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In short: your first 10 customers won't come from a tool. Customers 1–3 come from your personal network, 4–10 from unscalable work you do yourself (showing up in person, small dinners, DMs where people complain), and only from 10–50 do outreach tools make sense. Start by finding where your buyer actually spends the day.

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🎙️ Y Combinator · 👤 Max Kolysh · ⏱️ 14 min · 📅 June 22, 2026 · ▶️ Watch on YouTube

🧠 Key ideas

  1. The channel follows the buyer, not your laptop. Cold email and LinkedIn work for buyers who live on a computer, like sales leaders. School administrators, property managers or truck dispatchers don't. One founder closed more in 3 days at a trade show than in 3 months of cold email.
  2. Customers 1–3 come from your network, with almost no exceptions. Early buyers bet on you as a founder, not just on the product. Go in order: personal network, second-degree LinkedIn intros (one founder closed about half of her batch customers this way), then AI network-search tools like Happenstance.
  3. Get in the room. Founders flew to the same buyer four weeks in a row, walked into offices uninvited, flew to Hawaii and got kicked out after eight minutes, and still won those accounts. Awkward, slow, and more effective than anything else.
  4. Small beats big. Small industry conferences, with 15-minute meetings booked back to back via the attendee list, and dinners for 6–10 ideal customers at 50–100 dollars a head, convert far better than large events.
  5. Find where the pain is said out loud. Reddit, Facebook groups, Discord, industry forums. One founder DMed every commenter of old complaint threads; another replied to 2–5 complaints a day for months. Reddit threads also rank on Google for years.
  6. Frame outreach as learning, honestly. Asking for advice, mentorship or a product review opens doors, but only if you genuinely want to learn. One founder paid lawyers 100–200 dollars an hour for feedback; about 30% accepted, and acquisition cost stayed reasonable.
  7. Write like a human, and give first. Under 75 words, one clear call to action, read it aloud to a friend. The best outreach delivered something before asking: a website security scan, app suggestions, an audit note. Follow up 3–4 times over a couple of weeks.
  8. Tools come last. Apollo, Clay and sequences start to matter at customers 10–50, once you have a pitch worth scaling. Weeks spent on tooling before working your network skip the lowest-hanging fruit.

📑 Chapters

00:00 · Why the first 10 are different

00:54 · Where does your buyer actually spend their time?

02:45 · Customers 1–3: work your warm network first

04:20 · Get in the room: fly out, conferences, dinners

06:15 · Find where your customers complain online

07:30 · How to go outbound: Apollo, Clay and LinkedIn

08:35 · Frame outreach as advice

10:20 · Writing outreach that sounds human