If you are a recent startup and thinking of having a grand launch like how Steve Jobs did for the iPhone and believe it will work out to be the best user acquisition strategy, then, you are wrong.

Reason 1: You cannot recruit Steve Jobs Reason 2: You cannot buy Apple

Getting your first 1,000 customers is a different game than what you think.

If you are a founder, it is likely that:

• You don’t have an existing audience
• You don’t have a personal brand with 1,000 true fans

But these factors should not be your roadblock. Because thousands have gone through this cycle of getting their first 1,000. If you want your first 1,000 customers, why not use tried and tested strategies?

Here's the approach:

The basics:

• You have your idea
• You know your audience bottom-up
• You have a hook: Example: 10,000 songs in your pocket

Now starts the challenge. How to get those 1000 people to buy your product so that they tell their friends?

Simple: Do things that don’t scale. In other words, go the hard way.

Do Things That Don't Scale

When you first start a startup, you don't need to get the word out. You need to get the word in. You do not, in the very beginning, need the whole world to know about it. What you need is to find the initial group of early adopters, which you can probably find among your peers.

• Paul Graham

So, what's the hard way you need to take?

Here is the gist from Paul Graham's blog post Do Things That Don't Scale:

• Recruit Users Manually
• Delight each user
• Give great experience even if your product yet feels unfinished (which is often the case)
• Focus on a narrow market: address a niche sector/audience. Sail on the river, not in the ocean
• If you are a product startup: Fabricate things yourself
• If you are a B2B startup, you can also consult: Think of one user. 
Be their consultant. 
In case they don't agree, help them to use your software yourself on their behalf
• If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it 
manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate 
the bottlenecks

Suggestions:

• Big doesn’t work. Hold your desire to go viral at launch. Do it the hard way

• Don’t think of partnerships with big corporations either

• Think of building a startup as a vector, not a scalar: You are not just building a 
product. You need to build a product plus do the things that don’t scale.

• You cannot avoid doing sales by hiring someone to do it for you. You have to do sales yourself initially. Later you can hire a real salesperson to replace you.

But how to acquire those 1,000 people?