This is the week people dread, and the reason is a picture in their head: cold calls, trade show booths, a conference somewhere with a name badge. None of that is required, and none of it fits a business one person runs on their own schedule. The first ten customers of a business built for a specific kind of customer are found in writing, from a desk, in the places those customers already are.
Start with the five from week five. They gave you fifteen minutes each and they know the problem. Write to them, one at a time, with the same plainness you used the first time: you built the thing you asked them about, here is what it does in one sentence, here is what it costs, here is how to start. Do not pitch. They already know what it is. Some will say yes. Some will say not right now, and not right now from a person who has the problem is worth keeping, so ask if you can write again in a couple of months. That is your first two or three customers and it took five emails.
The rest come from the places you found in week one. Every specific kind of business has a small number of places where it talks to itself. A trade association with a newsletter and a vendor list. One or two forums or groups where owners ask each other questions. A handful of suppliers whose catalogs and blogs everyone in the trade reads. A trade magazine that is thinner every year and still gets opened. These are not big places, and that is the point. A general audience is expensive to reach because you compete with everyone. A specific one is cheap to reach because almost nobody bothers.
Showing up in those places means being useful in writing before being commercial. Answer the questions people ask about quoting. Write the short piece on how to price a sign job that the forum has needed for years and nobody wrote. Put the tool at the bottom, once, in a sentence, and let the piece do the work. The people in these places have a good nose for someone who arrived to sell and a genuine welcome for someone who arrived to help, and the difference is not subtle. Three good answers in a group where sign shop owners talk will bring more customers than an advertisement, and cost nothing but an evening.
The vendor list at the association is worth a separate mention. Many trade associations keep a directory of companies that sell to their members, and getting listed is usually a form and sometimes a small fee. It is a page that owners look at when they have decided to buy something and want to know who sells it. Being on it is not exciting. It works.
Keep the ask small. The sentence from week three, the price from week six, and one way to start that takes under five minutes. If starting requires a call with you, you have built a service and it will fill your calendar, which is the thing this whole series is trying to avoid. The owner should be able to read the sentence at ten at night, decide, and be quoting the next morning without you knowing she exists until the payment arrives.
Ten customers is the goal for a reason. One customer might be a favor. Three might be your five friends from week five. Ten means people you did not talk to first decided the sentence was true and the price was fair, and at ten you will know things you cannot know before: which sentence they repeat, what they ask on the second day, what they stop using, and who they tell. Ten is also small enough to write to by hand, each one, and ask how it is going. Do that. The answers are the next version of the not list from week four, and they are the only reliable source of it.
Next week is the last in this series and the one that matters after the business works: how to keep it something one person can run, because the pressures that turn it into a job begin the day the tenth customer arrives.
The guide before this one: Put a price on it before it exists. Next in the series: Keep it something one person can run. The worksheet for this week: worksheet 7, one page of questions to answer on paper.