The first instinct almost every new founder has is to figure out how much it costs to acquire a customer. Set a budget, boost a post and its reach and wait for customers to show up. It feels like progress, because money is moving and numbers are ticking up.
It’s almost always the wrong first move.
Your first customers are not solely an advertising problem. They’re a trust problem that gets answered through branding. Nobody’s first sales come from a stranger seeing a well-targeted ad and deciding to hand over their money to a business that didn’t exist last month. They come from somewhere much less glamorous — and much more within a founder’s control.
Your network is worth more than you think it is
Before looking for strangers, look at who already knows you. Teammates, coaches, classmates, friends, old training partners and people who’ve watched you compete for years without ever really talking to you about anything else. That’s not “networking” in the LinkedIn sense. That’s authentic trust that is already built.
The mistake most first-time founders make is treating that network like every other list of connections. One story announcing a launch gets likes and not much else. Twenty people getting a real message, one at a time, each explaining specifically why they came to mind — that’s slower, and it’s also the difference between silence and a first sale.
Athletes have something here that most founders spend years trying to build from scratch: people who are already paying attention to what they do next. The founders at SPORTx who move fastest aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who treat their locker room and their group chats as the most valuable customer channel they have. Because it is.
Show your work instead of pitching your product
Nobody trusts a pitch from someone they’ve never heard from before. But if you show up consistently, solving a real problem in public — not talking about your product, just being genuinely useful — people start trusting you before they’ve even considered buying anything.
This takes showing up and being specific. A lacrosse athlete building a nutrition brand doesn’t need an ad — she needs to post what she actually eats during a heavy training week, and why. Someone starting a landscaping business doesn’t need a jingle — he needs to address the exact pain point a stressed homeowner is dealing with.
One good post gets scrolled past and forgotten. Fifty of them, over a few months, build consistency and reputation. By the time you actually ask someone to buy something, they’ve usually already decided you know what you’re talking about and the sale confirms it.
Remove the friction, not the price
A lot of businesses don’t lose their first customers because of weak positioning. They lose them because there’s nowhere for an excited person to go. Someone’s genuinely interested in what’s being built, and then — nothing. No clear site, no easy way to pay and no next step. The moment passes.
This is where it’s worth being direct, since SPORTx works closely with GoDaddy: getting a real, working website and storefront put together should never be what’s standing between a good idea and a first sale. GoDaddy’s AI-powered tools can take you from a business name and a rough idea to an actual live site — logo, copy, structure and basic SEO — in an afternoon, no technical background required. If you’re running something service-based, their booking tools mean a DM that says “when are you free” turns into an actual confirmed appointment instead of a conversation that fizzles out. GoDaddy’s payment tools mean you stop asking people to Venmo you like it’s a favor, and start operating like a legitimate business. And when someone hears about you in person and goes to look you up later that night, GoDaddy SEO tools help make sure that search turns up something real and at the top of the page.
None of that is advertising. It’s just getting out of your own way and building a brand — and at this stage, that matters more than any campaign would.
Ask for the referral before you feel ready to
Most founders wait until things feel more “official” before asking current customers to send someone else their way. That wait costs time. The right moment to ask is right when someone says they’re happy — not after a formal referral program exists, not once a founder feels legitimate enough to ask.
Keep it simple: “Do you know one other person who’d want this?” Most people will help you once, if you make it easy and specific. What kills referrals isn’t people being unwilling — it’s you being vague. “Tell your friends” gets you nothing. “Do you know anyone else training for a marathon right now?” gets you an actual name.
Go where people already are, and just talk to them
Ads try to attract and redirect people’s attention to somewhere else. It can be faster to just go to where that attention already lives — a group meeting, a run club, a group chat, a community event or a booth somewhere your future customers already are. In person, people can ask you questions and watch how you answer them in real time, something an ad cannot do.
It’s slower, but a lot more durable, because trust built face-to-face doesn’t disappear the second you stop spending money. A hundred people who met you and liked what you said will beat 10,000 people who scrolled past an ad for half a second, every time.
Ask everyone how they found you
Without an ad dashboard telling you your cost per click, it’s easy to feel like you’re flying blind early on. You’re not — you just have to ask every early customer one question: “How’d you hear about us?” Write it down. Within a month you’ll see a pattern — maybe it’s one teammate who keeps sending people your way, maybe it’s a specific type of post. Whatever it is, focus on that and remove guessing at the rest.
A real website helps here, too. Even the basic analytics tools built into GoDaddy’s dashboard will tell you whether people actually show up after you post, and what they do once they land there. That feedback loop is worth more right now than any amount of ad spend, because it teaches you something ads never will: which of your own actions are actually working.
The advantage was never the budget
Every founder who gets real traction without spending on ads has one thing in common — they treated every early customer like it actually mattered, because it did. Ads buy attention. They don’t build belief. Belief gets built the slow way: the message you sent personally, the question you answered in public and the friction you removed so someone could say yes without thinking twice.
If you’re building something inside SPORTx with GoDaddy’s free digital tools for students, you already have what most founders spend years trying to earn — people who’ve been watching you show up under pressure for a long time. Use that before you ever think about paying strangers for attention. The strangers show up eventually. When they do, they’ll be walking into something real, built by people who believed in you first.
Plug into a community of entrepreneurs and innovators through Edson E+I events, where SPORTx at Arizona State University connects you to resources, relationships and opportunities.
