We were building a price comparison company. I was trying to figure out ways to make money after we were turned down by YC and unsatisfied with 4 months of fundraising. Thought we'd try and sell our price lists to businesses who wanted to be competitive.
I tracked down the biggest in the region, found someone there who had upvoted a couple answers of mine on Quora, pinged him there, and he replied. Said it was interesting, but he had no idea what price comparison was, so forwarded me on to the COO.
I met the COO at Starbucks, we talked for a couple hours. Initially, he said it was a very interesting concept, but he didn't understand how to integrate our information into his product. I said it would be easy to integrate it in his data warehouse. He asked me what that was. I explained, he asked me how much we'd want to build it for them part time. The contract was signed the next day after a 30 second meeting with the CEO, and so we were in the data business.
I didn't get on well with the CEO, in great part because I was still inexperienced at the political side of sales and would say what I thought in emails, particularly about their existing BI efforts. So we parted ways after 6 months, but they had a data warehouse and automated reports by that point, which afaik are still running there under a new team.
To this day it is my only cold pitch conversion. Every other client I ever had came through connections (making me wonder the value of spending time on pitching). Sometimes as random as - I met a guy in a conference I talked at, he invites me to his next government event, he introduces me to his friend who left the civil service for a VC, the VC likes what I'm saying and introduces me to her portfolio companies, one of them signs.
I tracked down the biggest in the region, found someone there who had upvoted a couple answers of mine on Quora, pinged him there, and he replied. Said it was interesting, but he had no idea what price comparison was, so forwarded me on to the COO.
I met the COO at Starbucks, we talked for a couple hours. Initially, he said it was a very interesting concept, but he didn't understand how to integrate our information into his product. I said it would be easy to integrate it in his data warehouse. He asked me what that was. I explained, he asked me how much we'd want to build it for them part time. The contract was signed the next day after a 30 second meeting with the CEO, and so we were in the data business.
I didn't get on well with the CEO, in great part because I was still inexperienced at the political side of sales and would say what I thought in emails, particularly about their existing BI efforts. So we parted ways after 6 months, but they had a data warehouse and automated reports by that point, which afaik are still running there under a new team.
To this day it is my only cold pitch conversion. Every other client I ever had came through connections (making me wonder the value of spending time on pitching). Sometimes as random as - I met a guy in a conference I talked at, he invites me to his next government event, he introduces me to his friend who left the civil service for a VC, the VC likes what I'm saying and introduces me to her portfolio companies, one of them signs.