Your first B2B customers: founder-led sales, design partners and pilots

Your first B2B customers won’t come from the website. They get found, persuaded and talked to at length, and almost always by the founder. Not because there’s nobody to hand it to, but because at this stage selling is mostly research, and the findings need to reach whoever decides what gets built.

Founder-led sales

Hiring a salesperson before your first ten customers is usually premature. A salesperson sells what exists, following a known playbook. You don’t have a playbook yet, or any certainty that what exists is what sells. A founder on a call can change the offer on the fly, hears objections firsthand, and can tell which ones are about the product and which are about price or timing.

Start with a narrow circle: companies of one type and size, with the same problem. Write to specific people, not a generic inbox. Warm introductions work best, through mutual contacts, investors, former colleagues. Cold email works too, if it’s short, about their situation rather than your product, and ends with a simple question.

The first conversation isn’t a pitch. It’s the same as an interview: how they handle the task today, who’s involved, what it costs them, what they’ve already tried. Demo if they ask.

Design partners

A design partner is a company that gets the product early and shapes it, and in return gives you time, data and honest feedback. Three to five of them is a good start. More than that is hard to manage.

For this to work, the arrangement has to be explicit, ideally in writing:

• what the partner gets: early access, a discount on the future subscription, a say in priorities;
• what they give: regular meetings, access to real data or processes, permission for a testimonial or mention if things work out;
• how long it lasts and how it ends.

Pick partners who look like your future market, not the most famous names. A large company with unique requirements will drag the product sideways, and six months later you’ll find you’ve built a solution for one customer. If a partner’s request is something nobody else needs, you can politely decline it.

Pilots that convert

Pilots are where B2B deals die most often. Not loudly but quietly: the pilot ends, everyone liked it, and then nothing happens. To avoid that, agree on how the pilot ends before it starts.

• Success criteria. What has to happen for the pilot to count as a success: time on the task went down, so many requests were processed, the team works in the product every day. Written down before launch.
• A deadline. A specific end date. A pilot without one turns into a free subscription.
• Money. Even a token amount. A paid pilot gets approved by the same people who will later approve the contract, which proves those people exist.
• People. Who uses the product day to day and who makes the buying decision. These are often different people, and you need to know both.
• What comes next. If the criteria are met, what the contract looks like, at what price, and when it gets signed.

Halfway through, hold a short check-in: what works, what doesn’t, are we on track for the criteria? Surprises at the end of a pilot are almost always unpleasant ones.

What to be ready for

Even small companies ask about security: where data is stored, who can access it, whether there are backups, how sign-in works. Larger ones send a questionnaire with dozens of questions. If the product was built fast, some of those may have no answer, and the deal stalls not over value but because nobody knows what to write. Better to find that out before the first questionnaire arrives.

One more thing: early B2B sales are slow. Decisions pass through several people, budgets are planned in advance, and your contact has a day job. Patience is part of the process. What matters is that every deal has a clear next step with a date on it.

SUBXCAT can help get a product ready for its first business customers, from answering security questions to running a pilot without late-night fixes.