Friday 4:

I get a questions more than any other when someone is trying to grow a business.

How do I get more customers?

I’ve asked it myself in every business I’ve built. It’s the first thing you think about when revenue is flat or when the promotion came in under what you hoped. And it always points the same direction. Up. Toward the top of the funnel. Toward more reach, more content, more posting, more strangers who have never heard your name.

I spent years pointed that way.

What I noticed is that almost every time I asked that question, I already had customers. Not always enough to feel safe. But twelve of them. Forty. A hundred people who had found me, believed me, and handed over money. And I was spending every hour of my week chasing people who had done none of those three things, while the people who had done all three sat there untouched.

The instinct is right. Growth is the job.

The direction is wrong.

The most expensive person in your business is the one who has never heard of you. The most valuable one is already at the bottom of your funnel. Paid for. Waiting for you to turn around.

1. Every qualifier shrinks the universe.

Picture the funnel. The top is everyone in the world. The bottom is people who hand you money. In between, they leak out.

Now count what has to be true for one person to survive the trip.

Say you sell a pricing course for freelance designers.

They have to be freelance.
They have to be a designer.
They have to be actively unhappy with what they charge.
They have to believe a course can fix it.
They have to have found you.
They have to trust you enough to put in a credit card.

Six conditions. Each one cuts what’s left by a large fraction. Stack them and the pool at the bottom is not the market you drew on the whiteboard. It’s a small, specific group of people, and you have to be honest with yourself about how small.

This is not an argument for being vague. Broadening your positioning doesn’t widen the funnel. It just makes you invisible when people are inside it. The narrow thing is right.

The mistake is narrowing your audience and then pricing like you have a wide one.

If it takes that much trust and that much effort to move one person to the bottom, that person cannot be worth $29 to you. The math never closes. What you charge has to match the funnel you can actually build, not the one you imagined when you started.

2. The sentence they have been waiting to hear.

The question you must ask isn’t what you sell. It’s what problem your customer wakes up with in the morning.

Not the problem you solve. The one already in their head before you show up. The thing they were thinking about while the coffee was brewing this morning.

That designer doesn’t wake up thinking “I need a pricing framework.” They wake up thinking “I have to send a number to this client today and I have no idea if it’s too high or too low.” Those are not the same problem. One of them is yours. One of them is theirs.

Once you know which is which, the job compresses into a single sentence. And when you say that sentence to a real person, you get one of two reactions.

Either they say “I have been waiting for someone to do that,” or they don’t really listen.

Most people never find out which one they’re getting, because they never say a sentence clean enough to test. They use 3 paragraphs to describe instead. The modules, the methodology, the years of experience, the framework they built. By the time they reach the part the customer cares about, the customer is already somewhere else.

Write the sentence. Say it out loud to one person. Watch their face. And keep iterating until you start getting the response you want.

3. Your job is not to find more customers for your product.

Now say it worked. You have a hundred people who paid.

The instinct at that moment is to go get a hundred more. Same product, wider net, back to the top of the funnel to start the climb over again.

Try the reverse.

Your job is not to find more customers for your product. Your job is to find more products for your customers.

Because those hundred people did the hardest thing a human being can do in business. They raised their hand and said, out loud, with money: I am willing to pay you to solve this. You already got that a hundred times.

Everything you build for them from here starts at the bottom of the funnel instead of the top. No introduction. No trust to rebuild. No leaks. You already know their language, their objections, what they tried before you, what they’re embarrassed to admit on a call.

And “more products” doesn’t have to mean building a second course. It might be the version of the same thing where you do it with them instead of handing it over. It might be the monthly room where they bring the problem that came up after they raised their rates. It might be a tool that does the tedious part they all complain about. The point isn’t scale. The point is that you stop treating a customer as the end of a transaction and start treating them as the beginning of a relationship that has more than one chapter in it.

And something else happens when you keep serving the same group of people. You become the only person who knows how they actually work. Not what they claim in a survey. What they do. What normal looks like for someone at their exact stage.

That knowledge ends up being worth more than the thing you sold them.

You can tell one customer how their numbers compare to the forty other people you’ve walked through the same problem. Nobody can copy that. It isn’t a feature. It’s accumulated attention, and it took you time to earn.

4. Put it to work

Open your customer list. The people who have actually paid you.

Count them. Write the number down somewhere you’ll see it. That number is your real business.

Now answer one question about that group and nobody else: what is the next thing they are going to need?

Not the next thing you want to build. Not the thing that would look most impressive on your site. The problem that shows up for them the week after you solve the current one. You probably already know what it is, because you’ve heard the same follow-up question on the last ten calls and filed it away as a distraction.

Then go ask five of them directly. Not a survey. A direct message: “You’re through the pricing thing. What’s the hardest part now?”

You’ll have an answer by Monday. It will be worth more than a month spent widening the top of your funnel.

You can spend the next year climbing. More reach, more content, more strangers at the top, hoping enough of them survive the trip down to the bottom.

Or you can turn around and look at the people who already made it.

That’s the direction the wind is already blowing.

Darrell from Copyblogger

Friday 4: You don't need more customers

Friday 4:

1. Every qualifier shrinks the universe.

2. The sentence they have been waiting to hear.

3. Your job is not to find more customers for your product.

4. Put it to work

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