How to Get Your First 10 Customers

0:09 – 2:43

Stop polishing cold emails for people who never read email

A founder spent months tweaking outreach into a legacy industry, watching terrible open rates and even worse reply rates crawl by. Then he walked the floor at an industry trade show and closed more in 3 days than he had in 3 months of cold email. That story is the video's first hard reset: the real problem is often not your copy, but your channel. Max starts with a blunt question founders should answer before touching Apollo, LinkedIn, or any automation tool: where does your target customer actually spend their time? He points out why founders default to email and LinkedIn. It is easy, laptop-friendly, and surrounded by software that makes it feel productive. For some buyers, that is exactly right. If you sell sales software to a sales leader, that buyer lives on a computer and spends time on LinkedIn, so the obvious channel works. But the unexpected angle is that many buyers do not work like startup founders do. A school district administrator, property manager, insurance agent, or truck dispatcher may not treat email as the center of their day. They may be on job sites, on the phone, talking to peers, or showing up at conferences. If you ignore that and keep blasting inboxes, you can easily reach the false conclusion that outbound does not work, when really your outreach is happening in the wrong room. So Max gives a simple diagnostic. Sit down for an hour and answer concrete questions: what does your buyer's average day look like? How often do they check email? Do they go to conferences, and which ones? Are they on Reddit, LinkedIn, newsletters, or trade boards? Do they ask friends for recommendations? If you cannot answer those questions specifically, he says that is not a tooling problem. It is evidence you have not spent enough time with real customers yet. In other words, before customer acquisition becomes a scaling problem, it is a customer understanding problem.