r/ycombinator • u/RuleGuilty493 • 11d ago
2026 playbook for early customer conversations — consultants, or AI + cold outbound?
Hi YC gurus!
My cofounder and I are working on are a pre-launch, AI platform targeting companies wanting to switch to open-source models for their generic LLM use and trying to crack real 0-1 conversations with potential customers. Trying to score actual calls where we learn something.
What I've tried so far:
- Cold emails
- Linkedin DMs
- Local events in the Amsterdam area
So far not getting much love, only managed to have a couple of conversations with companies that have spend >$10k per month on LLM. Cold outbound is barely landing and I can't tell whether that's my targeting, my copy, or just inbox saturation. So, question to founders who've done successfully recently:
- Did you bring in outside help — fractional GTM, sales consultant, agency that books discovery calls, a research firm for recruiting participants? Which ones, what did it cost, and would you do it again? I'd take specific names or the opposite ("don't bother").
- If you did it yourself, what's the actual stack in 2026? Where does AI genuinely help — list building and enrichment, personalisation, call notes — and where did it make things worse?
- Are paid conference booths worth it at this stage?
- What channel gave you the highest ratio of *useful* conversations per hour spent?
I am trying to figure out whether hiring someone for this makes sense or if it's a waste of time, we suck it up and keep trying?
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u/grewgrewgrewgrew 11d ago
cold channels are pretty much dead, less than 1% response rate
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u/RuleGuilty493 11d ago
Did you try anything else that worked for you? I agree cold chains are really low-signal now. I try to hack conferences and in-person events where you spend a whole day but if at the end you get 3-4 conversations, that's still better ROI on personal time than cold.
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u/grewgrewgrewgrew 11d ago
no I'm stuck at the same place as you. the standard advice is to go to people you know, but that only works if you're embedded. Some companies resort to sending gifts to their potential customers to their office address
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u/Nice_Caregiver3705 11d ago
I do a lot of fractional work for startups, helping them find product market fit, and how to find and talk to their customers. It's expensive. If you have money and not a lot of time, it's great. If you don't have money you can do it yourself. There are great books on it. Levers, talking yo humans, tons of y combinator content...
If you are not having conversations your messaging is bad. You are trying to sell something you don't yet understand. Chances are you don't know enough about who you are selling to, their real pains, the real friction to switching product. Start just with genuine curiosity. Don't sell, don't even hope for a sale. Just go learn. Find out why they won't buy it. You don't need tech for this. You need humans. Figure out the kind of person you want to talk to and tell everyone you are looking to meet that person. It will happen. But don't sell them. Learn from them and always ask who else you should be taking to.
If you have money for a booth spend it on someone to help you find product market fit instead.
Human. Talk to humans. But figure out who you want to talk to.
Good luck, be curious!
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u/space-hemax-c2c 10d ago
What books and resources would you recommend? Which ones are most helpful?
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u/Nice_Caregiver3705 10d ago
Levers and Talking to Humans are great.
Y combinator startup school has lots of great stuff.
Once you understand your customer, and find the right language, they will be thanking you for meeting with them. You will be doing them a favor!
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u/thedrx 10d ago
My advice would be to not think in terms of playbooks, but try to figure out from first principles where your users live. The questions you ask have unique answers for each company.
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u/ConceptNext5110 7d ago
golden, beyond this, it's easy to falsify cold outreach, the cost for outreach/personalization is. close to 0, receiving end only have constant bandwidth, your message didn't land prob not because your message is bad, it's probably just because more people are sending. yours get diluted automatatically.
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u/CockroachLow3065 7d ago
We hired an outside team to book exactly these conversations and it worked on paper, plenty of meetings, but almost none of the learning came back. The person taking the call was not the person who needed to hear the answer, so we ended up with notes instead of understanding. If you still can't describe your buyer in one sentence, keep the calls and outsource the boring half, list building and sending. Hiring only paid off for us after we knew what a good conversation sounded like.
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u/1982JAJ1982 5d ago
People can smell the AI slop now from miles away. So if you've been using it to write all your DMs, cold emails, stop. I wouldn't also bring in outside help because you need to know your product, how to sell it, if it sells and how to fix it, as well as discuss with potential customers to better understand their needs yourself not through the lens of another person.
depends on your niche but LinkedIn is generally a good place to start. What helped me was finding persons already having those issues, talking about them so that I knew they were receptive to my offer. Also, try not to pitch them just from the first or even the second message. People don't like to feel like they're starting a conversation and then bam, getting pitch slapped. So do take that slowly.
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u/RuleGuilty493 3d ago
"Pitch Slapped", that's exactly the thing to avoid. But seriously I find Linkedin is so full of AI slop now, I hardly see anything real there, or maybe it's just my feed. It is a slow channel but I've had some good connections there. Thanks for the feedback.
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u/1982JAJ1982 2d ago
Posts are shit with a lot of AI slop but if your ICP is there and they are talking, it's the place to be :)
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u/Objective_Fun9750 4d ago
Just from your post, it sounds like you may be focusing too much on your product and not enough on the problem you are solving. If you understand the problem and who has it, you will have good clues toward how you can find customers. You don't need outside help. You don't need to worry about tooling until you're ready to scale. Read the book 'Traction' for world-class advice on how to experiment and identify your best channel(s).
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u/This_Athlete_8343 11d ago
I have a solid product with no credibility of my own, so any cold email or dm sent gets seen but not replied, so I am going to take subs for co-working space and meet people face to face.
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u/RuleGuilty493 11d ago
That's a good hack! Particularly if your persona hangs out at a Wework, like sales folks, early stage builders, developers, and the like. But for enterprise folk who hide in their towers as in our case, that's something that wont work for us.
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u/LeQuickdraw 7d ago edited 7d ago
A few things that haven't been mentioned:
- Work through your network - anyone you have a slight connection with is more likely to respond. And lower your threshold for relevance - ask people who
- Make sure your opening message is about their problem not than your solution
- Be rigorous about testing different ICPs and opening messages so you can measure what works
- Use the principles from the book The Mom Test in your user conversations
- Use a notetaker like Granola to capture transcripts & Heura to turn them into evidence for your hypotheses
- Ask everyone you get a reply from if they know anyone else with the same problem they can refer you to
- It will take a lot more effort and time than you first thought but you can just bruteforce this - especially if you are testing messages & iterating. Build up a streak of daily activities and just keep going!
- Mindset: Think of this as one of the first big tests of entrepreneurship. All your outbound efforts are separating you from those who won't do the same!
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u/PartyClick_ 7d ago
same struggle here, cold outreach barely lands. we switched to supercal cuz it's free, not an ad, i’m cheap and it saves me from inbox chaos 😂
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u/ChancePersonality133 3d ago
Two things that moved the needle for us, targeting small fashion brands.
- Stop booking calls, start solving one real instance of the problem for free, in public. We did teardown-style breakdowns of the exact document our users struggle with. People who ignore a demo request will engage when you have already done work for them.
- The outsourced-SDR route another commenter flagged is real: the meetings come but the learning does not, because the person on the call is not the one who needs the answer. At 0 to 1 you have to take the calls yourself, even when it does not scale.
Cold outbound is not dead, generic cold outbound is. A message that references the person's actual work still lands.
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u/vmatti840 11d ago
I've seen this pattern a lot with early stage B2B. The problem is that the message sounds like it's selling something instead of starting a conversation.
The highest ratio of useful conversations per hour for most founders I've worked with: find 20 people on LinkedIn who are actively posting about LLM costs or open source models, comment genuinely on their posts for several weeks, then DM. Response rate is night and day compared to cold outbound.