Cold-(Brew) Outreach: Landing my first big client at a coffee shop
The highest ROI investment I’ve made in my startup was a Breakfast Burrito
After hours of over caffeinating and under eating, I was finally hungry enough to start looking for food. I didn’t have anything in my fridge so I opted for a quick breakfast burrito from the “Le Creperie” down the block. My mind was digesting the python and JavaScript code I’d been writing, but my stomach was completely empty. As soon as I enter the cafe what I hear is “if you want to land a junior dev role you should learn either python or JavaScript”. The man in line was giving career advice to the guy behind the counter and here I was, sucked back in to the world I was trying escape.
Immediately I agreed that those were good options and I asked the man in front of me to introduce himself and what he did for work. “My name is Roger, I’m the lead software engineer at a company that buys x low and sells x high”. After introducing myself and telling him I was trying to get my own business off the ground, we exchanged numbers and stayed in touch.
Over the course of several weeks I talked more to him about some of the problems he was facing at his company and I realized we could help. Most issues he mentioned revolved around sharing and understanding the data they owned internally to make better decisions. I’ve been working on a python+SQL notebook to help users create internal tools, presentations, and data apps very easily so it seemed like a good fit.
Roger sent me a JSON with some items from his database that his boss had been interested in and I spun up a visualization within a few hours. From that point on we were basically on a sales call with Roger’s boss. After understanding their needs better and making sure that the value was there for them, I quoted a price and they accepted my first offer. Maybe I had room to go higher but honestly I don’t really care. They accepted a number that was much higher than what I’d originally expected. More importantly though, they trusted me, my team and my product. To me, that’s worth more than money at this stage of our journey.
The cash hit the bank over the weekend and it still doesn’t actually feel real. It’s been a long journey getting here… I invested a lot of my life savings and there were lots of hard lessons learned the hard way. All I will say that despite all the struggles the path to profit seems more clear now: I just need to buy more breakfast burritos.
If you’d like to know more about what we’re building you can check out our website here:
Or reach out via linkedin (link in medium profile). I’m happy to talk about anything data/startups/business.
