How to get your first 3 customers with targeted outreach, fast

Today's issue we are going to talk about validating your idea and finding initial traction with targeted outreach.

This will start by finding ONE qualified prospect.

I know a lot of you signed up to learn how to send 1000 cold emails a day and get 100 replies.

But every successful cold email campaign starts from just one successful conversation.

By having one conversion at a time, you'll find out:

• Are you selling the right thing?

• Are you selling the right thing to the right people?

• Are you selling the right thing to the right people at the right time?

Understanding the final question is crucial, and while these early conversations might not scale, but they will help you understand their problem and situation, and help you tune in on your ideal targeting so you can scale up.

How do you get answers to that question?

Don't build an MVP, launch, improve, and wait…

Use targeted outreach instead.

Why you shouldn’t validate with an MVP

The traditional advice is to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and ask people to try it.

While this can work, in practice, this doesn't work too well for most people.

Because most people can't build a truly minimal MVP. This is a common issue that many startup experts also discuss.

“ If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.” — Reid Hoffman

Think about it, the point of MVP is to ask people if your idea is something they want.

So what's the easiest way to validate your idea?

Ask.

Targeted outreach, cold or warm, is exactly what you need, because you can start a conversation and ask them questions.

I’ve boiled down the difference in the flow chart below, you can see how starting from targeted outreach gives you much quicker feedback loop. You can go from POC (proof of concept) to a market-validated, launch-ready product in a couple weeks.

How to validate with targeted outreach

When I first started indie hacking, it took me 6 months to build an "MVP" and get my first user on the free app, only to find out 2 years a later there's no real demand for something I've built.

But in 2023, I’ve validated (or invalidated) 3 different ideas, all of them started with targeted outreach.

If I were to do it again today, here's what I'd do exactly.

Step 1 - Find people facing the problem you are solving

First, you gotta find ONE person who has this problem.

Right now it's not the time to think about scaling, just find one and start there.

The reason for this is that out of the 7 billion people there’s at least one person who's literally pulling their hair out right now because of the problem you are trying to solve. (If there’s not then you need a new idea)

Below are the most common places you can find that one users:

• Community forums. (Facebook, Reddit, Discord)

• Competitor's review section

• Google maps if you are selling local

• Social Media (Linkedin, X)

• Directory sites (ProductHunt, Microlaunch)

I also gave specific suggestions to 100+ other founders starting out on Twitter last Wednesday, you can see them here if you need more ideas.

The next step is important - you gotta find people who have your problem RIGHT NOW.

This is different from people who might have your problem.

For example, PressPulse is designed for people who already use HARO. To validate this, I looked for individuals actively discussing HARO on social media or posting jobs related to it. I also checked Facebook/LinkedIn forums for business owners and bloggers seeking PR and backlinks.

This is very different from people who could potentially benefit from HARO, which is literally every business owner out there. This approach narrowed my list down and increased my success rate up by 1000x.

Step 2 - Pitch their desired outcome

Step 2 is pretty simple, you offer to solve this problem you know they have, to get them their desired outcome.

However, this is when most founders do it wrong.

They focus too much on the feature they are building, but forget the person on the other end don't care about you, they only care about THEM and their problems. 

Don't take my word for it, just check my spam folder. There’s a reason why all of them are in spam.

See the common theme?

All of them start with "I" or "We".

Start your email with "You". This mindset shift will instantly put you ahead of 90% of people who try to do cold outreach.

Follow this template:

What’s an unbelievable offer? Solve this exact problem you know they have, for free, with 0 risk:

• You have 10k instagram followers but are not using Reels. Can I give you 5 reels you can use to promote {companyName} at no cost?

• Your facebook ads is driving crazy number of impressions. Can I give you 10 conversion tips for your landing page at no cost?

• Your linkedin post about hiring your first sales rep caught my eye. Can I send you 1000 qualified prospects for {companyName} you can contact today at no cost?

(Tip: The word "free" triggers the spam filter, use "no cost" instead)

If you receive an offer like this it's very hard to not say yes. And that's how you get the conversation started.

Step 3 - Deliver on your promise, manually

Now that you have their attention, you just need to deliver on your promise.

The best part of this approach is that it lets you provide everything async, in a scrappy manner, without the unnecessary complexities of a fully built system.

For examples:

• A custom prompt

• A hard-coded HTML

• A hand-written google doc

• A staged proof-of-concept loom

• A spreadsheet with manually-entered data

You don’t need a fully-functional system to deliver this, which is why this approach saves so much time from developing a full MVP.

As long as a human (you) can deliver this within the first 10-20 minutes of their reply, no one can tell the difference. If you think it might take longer, you can also do the work before you send the message in step 2.

Step 4 - Get quality feedback, iterate

By helping your users bypass the tedious tasks of signing up and navigating through multiple buttons, they quickly understand your product's goals. As a result, the feedback you receive is highly actionable.

In contrast, if you sent an MVP, many users would abandon it at the signup stage. More would drop off within the app due to usability issues, and you might be fortunate if 1% provide any actionable feedback on the concept itself.

Real SaaS Validation Examples

Below are some real outreach messages I sent. I was new to cold outreach at the time, so there are a number of things that I would improve now, including a more personalized, value-driven copy and remove the link to improve deliverability. But the idea still holds.

Example 1 - Pitching PressPulse to Natia Kurdadze (aka How it all started)

The idea of PressPulse is inspired by this one tweet from Natia Kurdadze about using HARO to get PR exposure, and Simona’s comment underneath back in October 2023. (Thanks again Natia!)

3 days after this tweet, I got the idea of building an AI to solve this exact problem when taking a shower.

2 days later I built a proof of concept with everything manually run in a node.js script.

2 more days later I sent this message to Natia.

The message is designed to be concise, since she knows this space very well already and has recently talked about it, I didn’t have to waste time explaining what my AI does at all. There’s a custom URL in the message, which deep-links to a custom page that presents 9 personalized HARO opportunities pre-generated using my node.js script.

I dug out my hard-coded HTML file from Vercel’s graveyard. Unfortunately the exact relevant HARO opportunities can’t be found anymore because I nuked the development database already. But you get the idea.

This ended up starting an amazing conversation with Natia, in addition to getting initial validation of the idea, she was kind enough to share many useful insights for free which I’m very grateful for:

• Some great legal advice

• Prior art on similar products

• Ways to scale beyond my initial market

• Two unexplored exit opportunities

If you want daily growth hacks, or profitable business ideas like the one I found, go follow Natia, you won’t regret it.

After this, I employed the same playbook to reach out to 10 more people who are already using HARO, some within my network and some in PR forums. That gave me enough validation to pursue a full Reddit launch, which drove 300 comments and pushed this idea beyond validation to $60/mo in 2 days. (You can read about my Reddit launch strategy here)

Example 2 - Pitching a blog image generator to a blogger

Before PressPulse, another idea I worked on in 2023 is a blog cover image generator, a Midjourney wrapper.

I used the same strategy to (in)-validate this idea:

First, I looked through a blogger forum, found someone who’s only using stock photos.

Second, I pitched the value of having unique photos and offered to generate unique images with commercial-use licenses.

Third, once they agreed to my offer, I manually ran an article of theirs through my ChatGPT prompt, generated some Midjourney prompts, ran through Midjourney, hand-picked 8 images, used Canva to make a collage, and sent it over as a zip file. (0 coding is required!)

By starting this conversation, not only did I get tons of insights into a real user’s needs, I also built an important connection with someone in my ICP group to get further feedback in the future.

Hopefully these are useful examples for you to see how validation with targeted outreach works.

So next time when you have an idea you need to validate.

Don't start with an MVP.

ASK.

In the next few weeks I’ll talk about how I took this concept one-step further, baked it into PressPulse’s onboarding flow, and scaled it to hundreds of people each day. If there’s anything else you’d like to see, reply and let me know.

p.s. If a friend shared this with you, join here to receive the next issue on Saturday.

p.p.s. If you are running or thinking about running a cold email campaign, reply to this email, I’d be happy to share some ideas with you. It’s free until July 1st.