Acquiring First B2B Customers

"Begin building a community, a network, or individual connections to people who may one day need what you’re building. If you don’t have these connections by the time you launch, look for an accelerator or network you can join that’ll get you access to your target audience."

"None of these seven strategies scale. That’s why they work. In B2B, it always starts with hand-to-hand combat."

"One of the recurring themes (and biggest surprises) across my interviews is the value, and effectiveness, of going cold outbound in the early stages—cold emails, cold DMs, cold calling. But you need to be clever about how you do this."

"We asked our angel investors and combed their LinkedIn networks. I had a target of 15 to 18 net new IT folks at different companies to talk to every month for the first six months and probably hit 85%-plus of my quota."

"A surprising number of founders found their early customers by putting out compelling content online and first building a following."

"Think about your friends—and their friends. Do any fit your ideal customer profile? This group will have the most innate trust (and the lowest amount of skepticism) about your idea."

"When joining communities, focus first on adding value to the community. No one wants to pay attention to you if you’re there just to pitch your product."

"In practice, it’s even easier — almost every B2B business BOTH hits up their personal network AND heads to the places their potential customers were spending time. The question isn’t which of these two routes to pursue, but instead how far your own network will take you before you move on."

"In search of more feedback, we turned to Twitter which I realized we could use to determine the most influential designers. After getting the data, I further filtered the list to people that were personally inspirational to me. Then I cold emailed / found introductions to many of these people and showed them Figma."

"Tapping your personal network is even more important if you need to “sell” your product (i.e. not going bottom-up), likely because early customers need to have a reason to trust you."

"It’s a huge advantage to have a strong personal network in B2B, which you can also build by bringing on a connector investor or joining an incubator such as YC."

"It turns out there are just three strategies early-on: 1. Bottom-up + self-service: Users discover your product, sign up for a free plan, love it, and upgrade themselves in order to get more functionality. 2. Bottom-up + inside sales: Users discover your product, sign up for a free plan, and then are either encouraged by a sales rep (or pro-actively reach out) to upgrade for more functionality. 3. Outbound sales: Founders or early sales hires reach out to leads, help them trial the product, and then sign them up for a paid plan."

"After many dead ends, we found our mule in a health insurance sales rep named Ari. He was energized by our hustle and invited us to shadow every meeting he had lined up at the conference."

"Suril was the co-founder and CEO at Savvy, which in the early days meant he was my insurance advisor, enrollment specialist, and customer support—basically my personal health insurance guru."