Outbound for YC founders — from zero to first $100K ARR.
You are pre-PMF. The batch ends in weeks. Founder-led outbound beats a hired SDR until $1M ARR — but it takes 250 personalized emails a week to find your first 10 customers, and every hour you spend on DKIM is an hour you are not on a discovery call.
Time is the binding constraint. Everything below is sequenced for that constraint.
Most YC B2B founders lose two-to-four weeks of the batch to the same mistake — they send cold mail from founder@yourstartup.com, the corporate domain reputation craters, transactional mail stops landing, and the team spends a week debugging Postmark instead of selling. The chapters below are the version of this discipline that exists before that mistake. Start with the reading path if you are at zero. Jump into the cluster references if you are debugging a specific layer.
What to read first.
- 01Curated reading pathThe pre-seed reading path — outbound from zero
Ten chapters in order. ICP hypothesis, design partners, sending estate, copy. The full read for batch founders who have weeks, not quarters.
→ - 02ICPClosed-won deconstruction — your first hypothesis
Even with three or five friendly logos, pulling apart what they have in common gives you a real ICP hypothesis. Do this before you write a single email.
→ - 03Design partnersWhy design partners beat cold outbound pre-PMF
If you are pre-PMF B2B, this is the highest-leverage motion you can run in the batch. Five committed buyers shaping your roadmap is worth more than fifty prospects who don't.
→ - 04Design partnersThe 30 → 8 → 3 design-partner funnel
Recruit 30 candidates from your network and YC alumni, qualify down to 8 hair-on-fire problems, sign 3 with a real agreement and a small check. The math that selects for fit, not politeness.
→ - 05Email infrastructureCold email infrastructure — the complete setup
Fourteen chapters. Skim once, then deep-read SPF/DKIM/DMARC, lookalike domains, warmup. The week you skip this is the week your founder domain gets blocklisted.
→ - 06CopyWhat makes cold copy good — four principles
50-125 words, plain text, written to a person not a company, one binary CTA. Good and bad examples annotated side by side. Read before the first sequence, not after.
→ - 07ConferencesICP velocity testing at conferences
A relevant industry conference inside the next 60 days compresses two months of cold-outbound learning into three days. Pre-book back-to-back Cal.com slots. Highest-density signal you can buy.
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What we do for YC founders.
An engineer in your Slack who runs everything upstream of the call.
Domains, DNS, warmup, sequencing, reply routing — all of it run end-to-end. You stay on discovery calls, design-partner conversations, and the close. We stay on everything that gets the prospect to the call.
Built for batch pace. Batch pricing on the call.
Most engagements start producing booked meetings inside three weeks — the window you have left to validate or kill the ICP before Demo Day. Discounted scope for batch founders. Ask.
Design partners first when it fits. Cold outbound when it stabilizes.
Pre-PMF B2B usually wants 3 design partners, not 300 cold emails. We structure the program — recruitment, agreements, paid pilots — and run the upstream sourcing for it. Cold outbound only when the motion has stabilized and the math says scale.
Case in production.
32 design partners reached in 3 weeks. 6 paid pilots in 90 days.
Two-founder fintech, mid-batch. Working prototype, a 40-account ICP hypothesis from a previous role, no sending infrastructure. We provisioned domains and inboxes in week one, ran a 24-inbox warmup for three weeks while building the prospect graph, and launched into the validated list as warmup closed. First booked meeting on day 19. 32 design-partner conversations across weeks 3-6. 6 advanced to paid pilots inside 90 days.
The founders spent the same weeks heads-down on product and discovery. Total engineering hours sunk into infrastructure by the founding team: under five.
We can be running by next week. You stay on the sales motion.
Book a free 30-minute audit. We will tell you the cheapest path to 30-60 conversations a week for your specific ICP. If it is design partners, we run the program. If it is cold outbound, we run the upstream. If a relevant conference falls inside the next 60 days, we plan the conference. YC-batch pricing on the call.