Newsletter · long read

How to find and win your first 10 B2B customers

Lenny Rachitsky · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Beginner

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.

  • Work outward in concentric circles from the founder, each ring one step further from personal trust.
  • Retool filtered Crunchbase by recent fundraise and pitched CTOs and VPs of ops, landing DoorDash and Brex.
  • Amplitude's Spenser Skates: other YC companies are not real customers, they have no money to spend.
  • Canva took two years to build a 10,000 person waitlist, and a TechCrunch feature brought only a couple thousand signups.
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It answers 3 questions

  1. I have never sent a cold email in my life. Where do I even start?
  2. 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?
  3. Is there a way to build demand before the product even exists?

Read with it

  1. A rare account of the specific moments a GTM changed shape, from narrowing to cold email agencies, to reversing the demo, to... First Round Review Article · ~25 min read The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation Varun Anand
  2. This is where the SDR and AE split came from, and the summary gives you the whole model without the book. The rule that no AE... Predictable Revenue Article · ~15 min read 15-Minute Summary of Predictable Revenue Aaron Ross
  3. Podcast · ~60 min How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a ~$900 Million Global SaaS Leader Khadim Batti
  4. The whole 400 page book is readable free chapter by chapter, written specifically for founders and first-time sellers rather... foundingsales.com Book · full book, free online Founding Sales: the early stage go-to-market handbook Pete Kazanjy
  5. Podcast · 80 min listen 7 Myths About Selling B2B SaaS In India ft Unicommerce Founder Kapil Makhija Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Kapil Makhija
  6. Podcast · 90 min listen 2X SaaS Founder: How To Sell Global Tech Products From India Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Sharath Keshava Narayana
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