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 --- 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
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