Mercury CEO's Rules for Cold DMs

Y Combinator's central advice, famously articulated by Paul Graham, is to "do things that don't scale." For founders seeking their first users, this means manual, intensive outreach rather than scalable marketing. This could involve personally recruiting users, providing high-touch onboarding, and building a product based on direct, continuous feedback. This hands-on approach is crucial for understanding customer needs and iterating toward a product people genuinely want. Identifying the right people to talk to is the first hurdle. Early adopters are often found in online communities where they actively discuss their problems. Searching forums like Reddit, LinkedIn Groups, or niche Slack communities for threads where people complain or ask for solutions related to your MVP's domain can be highly effective. The goal is to find individuals with "hair on fire" problems—those who are so frustrated they are already actively searching for a solution. Once potential users are identified, direct and personalized cold outreach is key. YC partner Gustaf Alströmer advises keeping sales emails short, with clear language that addresses the customer's specific problem. Successful cold emails often provide value before asking for anything in return, such as sharing a relevant insight or resource. The call-to-action should be low-friction, asking for feedback or a brief chat rather than a commitment to buy. The structure of these initial conversations is critical for validation. Founders should aim to have live conversations over video or phone to capture nuanced feedback. Instead of pitching the product, successful founders ask open-ended questions about the user's past experiences and current workflows to understand their pain points deeply. Questions like, "Walk me through the last time you dealt with [problem]" are more effective than "Would you use a tool that does [solution]?" To build a consistent pipeline of these conversations, founders should treat the process like a sales funnel, tracking outreach and conversion rates in a simple CRM. After each successful interview, it's crucial to ask for referrals to other potential users. This creates a chain of warm introductions, which have a much higher response rate than cold outreach. This initial, unscalable effort compounds over time. While the first ten customers might be acquired through painstaking manual outreach, the deep understanding gained from these conversations is what allows a startup to build a product that eventually grows organically. The feedback from paying customers is particularly valuable, as they are more invested in the product's success. The ultimate goal of early customer discovery is to identify patterns. When you start hearing the same problems described in the same words by different people, you're on the path to product-market fit. This validated learning is the foundation upon which a scalable go-to-market strategy can be built. YC President Garry Tan emphasizes that the best startups are often founded by people with a deep, personal understanding of the problem they are solving, a concept known as "founder-market fit." This firsthand experience provides an "earned secret" that allows founders to have unique insights into the customer's pain points and build a solution that truly resonates.