Talk to industry experts and ex-employees

I like to talk to ex-employees and previous founders in my space:

because they’ve spent years thinking about the user problems and what products and solutions to build. So I don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

If they’ve already moved on from the business, then there’s nothing holding them back from telling you all their hard won learnings.

How I would do this:

Go over to LinkedIn and search for people who have previously worked at competitor companies. For me it was: ZoomInfo, Apollo Connectifier.

I found around 3000 people.

I managed to connect with include John Girard, who was the VP of growth, Connectifier.

Trey Swan, an account executive at Connectifier.

Doug Hall, who was the VP of sales at Entelo

Santosh Sharan, COO at Apollo and VP of product at Zoominfo.

Santosh also advised Lusha and LeadIQ and a lot of other competitors in the space.

You can get people’s emails with contact out or any other contact tool.

My outreach email is something like:

Hi John,

I am Rob, an Australian tech entrepreneur (link to my Linkedin). We’re building ContactOut a sourcing tool similar to Connectifier but targeting the Australian and UK markets.

I would greatly appreciate your mentorship and advice on growth and how to do sales for recruitment sourcing tools, and any insights you’ve gained from your experience at Connectifier.

Would you be free for a brief chat?

Happy to send you $200 for your time.

Kind Regards,

Rob Liu

I find that offering money isn’t necessary, but it helps you legitimize your offer and get a higher response rate from people, most people.

Most people don’t even accept it.

I was getting a really high response rate to these mentorship emails about one in four people most people want to help.

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