Start With Ten

Last month, I visited two technology startups in London. Both were SaaS platforms, both had raised similar amounts of funding, and both were targeting the professional services sector. But their approaches to growth couldn’t have been more different.

The first CEO proudly displayed his dashboard showing hundreds of free trial users and a steadily growing conversion rate. “We’re planning to double our marketing budget next quarter,” he explained. “The more users we get into the funnel, the better our numbers look for the next investment round.”

The second founder took me to lunch with a client—the managing partner of a mid-sized accounting firm who had been using their platform for eight months. Throughout the meal, the client enthusiastically described how the software had transformed their practice, interrupted occasionally by the founder asking detailed questions about specific features. As we walked back to the office, the founder mentioned almost casually, “We have nine other clients just like her. Together, they’ve brought us more than sixty new customers through referrals alone.”

Two weeks later, I checked in on both companies. The first was still chasing new leads, seeing rising acquisition costs and plateauing conversion rates. The second had just signed three new clients—all referred by their original ten.

This isn’t just an anecdote. It’s a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly across industries: the most powerful gravitational pull doesn’t come from having many customers—it comes from having the right ones, delighted to the point of advocacy.

The Perfect Ten Philosophy

The most dangerous lie in business is that more customers equal more success. Ten perfect customers create more gravity than a hundred casual ones.

We’ve been conditioned to celebrate vanity metrics—user counts, download numbers, registration totals—but these figures often mask a painful truth: most of those “customers” aren’t invested in your success. They signed up out of curiosity, tried your product with minimal engagement, and will disappear without ever becoming true believers in what you’re building.

Your first ten enthusiastic customers aren’t just early adopters—they’re the gravitational core that will pull in your next hundred.

What makes them so valuable isn’t just their direct revenue contribution, but their compound impact over time:

1. They provide detailed, contextual feedback that shapes your offering far more effectively than surveys or focus groups
2. They test your systems thoroughly because they actually use them, revealing edge cases no QA process would find
3. They forgive early mistakes because they’re invested in your mutual success
4. They speak about you with authentic enthusiasm that no marketing copy can match
5. They connect you with others who share their characteristics, creating a multiplier effect

Most importantly, these perfect customers don’t just buy what you sell—they buy into why you sell it. They align with the essence we explored in Section I, creating a natural resonance that amplifies your gravitational pull.

When someone asks how many customers you have, the impressive answer isn’t a big number—it’s “Ten who would be devastated if we disappeared tomorrow.”

Finding Your Perfect Ten

Perfect customers aren’t perfect in an abstract sense. They’re perfect for you, right now, at this stage of your development.

Guy Watson of Riverford Organic Farmers understood this instinctively when he began delivering vegetable boxes to neighbours in Devon in 1986. Rather than trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience, he focused intensely on a small group of customers who shared his passion for organic farming, seasonal eating, and environmental stewardship.

“In the early days, our customers weren’t just buying vegetables,” Watson explains. “They were buying into a set of values and a relationship with the land. Those first few dozen families shaped everything about how we grew.”

To find your own perfect ten, look beyond demographic profiles to these deeper alignment factors:

Problem Resonance

Who feels the pain point you’re addressing most acutely? The perfect customer isn’t someone who might benefit from your solution—it’s someone who has been actively searching for it. They recognise the problem immediately and feel a sense of relief that someone finally understands their challenge.

Solution Alignment

Who benefits most specifically from your particular approach? Your solution has unique characteristics that make it especially valuable to certain users. The perfect customer isn’t just someone who needs a solution in your category—it’s someone for whom your specific approach creates disproportionate value.

Values Congruence

Who shares your fundamental beliefs and priorities? The perfect customer isn’t just functionally aligned with your offering—they’re philosophically aligned with your purpose. They choose you partly because of what you stand for.

Communication Density

Who naturally connects with others like them? The perfect customer isn’t isolated—they’re embedded in networks of similar people. They share experiences readily and have established credibility within communities you want to reach.

Feedback Propensity

Who will actively contribute to your evolution? The perfect customer isn’t passively satisfied—they’re invested enough to tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and what could be better. They see themselves as partners in your journey.

Habito, the UK’s first digital mortgage broker, exemplifies this approach. Rather than targeting all potential homebuyers, they initially focused on tech-savvy first-time buyers in London—a group that felt the traditional mortgage process was especially painful, valued Habito’s digital-first approach, shared their belief that financial services should be transparent and humane, communicated actively in online communities, and provided detailed feedback about their experiences.

This precision targeting enabled Habito to create an experience so perfectly matched to their needs that these early customers became powerful advocates. As founder Daniel Hegarty explains: “Our first customers didn’t just use Habito—they evangelised for us. They became our most effective acquisition channel.”

The Super-Serving Strategy

Once you’ve identified your perfect customers, the real work begins: transforming them from satisfied users into passionate advocates. This happens not through adequate service, but through what I call super-serving—creating experiences so meaningful that they become stories your customers tell others.

Super-serving isn’t about extravagance—it’s about impact. The question isn’t “How much can we spend?” but “How meaningful can we make each interaction?”

Consider Dishoom, the Indian restaurant chain that began with a single location in London’s Covent Garden. While most restaurants focus on efficient service to maximise table turnover, Dishoom created an immersive experience that turned dining into storytelling. From the carefully curated décor that transported diners to Bombay’s Iranian cafés to the detailed narratives on their menus explaining the history of each dish, every element was designed to create what co-founder Shamil Thakrar calls “moments of connection.”

“We never saw ourselves as just selling food,” Thakrar explains. “We’re creating experiences that people want to share—both in the moment with their companions and later with friends who haven’t yet visited.”

This approach transformed Dishoom’s early customers into natural marketers. The famous queues outside their restaurants—often stretching around the block—weren’t just evidence of popularity; they were social proof that created anticipation and made the eventual experience more satisfying. As one early customer told me: “Waiting became part of the story I told about Dishoom. It wasn’t an inconvenience—it was part of the experience.”

The super-serving strategy involves:

1. Breaking Industry Norms: Identify standard practices in your industry that frustrate customers, then deliberately contradict them.

2. Creating Story-Worthy Moments: Design specific interactions that customers will naturally want to share with others.

3. Personalising Beyond Expectations: Use information you already have to customise experiences in ways that show genuine attentiveness.

4. Solving Problems Before They’re Expressed: Anticipate challenges and address them proactively.

5. Connecting Customers to Your Purpose: Make every interaction reinforce why you exist, not just what you provide.

The most valuable sentence in business isn’t “I’m satisfied with your product.” It’s “Let me tell you about this company you have to work with.”

Turning Perfect Customers into Gravitational Ambassadors

Satisfied customers keep buying. Delighted customers tell others. But gravitational ambassadors actively pull others toward you—creating an entirely different level of impact.

Giffgaff, the UK mobile network operator, built its entire business model around this principle. Rather than spending millions on traditional marketing, they created a “member-get-member” programme that rewarded existing customers for bringing new ones. But the genius of their approach wasn’t just the financial incentive—it was how they transformed customers from users into contributors.

By developing a community platform where members could answer each other’s questions, suggest improvements, and participate in company decisions, Giffgaff created what they call “the mobile network run by you.” This wasn’t just clever positioning—it was an operational reality that converted customers into stakeholders.

As Vincent Boon, an early community manager at Giffgaff, explains: “We didn’t just want people to recommend us because they got a reward. We wanted them to feel ownership—to recommend us because they genuinely believed in what we were building together.”

This approach created exponential growth through four key mechanisms:

1. Natural Advocacy: When customers feel like owners, they promote you without prompting.

2. Credible Testimony: Recommendations from actual users carry far more weight than marketing claims.

3. Targeted Reach: Ambassadors naturally reach prospects similar to themselves—precisely the people most likely to become perfect customers themselves.

4. Continuous Reinforcement: Each positive experience strengthens the ambassador’s commitment to promoting you.

The contrast between Thread and ASOS illustrates this principle perfectly. While online fashion retailer ASOS pursued massive scale with an enormous product range targeting a broad demographic, Thread took a different approach. They began by focusing intensely on providing personalised styling for a small number of men who disliked shopping but wanted to dress well.

By combining human stylists with AI technology, Thread created an experience so precisely tailored to this specific need that their early users became dedicated advocates. Despite their much smaller customer base, Thread generated extraordinary word-of-mouth growth because their perfect customers actively sold the concept to friends. The company’s eventual acquisition demonstrated the value created through this depth-first approach.

Perfect customers don’t just provide revenue—they provide gravity that pulls others toward you naturally.

The Perfect Ten Framework

How do you systematically implement this approach? The Perfect Ten Framework provides a structured methodology for identifying, engaging, and leveraging your ideal first customers:

1. Identification: Finding Your Perfect Ten

Begin by mapping potential customers against the five alignment factors discussed earlier. For each dimension, rate prospects on a simple 1-5 scale:

• Problem Resonance: How acutely do they feel the pain point you address?
• Solution Alignment: How specifically does your approach benefit them?
• Values Congruence: How closely do their beliefs align with your purpose?
• Communication Density: How actively do they share experiences with others?
• Feedback Propensity: How likely are they to provide detailed input?

Those scoring highest across all dimensions represent your potential perfect ten.

2. Connection: Building Transformational Relationships

Once identified, focus on creating exceptional experiences through:

• Expectation Breaking: Identify moments to positively surprise by contradicting industry norms.
• Personalisation Mapping: Create individualised touchpoints based on specific customer characteristics.
• Story-worthy Creation: Design memorable interactions that customers will naturally share.
• Insight Gathering: Extract maximum learning from each relationship through structured feedback loops.
• Beyond Transactional: Move from exchanges to partnerships by involving customers in your evolution.

Allbirds, the sustainable footwear company, exemplifies this approach. While they now enjoy broad appeal, they initially focused intensely on environmentally-conscious urban professionals. They created a distinctive first-purchase experience with sustainable packaging, personalised welcome messages, and an explicit invitation to provide feedback about comfort and performance.

This deep engagement with early adopters allowed Allbirds to refine their products rapidly, creating a virtuous cycle where customer input directly improved the product, which in turn generated more enthusiasm and more valuable feedback. As co-founder Tim Brown explains: “Our early customers weren’t just buying shoes—they were joining a mission to rethink how footwear is made.”

3. Activation: Transforming Customers into Ambassadors

Convert delighted customers into active advocates through:

• Evidence Collection: Capture testimonials and success stories systematically.
• Facilitated Advocacy: Create organic sharing opportunities without manipulation.
• Community Development: Connect perfect customers with each other to strengthen commitment.
• Collaborative Creation: Involve perfect customers in product or service evolution.
• Recognition Systems: Acknowledge and reward natural advocacy to reinforce behaviour.

4. Expansion: Growing Through Perfect Customer Networks

Finally, expand thoughtfully through:

• Natural Adjacencies: Identify connections through perfect customers.
• Characteristic Cloning: Find others with similar attributes to your perfect ten.
• Community Spreading: Leverage network effects within related groups.
• Controlled Introduction: Manage the pace of expansion to maintain experience quality.
• Core Protection: Maintain initial customer experience through growth.

In the race to scale, we’ve forgotten a fundamental truth: depth precedes breadth in sustainable business growth.

The Perfect Customer Audit

To apply this approach to your business, conduct a simple self-assessment:

1. Quality Assessment:

   • Can you name your ten most perfect customers?
   • What percentage of these would be genuinely distressed if you disappeared?
   • How many have actively referred others to you without prompting?
   • What specific insights have you gathered from these relationships?
   • How has your offering evolved based on their input?

2. Relationship Depth Evaluation:

   • How many personal interactions do you have with perfect customers monthly?
   • What specific actions do you take that exceed industry standard service?
   • What percentage of your perfect customers have direct contact with leadership?
   • How do you recognise and celebrate their importance to your business?
   • What systems ensure consistent exceptional experiences?

3. Advocacy Assessment:

   • How effectively do you document perfect customer experiences?
   • What percentage have provided detailed testimonials or case studies?
   • How often do perfect customers represent your brand at events or in media?
   • What tools make advocacy natural and frictionless for perfect customers?
   • How do you measure and track the impact of perfect customer advocacy?

Most companies score poorly on this audit because they prioritise customer acquisition over relationship development—a strategy that ultimately increases acquisition costs while decreasing lifetime value.

The Quality Growth Mindset

Adopting this approach requires resisting powerful cultural pressures. Investors ask about customer numbers, not relationship quality. Competitors boast about growth rates, not retention depth. Industry publications celebrate funding rounds, not customer impact stories.

Most companies measure growth by acquisition speed rather than relationship depth. That’s like counting how many seeds you’ve scattered instead of how many have taken root.

Riverford Organic Farmers demonstrates the long-term power of the quality-first approach. By focusing intensely on a small group of committed customers in Devon, Guy Watson built deep loyalty that created natural expansion through word-of-mouth. Today, Riverford delivers over 55,000 boxes weekly across the UK, with customer retention rates far exceeding industry averages. Remarkably, some of their original Devon customers from the 1980s remain active subscribers—representing over thirty years of recurring revenue and countless referrals.

The secret to starting with ten isn’t just finding the right people—it’s becoming irreplaceable to them.

This approach requires patience—a commodity often in short supply among entrepreneurs and investors eager for hockey-stick growth charts. But the data consistently shows that businesses prioritising relationship depth over acquisition volume ultimately grow more sustainably and profitably.

When we examine the companies in our case studies with the strongest gravitational pull—from Riverford and Habito to Dishoom and Giffgaff—they share this common trait: they began by becoming intensely valuable to a small number of perfect customers, creating relationships so meaningful that advocacy became natural and attraction inevitable.

In your gravitational build, never forget this principle: The depth of your impact with few creates far more pull than the breadth of your contact with many. Start with ten.