start; later I can survey and learn something statistically significant.”

If there are millions, it’s trivial to find ten. If you can’t find even ten, then either there aren’t millions or those millions aren’t interested in you.

Businesses don’t start with millions of customers, they start with one, then ten, then a hundred, and then a thousand. But most don’t get past ten. If you haven’t gotten ten to at least say they’ll buy, where do you get your hubris to proclaim that thousands actually will buy?

Why getting 10 customers is all that matters

“most don’t get past ten”? When it comes to tech startups, that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen a lot of overly idealistic tech entrepreneurs who aren’t building something people want.

The things I want happen to be the things that other people now want, so I guess I’ve been fortunate. In 2001, I was ahead of my time: I got my start in programming with the Cybiko handheld computer. Mobile wasn’t nearly as big back then as it is today. And Cybiko had many of the right ingredients: especially its wireless communication features. Cybiko automatically created wireless networks between Cybiko devices for them to send files to each other, chat, play games, etc.

Cybiko died because the market wasn’t ready for it yet. Also, technology hadn’t advanced far enough to make it user-friendly. Cybiko probably had about 100 buttons on it, since it had a full keyboard, directional pad, action buttons, etc. It was a necessity because mobile touch screens were expensive and required a stylus.

iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad changed all that. It’s exactly what I had envisioned back in 2001/2002, and when the iPhone SDK arrived, I was ready. I didn’t have any of the programming knowledge, but I had the ideas and the design. I knew I had to build easy-to-use, mass market, networked apps. And that’s exactly what I did.

I’m definitely not a typical tech entrepreneur. I grew up far separated from Silicon Valley and the startup culture. Neither of my parents, and none of my close relatives, are involved in tech.

That seems to partly explain why I understand my customers so well. I work on what’s important, and drop everything else. I make what customers want, not what they say they want. And that is a big difference.

Greengar has far more than 10 customers today. It’s about time I started acting like it.