[Business] First1000_Slice: Approach Your Customers in a More Familiar Way

First1000 is a newsletter about how founders acquired their first 1,000 customers. Looking at the methods they chose when they had almost no money, most of what we can use today is already in there.

The case I looked at this time is Slice, which connected independent pizzerias to online ordering.

The problem Slice faced

Neighborhood pizzerias already had the option of large delivery platforms. The problem was the fees, and the bigger problem was that the shops did not own their customers. The orders belonged to the platform, not to the shop.

Yet explaining this problem to the owners was itself difficult. Most were small business owners who had run their shops for a long time and were not used to being pitched IT services.

How they went about it

The approach Slice chose was not flashy.

• They visited shops one at a time. Rather than gathering them through online ads, they opened the shop door, walked in, and met the owner.
• They spoke the owners' language. The founder is known to come from a family that ran a pizzeria. In effect, he was closer to someone who had long seen what was tedious and what hurt an owner's pride.
• They sold results, not technology. It was less "Join our platform" and more "We'll let you take orders under your shop's name."
• They took over the labor-intensive work. In the early days, people handled tasks owners found tedious, such as entering menus, by hand.

What matters in the Slice case

The takeaway from this case is not "they hustled on foot." That is the outcome; the reasons lie elsewhere.

• You don't have to gather early customers with scalable methods. The first 1,000 are actually faster to gather with methods that don't scale. Automation comes after you know what works.
• Knowing the customer's language comes before features. Even for the same product, "We'll save you on fees" and "We'll keep your regulars from being taken away" sound completely different.
• Early manual work is not waste but learning. While handling things yourself, you find out where the real bottleneck is, and that becomes the list of features to build next.

What I have applied myself

I followed a similar sequence when building a fintech app. At first I used ads to attract users, but acquisition costs kept rising while the number of people who stayed did not grow.

I changed direction: first I narrowed down which people actually stayed, then focused only on the channels through which those people came in. As a result, I was able to lower customer acquisition costs significantly. Before growing the numbers, narrowing the target came first.

I often see the same scene when meeting aspiring founders. Most first ask "How do I get the word out to many people?", but what is actually blocking them is often "Who should I be telling?"

If you do just one thing today

From the ways you currently gather customers, pick one that you have put off because it doesn't scale, and try it just five times this week. Things like meeting people in person, calling, or messaging people one by one.

Five times often teaches you more than an ad report.

If it is hard to judge on your own where to start narrowing, you are welcome to begin with a short diagnostic.

Case source: the Slice issue of the First1000 newsletter. The summary above is my reading of the original, retold from a solo business owner's perspective, and is not an official statement from the company.

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