4
7 Comments

Not getting new customers? let me show you how I get my first customer before launch

Recently, I started reaching out to people about my business: a fractional CFO service for tech startups.

I have been managing startup finance for my network of portfolio companies for the past several years and I decide to start taking on external startups.

I asked myself: what's the best way to reach out to startup founders?

After tons of research, I decided LinkedIn is probably the most effective way to communicate with startup founders. Also, my LinkedIn profile speaks a great deal of credibility for my experience.

During my research, I found this place online offering a database to the most recently launched startups with their funding status. (email me at ethan@ethanlu.co if you want the site info)

I went ahead and sent a simple intro message to the first 10 people I found in the database. (watch out for the invite and message limit on LinkedIn) Out of those 10 people, one became a customer 2 weeks after the initial LinkedIn engagement.

I realized one thing from this exercise. Getting sales is a numbers game. The more people you engage, the more sale you can get.

You can check out my fractional CFO service at www.SMBFinance.co

on August 15, 2021
  1. 2

    Neat business! Just curious, do you offer your services on a per-hour basis or is it more of a productized approach where a service has a fixed cost?

    1. 1

      I productize the complete CFO services into subscription offerings based on the size and complexity of the startups.

      I thought about charging by hours but decided that I would rather make sure founders have enough help without worrying about the hourly rate.

      1. 1

        That makes sense, thanks!

  2. 2

    Nice Ethan congrats on your first customer. What if any other outbound methods did you try?

    1. 2

      Hi, Filip.

      Currently, I'm only using LinkedIn outreach without the bot. However, I do have a couple of other growth tactics I want to test out. I can keep you posted on how those go!!

  3. 2

    I agree that LinkedIn is the best place to offer products for finance-related thematics.
    My product PrivateEquityList now has nearly 1000 followers on LinkedIn and growing https://www.linkedin.com/company/private-equity-list/

    Maybe it can be interesting for you and your portfolio companies (privateequitylist.com)

    1. 1

      Thanks, Vadim. I will definitely check out what you offer!