Launching Outbound Club

Hands up if this is you. As a founder:

• you love to build / design product

• you understand and obsess about the problems you are trying to solve with your product

• you might be considered "credible" by your target market, based on your past experience

• you could be better at sales

• you think part of the reason is you prefer to spend time on product than on sales (you know, talking to people who might be customers 😱)

If this isn't you, there's a good chance you know someone who fits this description. Early stage product / technical / creative founders will always find a reason to hack, experiment, tweet, prototype something instead of doing basic things like:

• cold outbound

• in person or video calls with people who might pay you

• blog content or anything related to marketing

• a bunch of other things that do not give the kind of immediate dopamine hit you get from seeing code / design / idea coming to life

Over 15 or so years, and 4 startups I've co-founded, I've found it challenging at times to do founder-led sales. For lots of product focussed founders it's a brand new skill set to acquire, and while there's plenty of tips and tricks out there, as well as pretty much proven strategies, it's rarely clear how you're going to figure it out, or if you'll even know how to make it a success.

There's so much experimentation. You need to figure out how to consistently communicate and demonstrate value in a way that:

• fits into whatever go to market strategy you have

• works with the current state of the product, and where the roadmap is going to take you

• works in the wider market environment

• works with whatever needs to be done to hit funding milestones

Ok, so, with all of that in mind, I want to try something with five founders for a month. If it works, I'll repeat, and you never know, it might make a difference.

Here's what I'm thinking, it's pretty simple. Every Monday morning, for 4 weeks, myself and five founders meet in person, 9am to 11am. We each construct an outbound pipeline of customers to reach out to, we share with each other our goals, approach, and messaging. We give each other feedback, and then we execute. We have a quick check-in on Wednesday to see how everyone is progressing, and we do a weekly retro each Friday. We repeat this each week, and by the end of the month, we hopefully will have some shared success to celebrate. At that point, if the five founders would like to continue as a group, they'll have my support and encouragement, while I'll start the process again with a new group.

That's it. There's probably some refinement to do, but as a general framework I think it could be helpful to pre-seed and seed founders who are doing founder-led sales amongst all the other things they are doing. Doing this along side other founders will probably be a great learning opportunity for all, as well as a great way to forge strong bonds with people who are trying to figure out the same type of things.

You might be wondering why I'd want to spend time doing this? Well, my "customers" are syndicate members. We currently have 65 members, and I'd like to grow that to over 100. So, it's a bit self serving, but I also believe doing this in a group could be hugely beneficial for product-focussed founders who may be solo-founders or may not have a commercial / sales co-founder.

If any of the above has resonated with you, and you're a product founder (i.e. you've held technical, creative, product manager or similar roles before founding your startup) drop me an email: eamon@broadstone.vc. If we don't already know each other please tell me about yourself, what you're working on, the stage you're at, your current outbound and GTM approach, and anything else you think is relevant.