Cold email or cold LinkedIn/DM, what works better for reaching first customers?
Use whichever gets you in front of your specific buyer, and often combine them, a warm LinkedIn touch before a cold email lifts reply rates. Email scales and is easy to personalize at volume; LinkedIn and DMs feel more human for reaching individuals and communities. The channel matters less than a genuinely relevant, personalized message.
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Before you have any data to cluster into an ICP, your job is to find and watch a handful of real customers up close. Michael Seibel (YC, co-founder of Twitch) gives a short, concrete talk on where those first customers actually come from and how to spot the ones who genuinely have the problem. It pairs well with the interview technique in The Mom Test: this is where to point that technique first.
Pete Koomen took Optimizely from zero to $100M+ ARR, and here he breaks the enterprise funnel down for exactly the person who finds it terrifying: the technical founder who has never sold. It is the clearest short primer we know on how a builder starts closing real deals.
Berman built his reputation entirely on cold email for agencies and B2B services, and this video breaks his framework, compliment, case study, call to action, down step by step with real examples. Watch it if you want a repeatable structure rather than starting from a blank page.
Dang trained at Oracle and has spent years teaching LinkedIn-specific outreach, and this video walks through his actual process for messaging prospects who've never heard of you. Useful if email feels too impersonal for your specific buyer and you want the LinkedIn side worked out in similar depth to the cold email advice above.
An Indian founder story where the early demand test was manual, cold emails and direct outreach to find the first customers before the product had proven itself. It is a grounded counterpoint to the landing page: sometimes the fastest way to measure intent in a B2B market is to ask people to commit directly. Useful if your buyers are enterprises who will never fill in a consumer style waitlist form.
An Indian SaaS founder on how he found and won real customers by identifying a large underserved market and solving its biggest problem, not by leaning on a friendly network. It is a useful India-context reminder that a stranger's paid yes is the signal that matters. Good if you are building from India for global buyers.
This is a curated run of founder interviews on The SaaS Podcast about landing the very first paying customers, and the recurring theme is exactly your question: the founders who got traction did it through direct conversations and pilots that led to a payment, not open-ended free access. Hearing several founders describe what actually converted (and what stalled) is more useful than one framework, because you see the pattern across different products. A good listen while you are still deciding how to price your first pilot.
The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past behaviour, not your idea, so you can't be lied to. If a founder reads one thing before talking to a single customer, it's this.
A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution strategy in real company examples.
Braun's four-sentence formula (proof you did your homework, the specific problem you think they have, a sliver of social proof, a humble ask) is the clearest short structure we found for turning research into a message instead of a pitch. It is built around starting a conversation, not closing a deal, which is exactly the tiny-ask posture our answer argues for.
Steli Efti built his sales career on the belief that unanswered outreach is a maybe, and a maybe is what kills deals. This gives you his actual day-by-day cadence (four touches spread across roughly a week for a cold prospect, longer for one showing real interest) so you're not guessing at spacing.
Barry documents, with real numbers, how he grew ConvertKit through direct outreach and relentless follow-up rather than a polished channel strategy. It's a rare essay that shows the unglamorous grind and the mistakes, which is more useful than the tidied-up version most people tell.
A real, specific account of the actual cold email that got a company its first paying customers before it even had a name or a team. It's a useful gut check against the polished cold email templates everyone else is selling you.
A direct, practical comparison of the two channels this exact question is about, including what each is better suited for and why. It's a good map to read before you decide where to put your first few weeks of energy.
Merge's founders sent hundreds of cold emails over six months, not to pitch but to understand who actually had the integrations problem they were solving. It's a good example of using cold outreach for discovery first, closing comes later once you actually know who to talk to.
The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.
A practical library of short LinkedIn opening messages organized by scenario, which you can adapt instead of guessing at tone from scratch. LinkedIn messages need to be shorter and less formal than email, and this gives you real starting points for that.
A free five-day email course covering the whole cold email process end to end: defining who to target, finding accurate contact details, writing the message, and following up. Good if you want a structured path instead of piecing advice together from a dozen separate articles.
A tool built specifically around sequencing cold email and LinkedIn touches together, which matches the exact combine-them advice in this answer. It's worth trying once you've already validated your message by hand and want to run a real sequence at volume, not as a shortcut past that testing.
