There’s beauty in transparency, right? Well, here it is anyway:
Building a company is fucking hard.
But the kind of hard that energizes you and keeps you up at night devising ways to push through.
Let’s start with the good.
One of our biggest advantages as a technical founding team is that we can iterate super-fast. We were on full throttle the past month and our product has developed ten-fold. We optimized performance on data tasks and packaged our insight engine into a simple UI.
Our customer is thrilled with how we’ve progressed. We finalized an annual contract with them, and we couldn’t be more excited.
Now, the bad.
Sales has been really hard for us.
Our wise friend Amit shared, “Sales is only hard if you’re bad at it.” Ouch.
Why we’ve been sucking at sales:*
We started the month targeting production companies with cold outreach. Leaning into production companies felt natural given our understanding of their pain points and data routines. Plus, we can easily translate what we’ve built for our first customer to many more.
This was absolutely brutal. Despite our personalized messages and enthusiastic pitches, the response rate was 0%.
So we self-examined.
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Why production companies? Well, for one, we know their general data retrieval & analysis routines. We learned this from our customer. Second, we think we can replicate the success we’ve had with them. But, our product is inherently problem-oriented—we solve a general problem that every company struggles with. So why limit ourselves to production companies?
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Why cold outreach? We exhausted our network. Wrong! We hadn’t even come close to exhausting our network. We overlooked the potential of our connections. In other words, we were being dumb.
With these insights, we licked our wounds and tapped back into our connections for intros.
The results speak for themselves: 90%+ response rate and 60% converted into meetings so far. Plus, we’re in early discussions with two $100M+ companies and one $100B+ company.
Warm intros are significantly better than cold outreach because they provide instant credibility. Without credibility, no one pays you any interest. Given that we’re early stage—with no marketing collateral, advertisement budget, or even a website—our most cost effective strategy is to leverage connections by seeking introductions.
Now, we’re doubling down on this approach to hit our target of $5k MRR. To build credibility without relying on others, we’re developing a case study with one of our customers as a testament to the value we deliver and the return on investment we provide. We plan to finish this by the end of the quarter.
This shit is hard, but damn it’s fun.
Goals and Milestones
Past
✅ Make $1 (by August) (beat by $49,999)
✅ Get a customer (by August)
Ahead
✅ 1k MRR (by September)
⛔️ 3 customers (by September)
🔲 5k MRR (by October)
*Granted, it’s only been a month. I’m a Bayesian, so I’ll reevaluate as we collect more data points.