The two routes to a first customer, why a deck is enough, and the intro chain that only pays off if you plant it early.
Waiting until the product is ready is how founders end up building for nobody. You can sell before you build, and the first yes is worth more than another month of engineering.
We asked Zimi CEO Michael Maas, who landed first customers twice over on his way to raising around R50m, how founders should go about it with nothing to show…
The move: sell the problem you solve, not the thing you’ve built
Michael’s position is that you can get away with selling to your first customer using a pitch deck or even a piece of paper. What matters is whether you can solve a real problem and get paid for it. If someone’s hair is on fire, they’ll come on the journey with you long before there’s software to look at.
How to land your first customers
1. Build the list yourself
Zimi’s first customers came from a genuinely unglamorous move: Michael scraped email addresses for wine farms and shopping centres, the places he thought should have EV chargers. No agency, no lead-gen tool, no warm network. Just working out exactly who should want this, then finding a way to reach them directly.
2. Send the deck and ask the direct question
The email was blunt: here’s my deck, do you want an EV charger at your location? No product, no case studies, no social proof. People actually responded, because the question was specific enough to answer and the offer was easy to picture. A vague “let’s explore synergies” email gets nothing; a clear proposition someone can say yes or no to gets replies.
3. Close it in person
Replies aren’t customers. Michael went to the venues and pitched the location managers face to face, which is how the first three chargers got installed. Early on, you’re not selling a product with a track record; you’re selling yourself and the fact that you’ll actually show up. That doesn’t travel well over email.
4. Plant intro chains and let them mature
The second route was slower and bigger. A friend introduced Michael to an automotive journalist, who introduced him to a truck-sales manager at EV truck supplier JAC. Nothing happened for six months. Then, mid-pivot, that contact was selling trucks to Baker’s Transport and pulled Zimi in as the charging provider, which landed the first fleet customer. As Michael put it, they were just going to wing it and go for it.
The lesson isn’t networking for its own sake. It’s that the conversation which lands your biggest early customer often starts months before you need it, with someone who isn’t the buyer and doesn’t work in your industry.
The big payoff
Between the two routes you get a first customer without a product, a reputation or a network: one you can start today with a spreadsheet and a deck, and one that quietly compounds while you build. Both beat waiting until the thing is finished to find out whether anyone wanted it.
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Want the full story?
Michael’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:
Why he’d sell to a first customer with a pitch deck before building anything
How climate grants and development finance fund a hardware business without diluting you
Why he runs fundraising like a sales pipeline, and how he qualifies investors out
The pivot from public charging to enterprise fleets, and what triggered it
What changed once the business stopped depending on things he couldn’t control
You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.
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