The Brute Force Reality of Early Customer Discovery

There's no silver bullet, no secret playbook, no growth hack that helps you find early customers.

Just pure grind and asking for A LOT of favors. Especially if you don't have a network.

I talked to Alexa Grabell, Co-Founder and CEO of Pocus about this. Pocus sells to sales teams. Alexa didn't have a network in sales tech. She had no warm introductions.

What she did have was the willingness to send hundreds of LinkedIn messages to strangers.

Her system was stupidly simple: Start with alumni from her school (Stanford) who worked at interesting companies. Message them. Get on calls.

At the end of every single call—without exception—ask for introductions to 2-3 other people. Rinse and repeat until you're drowning in meetings.

The goal?

10 meetings per week, every week, for months.

That means sending hundreds of messages weekly, spending nights and weekends on outreach, and following up with everyone who ghosts you.

Or as Santiago Suarez Ordonez, co-founder and CEO of Momentium.io told me:

“As a founder, you have to accept that you're going to ask for tons of favors from everyone. It’s going to be humbling and often, you won’t be able to give anything back besides say ‘thank you’. […] And of course, you not only have to ask for favors, but you also have to follow up a third time, a forth time, and so on. Until they’re upset enough to do the intro.”

Unfortunately, rather than will initial customers into existence, too many spend too much time preparing their pitch, waiting for the perfect introduction, convincing themselves they need a better deck, etc.

Here’s what actually works:

• Reach out to everyone who's even remotely relevant (LI / email). Honest outreach about what you're building and why you want their input - no fancy templates.

• Follow up relentlessly. If someone doesn’t respond? Message them again and again. Most people ignore the 1st message out of habit, not disinterest.

• Turn every conversation into 3 more. Every person you talk to knows other people with similar problems. But they won't offer introductions unless you ask. So ask. Every single time.

• Accept that most people will say no. Some won't have time. Others won't care about your problem. Many will agree to meet then ghost you. This isn't failure—it's filtering. You're looking for those who feel the pain so acutely they'll make time for a random founder.

Ultimately, the math is simple. If you need 10 customer discovery calls, you probably need to message 100+ people. If you want 100 discovery calls, prepare to message 1,000+.

This isn't elegant. It isn't scalable. It certainly isn't fun.

But it works. Stop looking for shortcuts. Start messaging people.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Alexa Grabell, Co-founder and CEO of Pocus ($23M raised from First Round, Coatue, Pear, Box Group, GTM Fund).

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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