The best way to find your first customers is to email them

Every technical founder’s first priority for a B2B company is to find an early set of customers that can shape their positioning, product, and go-to-market. Traditional wisdom is that the best way to find this group is to launch your product to the world, talk about the problem, build a waitlist, and you’ll find people deeply affected by the problem you’re out to solve. But years of repetition helping companies at this stage has taught us that this is very wrong. Launching early leaves you with:

Long feedback cycles: With a website and blog, the amount of time and effort required to change your story and positioning is colossal.
Low signal feedback: it’s hard to tell if your story is resonating (or not) based on numbers like waitlist signups or conversation rates.
Storytelling rigidity: launching forces you to lock into one particular story, when in reality, you don't know the right one yet.

Instead, with a few scant exceptions, the best way to find your first few customers is to proactively source and get in touch with them individually. The title says email, but messaging of any kind works (increasingly today, LinkedIn too).

Sourcing your early customers

For early stage B2B startups, the main goal is to find a cadre of early design partners that you can build your product alongside, getting the feedback and market validation you need along the way. The best way to find these early design partners is to go and find them, not to broadcast a message and hope they see it.

With the “sourcing-led” design partner approach, you get much quicker iterations on your early story and product:

Short feedback cycles: direct contact with someone will quickly tell you if your story is interesting or not.
High signal feedback: direct contact with someone will quickly tell you why your story is interesting or not.
Storytelling flexibility: you can vary your pitch by email and conversation to quickly understand what’s exciting and what’s not.

Here’s the playbook that we run with Amplify companies.

Figure out your initial ICP

The first step is to decide who you’re trying to find. We try to nail down a very, very specific persona for several reasons, foremost of which is that you’re trying to learn here, and if you’re talking to 18 different types of people, it’s much, much harder to get directed, useful feedback. A specific ICP is:

“Backend engineering team leads at US companies with $50M – $1B in annual revenue and mobile fleets of 1M+ devices”

A specific ICP is not:

“Developers at enterprise companies”

Your first ICP is a thesis, and you’re not going to know if it’s right. But most of the technical founders we work with at Amplify are starting companies to solve problems they themselves have experienced – so the ICP usually looks a lot like the founders.

Assemble a list of 200 leads you’re connected to

Once you’ve got your ICP nailed down, you need to find people who match it.

An obvious statement: warm introductions are the best way to get in touch with early design partners. You’re going to have so many things wrong early on: the pitch, value proposition, positioning, etc. You need to find someone who isn’t going to straight up ignore you if your outreach is bad, which people will do if you’re emailing them out of the blue.

We use a hodgepodge of different tactics to find this initial group of leads:

Going through your LinkedIn and seeing any mutual connections
Asking your investors (if you have them) for introductions
Combing through anyone you’ve already spoken to
Use Gem or some type of LinkedIn automation
Working with a firm like TaskMinions to create bespoke searches

We’ve generally found that around 200 is the right number to start with if you want to end up with 15-20 conversations.

Cold outreach should be an absolute last resort. Unless you have reasonable evidence that your pitch and your story are solid, we just don’t see good results with it most of the time.

Send painstakingly personalized messages

Even if most of your outreach is going to be via warm connections, sending the right message is still critically important. Whether you plan on your connection forwarding your message, or reaching out directly and mentioning that you both know X, your product and pitch are either interesting or not; the warm connection just gives you the luxury of a likely response (and that response can be "not interested").

When I say personalize, I don’t mean personalize like “hey, I saw you work at company X.” I mean personalize. Like pointing out a recent blog post they wrote and what you like about it, commiserating over a mutual boss at an old company that everyone hated, noting a recent tweet about how they’re been building a sauna in their backyard and you did that too and should mention that a good foundation is important because the wood is going to warp…that level of personalization.

Sometimes we’ll try to pick the 20 best leads out of the 200 and start there, making sure the messages – whether email, LinkedIn, or otherwise – are stellar. Messages cannot be templated and standardized: you’re trying to say hey, I’m a founder, and I really value your opinion on this topic for these reasons. Say it with heart!

Why founders tend to launch and not email

Though it’s a bit out of sequence with the story, I figured it might be interesting to readers to explore why I see founders reach for launch so often instead of just emailing.

Technical founders are increasingly spending meaningful time on X and LinkedIn compared to 5 years ago. You tend to see a lot of launches from other founders. And statistically, the ones you see will have an outsized degree of engagement in the form of likes, reposts, impressions, etc. (otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be seeing them).

This creates a skewed perception of what the steps are to building a successful company, because few people are out there on X or LinkedIn talking about how they messaged their way to phenomenal design partners. The people doing those launches that you want to emulate probably got their first few customers by emailing them anyway.

The “if you build it, they will come” fallacy

One of the biggest blind spots that technical founders have is the mistaken assumption that the context for their product is obvious, and that once they get it out there, people will immediately understand what makes it special (and adopt it). This is a well documented phenomenon beyond the scope of this post, and I call it the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy. In an era of a million developer tools, it’s a dangerous, company killing misconception.

What this misconception does is plant a seed in a founder’s mind that launching widely is the best way forward, since smart people who see the launch will adopt the product. It implies that breadth is preferable to depth because the product is inevitable. But the opposite is true: because the story of your product is more important than your product itself, the ability to tell that story in a controlled environment to a highly targeted audience is the best way to figure out if you have something here.

The desire not to spam people

This last one is very understandable. And a great instinct. When you launch, you’re putting your information out there; whoever wants to engage with it can. When you mass email people, you’re spamming them. You wouldn’t want a random person to email you trying to sell you something, so why would you do it to someone else?

You don’t need to do this. The right way to email and find your first few customers has nothing to do with spam. First, the goal is to go through 100% warm connections – you’re emailing them (who you already know), asking for introductions. And second, you’re coming with a highly targeted message, asking if someone has a problem and if so, can I help you solve that problem.

If you’re doing email right, it shouldn't feel spammy at all. Challenge yourself to write a note that you, yourself, wouldn’t mind receiving. They do exist and can be done properly; it’s just that most people don’t take the time and care to do so.