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36 Comments

Just closed our first customer from cold outreach

This morning, when checking Slack, I noticed we made a sale during the night 💸.

This alone was enough to brighten my day 🌞.

When checking his email address I noticed that he was one of the people we cold outreached earlier this month to try to see if he needed help with scraping.

At first, he seemed interested in the product but told me that he was too busy to take a look at it right now. I said that I completely understood and that I won't be bothering anymore, and that he could reach out for me if he had any questions.

We are still learning cold outreach and are definitely not expert but this first win is encouraging.

If you have any tips regarding cold outreach, feel free to leave some here 😃.

Happy Indie Hacking.

  1. 3

    Nice man, congratulations! How did you find people who could be interested in ScrapingBee? Who did you target?

    1. 2

      Hey, because we had no idea who to focus first we put down 6 hypotheses and went by creating 3 groups of potential.

      Analyzing who were our current customers helped us formulating those hypotheses.

  2. 2

    This is awesome. A million congratulations. Would you like to share some funnel numbers here for example how many cold mails you sent and how many replied. Again great job bro.

    1. 1

      We used 0 cold email, only Linkedin which is great because of the chat feature.
      You can quickly have a direct and easy conversation with potential customers.

  3. 1

    Congratulations! That's awesome!

  4. 1

    Fantastic, congrats!!

    Tangent: I'm going to be practicing my cold outreach skills this quarter. Any online learning materials you recommend for this?

    1. 3

      Thank you very much, I'd recommend you to read this blog post, it helped us alot although we did not follow it at 100%: https://blog.phantombuster.com/the-ultimate-growth-engine-step-by-step-processes-to-automate-your-outreach-on-linkedin-twitter-a094536ea44f

      1. 1

        Wow, this is pure gold. 💯 Thank you!!

  5. 1

    That's amazing congrats! Being kind and patience in the long term is the best when cold outreaching. It's always safe to think: "if I were on the other side of that message what would I like to read and when does it start to feel spammy." In that regard, I think you are doing a fine job. ✌️

    1. 1

      This !

      I totally agree, like everyone here we constantly receive outreach content and we decided to write "mail" that we'd like to receive and would answer to.

  6. 1

    Congratulations! This is huge, super happy for you! :)

    1. 1

      Thank you very much :)

  7. 1

    I run an outreaching SaaS known as FunnelBake. Here are some tips I posted on LinkedIn:

    https://www.linkedin.com/posts/uditgoenka_email-outreaching-tips-activity-6587297733093273600-_7QX

    I usually post a ton of stuff on LinkedIn, so you can check them out :)

  8. 1

    Hey,

    Congratulations!

    Your cold outreach content is doing something right (and of course, so is your landing page, sign up flow, etc). Do you mind sharing your LinkedIn message with us?

    1. 2

      Honnestly the first message was as simple as it can gets:
      "Hello X,
      Just saw your profile and though it would be interesting to connect,
      Pierre".

      If the person accepts, we then crafted a personalized message for each one.

      1. 1

        Hey Pierre,

        Well done for this first cold outreach sale!
        Hope more sales will come :)

        Thanks for sharing your messages with us.

        Didn't make you a spelling mistake while saying "though" instead of "thought"?

        Keep hacking

  9. 1

    Congrats, that's a great milestone!

    Did you get any complaints from LinkedIn users about promoting your product?

    1. 2

      We don't do promotion per se, we only do message and connection request so no problem for us :)

  10. 1

    Congratulations! Keep up the hussle :)

  11. 1

    How many people did you reach out to? Are you doing a drip campaign?

    1. 2

      We outreached through Linkedin, we did around 300 connection request, and talk with about 80 people who accepted the request.

      We haven't set up a drip campaign yet.

      1. 2

        This is unbelievable imo. Out of 300 requests you were able to speak with 80? Was it over call or zoom? How many accepted the request. Would be great if you can share the call request template.

        1. 4

          Sorry for the confusion, when I say "talk", we did not have 80 people on the phone, but it was either on the phone or through Linkedin chat.

          One the message that worked well, after the connection request was accepted was something along the line of:

          "Hey XXX,

          I am currently launching YYY a [product that solves X] and I thought that people in [XXX industry] industry could be interested.

          Those are still hypotheses I am trying to validate and I wanted to talk with an expert like you to talk about it.

          I saw your [conference, blog article, ....] and I loved it, especially [blog title].

          Would you be available for a X minutes phone call? (calendly link).

          Thank you very much"

          1. 4

            Still getting 80 replies out of 300 is really awesome. Great job, I must say

            1. 1

              Thank you very much ! :)

          2. 1

            Did you send 300 requests manually? Or did you use any tool?
            Thanks!

            1. 2

              At first we did everything manually but ended up using phantombuster for the connection request.

              All message sent after the connection was accepted were sent manually.

      2. 1

        Cool. Does linkedin give you any other stats that you could use for a drip email campaign, or is it just who responds to your request? i.e. can you track link clicks?

        A cool idea I saw recently (never used) is https://askalmanac.com/articles/445/tactic-how-to-know-who-visited-your-website

        Could be useful to hack something together there to have a better idea of your warm/hot leads.

        1. 1

          thats nice hack, but wondering is it aligning with GDRP ?

        2. 1

          I think you can track link click, and anyway, you could always use a url shortener to do it.

          I'll check this idea, thank you!!

  12. 1

    Nice to see a bit of hard work paying off!

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