Ask YC: How to get leads for a startup and how to followup?

ALee · on Nov 19, 2007

Manu, your question could be "How do I get written up in the press?" or it could be "How do I set up partnerships/sales leads etc.?"

So if it's the first one. My advice is to not be worried about that at this stage. You should be much more concerned with developing an amazing product and then empowering your users to blog about how sweet you are. Always more important to build organically. Trust me, we know from experience.

If it's a question about biz leads. Send an e-mail to someone you know in the organization or even a cold biz dev e-mail is good enough. We've done those and gotten to the right person. To follow-up, phone calls are always best along with another "gentle nudge" e-mail. Phone calls are really important. They help you set off a small amount of time to speak with the other person about your product and how you can make their organization and yours sweet.

skmurphy · on Nov 19, 2007

I have a couple of suggestions:

1. Be very clear on who your customer is (who will pay for your product). If you want your friends or advisors to recommend prospects you are going to need to get very specific on characteristics (preferably three) of the kind of folks who will most benefit from your product and the key symptoms (the prospect's perception of a problem) that would indicate you can guarantee you can deliver one or more benefits in a very short amount of time (preferably two hours, hopefully no more than five days). It's often better lead off with a well thought out question someone can say yes or no to, where the yes means you may be able to help them. Follow up with one or two clarifying questions to make sure you can deliver a benefit by which point you should at least have them intrigued. Here is an example of a bad question: "do you want to save money on your hosting service?" It's not a pain question.For your application a potential pain question related to blogging (since I don't know anything about your application this is only by way of example) might be "Are you trying to write and publish more than four blog posts per day?" or "Are your blog posts average over a 1,000 words" Please note that both of these answers might also be inferred by analyzing the blogs directly, which is another way to get leads, determine some objective tests based on data you can develop about a prospect that would indicate your product might be very relevant to pain he is likely to be experiencing.

2. Identify what is the key benefit(s)--no more than three--your product will offer them.

3. Explain why you believe it's dramatically better in at least one way from what they are doing now (or competitive alternatives).

4. Give them a reason to believe: this can be a benchmark, a testimonial, example input and output.

This is a straightforward formulation you should be able to explain in 60-90 seconds once you have it worked out. Items 2, 3, and 4 are taken from "Jump Start Your Business Brain" by Doug Hall which is a good resource. Item 1, the concept of focusing on pain and identifying clear objective metrics for what constitutes a prospect has numerous sources.

Reach out through your friends and advisors to get introductions to potential customers. Depending upon the circumstances (often a 30 minute coffee break can be a good venue for a conversation, or a meeting at their office) be polite but don't argue if they don't understand. You can explain or elaborate once or twice (no more) but be careful of wasting their time to the point that you can't go back.

Probably the best book on the subject is Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany"

We spend a lot of time helping early stage software startups with this issue. We typically work with pre-A folks who are either pre-revenue or whose product has been bought by friends or visionary customers and are now faced with figuring out how to sell it (and do they have the right features).

We recently blogged about questions you need to answer to be able to get started here: http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/11/05/i-have-an-idea-for-a...

If you have VC or some Angel money you might talk to Virsalent http://www.virsalent.com/ SalesRamp http://www.salesramp.com/ Growth Process Group http://www.growthprocess.com

If you are bootstrapping you should give us a call http://www.skmurphy.com

We also help more established firms but our focus is on early customers and early revenue for software startups.

I hope this helps, please provide some more details if you want some more specific advice.

lanej0 · on Nov 19, 2007

Identifying the key benefit is, er, key here (sorry, little sleep last night). As you've been very vague on what the product/service is -- do you have competitors? What makes yours better than theirs?

Anyone can be talked into giving something a try if there's no risk (don't ask for a credit card number up front), and if they can see the benefit to using it.

Do you have any traction yet? Get some testimonials from existing customers (if you've got 'em). Name dropping never hurts.

dshah · on Nov 19, 2007

I'd suggest writing a blog yourself and establishing some credibility.

Given your target market, this seems like a good thing.

joeguilmette · on Nov 19, 2007

you're probly going to need to be more specific about your product for any practical advice.