Outbound for founders doing their own selling
Founders doing their own sales should prospect from the conversations their buyers are already having, not from cold lists. Sluice lets you describe your buyer once, point it at posts, competitor reviews or listings, and get a ranked list of people scored 0 to 100, with drafted first messages you approve. Starter costs $9 a month.
The founder's version of sales
You are not a sales team. You have a product that half works, maybe a few users, and perhaps five hours a week to find more. What you need from prospecting is different from what a sales team needs:
- Learning, not just leads. Every conversation should teach you something about the problem.
- Tiny, predictable spend. You cannot sign an annual contract for a contact database.
- Messages that sound like you, because a founder writing personally is your one unfair advantage.
A five-step weekly routine
- Monday, 15 minutes. Re-read your customer profile. Did last week's conversations change who you think the buyer is? Edit it.
- Monday, 15 minutes. Check signal performance. Each phrase shows searches opened, people found and how many scored 70 or more. Switch off the dead ones, add one new one.
- Tuesday, 30 minutes. Read the ranked list. Open the link back to where each person was found. Pick the five you would most like to talk to.
- Tuesday, 30 minutes. Review the drafted first messages for those five. Rewrite freely; your own draft is scored too.
- Friday, 15 minutes. Note who replied and what they said. Feed that into Monday.
That is under two hours. The searching happens in between, either when you click run or, on the Working plan, through Autopilot on a schedule.
Which sources suit an early-stage founder?
It depends on what you have built. Pick the one place your buyers are most likely to complain in public:
| If you are building | Look first at | Example |
|---|---|---|
| A replacement for an established tool | Competitor reviewers on G2, Capterra or Trustpilot | Two- and three-star reviewers of the incumbent |
| A tool for a profession | Reddit and LinkedIn signals | Threads where people ask how others handle the problem |
| Something for local firms | Local listings by trade and town | Clinics with no online booking |
| A product for a specific role | The directory by title and company size | Heads of operations at 20 to 100 person firms |
Signal phrases founders could try
Phrases need at least three words. They work best when they describe a frustration rather than a product category:
- "is there a tool"
- "we still use spreadsheets"
- "how do you handle"
- "cancelled our subscription to"
The first one is noisy but often finds early adopters. Let the record tell you whether it is worth keeping.
The first month in numbers
A worked example only. Say you start on Starter at $9 a month, which includes 900 credits (a credit is one cent). Lookups cost supplier cost plus 60%.
- One competitor's review page and two signals on Reddit. Each pass shows its worst-case price before it runs; a single pass enriches 25 people by default. Say you cap the month's runs at 650 credits.
- From the ranked list you want work emails for 20 people who scored 70 or more. Directory reveals are 5 credits each: 100 credits.
- About 150 credits left for a rerun.
If conversations start, move to Working at $39: 5,000 credits in the first month (3,900 after), Autopilot, signal performance and LinkedIn sending. A connected LinkedIn or email account costs $10.80 a month while connected. Nothing is charged for a lookup that comes back with nothing usable.
How a founder's first message should read
Write as the person who built the thing, because you are.
- Open with what they said, in a few words.
- Say you are building something for exactly that and are talking to people who have the problem.
- Ask for their experience, not a demo. "How are you handling it now?" gets more replies than "Can I show you?".
Sluice drafts several versions from the person's own words; if one would not work, the next is steered by why. Our longer guides: outbound for founders and writing a first message from their words.
What it will not do for you
- It will not find product-market fit. If nobody scoring 90 wants to talk, the profile or the product needs work.
- Event signals such as "raised money" are not available yet, so you cannot target recently funded startups directly.
- HubSpot is the only CRM it syncs with; if you track deals in a spreadsheet, you will export.
- It is new, without public reviews yet. Treat the first month as a test.
Pick a plan
Starter at $9 if you want to test one source this week. Working at $39 once outbound is a regular habit and you want Autopilot doing the searching. If you are a SaaS team past the first customers, the SaaS startups page goes further. See pricing.
Questions people ask
- Should founders do outbound sales themselves?
- In the early days, usually yes. The founder learns what buyers actually say, which shapes the product and the pitch. The aim is a small number of real conversations, not volume.
- How much should an early-stage founder spend on lead generation tools?
- As little as gets you conversations. Starter is $9 a month with 900 credits; you can see a run's worst-case price before it starts and stop if the leads are wrong.
- What if I do not know my ideal customer yet?
- Write your best guess as a customer profile, run it on two sources, and read why people scored high or low. The scoring reasons are a quick way to sharpen a guess.
- Will Sluice send messages from my LinkedIn automatically?
- No. It drafts, scores and queues messages; it sends only through accounts you connect and only messages you approve. Connecting LinkedIn to send is on the Working plan.
Try it on your own market
Sluice quotes the worst-case price before anything runs and charges only for lookups that found something, so finding out costs close to nothing.
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