The first 10,000 customers are the foundation on which your brand will survive & thrive.

For any brand that is a category creator or a challenger brand, depending on your unique initial product offerings, you will have between 5,000-10,000 customers that are incredibly easy to acquire.

These are users who had been WAITING for a product as innovative and revolutionary as yours.
These are your ideal ICP.
These are the people you had in mind when you thought your startup is going to be a multi-billion dollar idea.
These are the superusers within a group to whom others listen. They aspirational for the millions of customers who will come after these initial users.
They will be the most loyal if you show them love.
They will refer SO MANY people in the next few years you can't even imagine.
You need to make sure that these users are the ultimate champions of your brand.

But there is a process on how to do that.
It's not as easy as running ads and acquiring 10,000 users.
Quite the opposite actually.

You need to be 100% business ready as a new category creator brand before you start chasing these early customers.

Business ready means:

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1. Do you have your brand strategy in place which communicates the unique value you are bringing to the market?
2. Do you have your basic retention flows & journeys setup?
3. Is your website CRO wise in the top 5% Shopify sites?
4. Do you have your brand story and founder story dialled in?
5. Do you have the first 8-10 social media posts ready which will help form a connection with your TG? Do you have the social strategy for the next few months?
6. Do you know what your breakeven roas is, and where you will get funds from if you are operating at a negative roas in the first few months?
7. Do you know what you need to do in order to be first order profitable and do you have a REALISTIC idea by when you can achieve that?
8. Do you have customer support FAQ automation flows setup on whatsapp?
9. Do you know the biggest pain points of your customers and are you doing a good enough job of communicating that nobody can solve them better than you using storytelling (as opposed to sales)?

etc etc tec.

Being "Business ready" does not mean striving for perfection and achieving 10/10 in all of the above. I am merely requesting you to DO the above. Even if everything happens at a 6/10 and and maybe 1-2 elements are an 8 or a 9, that's fine.

Here is what will happen if your business starts running ads without being business ready.

Let's say your breakeven roas is 2x.You start running ads at a 2.5x roas; but you're not business ready yet.
You will say "awesome, I just need to scale this". I did not even need to waste time and effort and lakhs of rupees in trying to be business ready.

Now let's say you have acquired your first 10,000 customers at a 2.5roas and you are elated. Great.
But soon, your roas starts dipping.
Now you realise that you need to do all the other things outside of performance marketing. You will scramble and apply desperate measures to fix your funnel and/or whatever needs to be fixed.

And now let's say you fixed it. You are now "business ready" finally.
After 2 years of running ads you have finally done something you should have done many moons ago. And now you're waiting for your numbers to pick up. But they don't. You don't understand why. you think it was all a waste of money.
"Email marketing does not work."
"CRO does not work."
"Everything is a scam and agencies don't know anything."

But hello.You missed a crucial point. The crux.
And by this time, denial prevents you from acknowledging it.

Your first 10,000 customers (or whatever the set of superusers in your category TAM is), are the EASIEST customers to acquire for a new category brand.
These are the users who had been WAITING for a product like yours.
these are the users who had the highest state of awareness BEFORE your product was even launched.
Chances are, you have not invested 10-15% of your monthly ad budgets to educate users and transition them from a lesser aware stage to a more aware stage. Because you were already working on razor thin margins.

Voila, you have LOST these initial users's trust and attention. They are not obsessed with you because you were not obsessed with them.
They are now loyalists of another brand in your category which launched after you but won them over with better communication & touchpoints.
By treating your superusers as a one-night stand instead of a relationship/partnership, you have lost out on experiencing true love.

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But had you researched & invested in being business ready before launching, your initial roas would have been a 3x or a 3.5x from day 0.
You would have had the leeway to invest 10-12% of your monthly spends on customer education.
And most importantly, your business would have survived.

Key takeways:

-> Bootsrapped brands in 2024-25 do not have the luxury of following the VC playbook. There is nobody coming to bail us out when we screw up.

-> Make sure to acquire your initial 5,000-10,000 superusers at the highest roas and lowest cac possible.

-> Integrate storytelling, education and relationship building at every touchpoint possible.

-> Focus on retention from day 0. It's much easier to retain super-users than the users that will follow.

CAC patterns for a new category D2C Brand

First 500-1000 customers -> Very high CAC

Next 5000customers (approx. actual numbers depends on your TAM) - > Low CAC
[You need to launch 1-2 new products here asap]

Next 5000customers (approx. actual numbers depends on your TAM) - > Medium CAC (rising CAC trend emerges as you run out of superusers)

Next 10,000 customers -> High nCAC but high repeat % of superusers will offset the blended CAC and make it not-so -bad.
[This is where you get gutted if you don't have efficient retention practices in place + if you have a leaky funnel]

At this point in your journey, everything will depend on how strong your brand is, how good PR you have done, your team, innovation, new product launches, and lastly, how consistently have you invested in educating users to transfer them from lesser to higher stages of awareness.