How to leverage your first customer into a growing business

Collaborate with your current customer, and learn as much as you can from them. What do they need? What do they miss in the current solutions? What types of approaches truly deliver a better experience for them?

Focus on building a prototype, which isn't scalable product. Create a great front-end, and supplement it with the manual service and support it takes to make your customer happy. You're still finding product-market-fit, so you don't need a flawlessly scalable architecture yet.

Just because you don't have a stable product doesn't mean that you can't line up your next wave of customers. Put your product out there and start marketing. When you find the next customer, be clear about expectations - don't sell a smooth, flawless product if that isn't what you have. For the customers who need something more developed, keep them engaged and let them know when you're offering a beta or stable product.

Learn as much as you can from your customers, and turn that into a superior customer journey that solves their pain points without creating new ones. Constantly experiment - whether with A/B testing on your website or product, or simply asking your customers for feedback on their experiment - and turn your findings into a seamless front end. Don't worry about the back end yet - keep your focus on the customer.