How John Kim Won His Startup Its First 100 Customers

Paraform was little more than an idea when co-founder John Kim found the playbook that would secure his company’s first 100 customers.

And, subsequently, their seed round of funding.

“This is a controversial take, but it was this idea that B2B outbound is ultimately a numbers game,” said John, “Because the highest intent will always be timing, this became our inspiration.”

But to execute meant investing in the prospecting later to target and engage the right prospects at scale with higher deliverability.

Here’s how Paraform secured its first 100 customers using Apollo.

Put yourself in the mind of a consumer

Paraform is a marketplace that connects startups and enterprises with open roles and recruiters that can fill them, helping companies find and hire the best and brightest talent.

They are inventing a completely new way of hiring.

But — no matter how great your product or service is — bringing it to market presents a unique set of challenges.

“It kind of hurt my head,” says John, “There are so many variables to outbound. What actually works?”

He started with an important, often overlooked, question: What messaging works on me?

“When I reply to emails, it’s not usually because the copy is stellar or because they reference my high school or something,” says John, “I respond to emails when the timing is right — when I need that product right then.”

Successful outbound is about mastering timing. And timely outbound is a result of two things: 

• Intent-based prospecting lists
• And perfecting deliverability so you can reach out at a high volume

Every email spot needs to reflect your ICP

Building lists that reflected their ICP was priority number one. 

“We knew exactly what we shouldn’t do is hit up someone who wasn't hiring. That’s just wasting an email spot.”

They used Apollo to filter against the attributes that were most important to them in a customer: mid- to enterprise-level, recently-funded accounts with open headcount and new job postings.

“Tools like Apollo make it easy. You can see if someone is hiring, see buying intent, there are awesome filters where you can find, for example, a high-intent head of talent that started their job within the last 6 months.”

With fresh lists of leads, they took it a step further and built custom Python scripts to further clean and enrich their target contacts.

But that was only half the battle.

How to set up your inbox for maximum deliverability

As email service providers continue to crack down on spam regulations, a “spray and pray” approach to outbound simply — doesn’t work. It not only lacks personalization, it puts your new domain at risk and heightens your chances of getting blocked.

“As an early-stage startup, we didn’t want to get banned while we refined our volume strategy,” says John.

So, John bought additional domains (through domain purchasing site, GoDaddy), e.g. getparaform.com and useparaform.com, and started many new inboxes.

To properly warm up their email addresses, they started simple: 40 emails/day per inbox (far less than Google Suite’s hard limit of 400 emails/hour and 2,000 emails/day).

Then, they customized their sending schedules, ensuring that emails didn’t go out any sooner than 7 minutes apart. 

They saw more emails being successfully delivered into inboxes, without negative impacts on their domain, and it resulted in open rates skyrocketing to 83%. 

Download Apollo’s free deliverability checklist for a step-by-step walkthrough of setting up your inboxes.

Automated sequences that convert

For startups, it’s a massive leap going from reaching out to your network and connections to completely cold prospects.

“We got complacent with this idea that the sales motion is easy and short but that runs out pretty quickly,” says John, “I thought it was ok to manually email and didn’t realize the importance of an email sequencing tool like Apollo.”

With their mailboxes synced, they queued up their leads into two different automated campaigns built around three email touchpoints with a basic formula:

Email #1: Sharing their main value proposition with A/B testing

Email #2: A quick “Hey just following up and making sure you got my note”

Email #3: Asking simply “Is this the right time? If not, let me know”

They found that 90% of their responses were coming from their simple, informal follow-up format, particularly on the third email.

“The highest decision makers all send and read very informal emails,” says John, “There are so many emails - even if you just want them to read your email, you need to follow up and keep it simple.”

To get them to read your email, you also need a killer subject line.

Their top performer? “Brex’s competitive advantage”

“We knew our buyers knew of Brex and thought they would want to know their story and how they found success doing something similar to what we do,” says John, “To write a good subject line you really want to think about what topics your audience is interested in.”

It triggered a fear of missing out and a genuine curiosity to learn how a top player found success, prompting clicks — lots of them.

Paraform’s best sequences were notching 80% open rates.

They started booking cold meetings in less time, a significant sign for John that his product was something that people wanted.

With the right leads and thoughtful deliverability practices at play, their sequences resulted in a 5% conversion rate to new customers.

Fun fact: Paraform got their angel investor’s via cold email, too! Including a response from none other than Andre Iguodala 👀

A better way to take your product to market

There are dozens of avenues and strategies to successfully bring your product to market. But in today’s competitive market, investing in the prospecting layer and impeccable email deliverability — with the right tools — is the baseline for success.

Try Apollo for free today and instantly gain access to 275M+ contacts and the engagement suite you need to build pipeline.

Hungry for more founder and VC content? Check out Michael Siebel’s tips for taking your biz from $0 to $10M in ARR.