Start with outbound from day 1

The conventional wisdom is that you should focus on product and initial customer discovery first. And only start with outbound once you start to scale sales.

This is wrong.

I recently chatted to Austin Hughes who built growth teams at Ramp and is now the CEO and Co-founder of Unify GTM as part of my podcast.

If he could start Unify all over again, he would start outbound six months earlier.

Which is a common pattern - almost all founders wish in retrospect they'd started outbound much sooner.

Why?

Because no other channel teaches you as much about your ideal customer profile as outbound does.

Through direct outreach, you discover who actually cares about your problem, which personas move quickly, and why deals get stuck. Crucial information you need to build the right product.

The goal with early outbound isn't just meetings. It's data. Who responds? What messaging works? Which personas move quickly? This information is gold for product development.

Early outbound is as much of a learning exercise as it is a sales channel.

To learn fast, your experimentation cycles have to be fast too. Ideally no longer than 24-48 hours.

Which in the case of outbound e.g. means reaching out to 50 prospects manually over the course of an hour or two. The next day, you analyze the results, adjust, and send an additional 50 messages. Until you land on something that works - then you invest more time and resources into the campaign to scale it.

Now, the most common response I get to suggesting doing outbound much earlier is “don’t most early outbound efforts fail?”

The answer is yes - and that’s fine. It’s how you learn.

Austin told me that at even at Ramp, they expected 70% or more of experiments to fail. The point is to learn quickly, not get everything right the first time.

Outbound will teach you about your market in ways other channels can't. Which will have a significant impact on how you build your product.

Thus, even if you're planning on growing your customer base primarily through inbound, conferences, or partnerships early on, you should still experiment with outbound early.

Ideally start the same day you start coding.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Austin Hughes, an early growth leader at Ramp and now Co-Founder and CEO at Unify GTM that changed how I think about growth at startups.

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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