Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

Predictable update: I have my first 10 software only customers in the kinda-using it stage! Alongside my 12 clients where I’m using it on their behalf. It feels good to hit but I know I still have work to do. I’m currently focusing on the question, ‘what features do I need to build for you to get the most value from it?’ from my cust. dev funnel and think that I’m almost ready to graduate. I just finished the Workbench feature and am working on the CLI/MCP next. If you’re interested in doing some high quality human in the loop outbound, hit reply.

I spent 18 months on voltageCRM. I talked to something like 150 sales leaders. I built multiple MVPs. I got a lot of "that's really smart" and only one paying customer.

Afterward I went looking for an explanation, mostly because the story I was telling other people wasn't one I believed. Somewhere in that search I found the Startup Genome Project. They'd surveyed thousands of startups and gone deep on a single question. What actually kills a startup.

The number one cause was premature scale.

Their definition, stripped down, is investing in anything that isn't going to pay back on a time horizon where you can afford it.

I read that and initially decided it didn't apply to me. I hadn't raised a big round. I hadn't hired a sales team. I hadn't rented an office. I'd been careful with money in all the ways the case studies warned about.

It took me a long time to see it. The premature thing I did was sell.

We didn't have product market fit and I kept pushing on selling anyway. Eighteen months of go-to-market effort poured into a product people found interesting and didn't need. What I should have been doing was learning from those potential customers and strengthening my product market fit. I had 150 of the right people in front of me. I used every one of those conversations to try to convert someone instead of to understand them.

I cycle a lot, and there's a phrase riders use that's been stuck in my head for years.

Burning a match.

You have a finite number of hard efforts in you on any given ride. Not a fuzzy number, a real one. You huff it up a big climb, that's a match. Somebody attacks and you put in a massive effort to get back on the wheel, that's a match. Each one is gone permanently. And when you're out, you're out. It doesn't matter how badly you want to go with the group at kilometer ninety. Your legs won't do it.

Startups run on the same mechanic and almost nobody counts.

The matches aren't only cash, though cash is the obvious one. Sometimes the match is linear time. I have three months to make this work and I just spent six weeks on something that was never going to pay back inside three months. Sometimes it's brain space. You've got a day job, or two startups, or small kids, and you have five real hours a week to move this thing forward. Those five hours are the matches.

I burned 18 months of them selling something that wasn't ready, when the same conversations could have made it ready.

Founders evaluate the channel. Is outbound good? Does paid work? Does content pay back? And they reason from benchmarks published by companies much further along than they are.

But the payback clock isn't set by the channel. It's set by the channel multiplied by how well you understand your market.

Product market fit isn't a milestone you pass. It's a multiplier sitting in front of every go-to-market dollar you spend. Strong fit and outbound works despite mediocre execution. Weak fit and the same channel, run by better operators with more money than you, produces almost nothing. Same activity, wildly different return.

Which means investing in growth early isn't just expensive. It's expensive in a compounding way. You're buying activity at your worst possible conversion rate and paying full price for it.

There are three hypotheses underneath any efficient go-to-market motion.

Who exactly you're targeting. Not the category. The specific person, at the specific kind of company, in the specific situation that makes them ready right now.

What to say to them. The actual words, in the actual order, that get a reply from that person.

And what they care most about solving. Not what your product does. What is currently annoying enough that they would take a meeting about it.

Until those three are nailed, every dollar of go-to-market spend runs at a discount. You pay for volume and receive noise. And the cruel part is that the volume doesn't teach you much either, because you can't tell whether the channel failed or your hypotheses did.

That's the trap I was in. I had 150 conversations and came out the other side without the answers to any of the three, because I was treating each one as a chance to convince rather than a chance to learn.

A founder tells me they want to hire SDRs.

I ask how many deals they've closed. The answer is three.

You've closed three deals. You do not need to buy SDRs. You need to run this yourself for a while longer.

And almost every single time, the same reply comes back. "But I'm not good at it."

That's the real reason, and it's exactly why the hire won't work. It isn't a resourcing decision, it's an avoidance decision wearing a resourcing costume. Hiring feels like progress and it feels like delegation. What it actually does is take the one thing you haven't learned yet and move it somewhere you never have to look at it.

Meanwhile you've lit a match that won't pay back for nine months, on a motion nobody in the company has proven can work.

I have had that conversation hundreds of times.

The only reliable way to raise your go-to-market efficiency is for the founder to run the whole thing. Not oversee it. Run it. Send the emails. Take the calls. Get told no by the wrong person and figure out what made them the wrong person.

You cannot outsource hypothesis testing. A rep can execute a motion you've already figured out. A rep cannot figure it out for you, because they don't know the product, don't know the market, and don't have the standing to change the message every week the way you need to at this stage.

That stretch is unglamorous, slow, and by far the cheapest thing you will ever do.

When I'm about to commit real money, real time, or the last of my attention, I ask three things.

When does this pay back, in weeks or months. Not "will it."

Can I survive the gap if that answer is wrong by a factor of two.

And am I doing this because it's the highest-value use of the match, or because I don't want to do the harder thing myself.

That third one has caught me more than the other two combined.

So before you spend anything on growth this quarter, can you write down who you're targeting, what you say to them, and what they most want solved, without hedging on any of the three?

Collin

PS - if you do want to burn a match on outbound, hit reply, I’m working on something that might be interesting.

The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is the playbook for founders who never planned to do sales but have to figure it out anyway. It pulls together 13+ years of building software startups, building outbound systems for hundreds of B2B startups, and more failed experiments than I'd care to admit, into a practical guide for finding your first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers.

It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

Order now and you'll unlock a stack of exclusive bonuses I actually use with my consulting clients: Email me the receipt and I’ll share the resources.

Email me your receipt and I’ll share the resources.