“I would love to build my startup, but I don’t want to quit my day job.”

Well, of course, you don’t. You’re likely a skilled developer, marketer, or sales professional making a significant income with bills to pay and perhaps even mouths to feed. It would be crazy for you to quit your job with nothing built.

Your full-time job, however, eats up least 40 hours per week that you could be using to build your business. So how do you ensure that you have food in your stomach while also building your dream business?

In this blog post, we’ll go over five ways you can keep your full-time job while growing your business.

This list will include:

Building a product that you’re passionate about

Concentrate on your key metric

Time block

Create an exit strategy

Stay Legal

Build a Business You’re Passionate About

We’ve talked about product/founder fit at length on the Nugget blog and for a good reason. Without a real passion for the product that you’re working on, your chances of success will decrease drastically. You’ll either lose motivation and just stop working on the business, look to exit too quickly, or find yourself miserable because you aren’t doing something that you enjoy.

Choosing to build a product in an industry that you are passionate about also means that you likely have a significant amount of domain expertise in that area, which will help you build a better product.

We recently discussed Logojoy and how Dawson Whitfield was able to create a company that was doing $15k in MRR in less than a year. There were many reasons why he was a success, but his ability to build a product 10x better than the competition because of his domain expertise stood out as a top factor in the company’s rise. He was the perfect mix of designer and developer which made him one of the few people in the world to be able to execute the product how he could.

His competitive advantage was his domain expertise.

Concentrate on Revenue

Founders tend to get pulled in all different directions, especially solo founders. Many of us act as the CTO, CEO, CMO and everything in between at our startups, so it’s easy to lose focus of what will move the needle.

What you need to remember is that everything comes down to revenue, and if you’re not spending time on things that are going to bring your startup the most revenue the quickest, then you are wasting time.

So don’t spend 10 hours in a week perfecting your company’s logo, deciding your business’s name, or creating social media accounts. Do spend that time talking to customers, implementing NEEDED features, and generating revenue.

You don’t have a business until you have paying customers. There is no greater validation than paying customers, and nothing will make you believe in your business more than getting paying users.

Block Off Your Time

Time management is a crucial skill for every founder. You have a full-time job, your startup, a family, and a social life to manage. So you NEED a system to keep yourself on schedule and accountable for your time. One of the best ways to manage your time and stay on top of your tasks is with time blocking.

Time blocking is a productivity “hack” that helps you to make the most of your work day by assigning very specific tasks to very specific blocks of time. Time blocking helps you stay focused on the task at hand and plan out your days more efficiently.

My favorite tool to do this is Plan, but you can use any calendars like Kin, Google Calendar, and Sunsama as alternatives. You simply list out your tasks for the day, estimate the time that each task will take to complete, and drop them in your calendar.

Once you’re all done, your day plan will look a lot like this:

This strategy will help you focus on the task at hand and remove unnecessary distractions.

Create An Exit Strategy

As you build your business while working full-time, the one thing that will keep you going until 3:00 am grinding your ass off is knowing that you’ll reach your goal and quit your job. For bootstrappers, this probably means making enough money consistently to cover your cost of livings and continue to grow the company, however, everyone’s goals are different. You need to figure out specifically what you need to do to leave your current situation and work on your business full time.

Ask yourself questions like:

What is the date I’d like to leave my job?

Do I need to raise money first?

How much revenue do I need to be generating (If any?)

How much should I have in personal savings?

Do I need to have my product 100% complete?

Do I need to have cofounders?

Thoroughly think through these questions and answer them. I suggest you then write them down and display them somewhere that you can see every day so you can let these goals motivate you.

Stay Legal

Your current employer is paying you to do a job, so you need to honor the commitment you made to them. At the same time, you need to protect yourself so that when your startup is a success, your former employer won’t have any recourse to come after you or your business.

If you are working on an idea that is unrelated to your current employer and you work on it in your own time with your materials, then you should have nothing to worry about. I would suggest checking out any employment or non-disclosure agreements that you may have signed and check to see what the company’s policies are in regards to outside businesses.

If you’re working on something that might compete with, or step on the toes of your current employer, I suggest consulting a lawyer to avoid any future issues.

Achieving your dream of building a business takes a LOT of work. Your dream will test your dedication, courage, and willpower.

Before you start working every night, take a moment to visualize taking the next step, quitting your job, and running your business full-time. Now get to work like you can see the finish line! You’ve got a dream to build.

. . .

Nugget is an online incubator & community. We help founders start and grow profitable side projects.

I hate to start off so bluntly, but every entrepreneur must remember this:

If your friends say they will buy your product idea, that does not mean they actually will buy your product.

We have an entire blog written about why you can’t always trust your feedback loop, but let’s recap.

Your friends and family are extremely biased because they know you, they care for you, and they would hate to do anything that might hurt your fragile ego, including crushing your startup dreams by telling you that your idea is absolute shit. What your friends and family don’t understand is that criticism is exactly what you need. Without it, you will go and spend a year building a product that no one wants, all because you never received appropriate constructive criticism.

So how do you go about getting real, useful feedback from friends, family, and other people in your target market?

The answer is by asking about their pain points and their process, instead of talking about your idea and hypothetical future events, like if they would purchase a product or not.

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can find out if your product is something that people would pay for in the following five steps.

1. Research and understand your customer’s process and create a hypothesis as to what their pain points are

2. Understand what pain points exist in that process

3. Understand the impact of these pain points

4. Rinse and repeat

Ready!? Alright, let’s go!

Research and Map Your Target Markets Process

Most problems that a product solves are simply friction points in a process. It’s up to you to research and understand what points in that process cause the most friction and what the impact of you solving that problem will be for the customer.

Start by using the following websites, and websites like them, to understand your customers process:

Quora

Reddit

Yahoo

StackOverflow

StackExchange

Every industry has specific forums and blogs where members discuss problems they are having. You should be finding those communities, researching them, and starting to engage with them. This DOES NOT mean ask them to fill out a survey or visit your landing page. It does mean that you should offer genuine and helpful advice when you can and asking good questions.

For Beam, a startup that I’m building with a cofounder that I met in the Nugget community, we found the following links on Quora that helped us understand our target markets process and pain points.

Are there any tools I can use to manage SaaS subscriptions?

Which tools can I use to cancel my subscriptions?

How do you manage your SaaS subscriptions?

What are mission critical SaaS tools?

After researching the problem, take some time to think through and understand what your customer’s’ process is and how your solution may fit in. This hypothesis will help you frame the conversations that you’ll have with potential users.

Now that you understand your target market’s process, you’re ready to start to talk to customers.

Discuss and understand how your target market sees their process

The first question that you should ask when talking to a potential user is simply “Tell me how X process works for you”.

By asking this question, you’ll get them talking broadly about the process so you can verify if the way you mapped their process in step #1, is accurate. Ideally, a pain point will stick out when your interviewee starts to talk about their problem. If they don’t mention any pain points or problems with the process, you’ll have to start asking some probing questions. These can include questions like:

• What part of this process takes the most time?
• Is there any part of this process that costs more money than you’d like?
• What is the most inefficient part of this process?
• What tools do you use to help you with this process currently?
• What part of this process provides you the most value?
• How happy are you with the current process?
• If you could improve one thing about this process, what would it be?
• Do you use X tools to help you with this process? If so, do they do what you need them to do?

These questions should help you hone in on the most painful parts of your customer’s process. Your last question should be “So it sounds like, X, Y, and Z are the biggest friction points in this process, is this accurate?” If your prospect answers yes, then you’ve discovered three pain points.

Now you have to understand if these are pain points that your customer would actually pay to have solved, and you do so by understanding how big of an impact these friction points have on your customers.

Understand the impact of these pain points

Just because a problem exists, doesn’t mean someone will pay for it. It is up to you as an entrepreneur to find and focus on the problems people are willing to pay to have solved. Simply asking if someone would pay for a problem will yield false positives more often than you want and is an unscientific approach.

After you’ve determined what pain points your interviewee is experiencing, ask them the following question: “What would it mean to have X problem solved for you?” The answer to this question is likely to involve creating extra revenue, saving time, or saving money.

This is a valuable question because every SaaS solution should either make your customer money, save them money, or save them time. If the answer to this question is a significant amount of money made, money saved, or time saved, then you likely have something people will pay for.

Once you establish what the impact of solving the problem will be, you can ask one of these follow-up questions:

• How much time would it save you if you didn’t have to do X
• How much money would it save you if you could solve X problem
• How much money do you think you could make additionally if you could solve X problem

These questions will also help you understand how much you can charge. If your product is intended to boost revenue, you can likely charge 10% – 25% of the expected additional monthly income that your product is supposed to make your customer.

If your product is intended to save them money, you can likely charge 10% – 15% of the annual savings that your product is intended to bring your customer.

Understanding how much you can charge for a product that saves a person time is slightly more complicated. Start by learning how much time your product would save someone. Then understand the value of their time regarding things they could be doing otherwise (find their opportunity cost), and how much this person is worth per hour. If someone spends 4 hours doing something nonvalue-add every month, and could otherwise be doing an activity that makes them $400 in that four hours every month, you could likely charge them 10%, or $40 in this case, of their missed opportunity cost per month.

Rinse and repeat

You’ll need to have multiple interviews with your target market to be confident that you understand your customer’s process, pain points, and how much you can charge them. The answers to these questions will likely change as you interview more and more people.

I would aim to have anywhere from 5 – 10 positive and similar interviews in which your interviewee confirms your hypothesis before starting to build your solution.

Luckily, we wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about getting customer development interviews that you can read here. So now that you know how to figure out if your idea is brilliant or not, you can go out and do it!

. . .

Nugget is an online incubator & community. We help founders start and grow profitable side projects.

*Hey man, our angel just pulled out.*

Crushed.

I sat at my desk for 20 minutes or so trying to understand my feelings. I was stunned that the deal I worked so hard to put together fell through, and I was horrified that I was 15 minutes away from quitting my job for a startup with $0 in the bank. I had an amazing role at a prestigious financial company, an amazing and supportive girlfriend (now fiancé), and a whole host of expenses to pay for. Not the least being an engagement ring for said fiancé. So what was I doing nearly throwing away the career and life I had worked so hard to obtain?

I deeply love entrepreneurship. I love the thought of building something that I have ownership of, and I love being in the trenches, fighting for traction with my cofounders.

That love, however, nearly betrayed me. Because I nearly dropped everything for an idea that not even I was sold on and a team that would eventually dissolve due to petty disputes. Looking back, I assumed we’d just figure it all out, but we never did. I was ready to jump before we had any validation. I was ready to jump before I validated whether the product would make any money (just because an angel gives you money, doesn’t mean you have a product that will sell). I wanted to jump before I validated whether or not I was truly passionate about the idea and was ready to spend the next five years of my life building. Most importantly, I wanted to jump before I validated whether myself and my family were personally ready to take this journey.

My love of entrepreneurship nearly drove me to make the same mistake I feel thousands of otherwise brilliant entrepreneurs are making. Quitting your day job before you truly have validation.

True Validation Always requires a credit card

My team spent months building a product we thought customers wanted. We conducted customer interviews, released surveys, and drove traffic to a landing page to validate our little SaaS App. We got people to sign up to a mailing list… so we must have a validated idea and product/market fit, right?

Wrong.

We released our product to our list of over 1,000 signups and received very little interest, and 100% churn from those who chose to sign-up. Still, we thought with a seed round of investment we could “figure it out.” So we took our business to some angel investors and somehow got a bite.

The problem with this plan, however, is we’d be burning investor money while we continued to attempt to pivot and find some traction. This means by the time we found any sort of traction, we’d likely need even more investment in order to scale. As a startup, you should be scaling with other people’s money, not trying to figure out what it is that you can build that people will want to buy. While you have a steady income from a day job, you need to HUSTLE to gain traction. For SaaS, that means sales because at the end of the day that’s the only thing that matters.

Our lack of customer validation through traction was a huge red flag, but not the only red flag.

Validate Your Own Passion

I like music. I listen to Spotify for a few hours a day while I work and while I’m at the gym, and I’ll attend a concert every now and then. I however have never met a concert promoter and I’m not even sure how the concert event industry works. Yet I was going to be the main co-founder of a company that sold an app in the concert venue space.

That wasn’t the real issue, however. The real problem is I didn’t want to learn anything about the concert venue industry. I didn’t want to learn about the industry because I didn’t have a passion for the space or the product. I was happy to rely on my team to have industry expertise, and I’d just learn what I needed to from them. Even worst than that, I was already thinking about an exit. Nevermind the naivety of even thinking we had a shot at a profitable exit at that point. How could I be starting a business that I couldn’t wait to exit because I didn’t like the industry it was in?

Looking back, I cringe at the excuses I would make in my head as to why I was even pursuing this idea. I wasn’t excited about the thought of coming home from my day job and working hours to build this business. I tried to be excited, but I never validated my passion for that product.

We’ve talked about product/founder fit in the past on the Nugget blog, and this was my first-hand lesson in how important it was If you aren’t willing and excited to work nights and weekends like a sleepless maniac to launch your startup, you haven’t validated your passion. If you don’t dream of working in your space for at least the next 20 years, then you haven’t validated your passion.

Want to build a million dollar business? You better have passion.

Check Your Personal Validation. Are You Really Ready?

The people closest to me have always been encouraging when talking about my entrepreneurial aspirations. However, when it’s time to quit your job, tones tend to change. Those that once were your biggest cheerleaders may turn into the one’s questioning you the most. You can’t just lump them all into the “They just don’t get it” category because most of them are truly concerned with your future.

I have a supportive family and a wonderful fiance that I thought would be 100% onboard with the idea of giving up the huge raise, signing bonus, and benefits that I spent $100k and four years in school getting. Unsurprisingly, they were less than enthusiastic. It probably didn’t help that I only had about four months of personal runway to live off of, and as stated above, clearly no passion for the space.

It’s critical to have a support system around you when you are making such a drastic decision, emotionally and financially. You don’t want to be worried about where your next meal ticket will be coming from while you’re trying to build a unicorn, and you’re going to need someone to vent to when another growth project goes up in flames. So make sure that you are financially ready to pursue your dream. Have an exit strategy that includes going back to a paying job, and please, embrace your family, don’t push them away. You’ll need them to pick you up when you fall.

How do you know?

I learned that for a founder, validation doesn’t just mean building a landing page, driving traffic, and getting a few signups. Thoughtfully consider these questions before you’re sitting at your desk, 20 minutes away from quitting your job for an invalidated product.

• Have I reached X product traction goal

• Do I have Product/Founder fit

• Am I financially ready to take this plunge

• Do I have the emotional support system around me to be able to take this plunge

• Are you ready for endless sleepless nights and stress-filled days

If you want it, you will find it

I thankfully missed that opportunity to quit my job by about 15 minutes. I instead took a skill I had been building for years and started to monetize it to a point where I could support myself and my family. I built the business until I could comfortably quit my day job and I wasn’t stressed about getting any last minute texts. I’m not on a constant vacation, in fact, I work more than I have ever worked in my life. However, I love what I’m doing and know that I’m building something that I’m truly proud of.

To be an entrepreneur, you must take big risks. However, you must take smart risks. Join a community like Nugget to start thinking about customer pain points and brainstorming ideas. Then validate every aspect of your startup and every aspect of your life before you jump. When you finally do, buckle up and enjoy the ride. It’s going to be a roller coaster.

. . .

Nugget is an online incubator & community. We help founders start and grow profitable side projects.

These Entreporn success stories have caused some entrepreneurs to prioritize growth over product validation, which often has dire results. This is illustrated in stories like this:

We scaled prematurely with the growth team because we focused our team on customer acquisition even though we still had no idea who our customers were and how much they were willing to pay. – Jun Loayza

And this:

In order to justify the product to myself, I started making problems up – there’s an extra iPad tilt, tired arms, uncomfortable grip,  etc. Joining the accelerator, we were reminded of how important talking to customers actually is. So I “cleverly” put up an online survey and started sending it out to all our subscribers, with biased questions like, “You have these problems, right?” What I should have done is actually gone out of my comfort zone and talked to them one-on-one about their lives, experiences and pains. Instead, I continued to perfectly execute the wrong plan. – Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev

The simple fact is, if you don’t provide enough value to customers, you’re going to have a difficult time even getting your first five early adopters… let alone build a sucessfull business.

With that in mind we’ve decided to take our expertise in lead generation, customer development and product development and package it into one highly valuable blog series.

Our Goal: Help 100 companies validate an assumption and get their first 5 early adopters

We’re here to show how you can validate an idea and obtain initial traction before developing your product. We want to share stories of how Nugget companies are doing it.

Our goal is to help 100 companies get 5 early adopters because at Nugget, we don’t just want to provide ideas, we want to help you build a sustainable business.

We’ll do this by sharing:

• Strategies to help you understand who your customer is 
• Strategies to help you develop problem hypothesis for your customers
• Strategies to get in front of potential customers quickly
• Advice on how to validate an idea both qualitatively and quantitatively

Since we’ve done this before (and continue to do so) we’ll be sharing:

• The templates we use to reach out to potential customers
• Call scripts and recordings (with interviewee permission) that we use to validate ideas
• All of our successful, and unsuccessful validation attempts

What’s Next?

Hopefully, you’ll join us on our journey. You don’t need to be a Nugget community member to take part (though you can sign up for a free trial here).

We will be releasing a post every Wednesday that will help you go from 0 customers to 5 customers. Next Wednesday we’ll be publishing a blog post outlining exactly how we helped a startup talk to 25 customers in 2 weeks.

This will include:

• How we identified target customers
• The exact templates used to reach out to over 120 companies (along with success metrics)
• The exact call script used to identify the companies pain points
• The findings and resulting pivot

We’ve learned dozens of lessons like the ones outlined above that we’ll discuss over the coming months. Many of these will be long and detailed posts, and we strongly believe that this actionable information will help your entrepreneurial endeavors.

Be on the look out for our blog post next Wednesday. If you have any specific questions or something you’d like to learn about, please feel free to email me at brandon@nugget.one.

. . .

Nugget is an online incubator & community. We help founders start and grow profitable side projects.

I’ve been lucky enough to speak with dozens of entrepreneurs in the B2B SaaS space that are in this same familiar predicament. They have what could be a very good idea, but no reliable way to contact and interview potential users to find out if their idea is solving a real problem.

Since many entrepreneurs don’t know how to obtain these customer interviews, they tend to forgo the practice. More often than not, this results in a product that doesn’t solve a problem that your customers will pay for.

Instead of avoiding customer development interviews, you can obtain 25 interviews with businesses that could end up being your first customers. That’s what I’m going to show you in this post (Part 1 of a 2 part series).

We’ll discuss how to:

1. Identify who I wanted to speak with
2. Build a targeted list of companies & individuals
3. Find and verify email address
4. Craft my message
5. Send a 3 step email sequence

Ready to get started? Let’s go.

Step 1: Identify who you want to speak interview

Before you decide to write a single email, you need to have a “hypothesis” about who your ideal customer is. I say hypothesis because as an early stage startup who has yet to validate any assumptions, you are working off your best guest. You don’t know anything for sure until you speak with customers.

I’m currently in the process of obtaining customer development interviews for a product called Beam. Beam is a company born from Nugget #14 and we believe it will become a SaaS platform that helps marketing agencies, startups, and tech-enabled small to medium sized businesses to reduce and control unnecessary SaaS spend. Our ideal customer profile is:

ACME. Corp is a US Based marketing agency, startup, or tech-enabled SMB whose employees frequently trial, and purchase cloud software. They employ 20 – 100 people and have at least 3 corporate credit cards and accounts in which they purchase SaaS solutions.

 

 

Employees at this company are welcome to create and try different products at will. They will often make joint decisions as to what products they will purchase and they don’t have a central place to identify what software solutions everyone across their company is using. ACME. Corp lacks information as to how much their current software solutions are being used.

 

 

Decision makers that would use Beam include people looking to manage overall company spend, manage IT security, monitor employee engagement with their SaaS platforms. These decision makers could include the CEO, CFO, and head of IT.

To identify and create an ideal customer profile hypothesis like the one above, start by asking yourself these questions:

1. What industry is my ideal prospect’s company in?
2. What’s the size of your ideal prospect’s company?
3. What is the pain point we believe our prospect will be feeling?
4. What is the most likely job description of your ideal prospect?
5. Based off the above job description, what is the most likely job title of your ideal prospect?

Based off these questions, you should be able to come up with a basic ideal customer profile similar to the one above.

Please note that your ideal customer profile is subject to changes and refinement. As you gather more information and start to sell your solution, your ideal customer profile will include things like:

– Customers with the shortest prospective sales cycle

– Customers with the highest probable conversion rates

– Customers with certain technologies that are complimentary to your product

– Customers with certain technologies that are competitive to your product

Step 2: Build a list of Target Companies & individuals

Now that you have your basic ideal customer profile, you can build a list of target companies.

You can easily build a list based off the job title that you are targeting. LinkedIn has a powerful boolean search engine with tons of filters for both the free, and paid versions of Linkedin.

Pro tip: Invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator if you’re serious about your business. $80 is a small price to pay for access to the largest business network in recorded human history!

Using Linkedin, search for the appropriate job title and filter by company size, industry, Fortune 500 status, and more. You can filter individuals by seniority level, interests, past companies, schools, and even nonprofit interests.

If you aren’t 100% sure of the titles you want to target, pay close attention to the current and previous company job descriptions of your prospects. Job titles are often vastly different from company to company in terms of what a person actually does. So even if the job title doesn’t completely match up to your hypothesis, they could still be the person you want to speak with.

If you want to target companies using a specific technology, you can build a list of companies that fit all of your other criteria, and check each URL with one of the following tools.

Ghostery

Datanyze

BuiltWith

These tools will allow you to see what technologies a specific URL is using. In the picture below, karmaCRM is using 25 technologies including Google Analytics, SumoMe, and Optimizely.

You can expedite this process by hiring a VA to check each URL on your list via UpWork.

You can also identify companies that have a certain amount of ad spend or SEO clicks via a tool called SpyFu.

Simply take build a list of companies that fit all of your other criteria, and check each URL with spyfu.com. As you can see in the screenshot below, Instapage would be a great target if your ideal customer profile called for SaaS providers with a significant amount of ad spend.

Step 3: Find and verify email addresses

As you find prospects, you’ll want to grab and verify the email addresses of these potential interviewees. There are a number of different tools that you can use to find these email addresses. These include:

– EmailHunter

– Leadfuze

– SellHack

– ProspectHive

These services do a great job of finding email addresses, however, they are usually only correct about 80% of the time. You can use services like Rapportive, and BriteVerify to double check that your email addresses are correct.

Step 4: Craft your message

Now that you have your lead list, you can begin to craft your outreach messages. It’s important to do this AFTER you build a list because you’ll want to customize each message for each prospect. That’s right, you won’t be able to just send out a mass email and see results. Don’t worry though! I’m here to show you how you can personalize these messages and still be efficient.

Use the 10/80/10 rule

Templates can be your best friend and your worst enemy when you’re doing cold outreach. If you rely too heavily on templates, your emails will be cold, impersonal, and come off as spam. However, proper templating can actually help you stay efficient even while you personalize.

The best way to use a template is by concentrating on customizing the first 10% and the last 10% of each email. This is called the 10/80/10 rule. These are the most important parts of the email because they are the first and last impression your prospect gets of you, and you want to leave a great impression.

The initial 10% should be customized according to why you decided to reach out to them. I call these reasons “Compelling reasons to reach out” (CRRO). These reasons could include:

– An interesting blog post that they wrote

– An article they shared on LinkedIn or Twitter

– A recent hiring at their company

– A recent fundraising event

– A recent article on press release published about their company

– A technology used

– A significant amount of ad spend

Based on these reasons to reach out, you can create common snippets that you use like these below:

CEO/Executive Statement

In a recent interview, the CEO of {{company}} stated that {{interesting.fact}}

Company News

Last week, {{publication}} posted an article called {{article.title}} which detailed how {{company}} {{interesting.fact}}

Blog Post

I came across your blog post called {{blog.title}} in which you talked about {{interesting.fact}}

Job Posting

I was doing a bit of research into {{company}} and noticed that you guys were growing your {{team.function}} team (saw post via {{linkedin}}). {{interesting.fact}}.

Ad spend

I did a bit of research into {{company}} and saw that you’re driving a ton of traffic via AdWords. Are you getting a lot of traction from keywords like {{keyword_1}} and “{{keyword_2}}“?

Technology usage

I noticed {{company}} was using {{technology_1}} and thought I’d reach out because I’m trying to understand how {{technology_1}} users are {{solving.complementary.problem}}

Middle 80%

With this middle 80%, your goal is to give them an idea as to what you’re going to be speaking to them about and to reassure them that this IS NOT A SALES CALL.

This section should be templated. Focus on being brief, flattering, and intriguing. Check out what I crafted below.

This works well because it’s simple, doesn’t come off like a sales pitch, and flatters the reader.

Bottom 10%

The bottom 10% should express to your prospect why you have chosen to seek out their help specifically. This can be as simple as because they are in a given position, because they have had a certain experience, or because they are in a certain location or a went to a certain school. Check out some examples below.

Certain position

Since you are the {{title}} at {{company}} I thought you would be a great person to talk to about this.

Certain amount of experience

I was hoping to talk to someone with {{experience}} experience, so I’m really looking forward to speaking with you.

Step 5: Send Send Send!

Once you’ve crafted your first personalized email message, you’ll need to also create at least 2 additional follow up emails. Kindly following up with your prospects increases your chances of landing an interview significantly because your prospect simply has more opportunities to respond. It is best to make use of systems like CadenceIQ, ReplyApp, PersistIQ, or ToutApp in order to send these emails and remember to follow up. Sending out your emails through Gmail can be tedious and severely cuts down on your efficiency. It also makes it difficult to remember to follow up with potential interviewees which is critical to your success.

Your follow up message for email #2 should be a short and simple email to bump your first message. Check out a screenshot of what I like to include in my second message below.

With follow-up email #3, I have had success by adding a simple survey to my emails along with just a little bit of creativity. This will intrigue your prospect and can spur them to answer your survey question. When they do respond, you can start to build on the conversation by asking questions and adding value.

Check out one of my favorite final emails below:

Reap the rewards!

When done correctly, you’ll be rewarded with the customer development calls that you need to help you build a successful business. I’ve seen anywhere from 25% – 40% reply rates with these emails, so while success isn’t guaranteed, you should see results if you take the time to do this carefully.

Check out a few response I received below.

Bonus Step!: A 10-Second Primer on the ethics of Cold Emailing

Cold outreach is an effective method of obtaining interviews and sales and has been the driving force behind most unicorn SaaS startups such as Hubspot (yes Hubspot, the inbound marketing platform), SalesForce, Mulesoft, Zenefits, and more.  Despite how effective it can be, cold emailing can easily do damage to your brand if not done correctly.

Cold, non-personalized messages are spammy, unprofessional, and annoying. So when employing these tactics, please remember to take care to not spam your prospects and do your best to intelligently and kindly provide value. Also, ensure that you are following all CAN-SPAM laws. These most include the following:

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
3. Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future email from you.
4. Honor opt-out requests promptly.

Check out any additional CAN-SPAM documentation here.

Update! Tool & Resource Listing

Finding email addresses:
– Rapportive
– Hunter.io
– Name2Email
– Leadfuze

Email followups:
– Boomerang
– ReplyUp
– Reply.io
– Persistiq
– Gorgias.io (Gmail email templates)

Listbuilding
– Linkedin
– Angel.co
– Stackshare
– Crunchbase
– Data-miner.io
– Datanyze
– Wappalyzer

Cold email personalization snippet examples

Now you have the tools to find customers to talk to. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and validate your idea! If you are having trouble coming up with your next idea, check out Nugget.

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Nugget is an online incubator & community. We help founders start and grow profitable side projects.