No revenue for 6 months, then signed $10k MRR in 2 weeks with a new strategy. Here’s what I changed.

This is my first company so I made A LOT of mistakes when starting out. I'll explain everything I did that worked so you don't have to waste your time either.

For context, I built a SaaS tool that helps companies scale their new client outreach 10x (at human quality with AI) so they can secure more sales meetings.

Pricing

I started out pricing it way too low (1/10 as much as competitors) so that it'd be easier to get customers in the beginning. This is a HUGE mistake and wasted me a bunch of time. First, this low pricing meant that I was unable to pay for the tools I needed to make sure my product could be great. I was forced to use low-quality databases, AI models, sending infrastructure -- you name it. Second, my customers were less invested in the product, and I received less input from them to make the product better.

None ended up converting from my free trial because my product sucked, and I couldn't even get good feedback from them.

I decided to price my product much higher, which allowed me to use best-in class tools to make my product actually work well.

Outreach Approach

The only issue is that it's a lot harder to get people to pay $500/month than $50/month.

I watched every single video on the internet about cold email for getting B2B clients and built up an outbound MACHINE for sending thousands of emails a day.

I tried all the top recommended sales email formats and tricks (intro, painpoint, testimonial, CTA, etc).

Nothing. I could send 1k emails and get a few out of office responses and a handful of 'F off' responses. I felt bad and decided I couldn't just spam the entire world and expect to make any progress.

I decided I needed to take a step back and learn from people who'd succeeded before in sales.

I started manually emailing CEOs/founders that fit my customer profile with personal messages asking for feedback on my product -- not even trying to sell them anything. Suddenly I was getting 4-6 meetings a day and just trying to learn from them (turns out people love helping others). And without even prompting, many of them said 'hey, I actually could use this for my own sales' and asked how they could start trying it out.

That week I signed 5 clients between $500-$4k/month (depending how many contacts they want to reach).

I then taught my product to do outreach the same way I did that worked (include company signals, make sure the person is a great match with web research, and DONT TALK SALESY).

Now, 6 of my first 10 clients (still figuring out who it works for, lol) have converted from the free trial and successfully used it to book sales meetings.

I'm definitely still learning, but this one change in my sales approach changed everything for me, so I wanted to share. If anyone has any other tips/advice that changed their business's sales, would love to hear!