The Vault Unlocked - How to Get Your First SaaS Customers Without a Product (The Customer Development Framework Nobody Teaches)

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Most founders are building the wrong thing. Not because they lack skill. Not because the market isn't there. Because they skipped the one conversation that tells you whether any of it is worth building in the first place. By the time most SaaS founders realize they've been validating their idea instead of the market's problem, they've already burned 18 months and a team's worth of goodwill. Collin Stewart lived that. He built anyway. Nobody bought. And what came out the other side became one of the most repeatable zero-to-revenue frameworks operating in SaaS today. This episode is that framework, unfiltered. Collin went from 18 months of zero traction on a CRM nobody asked for, to tripling monthly revenue in a single month, fully manual, before a single line of new code was written. He didn't pivot because of a blog post or a course. He pivoted because a mentor told him the truth, and he finally stopped arguing with his customers long enough to hear it. What changed wasn't the product. It was the sequence. Talk first. Build second. Sell before you ship. This conversation is for founders who are early, moving fast, and quietly unsure whether they're building toward something real or just building. It is also for operators who've hit a ceiling and suspect the problem starts at the top of the funnel, before the pitch, before the demo, before any of it. Collin breaks down how to identify the right customer, how to conduct a development conversation that actually surfaces pain instead of validating your assumptions, and how to move a prospect from "can I pick your brain" to paying customer across a structured sequence of meetings. He also covers why referral asks at the end of every conversation function as a self-healing list, why most cold outreach fails at the signal level, not the copy level, and what it actually looks like to run a pilot before committing engineering resources. This is the go-to-market strategy conversation most startup accelerators skip. Customer discovery, early revenue generation, SaaS sales without a product, zero to one frameworks, and founder-led sales systems are all covered in direct, practical terms, drawn from a decade of hands-on zero-to-revenue work. Topics covered: Why showing customers what you built is not customer validation The customer development funnel and how to move prospects through it How to run a manual pilot before building anything The Wizard of Oz method for generating real revenue signals Why referral asks function as a list-building system Relationship-first prospecting vs. cold outreach that dies on delivery What AI has changed about the speed of the zero-to-one window Looking to dive deeper into these conversations and connect with our host and guest? Follow Collin Stewart:  LinkedIn The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers book Predictable Revenue website Founders Edition newsletter Collin's Slidedeck  Follow Kayvon: Instagram Facebook LinkedIn TikTok     Want to go deeper with Kayvon? Subscribe to the newsletter Book a discovery call Get your Revenue Engine Scorecard™️ Hire the right salespeople  

Most founders build for 12, 18 months. Then they pitch. Then nothing happens. And they spend the next six months trying to figure out why nobody wants what they spent everything building. My guest today went through that. 18 months. One customer.

Zero traction. And what he figured out on the other side became the framework he now uses to take SaaS founders from zero to their first real revenue before the product is even finished. His name is Colin Stewart. He helped build predictable revenue. He has done the zero to one journey more than once. And today, he is breaking down the customer development process that most accelerators skip entirely. If you are building something right now, this conversation changes the sequence.

Let's unlock it. Colin, welcome to the show. Today, I'm excited because I know you were behind and worked with the guys with predictable revenue, which was a phenomenal book I read back and I think it was 2018. I was handed that book. And today you've taken all the things you learned in that time and you help founders, SaaS companies, go from zero to one.

You are the go-to-market strategy expert. And in marketing, after we've, you know, going to start going to market is all about that. So welcome to the show. Thanks, man. Appreciate you having me on. Welcome for being here. So tell us a little bit about your background.

So people understand, you know, who you are. Why I can confidently say you're the go-to-market strategy expert and what people can expect from listening today. Yeah, I mean, spent 10 years as a sales guy, I had the opportunity to help two different entrepreneurs to start either a company or a division within a company and got to do like the zero to one journey a couple of times, which was really fun. And then I was wanting to start my own thing. And so 14 years ago, I thought, hey, I'm that geeky kid who's always been who's good at sales. who's got pulled into every CRM project, I think I'll build a CRM system. And, you know, I'm a guy who knows I can close.

And I probably, when I started, I'm probably, I'm definitely a much better salesperson now than I was when I started. But I thought when I started, I was very good. Turns out that wasn't necessarily an accurate assessment, but there's a whole other bunch of reasons there. But, you know, I went 18 months and I had only closed one deal, trying to sell this CRM system that was like my idea.

and that was that was hard because you know you go from like a million and a half dollar year 240% quota like all that kind of stuff like you're just used to performing and then to go from that to zeros you're like hmm this feels different and so you know demoralizing really demoralizing and so i mean honestly it was my like startup founder education you know if i would have just headed off the If that tool made it to any sort of revenue, I would be an unsufferable asshole right now, guarantee. Okay. It was a humbling experience. I'm pretty sure, and I hate admitting this, but I'm pretty sure I said the words, the Steve Jobs of CRM, like, more than once.

At least I said it a bunch up here, and it was just the, it gives you an idea of like the cocky, arrogant mindset that I had kind of coming into this. And that 18 months of like not delivering anything of value really chips away at that. which I think was a valuable experience. Yeah, I actually kind of want to talk about that because I know a lot of people starting out go through. I almost feel like you kind of have to go through that. You know, like unless you get really lucky,

you're going to go through the pain first before you get to the like the pleasure. But my question is why, why did you stay in it for 18 months if you weren't making, you know, we know in business the first thing to do is, you know, sell, right? Like no sales,

no business. So I'm wondering what, what what what kept you in the game for so long for 18 months and then when was it when you're like go this is definitely not going to work insanity stubbornness like i refusal to quit i like i'm not very good at quitting anything you know um whether it's you know giving up on a a board game taking a joke too far being like the last guy at the party because people like hey it's like morning you need to you need to get out of here like it's uh yeah i call it the athlete DNA and it's one of the biggest factors,

which is you hate to lose more than you love to win. 100%. Everybody. Everybody hates to lose. Winning's fun temporarily. Losing sucks. Terrible. Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. And so it was part that. And it was part, like, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I enjoy sales. I hated selling for somebody else. And like, just feeling that value creation go to somebody else. It's like, I know I'm good at what I'm doing. And I feel like I'm good at what I'm doing.

only capturing a teeny tiny portion of it and that I didn't enjoy that. I also didn't enjoy that. They're like, hey, congrats. Like, I had one good quarter. I closed a million and a half in a quarter. And which was like, I've already hit like I'm already 150% or whatever it was or I don't know. I was 100 and something percent of quota for the year in Q1. And by Q3, they were going to fire me. I was like, guys, this is like long sales cycles. Yeah. I just happened to have everything line up and a deal came in early. otherwise it would have been like half and half and we'd be not stressed about anything. I'm like, so you're punishing me

because I got lucky in some client like instead of an 18 month sales cycle, it was a seven month sales cycle. Is that what we're talking about here? And so it just, I didn't enjoy that side of it. I like really enjoyed the sales side. I really enjoyed the learning piece.

And then I just felt like I capped out. You know, you get good. It was like snowboarding. I got good at it. And then I'm like, okay, this isn't as interesting anymore. Because I feel like I can go anywhere around the mountain and like such a Canadian reference, but I can go anywhere on the mountain and I'm not really worried about it.

And it just felt like I wasn't getting any better. And once I'm not getting any better anymore, then I just wasn't interesting. And so candidly, I wanted something harder. I wanted something where I wasn't resetting the clock back down to zero every year of like, okay, you know, good, good job salesperson. You were 140% last year, you know, now you're back to zero percent in January. And I just, I hated that like. you work for the year and then it resets.

Whereas I love the idea of you work your ass off and it's building something. And the harder you work, the higher probability, it builds towards something that's sustainable and keeps going. And that's, I think, one of the things that was probably the biggest driver of like what kept me going is like, I knew I could go back to sales. At the same time, I had my old boss who I told, I'm not coming back. But he would still text me monthly, like pictures of commission checks and being like, yours would be bigger. Wow. Yeah.

So let me ask you this. What was the pivot? When you, so you're 18 months in, at some point, you got to realize you got to wave the white flag, right? You know, you don't want to, but you do. And then you have this pivot. And then where does it go from there? So I was at this coworking space. And one of the mentors there sat me down and said, I can't wait until you're working on

something where you have a chance of being successful. I was like, oh, that hurts. And it kind of, it was kind of one of those moments where you just had to realize you pull your head out of your ass and be like, okay, you know what, if everybody is saying this, that I'm doing it wrong, I'm probably doing it wrong. And the results kind of point to I'm doing it wrong. And so I was like, all right, the stubbornness approach isn't working. I need to do something different. And when I took the time to like, because I'd gotten into this like, you know, before 9,96 was the thing. I was working like all the time. Like it was more than 9,96 because I would get, I'd get to the office at like 8 in the

morning. I'd get home at 11 or 12 o'clock at night. And like I would do that five days a week and then I'd work on the weekends from home or sometimes I'd go into the office. It was really busy. So it was like working all the time. And I think one of the things, like there's an upside to having that kind of capacity to just like grind. But I think the downside is you get so, you get so worn down. You don't have your

good brain to like really pull back and focus on like, am I grinding towards the right thing? And I think I maybe got caught in that loop a little bit. So when Roger had that conversation with me, I pulled my head in my ass. It was like, okay, well, what is it that I'm doing wrong? Like, what is the fundamental thing? And reflecting, talking to customers, talking to the team, it was that I was showing them what I had built and said, hey, look at this cool thing. Isn't this a great, cool thing that I built? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, cool, I did customer validation. I showed them the thing.

They went, yeah, validated. And I did that a lot. And I realized that that's not how you do customer validation or customer development. That's how you do. Look at my idea. Isn't it cool? Thanks. And how you get interview 150 people and zero of them buy from you.

And so the realization was I needed to ask them questions and not share what I was working on first. And because I, the crazy part is like another piece of like why I kept going is I knew I was right. Fundamentally, the core insight I had was the transition from CRM being something you installed on your laptop to something that you accessed in the cloud. And keep in mind, this is 2012 when we were talking, the timeline we're talking about. So CRM is Salesforce, or Cloud CRM is Salesforce. And you're accessing it through Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Google Chrome. which is like Chrome was good at the time, but most people in the enterprise were using IE7 or whatever it was,

Internet Explorer, 6, 7, 8. And like, it was 28 clicks to create an account, create a contact, and send them an email in Salesforce. And so CRM went for this from being this thing that I installed on my laptop, and it was my personal productivity tool. It was my Rolodex. It was like my daily planner, my agenda, like my pen and paper. And suddenly they were gone.

Now my boss kept them in his office and said, I'm going to tell you how to organize your agenda. I'm going to tell you how to organize all your things. And now you have to use this crappy web UI. And so it stopped being a personal productivity tool for our salespeople. And it started becoming a tool for my managers. And as somebody who identifies as a salesperson, I took that personally and I didn't like that. And so I think the insight was correct.

But I think I was like I was also wrong at the same time. And so if we kind of, if I had to roughly guess, I was about 40% correct in like the whole vision of everything and 60% wrong. And so 40% right in that the insight was sales, Salesforce is in a personal productivity tool. And then the 60% wrong was how I wanted to solve that problem. Okay. And the thing that I got wrong was like my idea of how to solve it was terrible. It was like, hey, replace Salesforce with my new SaaS CRM. And people were like, no, make your tool work with our Salesforce. And I was like, no, that's the wrong model. Then I'd argue with them like an idiot and so when I realized hey stop arguing with them start and listening to

them you might do a whole lot better and turns out I did we started listening to people we started interviewing them we were bootstrapped at the time and we made the call to stay bootstrapped and because we had terrible metrics you weren't going to raise nobody knew who we were we were in Vancouver the VC game in Vancouver was they were they were here but it was there was some pretty barbaric term sheets being handed out like like my buddy gave away 60% of his company for 400K, like pretty not good stuff. And so it just wasn't worth our time to go out and try and raise. And we figured we could bootstrap it. And so I started asking people questions about, hey, I'm going to do this process manually for you. This thing that I did to book all those 150

customer development emails was I'd read Aaron's book, predictable revenue. And it was cold email on folks, cold emailing. I was hitting them up on LinkedIn. And then the hypothesis was, well, you know, who has this sales productivity problem the most? Who has to do the most clicks in Salesforce? And this is my CTO's question to me. I was like, oh, hands down, it's SDRs, right? Like, it's such a crazy workflow. Outreach didn't exist.

Sales loft didn't exist. Think about all the stuff those things do for you that get updated in Salesforce. And people were like manually copying and pasting and logging emails. Salesforce still does that. It's crazy. Don't get me started on Salesforce. We're going to not talk about Salesforce. Okay.

Moving on. Yeah. Yeah. And that's for stay away. And so once we had this focus of, hey, it's sales development reps, right? This is, they have the personal productivity problem the most. Let's start talking to people about solving this. And let's find a way of solving this manually. So I don't have to ask the engineering team like Preston and Francesco are my two like co-founders.

Hey, can you go build some shit that people might buy? Because we did 18 months of like chasing features of like building shit. for customers that might buy from us. And I was embarrassed because, like, they bought zero of them. And I asked those guys to do a crap ton of work. And what it led to was nothing. And so I was like, all right, here's the deal. We're going to try this pivot.

I'm going to see if I can find five people to give me 500 bucks a month. And I'll do it Wizard of Oz style. Like, fully manual, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. And I'm like, if I can find five, that's a strong enough signal that there's a, it's worth us building a tool around this. And I went and I sat down and I interviewed five people. And two of those five people bullied me into letting their friend join the beta. And I was like, huh, we got $1,800 in revenue.

I think we were up to like $1,800 a month in revenue from the CRM product from our first customer. And now we got tripled that in a month for one month. And it was all manual. I was like, that sounds, that sounds interesting. And so we did that. We finished that pilot and like, it was hectic. It was me twisting the knobs, cranking the dial. Like it was, it was nuts.

And we finished up and it was like end of November. And my buddy James goes, I give you 500 bucks for this. I was like, yeah. He's like, what if I gave you 10 grand? It was like I couldn't, I couldn't handle it. It was all manual. Like manual list building, manual sending manual. I can imagine.

Yeah. Yeah, it was nuts. I literally couldn't handle it. I think I talked him down to five. okay because I was like I want to I want to take your money because I like money and I would like to afford meat this month but also you know it's producing value so let's do it and so that was the like first indication that we were on something and so we built that out as a service we ramped that zero to a million in ARR and like services revenue yeah in a year and along the way we built out

the SaaS platform that was going to be the sales loft outreach killer well we didn't know sales Loft Outreach existed at the time. I think they might have had a year head start on us. And Sales Loft was working on their, well, it was just called Sales Loft at the time. This is pre the pivot to cadence. And then Outreach was a recruiting tool that was using outreach to send emails to candidates to like four on behalf of recruiters. So they both kind of pivoted into the space, I think, around the time when we were running the service. So we all kind of hit on the same idea around the same time. And then when we started, like we got the business, that bootstrap business up and running. And then when I started interviewing potential customers about the software tool, man,

it was like people were trying to pull it out of me. They're like, is this ready? Can I use it? I want to test it. Like, it's the first people I asked about customer development interviews or about, like, hey, I want to pick your brain about X and Y. I think it was like SDR productivity or something like that or Salesforce automation. I think it was the term of the day back then. I was like, I want to talk about your SFA and like how you're doing it. And people were like stopping me. They're like, wait, are you building a tool to do this? I was like, can I ask, I don't want to, I don't want to skew the sample. Can I ask a couple questions first? And like, no, tell me if you're building this. Interesting. And there was this like, they were like stopping me. They're like,

are you working on this? Promise me you're working on this. And I was like, oh, that's a really good signal that like, I don't have to fight with them about you're doing it wrong. You know, they're just telling me that build this thing. I'll give you money. And so we had paying customers for our, like, alpha crappy product, like very, very, very early. So there's a nuance here for people listening. I think it's very important to hear this nuance because we're already talking about the go to strategy. Well, to go to strategy.

And what I'm hearing, I want you talk about this because I know we talked about this before, but I think it's super important is you're actually calling out to who you know has the problem that you want to solve. And instead of calling and saying, hey, I got a product to solve your problem, you know, I got a product to solve your problem. You're totally flipped it upside down and said, hey, I want to interview you. I want to understand what's going on. I'm thinking of maybe being able to solve this thing. Can I have 10, 15 minutes of your time?

Yeah. Yeah. And we call that customer development. And this is like you can read about this in the mom. test or any of Steve Blanks books on like how and where to focus. The thing that I, the thing that I think I got wrong was like, I'm tactically,

I just, I was thinking of it as customer validation, which is like, hey, this is the thing I built, you know. The, when I started getting it right,

what I realized was what the books don't teach you is that you're talking to potential customers. But all the books just kind of say, hey, go interview people. And then that's step one. And then step two is build the sales team and go sell it. And I was like, but what about all these people?

And honestly, that thought didn't connect for me until after the fact when like the second time going around, everybody who I interviewed, I shouldn't say everybody, but a high percentage of people that I had interviewed turned into paying customers. And then the next time I was going through it, I was like, well, that seems like a pretty strong signal of like the people that go through this as a funnel and like you know I had a couple we had a couple of clients in the services business that kind of showed me that like product market fit is not binary and like it exists on a I had this this argument with founders all the time they would hire us to do like cold email for him and I'm like I don't think this is going to be helpful because

you don't know who you want to email and if you don't know who you want to email I if you're if we're you're trying to sell like accounting software and we're emailing farmers in Nebraska it's not like it doesn't matter how good the messaging is. And so I kept fighting with founders of like, you don't have product market fit. And they are like, no, no, of course we have product market fit. And I finally,

it helped, the experience that helped kind of sharpen that was when Uber launched Uber Eats. Their VP of sales, their new VP of sales was one of our old customers. And Steve came to me, he was like, hey, I need this.

Can you like, I need the checkmate. Yeah, I need the checkmate deal, but I need it from my new company. I was like, oh, cool, happy to help. Who's a new company? Uber. I was like, holy shit.

And they were launching Uber everything is what they initially called it. And when we, to cut a long story short, in the first month, we booked so many meetings that it broke everything. A typical account strategist for us would handle like five, 10, five to 10 customers and book like 60 meetings a month total across those like five to 10 customers. And when Uber started, Uber started, Uber. booked 327 meetings in the first month. Yeah, wow. And I was like, okay, did Krista magically get like 6x better, 10x better, or is there something special about Uber?

And like, Krista's amazing. She was definitely our best account strategist. That's why she got the Uber account. But, like, who do you give the credit to? It was very clearly Uber. It was very, very clearly the, all the stuff that they had done with the brand, with the positioning with the offer. Everybody knew who they were. And the offer was, would you like to save money? And could we make you some more money? It was like the best offer, right? You don't have to pay a

delivery driver anymore. And we're going to bring you customers. It's the only offer I've seen that hits on like two of the three kind of core value drivers, which would be like make money, save costs, reduce risk. Right? And they had two of the three. And it's really hard to, it's very rare to see a real two out of three value driver. But anyway, so who gets the credit? Krista or Uber. We came to the conclusion that Uber gets the credit. And that was kind of the seed of the idea that product market fit has the strength. And it's not zero or one.

It's like zero to one to Uber, which is like 150. And like, okay, so there was that idea. And then when you look at like Uber got from their investment, they got roughly the same service that everybody else was getting, but they got, I don't know, 20x more results out of that same investment. And so that's where the second idea came from, which was that the stronger your product market fit is, the easier your go to market is going to be. Hands down. Yeah. Every salesperson knows this, right? If everybody needs the product, if everybody wants the product, it's going to be easier to sell. But it was not obvious to me at the time,

especially in the CRM days where I was like trying to sell this thing nobody wanted. And I was like, man, like, why is just nobody buying? Because nobody friggin wanted this thing that I was selling. Suddenly, you find an opportunity that a lot of people want. It's very easy to sell. Product Market Fit is a multiplier of all your go-to-market efforts. Everything, marketing, sales, whatever. And you go-to-market channel, tactic, anything.

And this is a multiplier. And this is why you can't learn anything from LinkedIn. Because just because it worked for somebody on LinkedIn who's working at Snowflake or any major company that you've heard of, Rippling, do not copy tactics from Rippling. Like the things that they are doing, I've seen some of their stuff. I've talked to their CRO, know the benchmarks that they're hitting. And they're doing like amazing work. They've got incredible people. They've got a really strong tail.

win because they're ripping, right? Like the reply rates they get are circa 2015, right? Like, that's what they're getting like industry standard benchmarks from 2015, which is incredible because Coal email now is very, very hard. And like, yeah. So it's a multiplier of your go to market. And so if that is true, then for folks like for any entrepreneur that's out there, I mean, I know you're building something. I'm building a bunch of things. what's the best thing that we can do, right? Obviously, let's have that conversation.

Not good for me, but for the audience as well. Like, what is the best thing? Because I, how, it's funny when you say email marketing, because I know it works because it works for companies.

I don't understand how it works because it doesn't work for me. I won't even go on LinkedIn because every message I have is a sale. I won't. So I don't even go on LinkedIn. Yeah. And I don't check my emails because it's every, I get bombarded probably 40, 50 emails a day and wild emails like people who've gone out of their way and like done looms on

my website people who've like given me scripts like they've written me scripts to use and they've done like SEO search like you're like wow like so much work goes into it but you get it all day how do you stand out of the crowd yeah i mean i'm a big fan of relationship first prospecting and not trying to sell folks and not trying to start off the start off the relationship with a hey let's let me sell you some shit you know like if after this podcast you told me you're like hey Colin I've got something that's I've got a tool that's perfect for go to market consultants you know that help startups go zero to a million I'd be like oh wow yeah I'd have a look at that and now I'm in your funnel right but we met through this podcast we've created the relationship first

then we do business later and to me that's the thing that's working you know like I help I help a not a crazy amount of clients but like I've got a bunch of clients right now and startups zero to a million helping them do the thing and the relationship first prospecting thing is the thing that's working really well across the board can be done with a number of different channels with a bunch of different mediums it doesn't have to be a podcast um i can send a for i can send you a link for the show notes i've got a blog post on my newsletter i think it's just called relationship first prospecting founders edition dot ceo if you look at founders edition relationship first prospecting you'll find it there um but that's the thing and like if you're

super, super early, you know what a great way to start off a relationship is? Hey, can I pick your brain? I don't know what I'm going to build yet, but I think I'm going to build something in your space. Can I have some advice from you? And like, that's just the very, very, very, very, very, very tip of the spear. It starts with customer development. And then after you interview them for the first time, you say, hey, you know, when I figure out if I'm going to focus on this, would you be open to giving me some feedback on that next thing, you know, on the idea? And I'm just like, yeah, sure, I really appreciate it. Then you go do the focus interview.

You say, hey, we decided to focus on this. Can I ask you some questions? Great. At the end, hey, when I got a rough sketch, would you give me some feedback on that? Yeah, sure. I like this calling guy. When I showed them the rough sketch,

they're like, that's ugly as shit. I'm like, I know, but it's not built yet. It'll get better. If I built this, would this be 10x better than what you currently have? Yes or no. If they say yes, great. I'm going to go build that.

When I build it, you be open to giving me feedback on my crappy first version. They say, yes, I show them the crappy first version. I say, what features do I need to build in order for you to use this full time and actually get that 10x value? I listen. Great. Next interview, built those features. What do we got to build to give you some money? Also, give me some money right now. Yeah. And then the last. Do this. I do this. I do this. Yeah. I've done this a bunch. This is, this is. You got to curate. The biggest thing is curating the list, I would say, is making sure your speech. to the right people. Yes and no. Okay, so the thing, there's one thing I do at the end. We'll come

back to that. The, the, where this came from is my training is a salesperson. Every salesperson knows at the end of the call, you book the next step. And I was just doing this naturally and not even noticing it. And people in the, I remember being in Launch Academy is this co-working space. And I was surrounded by engineers. This is like 2012. There's like everybody's in engineers. The Ruby on rails. and no JS and arguing about all these different things and no SQL databases or yeah came out and people are like oh mom goes crap i was like i don't know what any of this meets and i remember my buddy matt asked me he's like dude what the hell are you doing all day i was like what do you you're talking to people all day long how do you get anything done i was like oh i'm talking to

potential customers it's like that's what i'm talking to i'm interviewing them then i book the next step and so one person i keep interviewing but at the end of every conversation i always book the next step and then if they seem into it and i shouldn't say if they seem especially in the early days i always ask for a referral hey kavon who should i talk to next about this do you know do you know anybody else who's struggling with this yeah and that was the biggest thing because you could start with the worst list in the world you you could start with you like pick your parents pick like two people they know and then you ask them and then you ask you know you interview those people and say hey do you know two people that i could interview about this and then every round you get

closer and closer and closer to the target customer because you're just relying on people that know people. And so your starting list can be like, you know, just a few people. And as long as you're asking for referrals and you're connecting with enough people that are connected enough, like eventually you'll get the list has a self-healing kind of quality to it. It gets better and better and better the deeper you get. And so I, at the end of every interview, I ask for the next step and then I ask for a referral. Yeah, I mean, you're giving all the good, the good stuff right here. As you're, as you're going through that, I kept thinking, I said, do I want to put them on

the spot? And so, and go, well, hey, if you're this good, right? And I can tell you're so confident behind this. Why don't we do a live case study for our viewers and our listeners and say we come back again and we actually do this and use it as a case study for you and for people to see how, when done right, the effectiveness of it. Sure. Yeah, what do you want to do?

Like, how do you want to do that? Well, I think we'll have that call, I would say, offline to disinsures the right fit. But I want to leave the guests hanging here. And I think it'd be interesting for them to say, if they've been hang with us this long, going, all right, we're going to go do this. The goal is we're going to do this. And we're going to show you how we do this live on episodes until it's successful and show you that with the right systems of place, the tools in place, it could be easier than you think.

For sure. You can also, yeah, I've got some stuff I can share at the end. But yeah, I happily do that. Well, as we are coming there, I was going to ask if for people that are saying they, you know, maybe they're thinking about they want to go to zero one right now they can use this strategy they don't want to wait where can they get some information i read a weekly newsletter founders edition dot ceo and i initially started that because i was writing a book on the subject of going zero to one from a revenue perspective um so that's a good spot obviously the book terrifying art

of finding customers uh you can i think it's terrifying art dot com or terrifying art of finding customers on amazon um i can send you a deck um that i've done in a couple of startup accelerators recently recently. And it's skip to slide 15 and it lays out the customer development funnel. And so I found that I was kind of doing this naturally. And then when I work with founders on like how to do this, they typically need to see it. And so I can share this deck with you. We can throw it in the show notes. Anybody can take a look and you can see my customer notes and my silly jokes and my all of that. So I'm happy to share that if that would be helpful. I do want to add one thing to the customer development funnel because we didn't finish. I didn't finish that kind of idea.

Absolutely, please. After you ask for money, because what we're looking for here, right, like if we step back of like, why do we think of, why do we think of this as a funnel? Right. What we're looking at is the number of people we put into the top of the funnel and how many people make it to the bottom, right? When you offer, hey, let's take the next step. Are people like, hell yeah, let's do it.

Or are they saying no? And if nobody is taking that next call, it's a very strong indication that you're not working on a pain that's important enough to them. And so that would be, that's why I think about it as a funnel is you want to look at the ratio of like once one level to the next. So you can see like what is the volume of people? What is the conversion rate from one stage to the next? And then how quickly what's the velocity?

How quickly do they move? I would say, man, we keep going because I would say it's easier than ever with AI to actually have the real conversations of not actually having a product developed, but having a idea and having your target market picked out. And as they are literally telling you this, you can start working on it. Like gone on the days, as you know, we're waiting eight, nine, 12 months, $50,000 to build a software. You can build software in overnight.

You can build software in three hours. So I think it's important that people understand that like you can do this starting today. You can curate the problem, the person you want to help, start having those conversations and starting off with, which I hearing from you is conversation one is, hey, can I pick your brain? Yep. Yeah. And that's the easiest way.

And if you do get to the end of the customer funnel and you get the get some money from them, the next thing is what features do I need to build to get you to refer me to three of your friends? The ask for the referral never ends. Because if you think about to my, think back, if I think back to my carb experience, we went zero to a million in AR. are in three months selling $500 a month deals. It's a lot.

I mean, it's not a crazy amount, but it's still, it's good volume. It was a lot and it was fast. And there's no way we generated that number of meetings. Like, we had a very high close rate. And so, and like I'm saying this not as like, I'm the greatest salesperson in the world. The product did 95%.

I just showed up and didn't screw it up. Right. That was my role as a salesperson. You could have had an old loaf of bread on these salesmen. calls and it still would have closed 80% of the deals. But I think in what you're saying is you didn't have that many calls. A lot of those deals came through networks and a referral networks and asking the question, who else in your network needs this product?

That's one of the biggest actually, I saw a study on that exact thing where there was a, there was a sales team that and there was one guy that was just outselling everybody. And the manager, you know, after a couple months, like, couldn't figure it out. looking at the numbers couldn't figure it out and then started listening to calls and realize the one thing that changed everything that no other sales rep was doing at the end after they said yes he asked that right who else in your network do you know that can also use this double the sales of everybody else on the team with the same amount of bookings yeah i mean that one question you if you don't ask you never know yep and uh candidly i didn't even have to ask that very many times because

I we got to the point where we I would close a customer and like three days later two people would reach out and be like hey Steve just told us about carb they bought and we went in like we were in technically in beta like the whole time and because and it just it exploded with growth um so how many questions how many uh meetings would you say again i think the question is as many as many as can get but like would you say it's three four how many meetings on average are you having with somebody from the moment you say, hey, can I pick your brain to them hoping that you continue to move that meeting forward? Yeah, I mean, let's see. I'm currently doing this with, I'm going very deep with three people right now.

I've been working with off and on with them for six months now where we've basically, I've interviewed, I've got a startup I'm working on called Reply Loop. It's an email tool for residential property managers. I started the process about just over a year and a half ago. doing the customer development. It's an email platform, so it's taken some time to, like, you want to build it stable. You can't just, like, vibe code this.

Like, I could probably code something that would look exactly like our tool very quickly, and it wouldn't work very well. I tried. It didn't work at all. So I'll put that there. But I started the customer development process in, like, this November, December of 2024, we spent all of 2025 interviewing folks.

And then about six months ago, I had three people picked out and I said, okay, these are going to be the three like design partners. And we meet monthly. They give me feedback on all these things. I've probably met with Lance and Sarah and AJ 20 times. Wow.

25 times. Because we want to learn and we're getting deep. And it's there's lots of workflow. There's lots of stuff to learn. And so for these folks, for these first folks, they're getting a very hands on like get to no call and approach. For, you know,

other folks, I've probably done two to three. And we got. to a point where I was like, okay, I think I've learned enough. I would have gotten farther, but the product isn't ready to sell yet. And so I don't want to, I don't want to create too much momentum that I can't capture. Yeah. And so as we get closer, now that we're getting closer, I've started to pick up. And actually, I've been doing a podcast as well. And the folks from the podcast are folks that I've been reaching out to to get them to give me some feedback on

what I'm working on. Yeah, you might have to get, I'll give you some feedback. Yeah, love to. I'm your, uh, your buyer. Well, listen, we're going to leave in the show notes where people can get you. Again, thanks for stopping by. I'm looking forward to seeing how we can do maybe possibly a case study together and get it out to the world for you. For sure. Kevin, thanks for having me all, man. Thank you.