"We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback," Butterfield recalls. There was Cozy, which sells rental management software for landlords and tenants, and the music service Rdio. "We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we found this way." - Stewart Butterfield, Founder of Slack.

The focus on a small number is because at this stage we can and we want intimate observations of people using your product. You will be able to answer, "Is this product being used as it was intended?".

This is an article by Paul Graham of Y Combinator that you NEED to read before you go any further. I'll sum it up for you though in one sentence: Build something small for people that love it. This is why we don't need many people at this stage. We just need different cohorts of 10 people at a time.

...another great tidbit from Peter Reinhardt of Segment.com ...

WE WANT TEN PEOPLE AND ONLY TEN PEOPLE AT THIS STAGE.

At this point, being able to watch these users try your product in person or interview prospects for when our product is ready to try. We are also looking for the people that love what you are doing and listening for negative feedback.

Now that you know our 1QQ qualification we're going to use it to asks prospects and to validate if we are really on to something. If you have a product ready already we can watch customers use and and gain feedback if we are solving their problem or not.

One of the biggest mistakes of my career was assuming people used our products as intended. In person meetings for both prospecting and watching people use your product is exponentially more valuable.

Let's set up our Process for Prospecting

In order for us to get 10 people to try our product, we most likely need to send 100 emails and subsequent follow ups. What we're learning at this stage is a quick, cheap, and effective way to keep getting new prospects in the pipeline that we will be using even when the product is ramped up and doing well.

You can use a google doc but you'll need something to keep track of where prospects are in the pipeline so you can know the next steps to take with them. The good news is that Ecquire integrates with a few free CRMs and does the annoying data entry for you automatically so there's a free account that you can grab below to use.

Ecquire can capture data for you in Gmail, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Here's what it looks like and how to get it:

1. Go to Ecquire.com and add to Chrome.

2. Select Google Drive as your CRM

3. Go into Gmail (for sent messages and to capture inbound emails and profiles), LinkedIn, or Twitter and click the Ecquire blue icon when you're talking to a prospect.

4. Add that prospect to the Google Drive and in the Notes section, indicate what the next step is with that prospect. For example, it can be "follow up in a week", "send product", and/or "in person meeting".

The quickest path to validating if your product is worth paying for and finding potential customers at the same time is finding them in the places where they vent, complain, or talk in real time about the issue you are solving. This happens in forums and on twitter. Use Twitter once you've run out of people in your immediate network. Here's an example of me just searching for a way that I think someone would complain about the product that we hope to build and the problem we help to solve with our own software. As you can see, there's a valuable source (Rachel Miller) that I can reach out to.

By entering relevant key words pertaining to the problem you are solving you can find people that are complaining in real time about the solution they wish they had. DO NOT RESPOND TO THEM IN THE FORUM or directly on Twitter by replying. Take time to respond to them offline after doing research on their background. Reach out to them via email or warm introduction and use text similar to below:

"Hi Rachel - I saw your comment in the forum and being a hater of this problem myself, we started building a solution to solve this problem exactly. We're keeping it confidential for now. Our product is called "x" and it does "y". I'd like to share it with you and see if it solves your problem. IF so we are are thinking of charging $19/month for it. We'd also benefit from hearing bad and good feedback so you can actually help us shape the product. Here's a link to try it free in the meantime if you'd like. If you have time next Friday at 2PM we can do a skype call and I can answer any questions you might have. My team would like to hear your thoughts too on some things they are having trouble with. Please let me know if that is something you'd be interested in doing and I'll send out an invite with my skype credentials. PS I hope you don't mind that I grabbed the following surf report for you in San Diego, I'm a surfer too."