Outbound Can’t Wait For Product Market Fit

This contradicts conventional wisdom that tells you to not invest in outbound until you have your positioning nailed.

Wrong. Starting with outbound before you have a product is one of the best things you can do.

Early outbound isn't about money. You won't close deals. You might not even book meetings.

You’ll learn—fast.

You'll discover which titles actually respond. Which messages resonate. Which personas move quickly.

Plus outbound forces you to articulate value to people who've never heard of you.

Either your value is clear in 50 words, or it isn't.

These early learnings become even more valuable once you have early paying customers and need to start to truly scale your customer base.

Closing customers is a numbers game.

The more customers in your pipeline, the more you’ll close.

You can’t count on a deal actually closing. Even the most promising deals die for reasons outside your control. Your champion gets fired. The company gets acquired. Budget freezes. Priorities shift.

You can spend nine months on a perfect deal only to watch it vanish overnight when your contact leaves.

Sales skill can't prevent randomness. Only pipeline volume does.

Building predictable pipeline takes months. Your first campaigns will flop. Response rates will disappoint.

This is normal—which is why starting early matters. Make your mistakes before you need pipeline to scale.

The last thing I’ll leave you with: A tactical gem from Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, Co-Founder and CEO of Momentum, that works once you have a few paying customers:

The "Fellow Portfolio Company" email.

How it works:

Close one Sequoia-backed customer? Email every other Sequoia company.

Subject line: "Fellow Sequoia portfolio company"

Body: "Noticed you're also in Sequoia's portfolio. [Other company] uses us to solve [specific problem]. Open to learning how we could help you?"

Why this crushes:

1. The subject line guarantees opens. It cuts through the inbox noise.

2. The message is stupidly simple. The initial email’s only job is booking the meeting. Save the pitch for the call.

3. Portfolio trust is real. Founders tend trust their investors' other portfolio companies.

The amazing thing about this hack?

Every new customer can unlock 100+ warm leads if they have an investor you don’t have “covered” yet.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, Co-Founder and CEO of Momentum, who spent 15 years as a successful engineering leader before deliberately building for sales teams - a market he knew nothing about. He went from "never sold anything" to building a thriving AI sales company in a short time period and has many lessons to share that especially fellow technical founders need to hear.

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We lead their first round at the very start with up to $1M. Often before they even write their first line of code.

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