You've been burning the midnight oil for months, slaving over every little detail to craft the perfect product. Your solution is a game-changer, and you just know it's going to take the market by storm. But no matter how many cold emails you blast out or how much you spend on ads, you can't seem to get a single sale over the line. The constant rejection is demoralizing. You've pitched to prospect after prospect, giving heartfelt demos and thinking "this is the one!" - only for them to ghost you when it's time to whip out their wallets.
The fear of failure wraps its icy grip around your heart with each "thanks but no thanks" reply. You're hemorrhaging your personal savings to keep this dream alive, and your support system's confidence is shaking. "Are you sure this idea has legs?" they ask with furrowed brows. You plaster on a brave face, but deep down, you're questioning everything.
What if you've been pitching to all the wrong people this whole time? Folks who got starry-eyed by your demos but never truly had the means or desire to actually pay for your solution? All those wasted hours, all that mental anguish - for nothing. You can't keep burning through your runway like this. If you don't land legitimate paying customers soon, you'll be out of runway and out of a dream.
But what if there was a way to cut through the noise and get straight to the real decision makers with open budgets? A proven system for identifying the startups who have just raised serious money and are actively looking for solutions like yours right now? You could stop wasting time on tire-kickers and instead focus all your energy on the hottest prospects.
Here's a 5-step process for finding those elusive first customers with money to spend:
1. Find Funded Startups on Kickstarter
Go to kickstarter.com and click on the "Explore" dropdown menu. Then select "Projects We Love" and filter the results by "Successful" campaigns only. This will surface all the crowdfunding projects that successfully raised their funding goals.
Next, use the "Category" filters on the left to narrow it down to your target industries. For example, if you offer marketing tools, filter by "Technology", "Apps", and "Software". If you provide services for ecommerce brands, also add "Design & Tech" and "Tabletop Games".
Scan through the results and make a list of any companies that raised over $50K. Kickstarter makes it easy by displaying the funding amount raised right below the project's name.
Jot down the startup's name, funding amount, campaign URL, and a brief description of their product/service. This will make up your prospecting list to investigate further.
2. Confirm They're Spending on Ads
Now take your list of prospective funded startups and look up their main website URLs on builtwith.com. This free tool will analyze any website and show you the third-party apps, marketing platforms, and technology stack being used.
For example, when you plug in faco.ai, builtwith shows they're using Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Hotjar, and several other marketing and analytics tools. That's a strong signal they have an active paid acquisition budget and are investing in growth.
On the other hand, if you look up syllable.ai, builtwith shows they're only using basic hosting, WordPress, and no major marketing platforms. This indicates they may not be spending significantly on paid acquisition yet.
For any startups not showing major ad platforms, payment gateways, live chat tools, and other common marketing/growth software, remove them from your prospect list for now. You're looking for the hot startups actively investing in growth right now.
Pro Tip: Use the "Marketing" filter on the left sidebar of builtwith to quickly see all the advertising and marketing tools a website is using.
3. Find the Decision Maker's Email
Now you need to identify the specific decision makers to pitch at each of those startups spending on growth. These will be the founders, marketing leaders, demand gen managers, and others responsible for purchasing solutions like yours.
Use a tool like Rocket.bz or Reply.io to lookup the website and find verified email addresses and direct dial phone numbers for those key players. I'll walk through an example using Reply.io:
First, install the Reply.io Chrome extension and navigate to the startup's website you want to prospect, like faco.ai. Click the Reply icon in your browser and select "Find Emails".
Reply will then scan that website and compile a list of all the email addresses it can find associated with that domain. It ranks them by the likelihood of being a decision maker based on name/title.
Those would be your three hottest contacts to first at that company. You can even see their latest LinkedIn profiles to confirm titles/roles.
Click "Export" to save all those contacts and start building out your targeted outreach list for that startup. Repeat this process for every promising company remaining on your list.
Pro Tip: If you can't find emails for key decision makers, use Reply to find lower-level employees at the company. Then you can ask them for the appropriate contact to pitch your solution to.
Common Pitfall: Relying solely on findthat@company.com or info@company.com emails that go straight to a blackhole. You need verified contacts for real people.
4. Craft a Compelling Outbound Pitch
Now that you have a list of promising startup prospects and the direct emails of their decision makers, it's time to craft an outbound pitch that will grab their attention. You can't just send a generic cold email template - you need to speak their language.
Start by going through your research - all the pains, desires, jargon, and insights you gathered while developing your solution. What are the biggest challenges and goals for startup founders in your space? What are their primary responsibilities and key performance metrics?
For example, if you're selling marketing automation software, common startup founder pains might be:
Struggling to generate enough quality leads
Inability to scale 1-on-1 sales outreach
Leaking leads and leaving money on the table
Needing to free up their engineers from manual tasks
Lacking visibility into campaign performance
Using those customer voices, craft a 1-2 paragraph cold email pitch that immediately calls out those pains using the same jargon and language startup founders use. Demonstrate that you intimately understand the world they live in.
Example Pitch:
Chasing down every single lead and giving them white-glove treatment just isn't scalable anymore. You're hemorrhaging hard-earned paid leads while your engineers spend more cycles on one-off campaign deployments than actual product work.
What if you could 10x your existing conversion rates while finally liberating your tech team from tedious marketing tasks? Our fully-integrated marketing automation suite allows you to nurture every single lead with personalized multi-touch campaigns - without having to write a single line of code.
See how that pitch jumps right into startup founder problems and priorities using their own lingo? It establishes credibility that you "get" their world.
From there, provide a brief overview of your core solution and its key benefits. But stay focused on them - not on detailing every single feature. The goal of this first outreach is to pique their interest by showing you understand their pains and have a potential solution worth exploring further.
5. Systemize Persistent Outreach
Your first outbound pitch email alone likely won't be enough to book meetings with most startup founders. They're bombarded with solicitations daily from every vendor under the sun. You need a systematic, multi-channel cadence to persistently nurture them.
Use a sales engagement tool like Outreach, Salesloft, or Reply to build out automated follow-up sequences across email, LinkedIn messages, calls, and voicemails. You'll define the cadence of each communication touch based on no-reply.
For example, your cadence could look like:
Day 1: Initial cold email pitch
Day 4: Follow-up email
Day 7: LinkedIn connection request
Day 10: Follow-up LinkedIn message
Day 13: Voicemail drop
Day 16: Break-up email
By hitting startup founders from multiple channels on a consistent cadence, you'll eventually break through the noise and get responses from those who have a real need for your solution.
Within your sales engagement tool, you can also use mail-merge to automatically personalize each touch with the founder's name, their startup's name, and any other custom fields you have on each prospect.
Pro Tip: Before launching your cadences, send your initial cold emails in small batches of 10-20 at a time. This allows you to quickly identify any issues with deliverability, fine-tune your messaging, and make adjustments.
Common Pitfall: Giving up after the first or second touch when startup founders are notoriously unresponsive to cold outreach. Persistence pays off!
You've got an amazing product that deserves to be seen and paid for. But the traditional marketing methods clearly aren't working if you're still struggling to land customers. It's time to get hyper-strategic and go after the low-hanging fruit - startups that have just raised money and are actively looking for growth solutions right now.
With the right targeting process and persistent outreach, you can cut through the noise and get in front of the decision makers with real budgets. Sure, it requires more hustle upfront. But wouldn't it be worth it to finally start generating the revenue, traction, and social proof you need to take your startup to the next level? The choice is yours.
