The Best Way to Get More Customers Has Nothing to Do With Your Product

Classes at Duke start soon. And before they do, campus is going to fill with freshmen showing up for orientation week. It’s the best time of the year to get students involved in the program I work for — Duke’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship program — and if you’re willing to spend five minutes learning why, you’re going to unlock the most valuable and powerful customer acquisition strategy in business.

For a “startup” like ours (yes, for the time being, we’ll compare my university’s entrepreneurship program to a small, scrappy startup, which, in the context of the university, is basically what it is), freshman orientation represents what I like to call a “golden moment.” As the name implies, golden moments are the moments where entrepreneurs are best able to generate the gold — both proverbial and real. They occur whenever a potential customer is actively looking to change an existing behavior. This bias toward change helps entrepreneurs overcome one of the hardest parts of acquiring customers, which is convincing them to stop doing whatever they’re already doing.

For example, you can build the greatest car in the world, but if I bought a new car six months ago, good luck selling me another one. Your product quality isn’t the problem. Your timing is.

Or consider a significantly cheaper product than a car. Imagine opening the greatest pizza restaurant anyone has ever experienced. The crust is perfect. The sauce is incredible. You somehow found a cheese that makes every other cheese taste like melted plastic.

Great. Congratulations.

Now imagine opening that restaurant in a town where everyone has been happily ordering Friday-night pizza from the same beloved neighborhood place for 30 years.

I don’t care how good your pizza is, you’re going to struggle getting customers. And the problem won’t be that people disliked your pizza. The problem will be that they already have a solution they like. Friday night arrives, someone in the family says, “Should we order pizza?” and nobody opens Google to research the newest artisanal Neapolitan options in town. They call the same place they’ve been calling for the past decade.

Before you can sell those people your pizza, you first have to convince them to change a habit. And changing habits is expensive.

By the way, that’s also what my entrepreneurship program faces within the context of an established research university. Everyone already knows you go to college to study subjects like economics and biology and literature. But entrepreneurship? That’s not a “real” discipline (according to the habits of people in and around universities).

However, golden moments dramatically change the calculus of customer acquisition because the customer has already decided something needs to change. And that distinction matters more than most entrepreneurs realize.

Why Timing Matters as Much as Targeting

Entrepreneurs spend enormous amounts of time thinking about who their customers are. What age are they? How much money do they make? Where do they live? What do they care about? What websites do they visit? What podcasts do they listen to?

To be fair, those are useful questions. You should have a clear understanding of your customers. But those questions often ignore another question that can matter just as much:

When is this person most likely to become my customer?

Historically, this dynamic was a huge part of what made Google such a valuable advertising platform during the heyday of Internet search. Someone searching “best pizza in Atlanta” is basically announcing, “Hello! I’m currently trying to figure out where to get pizza.”

That person is in a golden moment.

Compare that with someone driving to work who happens to pass a billboard for a pizza restaurant. Maybe the pizza looks delicious. Maybe the billboard is funny. Maybe the driver even thinks, “I should try that place sometime.” But “sometime” isn’t especially valuable to the restaurant.

The Google searcher is different because the behavior change has already started. The customer is actively evaluating alternatives, which means the restaurant doesn’t have to manufacture the desire to reconsider an existing habit. It only has to become part of the consideration set. And smart companies will pay good money for that opportunity.

Freshmen arriving at Duke are in essentially the same part of their “customer journey” as it relates to the things they’ll be doing once they reach campus. They’re coming from all over the world. They don’t know where they’ll eat lunch, which clubs they’ll join, where they’ll exercise, what classes they’ll take, or how they’ll spend most of their time for the next four years. Their old routines have disappeared, and they’re actively constructing new ones. That’s exactly when my program wants to meet them.

In contrast, imagine waiting until junior year to tell a student about our entrepreneurship classes and programs. By then, that student might already have two majors, extracurricular commitments, research projects, leadership roles, internships, and an entire social ecosystem consuming her schedule. Now we’re asking the student to replace something.

Want to take an entrepreneurship class? Great. Which existing class are you dropping?

Want to start a company? Fantastic. Which ten hours of your already overstuffed week are you giving us?

That’s a difficult sale.

During orientation, we’re not asking students to replace nearly as much. We’re helping them fill empty space.

That’s why we work hard to show up early and be visible. Students are actively deciding how they’ll spend one of their most valuable resources — their time — and we want entrepreneurship to be one of the options they consider while those decisions are still being made.

Find the Moment Before You Find the Customer

I’m sharing this little piece of operational strategy for my niche entrepreneurship program because the same principle applies to whatever you’re building.

Stop thinking only about who your customers are. Start asking when they’re most likely to become customers.

What happens immediately before someone needs what you sell?

What event disrupts the existing behavior?

What causes someone to reconsider the solution they’ve been perfectly happy using for years?

Maybe people shop for your product when they move into a new house. Maybe they need it when they get married. Or have a baby. Or start a company. Or hire their first employee. Or lose an employee. Or receive an unexpected bill. Or get promoted. Or switch software. Or discover that the thing they’ve been using for years suddenly doesn’t work anymore.

Those moments are incredibly valuable because something has already disturbed the status quo. And the status quo is a much more formidable competitor than entrepreneurs tend to appreciate. It’s why your biggest competitor often isn’t another startup. It isn’t the giant incumbent with billions of dollars. It isn’t even some new AI product threatening to make your technology obsolete. Your biggest competitor is simply a customer shrugging and saying, “Eh… what I’m doing now works fine.”

But figure out when they’re least likely to say that, and you’ll have found the golden moment that makes acquiring new customers so much easier.