Day 20: Our first customer call
Day 20 of 30. Today we talk to a real potential customer.
Day 20 of 30. Today we talk to a real potential customer.
Our first contact, a CTO at a SaaS startup, responded to our cold email. They’re frustrated with their self-hosted Puppeteer setup. We scheduled a 30-minute call.
This is our first real sales conversation. Let’s see what we learn.
Preparing for the call
We prepared by:
- Researching their product - Social media management tool. They generate link previews and social cards.
- Listing questions - What’s painful about their current setup? How much time do they spend on it? What would success look like?
- Knowing our limits - What can’t we do? What would make us say “we’re not the right fit”?
We also reviewed The Mom Test: don’t pitch, ask questions, listen.
Interactive call timeline
See how the conversation unfolded:
- Tell me about your product
- What's your role/background?
- How did you find us?
The call
First 5 minutes: rapport building
We started with small talk followed with some genuine questions about their product, our backgrounds. They have been in startups for 10 years, previously at a larger company. The CTO is practical and obviously time-constrained.
Minutes 5-15: their problem
Us: “You mentioned your Puppeteer setup has been painful. What’s been happening?”
They: “We’ve self-hosted about two years ago. It worked at first, but as we scaled, things started breaking. Memory leaks crash the server every few weeks. Some sites timeout randomly. We’ve spent probably 40 hours this quarter just maintaining it.”
Us: “What’s the impact when it breaks?”
They: “Users see broken preview images. We get support tickets. It looks unprofessional. And it pulls engineers off feature work to fix infrastructure.”
Minutes 15-25: exploring the solution
Us: “When you looked at alternatives, what did you find?”
They: “We tried [Competitor X] briefly. Worked fine but got expensive fast. We generate maybe 50,000 previews a month. At their pricing that’s $200+/month. This is just hard to justify for a feature that’s not core.”
Us: “What would make a service worth paying for?”
They: “Reliability, mainly. I don’t want to think about screenshots. Ever. They should just work. And it should be reasonable pricing. We’re not making money directly from previews.”
Last 5 minutes: our pitch (finally)
Us: “That’s exactly why we built this. Reliability-first combined with simple pricing. For 50.000 screenshots you’d be on our Scale plan at $99/month - half what you were quoted elsewhere. And we handle all the browser headaches.”
They: “That’s interesting. What’s your uptime been?”
Us: “We’re new, so I’ll be honest - we don’t have months of uptime data. But our architecture is simple and we’re monitoring aggressively. We’d love to have you as an early customer and we’ll bend over backwards to make it work.”
They: “I appreciate the honesty. Let me talk to my team and run a pilot. Can you handle 50K/month?”
Us: “Yes, absolutely.”
After the call
We sent a follow-up email within an hour:
Hi,
Great talking today. Summary of what we discussed:
- Your current Puppeteer setup is eating engineering time
- You need reliability and reasonable pricing (~$99/month for 50K screenshots)
- You’ll run a pilot before committing
I’ve created a test account for your team with 5,000 free screenshots to try it out: [link]
Happy to jump on a quick call with your engineers if they have technical questions.
Looking forward to your feedback!
Erik
Immediate, concrete and helpful.
What we learned
Pain is real. “40 hours this quarter on maintenance” - that’s real money, and time which could have been spent better on their core activities. If we can eliminate those 40 hours, we’re valuable.
Price sensitivity exists. $200/month was too much, $99/month is “interesting.” Our pricing might be right, though we also have more affordable solutions which might be right for them.
Trust is the barrier. We’re new, and we have no track record yet. They are taking a risk on us. We need to reduce that risk.
Early customers want attention. “Bend over backwards” resonated. Big companies can’t offer that. We’re very flexible, and we can.
Our first potential paying customer
They aren’t paying yet, but they are seriously evaluating. Let’s not assume that every prospect will lead to a sale, but if the pilot goes well, they’ll convert.
Also, even if they don’t, we learned more in a 30 minutes phone call than in two days of building. This is how we will build the right product.
Things we need to fix
From the conversation:
- Uptime page - They asked about reliability. We should have a status page.
- Better error messages - If their pilot hits issues, they need to understand why.
- Volume capacity - Can we actually handle 50K screenshots/month? Let’s verify.
Tomorrow: performance at scale
Day 21 we stress-test our system. Can we handle 50K screenshots? What breaks first? Time to find out!
Book of the day
SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
Classic sales book based on research into what makes sales conversations successful. SPIN stands for: Situation questions, Problem questions, Implication questions, Need-payoff questions.
Today’s call followed this naturally. We asked about their situation (self-hosted Puppeteer), their problem (maintenance burden), the implications (40 hours lost, support tickets), and what they need (reliability, fair pricing).
The book is older but the framework is timeless. Worth reading if you’re doing any kind of B2B sales.