I am a founder in India and my buyers are in the US. How do I get a stranger twelve time zones away to reply?
The short answer
Distance is not your problem, credibility is. A US buyer who has never heard of you needs a reason to believe you understand their world, so lead with something specific about their stack, their market or a peer company rather than your funding or your team. Borrow trust wherever you can: an investor intro, a mutual connection on LinkedIn, a customer logo they recognise, a piece of research only you could have done. Send at a time that lands in their morning, keep the English plain, and never open with an apology for reaching out cold. Founders from India have been closing US enterprises this way for a decade, and every one of them did it by being specific rather than by being local.
Go deeper, your way
4 hand-picked resources, 3 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checkedIndiaFreeIntermediate
Why we picked it
Sharath has built two enterprise companies (Observe, Sanas) with engineering in India and buyers in the US, and is direct about founder-led sales being non-negotiable for the first customers. Good on what actually has to move to the US and what does not.
Why we picked it
The buyer's side of enterprise outbound, from a CIO who says roughly 80 percent of the startups he evaluates were found through outbound research, peers or LinkedIn. He also times each phase of his buying process, which tells you exactly how long your deal will take.
Why we picked it
Includes the detail most founder stories leave out: 500 cold emails to land the first customers, and a Fortune 10 logo won at 25 dollars a month because the logo mattered more than the price. Also direct on how they split India and US sales teams.
Why we picked it
It orders the seven ways early customers actually arrive (network, cold outbound, investors, community, content, press, launch) by how much trust each one starts with, which is the missing map for a first-time seller. Built from interviews with founders at Figma, Notion, Databricks and Slack rather than theory.
