We’ve all been there as startup founders – nervously making that first sale, hoping our product works for someone other than us.

Do you tell that brave soul willing to take a chance on your untested product that they are customer number one?

In this post, I’ll analyze the pros and cons to figure out the best approach.

The Risks of Telling Them

Let’s start by looking at why telling them might backfire:

1. Sets unrealistic expectations

As your first-ever customer, they might expect way too much hand-holding and customization since you don’t have an established product-market fit yet. This could eat into your limited time/resources during those fragile early days.

2. Damages your credibility

They might doubt if your product works or question your ability to support it if you openly admit their noob status. First impressions matter – you don’t want to injure your brand reputation right out of the gates.

3. Devalues your product

You risk signaling that your product isn’t polished or tested enough yet for serious customers. As much as you want transparency, desperate vibes during sales conversations never help.

The Benefits of Telling Them

However, there are also some solid reasons why telling them could work in your favor:

1. Makes them feel special

As the first to jump in, they get the bragging rights of helping a new startup find its feet. Having a good launch story to tell can incentivize them to root for your success.

2. Strengthens your relationship

Showing the courage to openly discuss your early struggles builds trust and connection with that customer. This helps pave the way for a longer-term partnership.

3. Motivates them to give feedback

Since they know you rely heavily on their initial experience for iterating your product, they may proactively share detailed feedback on bugs/challenges they face. This hugely impacts your product dev roadmap.

You Could Say – “We are our first customer, which makes you our second customer”

Saying “we are our first customer” communicates that you have been rigorously testing and using the product yourself first before making it available to external customers.

This establishes some credibility. Then positioning them as the “second” customer incentivizes them to join during the critical early stage when you are still perfecting things, while setting the expectation that you already have established things to some degree.

This balances transparency around still gathering feedback with building confidence in your readiness.

Take our current startup, Tactyqal Labs, as an illustrative case study. We initially focused inward, mastering content marketing for ourselves by combining human writers, AI tools and automation. This allowed us to successfully scale our own blog. But then we realized the internal content engine we built could be valuable to other companies struggling with high-quality blog production.

So while technically our first “customer” was ourselves as we iterated and learned, now we are opening up what we built as a managed service. As we start onboarding a select group of early adopters, we view them as the second wave of customers – benefiting from the head start we gained from leveraging the system firsthand.

See how that frames things less about being “first” but more about joining later stages after we worked out initial kinks? That puts positive expectations on product readiness while still giving them early adopter advantages.

Recommendation

So should you tell that wide-eyed customer they are your first? My take is to only do it if these 3 conditions are met:

a) Your product legitimately solves a burning need they have already

b) You have a personal relationship with the buyer

c) They seem genuinely passionate about taking a chance on early innovations

If you meet the above criteria, go for it! Having an advocate from day one is invaluable and can get your flywheel spinning faster.

But if you haven’t yet nailed extreme product-market fit, avoid putting undue expectations on your first customer. You don’t want to unintentionally turn them off before fully understanding their pain points around adopting a new solution.

The safer play is to frame it in terms of a special discounted rate for early adopters rather than position them as literally your first-ever customer. This incentivizes them to join a “selective” pilot group perfecting your product while also setting realistic expectations on functionality and support terms.

Over to you – what do you think? Have you told your first customer or played it safer till you smoothed out initial kinks? I’d love to hear your experiences!