Initially, the major cost for customer acquisition should be founders' own time. Writing articles, pitching to blogs and news, promoting on social media, SEO an

Initially, the major cost for customer acquisition should be founders' own time. Writing articles, pitching to blogs and news, promoting on social media, SEO and all other organic means should be the methods to get initial customers until you hit significant revenue (or get funding) to start using paid acquisition methods. The cost of customer acquisition can be very high for a bootstrapped startup to afford. For example, Constant Contact (for $20/mo subscription) spends $375 as cost to acquire one customer. Spending a major chunk of $2k to acquire just a few paying customers may or may not be a viable strategy (depends on numerous variables, of course). Source of data: http://investor.constantcontact.com/annuals.cfm http://investor.constantcontact.com/annuals.cfm