Article · 18 min read

The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders

Emery Rosansky (First Round Review) · First Round Review Free Intermediate

Validation in B2B bleeds straight into early sales, and this answers the real questions founders hit when they start selling to first buyers. It covers who to target, how to run those first deals founder-led, and when a pilot is enough proof to keep going. Practical grounding for the messy stretch between 'a buyer said yes on a call' and 'a buyer signed.'

  • Early B2B motion should be sales-led while you still figure out your ideal buyer
  • Founders must close the first customers themselves before hiring sales
  • Define your ICP by talking to buyers, not by guessing on a whiteboard

It answers 4 questions

  1. How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me?
  2. Where do I find the very first people to even talk to about my product?
  3. How is validating a B2B idea different from validating a consumer app?
  4. How do I get customers who don't already know me when I have no brand, no audience, and no case studies yet?

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. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  5. An Indian founder story where the early demand test was manual, cold emails and direct outreach to find the first customers... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~50 min How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a Global SaaS Leader Prime Venture Partners
  6. The consumer counterpart to finding B2B customers, focused on manually recruiting your first users for a consumer product. It... Lenny's Newsletter Article How to Find Your Early Adopters by Doing Things That Don't Scale Lenny Rachitsky
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →