Tell IH: Leads first. Customers second.

I posted last year the importance of building your email list.

Email is like the real estate of the Internet. You build your own little castle of tenants (email subscribers) and you're not as dependent as other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google which can change their algorithms and impact your growth.

I want to expand on that post and talk about leads in general and why I changed my focus from getting "customers" to getting "leads".

Here's a reality check:

Most customers won't purchase your product directly for three reasons:

#1 Your product does not offer value to them (we won't discuss that here)
#2 They don't see how your product offers value to them (so you need to educate them)
#3 They don't trust you (so you need to build trust)

The first step is to change your focus from "customers" to "leads".

Here's why:

1. You have no commitment when you deal with leads. I mean, you'll be doing most of the stuff for free. So people can't ask too much from you anyway.
2. It's easier and cheaper to start when you think about getting leads vs. getting customers. You can create content: A newsletter, running a niche Facebook group, writing a blog post, posting an article on Hacker News, or tweeting, instead of spending months to build a product that no one wants or trust.
3. It gives you valuable info about what customers needs. You can then funnel that into your product building efforts and make something people want.
4. It will make you an influencer in that niche if you keep educating customers. This creates your brand and creates defensibility over the long term.
5. This educates customers about their problems (always think of problem first). In my emails I even go one step further: I talk about possible objections and answer them. I want to show them I care so much about their possible objections I am answering them before they come to me.

Here are some examples on how I practice the Leads first, Customers second mindset:

1. In my email marketing I usually only send an offer after 3 or 4 emails. The first emails are educational and trust building emails.
2. For my new product (my SaaS), I ran a Facebook group (Productized Startups) for free for one year. I just announced yesterday I was building a SaaS to help them.

I am not the only one doing it either, another example is Nathan Barry from ConvertKit who was a blogger before, built an authority and that's how we got his first customers for his SaaS.

🎁 Bonus -- Here's the copy of the email and our analytics after sending a newsletter: https://imgur.com/a/BDge8lL

Any other thoughts?