How to Get Your First SaaS Customers Without a Product (The Customer Development Framework Nobody Teaches)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Vault Unlocked – "How to Get Your First SaaS Customers Without a Product (The Customer Development Framework Nobody Teaches)"

Host: Kayvon Kay
Guest: Colin Stewart (Go-to-market strategy expert, co-creator of Carb, SaaS founder, sales veteran)
Date: May 13, 2026
Podcast: The Vault Unlocked

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Overview

This episode centers on a brutally honest exploration of how SaaS founders can land their first paying customers—before building a product. Colin Stewart, who has succeeded (and failed) on multiple zero-to-one SaaS journeys, unveils the real-world "customer development" framework that helped him break through after months of going nowhere. Together with host Kayvon Kay, Colin walks through hard-won lessons, practical tactics, and subtle psychological shifts overlooked by most accelerators, founders, and playbooks.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Painful Beginning: When Selling Fails

• Colin's Missteps:

  • Built a CRM for 18 months, closed just 1 deal ([01:45])
  • Suffered from "cocky, arrogant mindset" and confusing customer validation with customer development ([03:10], [07:19])
  • Relied on showing his product and seeking affirmation rather than discovering genuine problems

• Memorable quote:

  "If that tool made it to any sort of revenue I would be an unsufferable right now, guaranteed." – Colin Stewart ([02:40])

2. The Turning Point: Humility By Force

• Reality Check:

  • Mentor bluntly tells Colin he's unlikely to succeed with his current approach, prompting self-reflection ([07:19])
  • Realizes he’s asking the wrong questions and ‘grinding’ in the wrong direction

• Memorable quote:

  "You get so worn down, you don't have your good brain to pull back and focus on, like, am I grinding towards the right thing?" – Colin Stewart ([08:16])

3. Shift From "Look At My Cool Thing" to Real Problem Discovery

• Key Insight:
  • Stop pitching prematurely; start by understanding and validating the core pain points
  • Product ideas are often 40% right and 60% wrong—the insight was right, but solution wrong ([10:35])
  • Example: CRM went from personal productivity tool to management tool, alienating the sales users ([10:55])

4. Manual MVP & Wizard of Oz Tactics: Proving There’s Demand

• Wizard of Oz Strategy:

  • Offer to manually solve the target customer’s problem for a fee before you build software ([12:50])
  • Set a clear goal: Find five people willing to pay $500/month for manual service
  • Once money is on the table, it proves urgent demand exists—worth building around

• Memorable moment:

  “Two of those five people bullied me into letting their friend join the beta.” – Colin Stewart ([14:38])

5. Product-Market Fit as a Multiplier

• Product-Market Fit Isn’t Binary:

  • It’s a spectrum; the stronger it is, the easier the go-to-market ([20:03])
  • Uber Eats anecdote: massive volume with same effort due to a powerful offer—“make money and save money” ([20:03])
  • Product-market fit multiplies every go-to-market activity; without it, sales tactics don’t matter as much ([21:44])

• Memorable quote:

  "Product-market fit is a multiplier of all your go to market efforts. Everything. Marketing, sales, whatever, any channel." – Colin Stewart ([21:44])

6. Customer Development Funnel: The Practical Framework

• Don’t Pitch—Interview First:

  • Approach with “Can I pick your brain?” rather than “Here’s my product” ([24:12], [26:40])

  • Move participants through these stages:

    1. Initial interview: Understand problem
    2. Validation interview: Show rough ideas/sketches, get honest feedback
    3. Early prototype: Reveal MVP, ask for prepayments or commitments
    4. Refine via feedback: Ask what would make it 10x better and/or get referrals
    5. Feature building: “What features do I need to build for you to use/refer this?”

  • At each stage, always book the next step and ask for referrals ([27:58])

• Notable insights:

  • “Your list gets better over time—the referral ask self-heals your target market.” ([27:58])

  • Don’t worry if your starting list is weak; referrals lead you to the right customers

  • Memorable quote:

    "At the end of every interview, I ask for the next step and then I ask for a referral." – Colin Stewart ([28:42])

7. Relationship-First Prospecting

• Modern Tactics:

  • Cold email and LinkedIn are saturated; focus on building genuine relationships instead ([24:12])

  • Use podcasts, interviews, or “pick your brain” calls to begin the relationship

  • Each interaction primes the future sale—by the time you do present an idea, they’re eager to see it

  • Memorable quote:

    "If after this podcast you told me you had a tool that's perfect for go-to-market consultants, I'd be like, oh wow, yeah, I'd have a look at that…We met through this podcast—we created the relationship first, then we do business later." – Colin Stewart ([24:12])

8. Referrals: The Unfair Advantage

• Critical Tactic:

  • After every “yes,” ask: “Who else in your network needs this product?” ([34:25])

  • This doubles or triples effectiveness without added marketing spend

  • Referral loops fueled rapid growth at Colin's SaaS companies

  • Memorable quote:

    "If you don't ask, you never know." – Kevin ([34:25])

9. Metrics and Real-world Volume

• Go deep with a small number of “design partners”—20+ meetings over months isn’t uncommon ([35:09])

• For lighter products or simpler sales, sometimes just 2-3 meetings are needed before conversion ([35:09])

• Memorable moment:

  "I'm going very deep with three people right now…I probably met with [them] 20 times, 25 times. Yeah, because we want to learn and we're getting deep..." – Colin Stewart ([35:09])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00]–[04:00]: Colin’s background, early failings, and why he persisted
• [07:19]: Mentor intervention and the humility lesson
• [10:35]–[12:42]: Shift to listening; identifying actual vs. perceived problems
• [12:50]–[16:00]: Wizard of Oz validation—pre-selling before building
• [17:29]–[21:43]: Customer development vs. customer validation; Uber Eats as an example of product-market fit strength
• [24:12]–[28:42]: Relationship-first prospecting; the practical customer interview framework
• [34:25]: Power and mechanics of asking for referrals
• [35:09]: Depth and volume of engagement needed for a true learning loop

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Actionable Takeaways

• Don’t wait to build—start talking to customers now.
• Approach via “Can I pick your brain?” not “Can I sell you something?”
• Iterate through interviews, sketches, prototypes—validate with money, not compliments.
• At every stage, book the next step and always ask for referrals—your customer quality compounds.
• Strong product-market fit turns mediocre tactics into winning strategies (and vice versa).
• Relationship-first approaches outperform cold, transactional ones.
• Use referral feedback loops to explode reach with little incremental effort.

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Notable Quotes

• "Product-market fit is a multiplier of all your go to market efforts." – Colin Stewart ([21:44])

• "Everybody hates to lose. Winning's fun. Temporarily. Losing? Yeah—sucks." – Colin Stewart ([04:38])

• "At the end of every interview, I ask for the next step, and then I ask for a referral." – Colin Stewart ([28:42])

• "You can start with the worst list in the world... the list has a self-healing kind of quality to it." – Colin Stewart ([27:58])

• "You could have had an old loaf of bread on these sales calls, and it still would have closed 80% of the deals." – Colin Stewart ([33:12])

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Where to Learn More

• Colin's Newsletter: foundersedition.co
• Book: "The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers" (terrifyingart.com)
• Slide Deck: Customer Development Funnel (see show notes, Slide 15+)
• Blog Post: Relationship-First Prospecting (link in show notes)

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Closing Thoughts

This episode is a no-BS blueprint for SaaS founders who want to shortcut months (or years) of wasted effort. Colin Stewart’s practical, relationship-driven customer development funnel turns “fail faster” into “succeed much sooner”—with less burn and more learning. If you want your first SaaS dollars before code is written, start interviewing, keep asking for referrals, and let your prospects lead you to real product-market fit.

Listen to the full conversation for deeper context, stories, and tactical details.
Listen like a founder who plans to win.

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Transcript

[Host]

Most founders build for 12, 18 months, then they pitch, then nothing happens. And they spend the next six months trying to figure out why nobody wants what they spent everything building. My guest today went through that 18 months. One customer, zero traction. And what he figured out on the other side became the framework he now uses to take SaaS founders from zero to their first real revenue before the product is even finished. His name is Colin Stewart. He helped build predictable revenue. He has done the zero to one journey more than once. And today he is breaking down the customer development process that most accelerators skip entirely. If you are building something right now, this conversation changes the sequence. Let's unlock it.

[Colin Stewart]

Foreign.

[Kevin]

Welcome to the show today. I'm excited because I know you were behind and worked with the guys with predictable Revenue, which was a phenomenal book I read back in, I think it was 2018. I was handed that book. And today you've taken all the things you learned in that time and you help founders, SaaS companies go from 0 to 1. You are the go to market strategy expert. And in marketing, after we've, you know, going to strad, going to market is all about that. So welcome to the show.

[Colin Stewart]

Thanks man. Appreciate you having me on.

[Kevin]

Welcome for being here. So tell us a little bit about your background so people understand, you know, who you are. Why I can confidently say you're the go to, you know, go to market strategy expert and what people can expect from listening today.

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah, I mean, spent 10 years as a sales guy. I had the opportunity to help two different entrepreneurs start either a company or a division within a company company and got to do like the 0 to 10 to 1 journey a couple of times, which was really fun. And then I always want to start my own thing. And so 14 years ago I thought, hey, I'm that geeky kid who's always been, who's good at sales, who's got pulled into every CRM project. I think I'll build a CRM system and you know, I'm a guy who knows I can close and I probably when I started, I'm probably, I'm definitely a much better salesperson now than I was when I started, but I thought when I started I was very good. Turns out that wasn't necessarily an accurate assessment, but there's a whole other bunch of reasons there. But you know, I went 18 months and I had only closed one deal trying to sell this CRM system. That was like my idea. And that was, that was hard because, you know, you go from like million and a half dollar year, 240% quota, like, all that kind of stuff. Like, you're just used to performing, and then to go from that to zeros, you're like, this feels different. And so, you know, demoralizing, really. Demoralizing. And so, I mean, honestly, it was my, like, startup founder education, you know, if I would have just headed off the. If that tool made it to any sort of revenue, I would be an unsufferable right now, guaranteed.

[Kevin]

Okay.

[Colin Stewart]

It was a humbling experience, I'm pretty sure. And I hate admitting this, but I'm pretty sure I said the words the Steve Jobs of CRM, like, more than once. At least I said it a bunch up here. And it was just the. It gives you an idea of, like, the cocky, arrogant mindset that I had kind of coming into this. And that 18 months of, like, not delivering anything of value really chips away at that, which I think was a valuable experience.

[Kevin]

Yeah, I actually kind of want to talk about that because I know a lot of people starting out go through you. I almost feel like you kind of have to go through that, you know, like, unless you get really lucky, you're going to go through the pain first before you get to the, like, the pleasure. But my question is, why. Why did you stay in it for 18 months if you weren't making. You know, we know in business the first thing to do is, you know, sell, right? Like, no sales, no business. So I'm wondering what. What. What kept you in the game for so long for 18 months? And then when was it when you're like, oh, this is definitely not going to work?

[Colin Stewart]

Insanity, Stubbornness. I refusal to quit. Like, I'm not very good at quitting anything. You know, whether it's, you know, giving up on a. A board game, taking a joke too far, being like, the last guy at the party who's. People like, hey, it's like, morning. You need to. You need to get out of here.

[Kevin]

Like, it's. Yeah, I call it the athlete DNA. And it's one of the biggest factors, which is you hate to lose more than you love to win.

[Colin Stewart]

100. Everybody. Everybody hates to lose. Winning's fun. Temporarily losing. Yeah. Sucks.

[Kevin]

Terrible.

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah. Yeah. 100. And, like, so it was part that and it was part like, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I enjoy sales. I hated selling for somebody else. And, like, just feeling that value creation go to somebody else. It's like, I know I'm good at what I'm doing, and I feel like I'm only capturing a teeny, tiny portion of it and that I didn't enjoy that. I also didn't enjoy that. Like, hey, congrats, like I had one good quarter. I closed a million and a half in a quarter and which was like I've already hit like I'm already 150 or whatever it was or I don't know. I was 100 and something percent of quota for the year in Q1 and by Q3 they were going to fire me. I was like, guys, this is like long sales cycles.

[Kevin]

Yeah.

[Colin Stewart]

I just happened to have everything line up and a deal came in early. Otherwise it would have been like half and half and, and we'd be not stressed about anything. I'm like, so you're punishing me because I got lucky and some client, like Instead of an 18 month sales cycle, it was a 7 month sales cycle. It's like, is that, is that what we're talking about here? And so it just, I didn't enjoy that side of it. I like really enjoyed the sales side. I really enjoyed the learning piece. And then I just felt like I capped out. You know, you like, you get good. It was like snowboarding. I got good at it. And then I'm like, okay, this isn't as interesting anymore because I feel like I can go anywhere on the mountain and like such a Canadian reference. But I can go anywhere on the mountain and I'm not really worried about it. And it just felt like I wasn't getting any better. And once I'm not getting any better anymore then I just wasn't interesting. And so candidly I wanted something harder. I wanted something where I wasn't resetting the clock back down to zero every year of like, okay, you know, good, good job Salesperson. You were 140% last year. You know, now you're back to zero percent in January. And I just, I hated that like you work for the year and then it resets. Whereas like I love the idea of you work your ass off and it's building something and the harder you work the higher probability it, it builds towards something that's sustainable and, and keeps going. And that's, I think one of the things that, that was probably the biggest driver of like what kept me going is like I knew I could go back to sales. I, at the same time I had my, my old boss so I told I'm not coming back. But he would still text me monthly like pictures of commission checks and being like, yours would be bigger.

[Kevin]

Wow. Yeah. So let me ask you this. What was the pivot? What when when you. You're so. You're 18 months in, you. Yeah. At some point, you got to realize you got to wave the white flag. Right. You know, you don't want to, but you do. And then you have this pivot, and then where does it go from there?

[Colin Stewart]

So I was at this co working space, and one of the mentors there sat me down and said, I can't wait until you're working on something where you have a chance of being successful. I was like, oh, that hurts. And it kind of. It was kind of one of those moments where you just had to realize you pull your head. Head out of your ass and be like, okay, you know what? If everybody is saying this, then I'm doing it wrong. I'm probably doing it wrong. And the results kind of point to I'm doing it wrong. And so I was like, all right, the stubbornness approach isn't working. I need to do something different. And when I took the time to, like. Because I'd gotten into this, like, you know, before 9, 9, 6 was a thing, I was working, like, all the time. Like, it was more than996, because I would get. I get to the office at like, 8 in the morning. I'd get home at 11 or 12 o' clock at night. And, like, I would do that five days a week. And then I'd work on the weekends from home, or sometimes I go into the office. It was really busy, so it was like working all the time. And I think one of the things, like, there's an upside to having that kind of capacity to just, like, grind. But I think the downside is you get so. You get so worn down, you don't have your good brain to, like, really pull back and focus on, like, am I grinding towards the right thing? And I think I maybe got caught in that loop a little bit. So when Roger had that conversation with me, I pulled my head in my ass. I was like, okay, well, what is it that I'm doing wrong? Like, what is the fundamental thing? And reflecting, talking to customers, talking to the team, it was that I was showing them what I had built and said, hey, look at this cool thing. Isn't this a great cool thing that I built? And they're like, yeah. I'm like, cool. I did customer validation. I showed them the thing. They went, yeah, validated. And I did that a lot. And I realized that that's not how you do customer validation or customer development. That's how you do. Look at my idea. Isn't it cool? Thanks. And how you get, you know, interview 150 people and 0 of them buy from you. And so the realization was I needed to ask them questions and not share what I was working on first. And because the crazy part is, like, in another piece of, like, why I kept going is I knew I was right. Fundamentally, the core insight I had was the transition from CRM being something you installed on your laptop to something that you accessed in the cloud. And keep in mind, this is 2012, when we were talking the timeline we're talking about. So CRM is Salesforce or Cloud. CRM is Salesforce. And you're accessing it through Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Google Chrome, which is like, Chrome was good at the time, but most people in the Enterprise were using IE7 or whatever it was Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and, like, it was 28 clicks to create an account, create a contact, and send them an email in Salesforce. And so CRM went for this from being this thing that I installed on my laptop. And it was my personal productivity tool. It was my Rolodex. It was like my daily planner, my agenda, like my pen and paper. And suddenly they were gone. Now my boss kept them in his office and said, I'm going to tell you how to organize your agenda. I'm going to tell you how to organize all your things. And now you have to use this crappy web ui. And so it stopped being a personal productivity tool for us salespeople, and it started becoming a sales tool for my managers. And as somebody who identifies as a salesperson, I took that personally, and I didn't like that. And so I. I think the insight was correct, but I think I was like, I was also wrong at the same time. And so if we kind of. If I had to roughly guess, I was about 40% correct in, like, the whole vision of everything. And 60. 60% wrong. And so 40% right. And that the insight was sales. Salesforce isn't a personal productivity tool. And then the 60% wrong was how I wanted to solve that problem.

[Kevin]

Okay?

[Colin Stewart]

And the thing that I got wrong was, like, how my idea of how to solve it was terrible. It was like, hey, replace Salesforce with my new Sass. CRM people were like, no, make your tool work with Sierra with our Salesforce. And I was like, no, that's the wrong model. Then I'd argue with them like an idiot. And so when I realized, hey, stop arguing with them, start listening to them. You might do a whole lot better. And turns out I did. We started listening to people we started interviewing them. We. We were bootstrapped at the time and we made the call to stay bootstrapped. And because we had terrible metrics, we weren't going to raise. Nobody knew who we were. We were in Vancouver. The VC game in Vancouver was. They were. They were here, but it was. There were some pretty barbaric term sheets being handed out. Like, I think my Buddy gave away 60% of his company for 400k. Like, pretty not good stuff. And so it just wasn't worth our time to go out and try and raise. And we figured we could bootstrap it. And so I started asking people questions about, hey, I'm going to do this process manually for you. This thing that I did to book all those 150 customer development emails was I'd read Aaron's book Predictable Revenue, and I was cold emailing folks, cold emailing. I was hitting them up on LinkedIn. And then the. The hypothesis was, well, you know, who has this sales productivity problem the most? Who has to do the most clicks in Salesforce? And this is my CTO's question to me. I was like, oh, hands down, it's SDRs, right? Like, it's such a crazy workflow. Outreach didn't exist. Sales loft didn't exist. Think about all the stuff those things do for you that get updated in Salesforce. And people were like, manually copying and pasting and logging emails. Salesforce still does that. Crazy.

[Kevin]

Don't get me started on Salesforce. We're going to not talk about Salesforce.

[Colin Stewart]

Okay, moving on.

[Kevin]

Yeah, yeah. And that's for stay away.

[Colin Stewart]

And so once we had this focus of, hey, it's sales development reps, right? This is. They have the personal productivity problem the most. Let's start talking to people about solving this and let's find a way of solving this manually so I don't have to ask. The engineering team, like, Preston and Francesco are my two, like, co founders. Hey, can you go build some shit that people might buy? Because we did 18 months of, like, chasing features of, like, building shit for customers that might buy from us. And I was embarrassed because, like, they bought zero of them. And I asked those guys to do a crap ton of work. And what it led to was nothing. And so I was like, all right, here's the deal. We're going to try this pivot. I'm going to see if I can find five people to give me 500 bucks a month and I'll do it wizard of Oz style, like fully manual. Pay no attention to the man behind the Curtain. And I'm like, if I can find five, that's a strong enough signal that there's a. It's worth us building a tool around this. And I went and I sat down and I interviewed five people. And two of those five people bullied me into letting their friend join the beta. And I was like, huh? We got $1,800 in revenue. It was. I think we were up to, like, 1,800 bucks a month in revenue from the CRM product from our first customer. And now we got triple that in a month for. For one month. And it was all manual. I was like, that. That sounds. That sounds interesting. And so we did that, and we finished that pilot, and, like, it was hectic. It was me twisting the knobs, cranking the dial. Like, it was. It was nuts. And we finish up, and it was like, end of November. And my buddy James goes, I give you 500 bucks for this. I was like, yep. He's like, what if I gave you 10 grand? It's like, I couldn't. I couldn't handle it. It was all manual. Like, manual list building, manual sending manual.

[Kevin]

I can imagine. Yeah.

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah, it was nuts. I literally couldn't handle. I think I talked him down to 5k because I was like, I want to. I want to take your money, because I like money, and I would like to afford meat this month, but also, you know, it's producing value, so let's do it. And so that was the, like, first indication that we were on something. And so we. We built that out as a service. We ramped that zero to a million in ARR. In, like, services revenue in a year. And along the way, we built out the SaaS platform that was going to be the Sales Loft outreach killer. Well, we didn't know salesloft Outreach existed at the time. I think they might have had a year head start on us. And Sales Loft was working on their. Well, it was just called Sales Loft at the time. This is pre. The pivot to cadence. And then Outreach was a recruiting tool that was using outreach to send emails to candidates to, like, for. On behalf of recruiters. So they both kind of pivoted into the space, I think, around the time when we were running the service. So we all kind of hit on the same idea around the same time. And then when we started, like, we got the business, that bootstrap business up and running. And then when I started interviewing potential customers about the software Tool man, it was like people were trying to pull it out of me. They're like, Is this ready? Can I use it? I want to test it. Like, it's the first people I asked about customer development interviews or about, like, hey, I want to pick your brain about X and Y. I think it was, like, SDR productivity or something like that, or Salesforce Automation. I think it was the term of the day back then.

[Kevin]

Yeah.

[Colin Stewart]

I was like, I want to talk about your SFA and, like, how you're doing it. And people were, like, stopping me. They're like, wait, are you building a tool to do this? I was like, can I. Can I ask? I don't want to. I don't want to skew the sample. Can I ask a couple questions first? And, like, no, tell me if you're building this.

[Kevin]

Interesting.

[Colin Stewart]

And there was this, like. They were, like, stopping me, and they're like, are you working on this? Promise me you're working on this. And I was like, oh, that's a really good signal that, like, I don't have to fight with them about, you're doing it wrong. You know, they're just telling me that, build this thing. I'll give you money. And so we had paying customers for our, like, alpha crappy product, like, very, very, very early.

[Kevin]

So there's a nuance here for people listening. I think it's very important to hear this nuance because we're already talking about the go to strategy while they go to strategy. And what I'm hearing. I want you to talk about this because I know we talked about this before, but I think it's super important is you're actually calling out to who, you know, has the problem that you want to solve. And instead of calling and saying, hey, I got a. You know, I got a product to solve, you're totally flipped it upside down and said, hey, I want to interview you. I want to understand what's going on. I'm thinking of maybe being able to solve this thing. Can I have 10, 15 minutes of your time?

[Colin Stewart]

Yep. Yeah. And we call that customer development. And this is like, you can read about this in the mom test or any of Steve Blank's books on, like, how and where to focus. The. The thing that I. The thing that I think I got wrong was, like, I'm. Tactically, I just. I was. I was thinking of it as customer validation, which is like, hey, this is the thing I built. You know, the. When I started getting it right, what I realized was what the books don't teach you is that you're talking to potential customers, but all the books just kind of say, hey, Go interview people. And then that's step one. And then step two is build the sales team and go sell it. And I was like, but what about all these people? And honestly, that thought didn't connect for me until after the fact, when the second time going around, everybody who I interviewed, I shouldn't say everybody, but a high percentage of people that I had interviewed turned into paying customers. And then the next times I was going through it, I was like, well, that seems like a pretty strong signal of the people that go through this as a funnel. And we had a couple clients in the services business that kind of showed me that product market fit is not binary. And, like, it exists on a. I had this, this argument with founders all the time. They would hire us to do, like, cold email for them. And I'm like, I don't think this is going to be helpful because you don't know who you want to email. And if you don't know who you want to email, I. If you're. If we're. You're trying to sell, like, accounting software and we're emailing farmers in Nebraska, it's not like it doesn't matter how good the messaging is. And so I kept fighting with founders of like, you don't have product market fit. And they are like, no, no, of course we have product market fit. And I finally, it helped the experience that helped kind of sharpen. That was when Uber launched Uber Eats. Their VP of sales. Their new VP of sales was one of our old customers. And Steve came to me, he was like, hey, I need this. Can you, like, I need. I need the check. The checkmate. Yeah, I need the checkmate. Deal. But I need it for my new company. I was like, oh, cool. Happy to help. Who's the new company? Uber. I was like, holy. And they were launching Uber Everything is what they initially called it. And when we, to cut a long story short, in the first month, we booked so many meetings that it broke everything. A typical account strategist for us would handle like 5, 10, 5 to 10 customers and book like 60 meetings a month total across those, like 5 to 10 customers. And when Uber started, Uber booked 327 meetings in the first month.

[Kevin]

Yeah.

[Colin Stewart]

Wow. And I was like, okay, did Krista magically get like 6x better, 10x better, or is there something special about Uber? And like, Krista's amazing. She was definitely our best account strategist. That's why she got the Uber account. But I like, how do you. Who do you give the credit to? It was Very clearly Uber. It was very, very clearly the, all the stuff that they had done with the brand, with the positioning, with the offer, everybody KN who they were and the offer was, would you like to save money and can we make you some more money? It was like the best offer, right? You don't have to pay a delivery driver anymore and we're going to bring you customers. It was the only offer I've seen that hits on like two of the three kind of core value drivers, which would be like, make money, save costs, reduce risk. Right? They had two of the three. And it's really hard to. It's very rare to see a real 2 out of 3 value driver. But anyway, so who gets the credit? Krista or Uber? We came to the conclusion that Uber gets the credit. And that was kind of the seed of the idea that product market fit has the strength and it's not 0 or 1, it's like 0 to 1 to Uber, which is like 150. And like, okay, so there was that idea. And then when you look at like Uber got from their investment, they, they got the same, roughly the same service that everybody else was getting, but they got, I don't know, 20x more results out of that same investment. And so that's where the second idea came from, which was that the stronger you go, the stronger your product market fit is, the easier your go to market is going to be.

[Kevin]

Hands down.

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah, every salesperson knows this, right? If everybody needs the product, if everybody wants the product, it's going to be easier to sell. But it was not obvious to me at the time, especially in the CRM days where I was like trying to sell this thing nobody wanted. And I was like, man, like, why is just nobody buying? I'm like, because nobody frigging wanted this thing that I was selling. Suddenly you find an opportunity that a lot of people want. It's very easy to sell product Market fit is a multiplier of all your go to market efforts, Everything. Marketing, sales, whatever, any go to market channel tactic, anything. And this, it's a multiplier. And this is why you can't learn anything from LinkedIn, because just because it worked for somebody on LinkedIn who's working at Snowflake or any major company that you've heard of rippling. Do not copy tactics from rippling. Yeah, like the things that they are doing. I've seen some of their stuff, I've talked to their croat, know the benchmarks that they're hitting and they're doing like amazing work. They've got incredible people. They've got a really strong tailwind because they're rippling. Right. Like the reply rates they get are circa 2015. Right. Like, that's what they're getting, like industry standard benchmarks from 2015, which is incredible because coding mill now is very, very hard. And like. Yeah, so it's a multiplier of your go to market. And so if that is true, then for folks, like, for any entrepreneur that's out there, I mean, I know you're building something, I'm building a bunch of things. What's the best thing that we can do?

[Kevin]

Right, Obviously, let's have that conversation not just for me, but for the audience as well. Like, what is the best thing? Because how it's funny when you say email marketing, because I know it works because it works for companies. I don't understand how it works because it doesn't work for me. I won't Even go on LinkedIn because every message I have is a sale. I won't. So I, I don't even go on LinkedIn.

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah.

[Kevin]

And I don't check my emails because it's it every. I get bombarded probably 40, 50 emails a day. And wild emails, like, people who've gone out of their way and like done looms on my website. People who've like given me scripts, like, they've written me scripts to use and they've done like SEO search. Like, you're like, wow, like so much work goes into it, but you get it all day. How do you stand out of the crowd?

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of relationship first prospecting and not trying to sell folks and not trying to start off the, start off the relationship with a. Hey, let's let me sell you some shit. You know, like if after this podcast you told me you're like, hey, Colin, I've got something that's, I've got a tool that's perfect for go to market consultants, you know, that help startups go zero to nine. I'd be like, oh, wow. Yeah, I'd have a look at that. And now I'm in your funnel. Right. But we met through this podcast. We've created the relationship first, then we do business later. And to me, that's the thing that's working, you know, like, I help, I help not a crazy amount of clients, but like, I've got a bunch of clients right now and startups zero to million, helping them do the thing. And the relationship first prospecting thing is the thing that's working really well, across the board can be done with a number of different channels with a bunch of different mediums. It doesn't have to be a podcast. Um, I can send a. For. I can send you a link for the show Notes. I've got a blog post on my newsletter. I think it's just called Relationship First Prospecting Founders Edition. Co. If you look at Founders Edition Relationship First Prospecting, you'll find the. Find it there. Um, but that's the thing. And like, if you're super, super early, you know what a great way to start off a relationship is. Hey, can I pick your brain? I don't know what I'm going to build yet, but I think I'm going to build something in your space. Can I have some advice from you? And like, that's just the very, very, very, very, very tip of the spear. It starts with customer development. And then after you interview them for the first time, you say, hey, you know, when I figure out if I'm going to focus on this, would you be open to giving me some feedback on that? Next thing you know, on the idea, and everybody's like, yeah, sure, I really appreciate it. Then you go do the Focus interview. You say, hey, we decided to focus on this. Can I ask you some questions? Great. At the end, hey, when I got a rough sketch, would you give me some feedback on that? They go, yeah, sure. I like this calling guy. When I show them the rough sketch, they're like, that's ugly as shit. I'm like, I know, but it's not built yet. It'll get better. If I built this, would this be 10x better than what you currently have? Yes or no? If they say yes, great, I'm going to go build that. When I build it, would you be open to giving me feedback on my crappy first version? They say, yes, I show them the crappy first version. I say, what features do I need to build in order for you to use this full time and actually get that 10x value? I listen, great. Next interview. Built those features. What do I got to build to give you some money? Also give me some money right now.

[Kevin]

Yeah.

[Colin Stewart]

And then the last. Do this. I do this. Yeah, I've done this a bunch. This is.

[Kevin]

You got to curate. The biggest thing is curating the list. I would say is making sure you're speaking to the right people.

[Colin Stewart]

Yes and no. Okay. So the thing, there's one thing I do at the end. We'll come back to that. The. The where this came from is my training as a salesperson Every salesperson knows at the end of the call you book the next step. And I was just doing this naturally and not even noticing it. And people in the. I remember being in launch academy as this co working space and I was surrounded by engineers. This is like 2012. There's like, everybody's in engineers, the Ruby on rails and Node JS and arguing about all these different things. And NoSQL databases are, yeah. Came out and people were like, oh, Mango's crap. And I was like, I don't know what any of this means. And I remember my buddy Matt asked me, he's like, dude, what the hell are you doing all day? I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you're talking to people all day long. How do you get anything done? I was like, I'm talking to potential customers. That's who I'm talking to. I'm interviewing them. Then I book the next step. And so one person I keep interviewing, but at the end of every conversation, I always book the next step. And then if they seem into it, and I shouldn't say if they seem, especially in the early days, I always ask for a referral. Hey, Kevon, who should I talk to next about this? Do you know, do you know anybody else who's struggling with this?

[Kevin]

Yeah.

[Colin Stewart]

And that was the biggest thing because you can start with the worst list in the world. You can start with your, like, pick your parents, pick like two people they know and then you ask them. And then you ask, you know, you interview those people and say, hey, do you know two people that I could interview about this? And then every round you get closer and closer and closer to the target customer because you're just relying on people that know people. And so your starting list can be like, you know, just a few people. And as long as you're asking for referrals and you're connecting with enough people that are connected enough, like eventually you'll get. The list has a self healing kind of quality to it. It gets better and better and better the deeper you get. And so I, at the end of every interview, I ask for the next step and then I ask for a referral.

[Kevin]

Yeah, I mean, you get, you're given all the good, the good stuff right here. As you're, as you're going through that, I, I kept thinking, I said, do I want to put them on the spot? And, and so, and go, well, hey, if you're this good, right? And you're, and I can tell you're so confident behind this, why don't we do a live case study for our viewers and our listeners and say we come back again and we actually do this and, and use it as a case study for you and for people to see how, when done right, the effectiveness of it.

[Colin Stewart]

Sure, yeah. What do you want to do? Like, how do you want to do that?

[Kevin]

Well, I think we'll take, we'll have that call, I would say offline, to just ensure it's the right fit. But I want to leave the, the guests hanging here and I think it'd be interesting for them to say if they're, if they've been hanging with us this long, going, all right, we're going to go do this. The goal is we're going to do this and we're going to show you how we do this live on episodes until it's successful and show you that with the right systems in place, the tools in place, it could be easier than you think, for sure.

[Colin Stewart]

You can also. Yeah, I've got some, some stuff I can share at the end, but yeah, I happy to happily do that.

[Kevin]

Well, as we are coming there, I was going to ask if, for people that are saying they, you know, maybe they're thinking about, they want to go to 01 right now, they can use this strategy. They don't want to wait. Where can they get some information?

[Colin Stewart]

I write a weekly newsletter, Founders Edition co, and I initially started that because I was writing a book on the subject of going 0 to 1 from a revenue perspective. So that's a good spot. Obviously, the book Terrifying Art of Finding Customers. I think it's terrifyingart.com or terrifying art Finding Customers on Amazon. I can send you a deck that I've done in a couple of startup accelerators recently. Um, and it's slip Skip to Slide 15 and it lays out the customer development funnel. And so I, I found that I was kind of doing this naturally. And then when I work with founders on like how to do this, they typically need to see it. And so I can share this deck with you. We can throw it in the show notes. Anybody can take a look and you can see my customer notes and my silly jokes and my all of that. So happy to share that if that would be helpful. I do want to add one thing to the customer development funnel because we didn't finish. I didn't finish that kind of idea. Absolutely. Please, after you ask for money. Because what we're looking for here, right, like, if we step back of like, why do we think. Why do I think of this as A funnel, right? What we're looking at is the number of people we put into the top of the funnel and how many people make it to the bottom. Right. When you offer, hey, let's take, let's take the next step. Are people like, hell yeah, let's do it, or are they saying no? And if nobody is taking that next call, it's a very strong indication that you're not working on a pain that's important enough to them. And so that would be, that's why I think about it as a funnel is you want to look at the ratio of like once one level to the next. So you can see like what, what is the volume of people, what is the conversion rate from one stage to the next and then how quickly, what's the velocity, how quickly do they move?

[Kevin]

And then I would say, man, we keep going. Because I would say. And it's easier than ever with AI to actually have the real conversations of not actually having a product developed, but have an idea and having your target market picked out. And as they are literally telling you this, you can start working on it like gone are the days as you know, waiting 8, 9, 12 months, $50,000 to build a software. You can build a software in overnight, you can build software in three hours. So I think it's important that people understand that like you can do this. Starting today. You can curate the problem. The person you want to help start having those conversations. And starting off with like, which I hearing from you is conversation one is, hey, can I pick your brain?

[Colin Stewart]

Yep. Yep. And that's the easiest way. And if you do get to the end of the customer funnel and you get the get some money from them, the next thing is what features do I need to build to get you to refer me to three of your friends? The ask to the for the referral never ends. Because if you think about to my. Think back, if I think back to my car experience, we went zero to a million in ARR in three months selling 500amonth deals. It's a lot. I mean it's not a crazy amount, but it's still, it's.

[Kevin]

That's good volume.

[Colin Stewart]

It was a lot and it was fast. And there's no way we generated that number of meetings. Like we had a very high close rate. And so, and like I'm saying this not as like I'm the greatest salesperson in the world. The product did 95%. I just showed up and didn't screw it up. Right? That was my role as a salesperson. You could have had an old loaf of bread on these sales calls, and it still would have closed 80% of the deals. So.

[Kevin]

But I think in what you're saying is you didn't have that many calls. A lot of those deals came through networks and referral networks. And asking the question, who else in your network needs this product? That's one of the biggest, actually. I saw a study on that exact thing where there was a. There was a sales team that. And there was one guy that was just outselling everybody. And the manager, you know, after a couple months, like, went, couldn't figure it out. Looking at the numbers, couldn't figure it out, and then started listening to calls and realized the one thing that changed everything that no other sales rep was doing at the end, after they said yes, he asked that. Right. Who else in your network, do you know that can also use this? Doubled the sales of everybody else on the team with the same amount of bookings.

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah.

[Kevin]

Just on that one question. If you don't ask, you never know.

[Colin Stewart]

Yep. And candidly, I didn't even have to ask that very many times because I. We got to the point where we. I would close a customer and like, three days later, two people would reach out and be like, hey, Steve just told us about Carb. They bought and we went in, like, we were in, technically in beta, like, the whole time. And because. And it just. It exploded with growth.

[Kevin]

So how many. How many meetings would you say again? I think the question is as many as you can get. But, like, would you say it's three, four?

[Colin Stewart]

How many meetings on average are you

[Kevin]

having with somebody from the moment you say, hey, can I pick your brain to them hoping that you continue to move that meeting forward?

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah, I mean, let's see. I'm currently doing this with. I'm going very deep with three people right now. I've been working with off and on with them for six months now, where we've basically. I've interviewed. I've got a startup I'm working on called Reply Loop. It's an email tool for residential property managers. I started the process about just over a year and a half ago doing the customer development. It's an email platform, so it's taken some time to, like, you want to build it stable, you can't. You can't just, like, vibe code this. Like, I could probably code something that would look exactly like our tool very quickly and it wouldn't work very well. I tried. It didn't work at all. So I'll put that there. But I started the customer development process in like, November, December of 2024. We spent all of 2025 interviewing folks. And then about six months ago, I had three people picked out. I said, okay, these are going to be the three, like design partners. And we meet monthly. They give me feedback on all these things. I probably met with Lance and Sarah and A.J. 20 times. Wow, 25 times. Yeah, because we want to learn and we're getting deep and it's. There's lots of workflow, there's lots of stuff to learn. And so for these folks, for these first folks, they're getting a very hands on, like, get to know call and approach. For, you know, other folks, I've probably done two to three. And we got to a point where I was like, okay, I think I've learned enough. I would have gotten farther, but it like the product isn't ready to sell yet. And so I don't want to. I don't want to create too much momentum that I can't capture on. And so as we get closer, and now that we're getting closer, I've started to pick up and actually I've been doing a podcast as well, and the folks from the podcast are folks that I've been reaching out to to get them to give me some feedback on what I'm working on.

[Kevin]

Yeah, you might have to get. I'll give you some feedback.

[Colin Stewart]

Yeah, love to.

[Kevin]

I'm your. Your buyer. Well, listen, we're going to leave in the show notes where people can get you. Again, thanks for stopping by. I'm looking forward to seeing how we can do maybe a. Possibly a case study together and get it out to the world for you.

[Colin Stewart]

For sure. Kevin, thanks for having me on, man.

[Kevin]

Thank you.