Two cheerful cartoon characters, a woman and a man, with the woman giving a thumbs-up and both smiling, standing in front of a green background with colorful sticky notes.

THINKING – Sprint 5

How many customers can you get?

The reason for this sprint

At this point you should feel confident that your idea will make some group of people happy. But that doesn’t mean that enough of them will gladly pay you to create a self-sustaining business or non-profit.

This sprint coaches you how to think through how many customers you can reasonably expect to capture (while the next sprint leads you through how much they might pay).

To figure out how many customers you might get, we take you through several steps. You will need to reason through how potential customers will find you and decide they love what you are doing so much they want to be your customer (and not a competitor’s).

Many great ideas fail because founders forget that they need to go out and thoughtfully solicit customers. This is a critical risk reduction exercise.

Sprint exercise

We created the “How many customers can you get?” article to help you think through finding potential customers and how to entice them to be actual customers.

By the end of this sprint we want you to be able to confidently answers these questions:

  • How will potential customers find you?

  • How will you entice them to try your product or service?

  • How do you plan to make them happy enough with these experiences and with trying your product or service that they become your loyal customer?

We also want you to think about:

  • How happy are you with these plans?

  • What do you need to feel even more confident with these plans?