The Volume and Reality of Cold Outreach
Successful user discovery often requires significant, direct outreach efforts when a founder is unknown. One founder shared that DMing 100 people was necessary to secure just two meaningful user interviews. This highlights the high-volume, persistent nature of building an initial user pipeline from scratch.
- Before writing any code, Gagan Biyani, co-founder of Udemy and Maven, advocates for "Minimum Viable Testing" (MVT) to validate ideas. This involves breaking down the business into testable assumptions and using non-scalable methods like conversations and mockups to gather evidence before building an MVP. - Successful early outreach often happens in "watering holes" where target users already congregate online. This includes niche subreddits, Slack and Discord communities, Facebook groups, and industry-specific forums where potential users are actively discussing the problems your product aims to solve. - YC General Partner Ankit Gupta advises founders to find early adopters by focusing on a "minimum evolvable product" rather than just a minimum viable product. The goal is to build something simple that can adapt quickly based on the feedback from the first handful of users who have a burning need for a solution. - For cold outreach, concise and non-promotional messaging is key; a general rule is to keep the initial message under five sentences. The focus should be on their experience and problems, not on selling your product, and should always include a specific, low-friction request, like a 20-minute call. - Founders of highly successful companies often did unscalable things to get their first users. For example, the founders of Airbnb traveled to New York City to meet their first hosts and take better photos of their apartments, while Tinder's then-CMO Whitney Wolfe visited sororities and fraternities to get them to install the app. - When structuring cold outreach, it's recommended to start with a customized connection request on LinkedIn. If there's no response, follow up with an InMail or a direct email, referencing the initial connection attempt. - Many successful YC founders acquired their first users through their personal networks and by launching to friends and family to test processes and pricing. Several founders also found success by creating a waitlist from sharing what they were building on their personal LinkedIn profiles, which generated inbound interest. - When you don't have a product yet, you can sell the vision to early customers. The founder of Rosterfy landed their first customer with only about 80% of a platform by being transparent and working closely with them, making them feel like a partner in the development process.
