Thread

The cold email that started a $100M/yr company

Indie Hackers Free Beginner

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.

  • The winning email was short and specific, not clever or long.
  • Customers said yes before there was a finished product to show them.
  • Real examples like this show what a working first message actually looks like, not a template.
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The question it answers

  1. Cold email or cold LinkedIn/DM, what works better for reaching first customers?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to win your first 10 B2B customers Lenny Rachitsky
  4. Pete Koomen took Optimizely from zero to $100M+ ARR, and here he breaks the enterprise funnel down for exactly the person who... Y Combinator Startup School Video · ~35 min Enterprise Sales for Founders Pete Koomen
  5. Video · ~10 min How to get your first ten customers Michael Seibel
  6. This is a curated run of founder interviews on The SaaS Podcast about landing the very first paying customers, and the... SaaS Club Podcast · Ongoing series, ~45 to 60 min episodes Getting Your First SaaS Customers (Founder Interviews) Omer Khan, The SaaS Podcast
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