đ Happy Birthday Magical Audios!
Last week, January 29, 2025, our startup turned year old! While the product itself was launched on June 2025, my co-founders and I said YES to each other on January 29, 2024.
Since then many people have asked me how to find their startup co-founder, what steps they can take to find their product-market fit, or find customers without funding.
So to celebrate this milestone, Iâve been sharing a 3-part story about the practical step-by-step of how we started and how we got here with Magical Audios.
So in this series, Iâm writing about:
How to find customers - this issue
This is not a best practices story nor is it a success story (at least not yet). Just a âthis is how weâre doing it in real lifeâ story.
And today Iâm sharing with you:
how we found our first paying customers
how weâve lost them too
and what weâve been doing to grow our customer base.
Because if you think that you canât do it because you donât have funding, product marketing skills, or permission from your boss⌠let me assure you that can!
Disclaimer: Product Marketing is not my expertise but I believe that every PM still needs to know how to GTM. And if youâre an aspiring startup founder, then this is a must.
Step 0: What do we need to do?
If only us shouting out from the rooftops of Barcelona that âMagical Audios is awesome and effective!â is enough to bring us our ICPs with wallets at a ready, to buy whatever we were selling.
If only.
There were 3 things we needed to do to sell:
Find our ICP and convert them to a captured audience
Once weâve got them into our orbit, convert them to paying customers
And ideally, our paying customers will be repeat customers
Simple right? â said no one, ever.
Step 1: Building a captured audience
Building a captured audience was the first step (and honestly, the most perplexing step for me)
There were so many things to consider just to get people to:
pay attention
get them interested enough to maybe:
follow us on social media
subscribe to our communication channels
And it felt like we had a lot of things working against us:
We didnât have a budget for ads so this will be slow
We were talking about a topic that some people can be suspicious about (i.e. hypnosis as means for therapy)
But as weâve seen before, constraints are a means to exercise creativity and resourcefulness. And an enabler for focus.
Knowing that there are more steps to get people to convert to a paying customer, we focused on a single goal:
Capture the audience and move them to our own channels.
Meaning: instead of simply trying to grow our social media followers, we wanted to get them to something we own so we can customize our communication with our audience.
Getting followers on Social media is great and all for social proof but:
Algorithms are flaky and weâd always be competing with everything else they have in their feeds. Our engagement was also too low so our social media audience did not give us much confidence at all
We wanted to also identify who our ICPs were and learn from them vs people who found our content âinterestingâ but we didnât stand a chance to convert
How did we do it?
We invited people to events that demonstrated the value of hypnotherapy
We invited people to download free hypnosis audios that can solve problem x
We invited people to join our Whatsapp group as a means to test our MVP
These invites were shared across multiple relevant communities, our personal social media accounts (IG, Linkedin), people weâve met at various events, and more.
These invitations were mostly personal. And we iterated on our messaging a lot.
Although we did spend a few ⏠on ads on Meta just to test.
The result?
All in all, we captured 500+ people who shared their contact information so we can send them hypnosis audios and more information about what we were building before we even launched.
500 people who were listening to our audio and were generous with giving their feedback whenever we were wondering why things were not working.
This also allowed us to continuously refine our ICP.
Professional women who are burning out from juggling the demands of their careers and their personal lives.Our Current Focus:
Today, this is still our main focus. To increase our captured audience. Even though weâve definitely got more than 500+ people in our captured audience by now, having a sizeable volume is necessary for us to build a viable business.
So what have we been doing these days?
Weâre also investing in building our personal brands. Trust is a huge factor, especially for a product like ours. So showing credibility and humanity has been high on our agenda.
All to get people to: subscribe to the Magical Audios newsletter so we can keep talking to them there.
Step 2: From captured audience to paying customers (PLG irl)
The second part of our funnel was critical as this is where we hope to convert our captured audience to paying customers.
Needless to say, our first paying customers were our friends.
But our first customers who were not privy to whatâs happening behind the scenes were:
The people who were able to try out a free self-hypnosis audio and had a positive experience with it.
As in after listening to an audio they could:
Think more clearly
Wake up feeling refreshed and rested
Come up with ideas to solve a problem theyâve been dealing with for a while
These would be people who joined us at an event or downloaded a free self-hypnosis audio.
As a next step, we would immediately send them a follow-up email to ask them for feedback and to continue their healing journey by joining one of the 7-day programs available.
The result?
The people who had a positive experience listening to a free audio were likely to buy a full program within 48 hours.
But this is also where we dropped the ball.
When we were diligent with setting up our email journeys, the conversion was consistent.
Then we stopped. For one reason or another.
The journey broke in Mailchimp
We got distracted by a different problem
We were spreading ourselves too thin and didnât prioritize well
And this oversight had a direct impact on our business because this is where the majority of our paying customers were coming from.
Our Current Focus:
This is a huge priority for us â a big item in our roadmap for Q1. Especially since bringing in more captured audience is a big priority too.
So it doesnât make sense to get them to:
sign up to receive information and not send them any
get them to try a free self-hypnosis audio and not tell them how they can have more
have them feel the positive impact and not tell them that thereâs more where that came from
Users came to us with a problem. We told them thereâs a solution. We even showed it to them. The least we can do is tell them how to get the full package for themselves.
Also, you canât have much of a business if you fail to sell.
Step 3: When they become buyers
Approximately 15% of our customers who complete the first program they bought become repeat users. They would either buy a 2nd program or buy access to our full library of self-hypnosis audios. Without any prompting.
Thatâs why weâre so confident that our programs and audios work because the behavior of our users tells us so.
And they also became our advocates!
How weâre taking care of them:
We have a fast response time for our customers. If they send us a support ticket asking for help, our response is immediate and as detailed as possible
We keep a community for our customers that they can joino. So they have access to Andrea, our hypnotherapist, and they can ask anything and everything about hypnotherapy, suggestions for audios, and how to tackle a different problem.
These might not scale later on; but weâll cross the bridge when we get there.
Our Current Focus:
Apart from letting them know that we have new programs, incentivizing them with additional discounts, making sure we stay responsive to their questions and concerns, and keeping the line open to Andrea â weâve decided to not prioritize anything more on this.
Weâll probably revisit this in the future as we know we have areas of improvement in this regard, but when youâre 3 people⌠ruthless prioritization is important.
To Conclude (this post and this series):
Iâm sure youâve heard this before but just in case
Building a startup is not as glamorous as some people make it out to be.
You gain autonomy in some and lose it in others.
This endeavor requires investment in both time and money (especially when you donât have funding).
But it can also be the biggest adventure, if not the most rewarding one.
So if youâre thinking of setting out to build your product and company â here are some takeaways Iâd like to impart to you:
Finding a co-founder who is aligned with you in both values and ambition and is somebod you actually enoy spending time with â is critical. Too many startups end too soon because of founder misalignment or founders playing the blame game.
The sooner you can have a tangible way for people to experience the solution, the sooner you can get real behavior and not just feelings and false promises. People will always say theyâre interested in what you have to offer. But until they actually use it and later on, pay for it⌠youâve got nothing. Assume every idea is wrong and get creative on how you will validate your assumptions.
Your GTM strategy is important! Yes youâll need to create visibility and awareness for your product (and knowing whose attention you need is key). But getting them to an owned channel is crucial so youâre not at the mercy of algorithms (which is expensive).
Giving free value in the beginning is a great way to get people to your owned channels, give you feedback, and turn them into customers. You want to convince people to buy? Give them a reason to. Earn their trust by showing them truth.
Get clear on your priorities. Consider not just the impact but also the risks, the cost if not done well, and the implications of executions. When youâre still in the validation phase, youâre not always doing things at scale so the steps to getting done might require more effort than you estimated.
Note: There will be many things that need to get done. Truth. Your capacity will always be limited. Also truth. Even truer when youâre also working a job that pays the bills. So being super strict on what balls canât get dropped is needed otherwise you also can compromise your customerâs journey and experience.
Honestly, youâre going to make mistakes. Itâs inevitable. And Iâm not sharing our fuck ups so you wonât make the same mistakes we did. You will. If not the same, something else. And I think itâs a good thing. The sooner the better.
Why?
Because the cost of those mistakes is not yet so high (except maybe on our egos). This will help you iterate faster on both your product and your ways of working as the founding team.
Because there will be more mistakes ahead in your founder future. So the sooner you normalize them, the sooner you can laugh about them when they happen.
Because your biggest ally when youâre building a startup with no experience and no funding?
A strong sense of self and an even stronger sense of humor.
đŁ My 1:1 coaching waitlist for March is open!
To the accidental Product Leader who needs help navigating the new leadership role, setting up the team for success, and making sure that there is still time for thinking strategically and for having a life.
To the Senior PM who wants to make the jump from IC to leadership but not sure how to do that.
To the Senior PM whoâs not sure whatâs next for them and even less sure how to position themselves for opportunities.
To the experienced PM who is struggling with their day to day: collaborating with cross-functional peers, managing relationships with stakeholders and leaders, or being seen as having impact.
Iâd love to support you! My approach is a balance of practical work - wherein we define goals for what you want to achieve, design a strategy for it, and identify next best actions that you can take in your day-to-day. As well as mixing it with a holistic approach to make sure you have the right system to take on your challenges with energy and strength.
Iâve built products and product organizations before. I know how it works. And I definitely know how it feels.
If this is the kind of support that youâre looking for, Iâd love to chat!
If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that youâd like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.
â¤ď¸
Kax
PS. Here are more ways for us to connect: