StartupGTM.com | I help b2b founders hack traction | Profitable founder (YC)

Transforming a startup from early to repeatable sales is HARD.

If you’re a B2B founder with early sales, then you've done many things right to win your first customers.

BUT - to raise a round A, your startup will need to have a product that's ready to scale because it can be 𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙮.

To get repeatable sales - there are four blockers. 
 
You'll need to change each one from "not working" to "working": 
 
1️⃣ Consistently creating a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of conversations with customers 
 
2️⃣ Converting these conversations into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of first meetings 
 
3️⃣ Converting these meetings into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of trials 
 
4️⃣ Converting trials into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of deals. 
 
These blockers need to be removed 𝙨𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 - i.e. one by one. 
 
💡 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗡𝗢𝗪. 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀.

—

I'm a former co-founder and CEO at ApolloShield - a profitable YC startup.

I work hands-on with B2B founders on turning their early sales into repeatable sales through a combination of disciplines:

1️⃣ 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: Understanding the market, identifying target customers, and analyzing competitors.

2️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴: Defining how the product fits into the market and crafting compelling messages to appeal to the target audience.

3️⃣ 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀: Developing strategies for selling the product, including choosing sales channels and partnerships.

4️⃣ 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵, 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Creating and executing campaigns to build brand awareness and generate leads.

5️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀: Managing discovery and commercial discussions with clients and partners to get their business.

5️⃣ 𝗢𝗻𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸: Gathering customer feedback and continuously adapting the product and strategies accordingly.

6️⃣ 𝗜𝗧 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: Building support systems to holistically orchestrate and manage your GTM efforts.

7️⃣ 𝗥𝗮𝗽𝗶𝗱 𝗜𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Developing a method to move forward quickly, iterate and get market feedback - doubling what works and tossing what doesn’t.

🚀 Let's connect and accelerate your startup together!

Nimo Shkedy

Roman Hipp

Building BetterContact | Helping early-stage B2B SaaS companies with insights & ready-to-use templates

Currently building BetterContact, a B2B SaaS that aggregates various data sources to find and verify any email and mobile phone number.

Growth Co-Founder

I convert 12% of BetterContact free signups into paying customers with a simple message like: 'Hey, saw you tried BetterContact'

But this isn’t really about PLG.

It’s about how we’ve over-engineered outbound into something people instinctively ignore.

A bit of context first:

BetterContact runs mostly self-serve.
People sign up for free, try it out, and some never return.

Initially, I used to reach out with this message:

💬
'Hello [First Name],

Thank you for signing up for BetterContact - we’re excited to have you on board. You can now log in and start using the platform.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Thanks,
Roman'

Reply rates were bad. Around 3%.

And these weren’t random cold leads - they signed up themselves, and played around with the product.

And still… only 3% replied.

So I started thinking:

Maybe it’s not that most people hate those messages.
Maybe they just hate messages that sound automated.

So I stripped everything away and now send something like this:
“Hey, saw you tried BetterContact, is it working like you expected it to?”

That’s it. On average, almost every third person replies.

Outbound isn’t broken. We’ve just optimized it so hard… that we removed the human touch.

Building BetterContact | Helping B2B companies win outbound through more and better contact data

🚨 We just launched multi-source profile enrichment at BetterContact!

It was one of our most requested features, and the reason is quite simple:

If essential data like the job title or the current company is outdated/wrong, the whole lead might not be relevant anymore if he works in a completely different industry/role.

As we have waterfalling/multi-source as part of our DNA, we do not only source from 1 provider, but from multiple, and validate the data through live web crawling.

This includes fresh data like:
- person role data (current company, current job title etc.)
- person skills, education, languages etc.
- company industry
- company technographics
(and many others + more to come)

The best thing: for file uploads inside the app, it’s a new option that comes at no extra cost!

The API is a few days away from being publicly released, and the feedback from beta testers has been great so far (shoot me a quick DM if you want to play around with it)

$2.5M ARR outbound agency founder reached out. They're doing 20.000 cold calls/month, averaging a 56% enrichment rate. I thought 'solid', until we ran the math:

1. Using Apollo & Lusha, they average 56% match rate
2. Their costs average $0.36/enriched number
3. BUT, 32% end up being landline, VoIP, or invalid
4. Their dial to connect rate is 4% 
5. They make 20.000 cold calls/month
6. Turns out, they're wasting ~$2,300/month on invalid numbers

We quickly went from 'solid' (56% match rate, $0.36/number) to 'ouch' (4% connect rate, $9/conversation).

Now it was clear why this founder reached out, so we ran the same sample list through BetterContact and got:

✅ 71% match rate
✅ 2.8x higher connect rates
✅ Only 7% wrong numbers

Redoing the maths, that’s $2.5/conversation, meaning a 75% cost decrease.

PS. We haven’t even factored in the hours his SDRs are burning by dialing dead numbers. At the very least, that's in the mid-/high 4 digits, every month.

If you're doing 1000s of cold calls every month, BetterContact can make a big difference in your cost efficiency + total connects, and we should probably talk!

More than happy to do a free data test for everyone unhappy with their mobile phone data provider.

8 weeks ago, we launched the first Waterfall Lead Finder - and immediately realized building the best one in the market is way harder than we initially thought.

Here’s what’s working - and what still needs *serious* improvement:

(+) 9/10 times we hear: “we found x% more AND fresher contacts with you vs. what we currently use”

(+) We got highly-requested filters such as max. people/company, skills, and keywords to finally work

(+) Some competitors suddenly also launched a waterfall lead finder now

(+) We did a complete UI overhaul that people seem to really like

(+) We launched an API which is currently being implemented in some of the biggest GTM platforms

But building a best-in-class lead finder is hard - we are currently struggling with things we didn’t expect were *that* hard to get right: 

(-) Job title matching → identifying real synonyms (e.g. that “Managing Director” in the UK usually equals “CEO” in the US - but not “Director” in the US), which gets tricky fast across countries and languages.

(-) Industry standardization → deciding how broad is too broad (e.g. if someone types “Finance”, should we expand it to “FinTech”, “Private Equity”, “Asset Management" etc., or keep it narrow and risk them missing half their market?)

(-) Some filters are hard to implement, such as headcount growth/leads per department etc. (though we’re making good progress there)

(-) Determining someone’s main, decision-making role — instead of surfacing a side project or secondary title first

There is still a lot of work to be done, so more than keen on every additional feedback!

I just had an eye-opening feedback call with a RevOps manager at a Series A company who used BetterContact for inbound leads. He was genuinely excited, but *not* for the reason I typically hear.

Before joining our call, I assumed it would be the usual:
“you found more mobile numbers”
“connect rates went up”
“data quality improved”

Instead, he said the biggest impact of using us was their speed-to-lead improvement.

They’re now calling inbound leads immediately again.

Why this matters:

There’s well-known sales research showing that contacting inbound leads within the first ~60 seconds massively increases the likelihood of converting them (some studies say 3-5x).

However, they stopped calling inbound leads altogether before.

With their previous data provider, phone numbers were often wrong.

So reps tried calling → didn't connect → lost confidence → defaulted to email-only follow-ups.

The issue with email outreach is that their speed-to-lead got significantly worse.

After running an extensive pilot with our numbers, they were confident again to pick up the phone.

Results we got so far: +41% more inbound leads closed compared to their old email-only workflow.

Months ago, an AE from Hubspot asked me “How can BetterContact
improve my current contact data enrichments?” I’ve been getting the same question in my inbox ever since, so here is my most detailed answer:

(1) 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡
		
We don’t pull our data from 1 big database, but are connected to all the relevant providers on the market via API.

The reason why we launched waterfall enrichment years ago was that databases are complementary - database A has data that database B doesn’t, and vice versa.

Aggregation isn’t just about finding more data, it’s about selecting the best data point available on the market right now.

(2) 𝐖𝐡𝐲 “𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐢𝐬 100% 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐝” 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐦𝐲𝐭𝐡

“Our database only has valid data” is probably the biggest hoax in the data industry.

Based on millions of enrichments so far, 27% of the data we receive from providers is actually invalid & unusable.	

How do we do it?

Just like with data providers, we aggregate multiple real-time validation layers in-between our providers.

(3) 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞 (𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭)
	
We only use external validation layers that are specialized on deep verification, and only do that.

It’s common for one provider to return a number we deem invalid, while another sends the exact same number again.

Sometimes, we need to request 4+ providers to finally get to a valid output (and yes, even with that method it's never 100% valid)

However, we only charge IF a valid number has been found - and only once, no matter how many tries it took to get there.

(4) 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤-𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬

Many data providers (especially the legacy ones), require large upfront investments for (multi-)yearly subscriptions.

Once in, it’s often hard to get out, because cancellation processes are tiresome.

We made it possible to test within minutes, start small, and adjust plan sizes at any time.

(5) 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐏𝐈-𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐝𝐝-𝐨𝐧

Legacy providers often don’t offer an API - if they do, it’s either very restrictive, or one needs to buy it as an ‘add-on’ for hefty amounts.

We started buiding API-first, with no add-ons and rate limits that enable every workflow imaginable.

Happy to cover any other point I missed 👇

The last few weeks have been wild since we released our waterfall lead finder at BetterContact. It’s already getting integrated into some of the biggest GTM tools - and users are building some seriously cool plays with it.

Here are a few of them: 

(1) The 60-Second Website Visitor Play

One team identifies anonymous website visitors, pipes the company domain into our API, pulls the Head of Sales, enriches the mobile… and calls within 60 seconds.

They showed me their conversion rates and they are insane.

(2) The “Waterfall on Top of a Waterfall” Play

Another team built a cascade of job searches with our lead finder. 

For example: if no CRO is found, they automatically look for a VP RevOps. If none, a RevOps Manager, and so on.

They don’t accept “no result", but keep going until someone relevant shows up.

(3) The Conference Pre-Booking Play

One team collects attendee company names before a conference, runs the domains through the lead finder, pulls the most likely decision-maker… and emails them before the event.

They don’t even know who’s attending - they make a smart guess and usually get forwarded to the right person.

By day one, meetings are already booked.

Pre-event pipeline > booth roulette.

Would love to hear about more of these! 👇

The most valuable sales training I ever had came from my first job at a call center selling shady Google Ads packages - a lesson that later helped me bootstrap BetterContact to 7-figure ARR as the only salesperson

I just turned 17 that summer, and was quite excited to earn my first money in a ‘real’ job.

My onboarding was kind of straightforward - they put a script on my desk and said:

“Just read this when you call.”

20 seconds into my first call, I realized I was trying to sell an overpriced
Google Ads package built on generic keywords.

What made things even harder was that my calling list was a random mix of all sorts of industries, company sizes, and locations.

I hated my time there (3 months), but looking back, it was a masterclass.

Not in how to do great cold calls.

But in how *not* do them, and:

1. What it feels like to sell something I think is a bad offering
2. How painful it is trying to sell to anyone and everyone
3. How quickly I lose people without a clear and specific value proposition

That job didn’t make me a great seller, but it gave me a clear blueprint of what not to do, which allowed me to reverse-engineer everything.

Fast forward to building BetterContact, and I found myself back on the phone in the early days.

This time, I was selling something I genuinely liked and believed in.

To a very specific persona I understood deeply.

Solving a real, painful problem with an effective solution.

That’s when I realized that selling doesn’t need to feel forced, but can actually be natural.

A *conversation* where the person on the other end actually wants (or even needs) to talk to me.

“It’s safe to say you guys are the reason I’m hitting my quotas” has been one of the nicest messages I got this year.

The guy who sent me this is a sales rep at a big software company.

And they just signed a big contract with a legacy data provider.

But he’s not even really using it, and neither is half his team.

Instead, they’re running their prospects through BetterContact to get better mobile numbers and actually connect.

Hearing things like that genuinely means a lot to me.

Because behind every “connect rate” or “hit rate” metric… there’s a real person trying to hit targets, earn commission, and build a career.

If we can make that even a little easier - that’s all we're looking for.

After talking to over 200+ cold email experts over the last 3 years, I realized that most outbound campaigns fail before the first email is ever sent.

I still remember when I launched my first cold email campaign as a working student:

It went *bad* - some of the things I blamed back then:

→  my emails weren’t ‘personalized enough’
→  my copy was bad and no one wanted to read it
→  our social proof was not strong enough with the case study we put
→  our domains weren’t warmed up properly, so most likely we landed in spam

Today, after building a fast-growing company in that space, I realized it didn’t fail because of execution - it failed because outbound was the wrong growth motion from the start.

Yes, outbound can work - sometimes insanely well - but only if the fundamentals are in place.

Here’s when it actually makes a powerful play:

✅ High ACV (> $10k+)

High ACV deals grant margins for error. They allow to spend more per account, follow up longer, personalize deeper, and still have the economics make sense.

Outbound can also work for lower ACVs (we’re living proof of that), but only if the math checks out.

This is a formula that helps to determine exactly that:
(Emails Sent × Positive Reply Rate × Meeting Rate × Close Rate × ACV) – (Emails Sent × Cost per Email) = Profit

If the cost per meeting still makes sense at the end of that chain - great!

✅ Clearly defined ICP

If your target audience is broad, your message will be diluted.
Because ultimately, outbound rewards precision, and not primarily volume.
The more specific and exclusionary the ICP, the stronger the resonance.

Not the highest volume campaigns win, but those with the best offer & relevancy (having both is of course optimal).

✅ Pain-aware market

Outbound works when you’re speaking to people who already know something isn’t working.

If the pain is obvious to them, then you don’t need a 5-paragraph explanation.

You just need to articulate what they’re already experiencing - better than they can themselves.

If you first have to convince them that the problem exists, your reply rate will show it.

✅ Strong offer & social proof

Outbound is brutally honest.

If your offer is weak, unclear, or “nice to have,” you’ll feel it immediately in the outcome.

Because ultimately, outbound doesn’t fix bad positioning. It magnifies whatever is already there.

If the offer is strong and backed by real proof, there will be (almost) nothing holding it back.

Anything you would add? 👇

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Nimo Shkedy

Roman Hipp

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The Battle

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Roman Hipp

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