Start small: Getting your first customers through small-scale marketing tactics

Once you start putting your product out into the world, you face a question that can be genuinely terrifying: is the thing that I'm selling good enough that people will actually pay for it? If you're like me, the result may be that you try to start marketing in the most impersonal ways possible, like running Facebook and Google Ads, to avoid the prospect of face-to-face rejection.

 Small scale marketing is personal, and people like personal. They increasingly want to support small businesses over giant behemoths. They want to know who's behind the products they buy and what drives them

Farmers' markets, craft fairs, and other events

Setting up a table and pitching your wares to folks passing by is the essence of starting small. Depending on what type of product or service you're selling, farmers' markets might work, or there may be less frequent events that are more domain-specific (for example, if you're starting a sportswear company, many marathons have vendor villages). 

People come to these types of events specifically to see what's out there, so the fact that you're a new brand that they haven't heard of is intriguing, not off-putting. You'll have the chance to engage with people and tell them not only about your product, but also about you and why you decided to start a company. You'll also have the chance to ask people for feedback—if they seem hesitant to buy, you can ask why and expect a real answer. Good luck with that when people abandon their carts on your website.

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