Get your first customers

What founders use for get your first customers, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

1. This is the chapter of the standard founder-led sales handbook that deals directly with cold email, and it gives you real... Holloway Book · 20 min read Founding Sales: Emailing Prospects Pete Kazanjy
2. The author names the exact failure mode our short answer warns against, calling most personalized cold email mail merge with a... Indie Hackers Thread · 6 min read Your Cold Emails Aren't Personal, Here's Proof (And How We Fixed It) Virgil Nelson
3. A marketer at Toggl walks through the actual cold emails that turned into 150,000 visits and 60,000 signups, mostly by pitching... Medium Article · 10 min read 10 Cold Email Tips I Used to Get 60,000 App Signups Dunja Lazić
4. The project itself, an agent that researches a person then drafts a first line, is less important than the comment thread,... Hacker News Thread · 5 min read Show HN: I Built an Agent to Write Personalized Cold Email Opener Hacker News
5. This is Google's own rulebook for what gets an email into Gmail instead of spam: SPF or DKIM for every sender, SPF, DKIM, and... Google (Gmail/Workspace support) Article Email sender guidelines Google (Gmail/Workspace support)
6. Postmark is an email delivery company, so this is a working list from people who watch inboxes for a living, not a generic... Postmark Article 13 reasons why your emails go into the spam folder (and what you can do about it) Postmark
7. Spam complaints are the signal that actually poisons a domain, more than any single email landing in a spam folder. This piece... Postmark Article How to reduce and fix email spam complaints Postmark
8. Mailgun is one of the infrastructure providers that actually sends the mail, so this is a hands-on, technically accurate... Mailgun Article How to authenticate your email for better delivery rates Mailgun
9. HubSpot sends a genuinely enormous volume of email and publishes what they tell their own customers to do to stay out of spam.... HubSpot Knowledge Base Article Improve email deliverability HubSpot Knowledge Base
10. Instantly is built specifically for cold outreach, so this guide is framed around your exact problem rather than transactional... Instantly Article How to Master SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for Cold Email Deliverability Instantly
11. This directly supports the 'warm up a fresh domain slowly' half of your answer. It lays out why a brand-new domain has zero... Woodpecker Article How to Warm Up a New Domain Before Email Outreach Woodpecker
12. This is the clearest explanation of exactly the advice in your short answer: keep cold outreach off your main domain so a spam... GlockApps Article Why You Need a Separate Domain for Cold Email Outreach GlockApps
13. This gives you a week-by-week volume ramp for a new domain alongside the authentication basics, which is more concrete than... Mailshake Article The Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability Mark Lindquist
14. Ajay Goel has built email sending software for two decades, so this guide connects deliverability mechanics to the practical... GMass Article The Ultimate Guide to Cold Email Ajay Goel
15. Al Iverson spent 15 years running deliverability for a major email platform, and this is his running commentary on what mailbox... Al Iverson Article Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability Al Iverson
16. Written by the team behind one of the most used email finder tools, so it walks through the same order of operations our answer... Hunter.io Blog Article · 10 minute read 10 Ways to Find Anyone's Email Address Ziemek Bućko
17. A clear rundown from a company that does outreach at scale for its own work, covering lookup tools, pattern guessing, and... Ahrefs Blog Article · 8 minute read 6 Proven Ways To Find Anyone's Email Address Nick Churick
18. Written from the recipient's side of the inbox by someone who gets hundreds of cold emails a week. It makes the case that... Ahrefs Blog Essay · 12 minute read I Just Deleted Your Outreach Email Without Reading. And NO, I Don't Feel Sorry Tim Soulo
19. Once you've found or guessed someone's email, this is what to actually put in it, with word for word scripts from a founder who... First Round Review Article · 15 minute read Here are the Scripts for Sales Success: Emails, Calls and Demos That Close Deals Peter Kazanjy
20. Ferrazzi's core argument is that the people worth reaching are found through relationships, not databases, so a connector who... Keith Ferrazzi Book · about 370 pages Never Eat Alone Keith Ferrazzi
21. A blunt, contrarian counterpoint from working founders and investors: several commenters argue you shouldn't be hunting down a... Hacker News Thread How to write cold emails to investors Hacker News
22. Plain-language breakdown of every cold email metric (open, reply, positive reply, bounce) and what actually separates a healthy... Hunter.io Article Cold Email Metrics Hunter.io
23. A short, practical checklist for raising reply rates once you already know your baseline is low. It walks through list size,... Hunter.io Article Improve Your Reply Rate Hunter.io
24. Real platform-wide data across millions of sends, kept current, so you can see where your own numbers sit against a large... Woodpecker Article Cold Email Statistics Based on Sending Over 20M Cold Emails Woodpecker

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