Sales.co：2人团队靠技术赋能线索服务月入5万美元

Moving back to the farm

I graduated from college and took a sales job with a tech company in Palo Alto. I knew that I wanted to build a company of my own, so I started building software on nights and weekends in 2020. I grew up on a farm, and I liked being able to create and then see what I created. I played with entrepreneurship a bit in college and decided I had the right disposition for it: curious enough to try things and stupid enough not to care about too many of the risks. I quit my sales job and moved back to my family's farm to build the tools that I wished I had as a salesman. One product caught on, Magic SalesBot, the first GPT-powered cold email writer, which got backed by Y Combinator's Calm Fund, and grew into Sales.co, a lead generation service fulfilled with our self-built software.

Building the initial product

I really advocate for starting with services. Most people build products without knowing what outcome businesses actually pay for. When you go service-first, you figure out real pain points and what customers are willing to pay for, then you know exactly what product to build. I worked with a dozen B2B companies to find their common needs, then my partner Jakob and I built the whole infrastructure starting from Airtable with Python and JavaScript automations, gradually replacing all manual work with code. Our stack is Python, Node.js, Next.js, with a simple HTML website, MongoDB storing millions of cold email records, and 100% self-built cold email infrastructure.

Productized service model

We run on a monthly subscription model, with monthly fees ranging from $3000 to $30000, all paid via credit card month-to-month with no long-term contracts. Customers only pay $1 to start, and we onboard them in a week before formal billing. This not only lowers customer decision risk, but also keeps our cash flow very healthy.

Growth via dogfooding

Our core growth channel is cold email. As a cold email service provider, we can send thousands of high-quality emails per day, and test any new idea on the market very quickly. We also tried other channels: paid ads work but leads are low quality, agency partnerships also have low lead quality. We had some success with programmatic SEO early on, and are now focusing on long-term SEO strategy.

Startup advice

I want to emphasize again: start as a service, and build your software around the service needs. If I had to start over, I would start directly from services, without building the pure SaaS product Magic SalesBot first. This experience made me realize I'm not fit for the pure indie SaaS path, and found my perfect niche that matches my natural sales talent.

What's next

Our next goal is to scale the business, use the cash flow generated from operations to acquire other software companies, and create more value with our technical capabilities. You can visit Sales.co, CommunityMentions.com, JakobGreenfeld.com and RpDoyle.com for more information.