Leaning into Founder-Led Sales

Hello, and welcome to Future Founders. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard that much from us over here at Day One, it’s because we’ve been quite busy launching and delivering our new done-for-you offering: Customer Discovery-as-a-Service, where we help early-stage founders accelerate customer discovery and build a system for founder-led sales.

We laid it all out in our last newsletter (and if you haven’t read that or want to brush up on what we’re doing, please take a second to read it), and we’ve had quite the response, ranging from feedback and kudos to clients signing up. In just two months, we’ve started working with multiple repeat founders (case studies in the works), across sectors like healthcare, tech, manufacturing, and food, and we’re delivering dozens of conversations a week that are driving learnings, validation, sign ups and sales.

That was just about 2 months ago, and as you can imagine we’ve been constantly learning and refining our offering. We’ve been doing our own customer discovery (very meta) and talked with almost 50 founders about the service and their needs when it comes to finding customers, attracting customers, learning from customers, and ultimately building a founder-led sales system to drive real customers and revenue.

So while we’ve been busy - and feeling really good and excited about this new direction - apologies are in order for not delivering our usual cadence of insights and advice for founders. We really do appreciate everyone who reads what we share.

What I wanted to do this week was get back in the flow of sharing advice and insights for founders… by taking you behind the scenes into some of those lessons we’ve learned in launching our new service.

Let’s dig into it.

Customer Discovery is Sales, and Sales is Customer Discovery

This was a big one for me. When we launched 2 months ago, we focused the whole offering around customer discovery. And for good reason; every single founder needs to do customer discovery, and the vast majority need help (or could use help to go faster or be more thorough). Talking to and learning from customers is the single biggest determinant of a startup succeeding… but most don’t get it right.

But what we’ve learned is that for early-stage founders, customer discovery is not enough. As fundamentally important as it is, customer discovery is a means to an end - validating that your business will work (which means 9 times out of 10 driving revenue and converting real customers).

This is 100% the right attitude to take. And the nuance is that founders need to recognize that they can’t leave out either part. Customer discovery is the way that you refine your offering, understand your customers needs and wants, and build trust to make your first sales. And at the exact same time, if you’re not driving potential customers down a funnel into a commitment, then your learnings need to be highly discounted.

To say it one more way, while founders DO need help with customer discovery, what they really need is help understanding their customer so they can shape their product and offering, and drive real customers and sales.

So that’s what we do (and have been doing!). We define your target market and ICP (and iterate and experiment when it’s not well defined). We set up message sequences and outbound systems to find, reach, and nurture your potential customers. We set up meetings where we lead with curiosity and relationship building. We help you create demos, sales materials, and offers that convert. And we work with founders to take learnings from every step of the process to refine and build toward those first sales (and beyond).

What most founders who do customer discovery miss is that they don’t have a sales mindset - meaning, if you’re not qualifying who you’re learning from, and ultimately pushing for a yes or no, then you’re ultimately learning from the wrong people. Or, when they put their sales hat on and try to sell, it’s transactional and not based on deep understanding, curiosity, or proven sales approaches.

Bringing them together has been an unlock - for us, and for the founders we’re working with.

Getting to “no” is just as valuable as getting to “yes”

I couldn’t decide which learning to put first (this one or the one I started with), because they’re both so fundamentally important for a founder. But it’s hard to overstate how important it is for a founder to figure out if something is really working, or really isn’t working, vs. a lukewarm signal that keeps a founder in limbo.

So it’s super important, but it’s also really tough most of the time. There are so few moments in startup life where the signals are obviously black or white. In the early stages, you’ll talk to people who won’t tell you to your face your idea is bad. They just won’t. Even if it isn’t. They’ll say your idea is “cool” - which is just the worst, because it probably is cool to anyone who’s been around tech or the industry you’re focused on. But “cool” is so far from signaling that you’re building something they will actually use, much less pay for.

The worst thing a founder can do is keep going with lukewarm signals, or worse, false positives. It’s always better to know if something is or isn’t working, because if it isn’t, you can stop and change course instead of wasting resources.

So how do you do that? Related to Lesson #1, you have to force the issue and you can’t shy away from selling. You have to put your potential customers into moments where they have to decide to put skin in the game.

It’s a delicate balance - because if you show up with a blunt paywall or a tone-deaf pitch in your cold outbound, you’ll neither make a sale or learn anything. Luckily, the line that we walk is at the intersection of sales and customer discovery, something we’ve perfected.

You gain superpowers when you detach from what you’ve built or tried before

Building a successful startup is hard. It gets even harder when you limit yourself to iterating and trying things that are anchored by the products you’ve built or the customers you’ve already served.

Now, this doesn’t mean serving just anyone. Every founder constrains themselves in some ways, even if it’s just a fundamental decision about the kind of business you as a founder want to be building (and succeeding in a different kind of business wouldn’t be a success to you).

But outside of that, holding on to what you did is often an unnecessary drag.

This lesson is a personal one. For 3 years, we were building Day One into a community and education platform for founders. We also had VC backing and had targets to keep up with fundraising benchmarks. We also just built up inertia, a roadmap and things we set out to do, and I can tell you, it’s extremely hard to make big swings away from that.

But going back to this past summer, we let all that go, and just asked ourselves “what do our customers really need”. We didn’t actually even let go of everything - we’re still focused on early stage founders, because if we weren’t serving founders, we wouldn’t be Day One. But importantly we let go of the expectations we had on the business model and growth targets… and it’s been awesome.

I recognize that making this switch is mostly psychological, letting go of constraints and expectations. Many times, these constraints aren’t real. Or, by letting go of our constraints or expectations, we can act with freedom and actually have a better shot of hitting those original goals. Either way, if things aren’t working, there’s little reason to hold onto your old thinking.

If your stuck, I recommend looking around at what you’re anchoring on and see if you can’t let it go and where that takes you and your business. I bet you you’ll just feel better, and that your business will be stronger for it.

So what’s next?

Those are just three of many, many lessons we’ve learned in the past few months of helping founders with customer discovery (and founder-led sales) - lessons learned both by getting in deep with founders, and by doing things differently ourselves.

So first off, we’re going to try to get back in the habit of sharing those lessons (maybe even fun stories from our hands-in-the-dirt engagements).

But we’re also doubling down on Customer Discovery-as-a-Service, and incorporating all these learnings into the offering, so it’s better than ever. And now as we head into November, we have a handful of slots open and we’re ready to onboard our next batch of clients.

If that’s you, and we could help you level up customer discovery or accelerate founder-led sales, just fill out this short form, and we’ll get in touch to set up a call.

If you’re looking for specifics, this is what we do and a little about how we do it:

• We kick off each engagement by deeply understanding your business and crafting a plan for validating core assumptions in your business and building a pipeline that leads to real customers. You can rely on us to guide you, coach you, and drive a process tailored for your business.

• We set up and run outreach campaigns, nurturing potential customers into live conversations - we typically drive between 20-25 customer conversations every month, iterating and experimenting weekly to continuously refine your GTM and positioning.

• We create and maintain all the documentation for this process - from interview guides and sales scripts, to notes and transcripts, we keep your whole process on track and organized, whether you’re a solo founder or a growing team.

• We sync up weekly to discuss progress, insights, and make adjustments as needed (and stay engaged asynchronously around the clock)

Net net, we help you run a world-class customer discovery process that drives towards customers and sales. So whether you’re at the idea stage (and want to validate your core ideas before building), MVP stage (and want to start building a GTM around a product you’ve built), or even have early customers (but want to accelerate and add process to your GTM), you should get in touch.

And if you still have questions, just ask! Feel free to hit ‘reply’ to this email and we’d love to answer your question or find time to dig in more.

That’s all for now!