Growth Hacks from a YC Founder hitting $10k MRR in 30 days

Finn Mallery, the founder of Origami Agents, delivers a must-read post packed with actionable insights for startups looking to supercharge their growth. If you're aiming to build meaningful Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and scale effectively, this practical guide will arm you with the tools to get there.

From nailing your product-market fit to streamlining your onboarding process, Finn breaks it down into clear, actionable steps that any startup—no matter the stage—can implement today. Don’t just dream about scaling; take charge with these proven strategies.

Have a read, take notes, and start executing to see your MRR grow. Your future self will thank you!

STEP 1: Creating a customer profile

STEP 2: Build your list

STEP 3: Writing a killer email

STEP 4: The call

STEP 5: How to close

STEP 6: After

Final Thought

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Now that we’re done with YC, we're going to be revealing all of the growth hacks we used:

Here’s a full guide (step by step) for how we used a single channel to go from 0 -> $10k MRR in our first 30 days.

We spent less than $100 and didn’t have any paid ads, SEO, waitlist, or content marketing.

The only channel we used was cold email.

We sent 50-75 highly targeted cold emails a day, and this was more than enough.

Cold email is the most underrated channel because it's hard to get right, but if you figure it out you can build and sell ANY B2B product.

Here's what we did from start to finish:

STEP 1: Creating a customer profile

First, you need to figure out who you're selling to. If you do this right, you can mess everything else up and still succeed.

To do this, we started by creating an ideal customer profile. It's okay if this is completely wrong, most startups have changing targets.

It just needs to be good enough to eventually iterate to get to the people with the biggest pain point in the next weeks.

For us, we wrote out this exact profile, first at the company level. Then, person level. This is where the magic happens. The more specific you can be about your dream customer (even if wrong initially) the better.

Here is who we wanted to target on day 1:

Company Size:

-5-10 employees

(has a sales budget + process, small enough to try our MVP)

Industry:

-B2B software

Type:

-US based

-sales-led motion (no public product), 

-selling large contracts ($100k+ ACV), 

-sales driven by cold outbound

-recently founded and high growth

Persona:

-Founder

The goal here is to create such a perfect customer, that if they heard about your solution they would have no choice but to say "tell me more".

Think about everything that would need to be true about the problems the company faces for your product to be the magic fix.

For us, we build AI agents that do sales research. So the best customers for us are those that spend a LOT of time doing research for their outbound sales.

So we'd email them saying "we can give you AI agents that will do all this research for you better than humans"

Even if they don’t trust us yet, the 1% chance we're legit is enough for them to hop on a call to hear more.

STEP 2: BUILD YOUR LIST

After you create this customer profile, get on LinkedIn and find the companies that meet this criteria.

Create as long a list of the key people at each of these companies as you can. Ideally you can find 30-50 to get started.

After this, you can use an email finder like Apollo or anymailfinder to get their email address.

STEP 3: WRITING A KILLER EMAIL

Now, comes the fun part. You need to convince the person you're emailing that you're worth talking to.

If this person is senior enough to make a purchasing decision, they are already receiving literally 100+ cold emails from people like you every day. And they probably ignore 99.9% of them.

So how can you stand out from all these people?

I used to run a cold email agency and we'd send 50k+ emails/month to book b2b sales calls via cold email.

Here are the basic principles of cold email writing that I always use

1. Keep it 5-8 sentences. 70%+ of emails are read on mobile, so make sure they can get most of it from that screen view.

2. Never write more than 2 sentences without breaking up the lines. People skim, and that’s the best way to keep their attention

3. DO NOT talk about your product’s features. Founders talk too much about what they’re building, and not enough about how it can help the customer. Like I said before, you’re the 500th email in their inbox that day and they do not care. If you must, at most a reference to “we do X”

4. Instead, talk about the person, their company, and their pain points. People care about themselves and their own problems. Your product solves a problem, talk about that problem and twist the knife in it to get them interested.

5. Call to action: If your cold email is working well, you can go straight for the ‘let’s hop on a call’ in the first email. If you’re struggling to get replies though, it’s much easier to get people to answer by having a less strong CTA. 

For example “Can I send you my thoughts on how you can solve this problem” or “cool if I send a personalized loom on how you could do X?” or “got an awesome outbound growth strategy, lmk if that would be of interest”

Above all, the most important thing I learned is BE DIRECT.

There are many ways to 'trick someone' into getting on a call with you. This is a waste of both your time, you only want people that may actually buy your product.

When we applied these principles, we got up to a 4.7% response rate, which is considered great in cold email.

That still means 19 of 20 of our custom, well tested emails directly to our ICP were never responded to.

So don't be discouraged, even if you do this perfectly you may need to send 50/day for a few days before you see a single reply.

STEP 4: THE CALL

Okay, you've convinced a decision maker to agree to get on a call with you, now what?

I've taken 493 sales calls since we launched Origami Agents 3 months ago. Here's what I've learned:

The 2 biggest goals for this call are

1. Figuring out the customer’s problems

2. Getting the customer excited about your solution

Unless you already have PMF, it doesn't matter if you have a full built product/demo. You still need to spend 90%+ of your time figuring out what the customer actually needs.

You have literally 0 idea what problems are top of mind for this person, even if you think you do.

So, you can open the call up by briefly talking about your solution. But transition the conversation to asking them questions.

Your biggest goal is to HELP the customer, so you need to figure out what part of your solution caught their attention.

The good news is that they already took time out their busy day to hop on a call with a random person, so there is a good chance they already want some version of your product.

Your job is to figure out what version that is, and how your product can be most helpful to them.

Once you've gathered enough information through targeted questions, walk them through exactly how your product solves their problems and what outcomes they’ll get by using it.

You can use a demo here, but you don't need one. We typically only do a demo on the second call after we know exactly how we can make it amazing for the customer.

STEP 5: HOW TO CLOSE

At the end of the call ask them: “if we could deliver [solution to your problem], would you be willing to pay X for it?”

If they respond positively, schedule a follow up call. Tell them you'll show them a full demo of how you can help them. If you already showed a demo on this call, then you can ask directly what else they need to see to be confident in the sale.

Once you've addressed their remaining questions and concerns, you're ready to close the deal. At this point, many customers will naturally move toward a decision, especially if you've effectively demonstrated your value throughout the process.

In the early stages, you can even offer a full refund if they aren’t satisfied to give them maximum confidence and get your first few deals over the line.

STEP 6: AFTER

Congrats! You've closed your first customer. The next 10 will be much easier.

You've sent hundreds of emails and narrowed down on the person you were able to help most. Now, you can iterate on who you target, your email messaging, and sales pitch to cater to this demographic.

You should keep adjusting this with every positive email response, call, and sale. This is your iteration loop to keep getting better.

And, more importantly:

You cracked cold email.

There's a reason we don't use other cold outbound channels. If you can figure out cold email you win.

It costs $0, you can now get your message read by literally whoever you want in the world, whenever you want, and you have unlimited scale.

Even though we now get many inbound sales calls, I personally still send 10-20 personalized cold emails a day to senior RevOps at larger companies, and it's 100% paid off.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This was the exact approach we used at Origami Agents to get our first $10k MRR, and the highest converting outbound approach I’ve seen when I ran my agency.

I posted the stats in a prev tweet, but in our first 40 days we sent 3119 emails (~77 per day) and got a 5.3% response rate, resulting in demos with 64 founders at companies within our ICP.

This resulted in ~$22k new MRR by the time our sales for all of these calls had closed.

The best part is that once you nail this process, you can automate it. We've got our agents running this 24/7, which frees us up to explore new channels and focus on scaling.

If you can crack cold email, everything else in your startup becomes 10x easier.

We’re now at $50k+ MRR 3 months in, and everything we’ve done was built off this initial process.

If you made it this far, I'm going to keep posting about the best growth hacks we've used to scale with detailed breakdowns of exactly how we execute them.

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This post was originally published by Finn Mallery on X

https://x.com/fin465/status/1876038438698520743

Check out Origami agents: https://www.origamiagents.com/

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