David Cummings on Startups

Cold Calling Doesn’t Scale Initially

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David Cummings

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Paul Graham has his latest essay online titled Do Things that Don’t Scale. The idea is that many founders believe that every part of a startup should be scalable and automated right from the beginning. In reality, it’s better to get things going as quickly as possible, even if it’s manual and doesn’t scale.

Early on in Hannon Hill, my first real company, we built a solid product, but had no customers. I knew how to build software while I had no idea how to build a customer acquisition machine. With limited resources, I started a very manual process: cold calling all 4,160 two year and four year colleges / universities in the United States.

To start, I went over to the local Barnes & Noble in Buckhead and bought one of those massive books that listed all the colleges (geared towards high school seniors). Next, I had my brother, who was a student at Emory, post a job opening for a sales intern on the internal Emory website. Finally, I hired two students part-time to call every school, with the goal of scheduling an appointment for me to do a web demo. After much trial and error we developed a process that worked and today Hannon Hill has hundreds of school customers, many from cold calling.

Paul Graham cites cold calling for B2B startups as an example of something not scalable for the founders. While it doesn’t scale for an individual, it does scale for many organizations.

What else? What are your thoughts on doing things that don’t scale, including cold calling?

Comments

4 responses to “Cold Calling Doesn’t Scale Initially”

  1. Himanshu Pagey Avatar
    Himanshu Pagey

    PG’s article, I believe, was not about scale per se, but was about finding product/market fit without the need of scale. He emphasizes treating the very early customers as king by providing great personal service, so that startup is able to fine tune the product to its customer’s need. Such manual approaches in the early stages is especially important for marketplace products, for example AirBnB, to break the chicken and egg cycle.

    Reply
  2. Jeff Avatar
    Jeff

    Cold calling has been a great asset to my business, which is a small local event production company. What I have found is that most of the time, these event planners actually want to sit down and meet to discuss *their* needs(sounds backwards, right?) of my services.

    Now, I will say that I’m not trying to sell my product over the phone and I have a much shorter list of potential clients. All I’m trying to get is a meeting and then I’ll sell my product, similar to your approach with Hannon Hill. If I get the meeting, the call was successful to me.

    Reply
  3. John Avatar
    John

    You hired only one intern the first summer, and he still remembers the first school (and the contact’s name)!

    Reply
    1. David Cummings Avatar
      David Cummings

      Hah! Good memory. That was a great summer…

      I hope everything is going well.

      Reply

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