How we got our first 1,000 customers at OpenPhone (and what I’d do differently)

[@DarynaKulya]

Hey folks! Hope you enjoy this video :) Lmk if you have any questions or feedback!

[@lucysan14]

Great video, thanks for sharing!

[@AmeyaGhuge80032]

thank you so much for making this video, it's a lifesaver!

[@johndibling8091]

Great video, thanks. One question - at the very end you said "I was on Medium - bad idea." Are you saying being on Medium was a bad idea, or waiting as long as you did was a bad idea?

[@wisdomagunta2209]

I was starting to feel overwhelmed and questioning if I might be in over my head with my startup, but your words have truly reignited my hope. Thank you so much! ❤

[@DarynaKulya]

so happy to hear it!

[@whkelvin]

That is super inspiring!! I'm also looking for beta users by posting everywhere, DMing ppl in slack groups one by one and spamming all of my LinkedIn connections 😂

[@saaimk]

great vid

[@atotech237]

Thank you so much for this

[@mustafabektas7207]

Thank you, this was great. Currently at the step 1, trying to get free beta users :d Texting connection sounds great, doesn't that mean you require phone number to sign up though? Did you put it like an optional dialog, where it promises that you are not going to use the phone number for marketing etc?

[@DarynaKulya]

In our case, since we are building OpenPhone and using OpenPhone, we'd send a text message within our own product to say hi and welcome new users. In your case, you can do several things. Maybe send a welcome text message if folks opt-into SMS. (the opt-in can be a part of the sign up flow). When asking folks to opt-in, you can mention what they're opting into

[@mustafabektas7207]

@@DarynaKulya That makes perfect sense, thank youu!

[@barrywinata]

Wow! This is super valuable. Will share with my own portfolio of founders.

[@DarynaKulya]

Glad to hear it and thank you!

[@zachary_thomas]

This is great, thanks! Yeah already got kicked off of a subreddit - those mods don’t play 😅

[@DarynaKulya]

Glad this resonated and yeah that's a part of the journey :)

[@stasbatururimi3554]

@DarynaKula, why did you say "bad idea" when talking about blogging & medium?

[@DarynaKulya]

good question! Instead of blogging on Medium I should've started our own blog on the website so we can get our domain reputation established

[@a4ajith]

This is a story about what worked in 2018. A lot has changed. Not guaranteed that this playbook if followed will bring customers like it did for OpenPhone back in the days. Defining ICP very narrowly is the actual answer to scale from 0 to 100 or 1000.

[@DarynaKulya]

Fair enough and yes, that's our story from 2018, but I do share about being a lot more precise with ICP as my #1 thing I'd do differently so I do agree with you there. I also share upfront that we're a horizontal product serving many industries and use cases intentionally, so we went into this knowing we'll be building something for multiple personas. Some folks may not want to build a horizontal product and not all of what worked for us would be relevant to them.

[@jb31842]

Wanted to hear more about the posts that got you banned 😜

[@DarynaKulya]

Where do I even start :) Tbh those were pretty simple "spammy" posts that looked like ads. I made enough of those that folks must've flagged me. Lesson learned!