Latest / The Founder's Journey with Fexingo: First-Time Entrepreneurs, Failures, and Lessons Learned / How a Founder Used a No-Budget PR Stunt to Land 50 Customers
Transcript
- Lucas: So you're a first-time founder with zero budget for marketing, zero PR agency, zero ad spend. How do you land your first 50 paying customers in under a week? Luna: That sounds impossible unless you've got a massive network or a lot of luck. Lucas: Right. And yet that's exactly what happened with a founder I spoke to recently. She had built a SaaS tool for small service businesses — think plumbers, electricians, dog walkers — and she needed to prove the market would pay. But she had maybe three hundred dollars in her bank account after building the MVP. Luna: So she couldn't run Facebook ads or hire a PR firm. What did she do? Lucas: She sent physical letters. But not just any letters. She spent a weekend researching exactly 100 local service businesses in her city — plumbers, electricians, landscapers — and she hand-wrote each one a short note on a postcard. The note said something like: 'I built a tool that helps you save two hours a week on scheduling. I'd love to show you for free. No catch. Just a 15-minute call.' Luna: Hand-written postcards to 100 strangers. That's a bold move. What was the response? Lucas: Fifty-seven of those businesses replied. Fifty-seven percent response rate. Think about that for a second. Most direct mail campaigns get a one to two percent response rate if they're lucky. She got nearly sixty percent. And out of those, fifty signed up for a paid plan within the first week. Luna: That's insane. Why do you think it worked so well? Lucas: A few things. First, the medium is the message. In a world of emails, social media DMs, and spam, a hand-written postcard stands out. It signals that you care enough to spend time on them. Second, she was incredibly specific — she named their business type, she mentioned the exact pain point. It wasn't a generic sales pitch. It felt personal. Luna: It's almost like she treated each prospect like a human being, not a lead. Lucas: Exactly. And the third thing — she made it absurdly easy to say yes. No pricing, no commitment, just a 15-minute call. She removed every barrier. The call was just her showing the product, and at the end she said, 'If you like it, it's thirty dollars a month. If not, no hard feelings.' No discount, no pressure. Luna: That's a great example of using creativity when you have no budget. And it's a reminder that sometimes the most effective marketing is the least scalable. Lucas: And it's a reminder that this show, The Founder's Journey, exists because of listeners like you. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: Yeah, it really does make a difference. Even a small contribution helps us keep the episodes ad-free and focused on real stories. Lucas: So back to the postcard story. The interesting thing is that she didn't stop there. She took that initial success and turned it into a case study. She wrote a blog post about the experiment, with screenshots of the responses and the revenue numbers. That blog post then got picked up by a few small business blogs, and that brought in another couple hundred leads organically. Luna: So the PR stunt itself became the marketing asset. Lucas: Exactly. She essentially created her own PR by documenting what she did. There's a lesson there: if you do something remarkable, make sure you tell the story. She spent maybe fifty dollars on postage and a few hours writing. That's a customer acquisition cost of one dollar per customer. Compare that to the average SaaS customer acquisition cost, which can be hundreds of dollars. Luna: It's also a validation of the product. If fifty people are willing to pay after a 15-minute demo, you know you're onto something. Lucas: Right. And she didn't just validate the product — she validated the channel. She now knows that direct mail can work for her target audience. That's a repeatable playbook. She can scale it to other cities, or she can use the same approach with a slightly different twist. The key is that she started with a small, cheap experiment. Luna: I think a lot of founders get stuck because they think they need a big launch or a viral video. This shows that you can start with a very small, intentional action. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the core of what we talk about on this show — the practical, scrappy moves that first-time founders make when they have no other choice. The postcard stunt is a perfect example. Luna: So what happened next? Did she keep growing? Lucas: She did. Within three months, she had over 200 paying customers. She never raised any outside funding. The business is still running today, profitable, with a small team. And it all started with a hundred hand-written postcards. Luna: That's the kind of story that makes you want to go write some postcards yourself. Lucas: That's the spirit. If you're a founder listening and you're stuck on customer acquisition, think about what you can do that costs almost nothing but requires a bit of effort. It might just be your breakthrough. Luna: And if you try it, let us know. We'd love to hear how it goes. Lucas: Alright, that's all for today. Until next time.