yeah but how to get new customers

You've to go into founder mode - solve problems that exist for customers you've already discovered, rather than build something and expect magical "marketing" to find customers. The latter was previously a weak strategy, and is completely gone with the AI era. No alternative to working very closely with customers.

Honestly, I'm still not quite seeing how this fits into marketing. I get that we're focusing on our current customers, but how do we actually bring in new ones?

No magic pill: you can't work backwards. Pivot away from current idea if it's not getting word of mouth or any other traction, and for the next idea start with finding problems for people in your network that they will pay for.

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Go looking for them wherever you think they might gather or hang out (online or in person). Reach out to those who seem like a good fit and ask them about the problem(s) they’re having that your product solves. Once you know if your product would actually solve it well for them, tell them about it in earnest.

If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.

You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.

I used the shopify app store to get the first customers - i think an app store is still the way to go since they handle a lot of the customer outreach for you. that said, there are a lot of other ways to niche down - discord communities, subreddits, private boards, etc... come to mind as good places to start