Latest / The Founder's Journey with Fexingo: First-Time Entrepreneurs, Failures, and Lessons Learned / How a Founder Used a Personal Letter to Land First 100 Customers
Transcript
- Lucas: So picture this. You've got a product that doesn't fully exist yet, zero budget for ads, and you need your first paying customers. What do you do? Luna: I'd probably start with cold email, maybe some LinkedIn DMs, try to get a few warm intros. Lucas: Right, that's the standard playbook. But today's founder — her name is Sarah Chen — she did something almost nobody does anymore. She wrote a physical, handwritten letter to 100 strangers. Luna: Handwritten? Like, on paper, with a pen? Lucas: Exactly. She sat down with a stack of nice stationery, a fountain pen, and wrote 100 personal notes. Each one was different, tailored to the person she was sending it to. She'd researched each recipient — looked at their LinkedIn, their company blog, recent projects they'd mentioned. Then she'd reference something specific in the letter. Luna: That sounds incredibly time-intensive. How long did it take her? Lucas: About 40 hours total. She spread it over two weeks. So roughly 24 minutes per letter, including research. And here's the key: she wasn't pitching a finished product. She was inviting them to join a beta test for a B2B tool she was building — a project management platform for small creative agencies. Luna: And the response rate? Lucas: 63 percent. Sixty-three people wrote back. Of those, 47 agreed to hop on a call. And after those calls, 31 signed up for the beta. She got her first 31 paying customers — at 99 dollars a month — before she'd even finished building the software. Luna: That is insane. I mean, typical cold email response rates are like 1 to 5 percent, maybe 10 if you're really good. Lucas: Exactly. And she wasn't an experienced salesperson. She was a product manager who'd never started a company before. She just had this instinct that if you treat a stranger like a human being, they'll treat you like one too. Luna: But let's talk about the cost. Paper, envelopes, stamps — that adds up. What was her per-letter cost? Lucas: She spent about $1.80 per letter, including the stationery and postage. So her total customer acquisition cost for those first 31 beta users was roughly $5.80 each. Compare that to the average B2B SaaS customer acquisition cost, which can easily run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Luna: And she got validation, feedback, and revenue all at once. That's a pretty good return on 40 hours of handwriting. Lucas: It gets better. Because those 31 beta users were so carefully selected — they were exactly her target market — they gave her incredibly detailed feedback. Two of them essentially became unpaid product advisors. One even introduced her to a design agency that became her biggest client later on. Luna: So the letters didn't just acquire customers; they built relationships. But here's my question: does this scale? I mean, once you need your thousandth customer, you can't handwrite a thousand letters. Lucas: That's the tension. Sarah herself admits it. After she hit about 200 customers, she couldn't maintain that level of personalisation. So she evolved the approach. She started using a service that prints and sends handwritten-looking cards, but she still writes the first paragraph herself for key prospects. Luna: So it becomes a tiered system. VIP prospects get the real handwritten note; others get a printed version with a personal signature. Lucas: Exactly. And she still keeps the core principle: every outreach includes a specific, researched reference. Not 'I saw your profile' — that's generic. She'll say something like, 'I read your recent article about managing remote creatives and I loved the point about asynchronous stand-ups.' That level of specificity signals genuine interest. Luna: It's almost like the letter format forces you to be more thoughtful. You can't just copy-paste when you're holding a pen. Lucas: That's exactly what she told me. She said the physical act of writing slowed her down. She'd read a note she'd drafted and think, 'That sounds too salesy' — and rewrite it. The medium itself made her more authentic. Luna: I wonder if this would work for a consumer product, as opposed to B2B. If I got a handwritten letter from, say, a new meal-kit startup, I'd be intrigued but also a little creeped out. Lucas: Probably depends on the product and the audience. Sarah's product was B2B, expensive, and solving a real pain point. Her recipients were agency owners who are used to being pitched constantly. A letter stood out because it was so unexpected. For a low-cost consumer item, the math might not work. But for high-ticket B2B, especially early on, it's a brilliant wedge. Luna: It also helps that she didn't ask for money upfront. She invited them to beta test. That's a lower ask, which makes the letter feel more like an invitation than a sales pitch. Lucas: Right. She was essentially saying, 'I think you might find this useful. Want to help shape it?' That's flattering. It makes the recipient feel like an insider, not a target. Luna: And she gave them a reason to care about her success, because they'd invested time in giving feedback. Lucas: There's one more detail I love. She didn't just send letters and wait. She followed up with a personalized email three days later, referencing the letter: 'Hey, I sent you a note in the mail — did it arrive? Happy to chat if you have questions.' That bumped her response rate even higher. Luna: So the letter was the hook, but the email was the follow-through. That's a two-touch sequence with a human touch. Lucas: Exactly. And she tracked everything in a simple spreadsheet — name, company, date sent, response, notes. No CRM, no automation. Just a spreadsheet and a pen. Luna: It's almost retro, but it works because it's so rare now. Everyone is drowning in emails and LinkedIn messages. A physical letter is like a time capsule from a more polite era. Lucas: And that's the lesson for this episode. If you're starting from zero, don't underestimate the power of doing something that doesn't scale — something that forces you to be genuine. It might feel inefficient, but it can be the most efficient path to your first real customers. Luna: You know, it's interesting. We talk a lot about growth hacks and viral loops on this show. But sometimes the oldest trick in the book — a handwritten note — is the most effective. Lucas: And speaking of doing things that don't scale, that's actually why we keep this show ad-free. We don't want to interrupt the conversation with ads. It's a choice that costs us money, but we think it makes the show better for you. Luna: Yeah, and if you've gotten value from these episodes, especially if you've applied something you heard here to your own business, that's really the only reason we ask for support. Lucas: If you want to help keep this ad-free, there's a link: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure — just a way for listeners who find this useful to chip in. Luna: It genuinely helps us keep going, and we appreciate anyone who does. Lucas: Alright, back to Sarah's story. So after those first 31 beta users, she had enough revenue to quit her job and go full-time on the product. That was about 18 months ago. Today she has 1,200 paying customers and a team of six. Luna: And she still uses handwritten notes for certain things, right? Like for onboarding or churn? Lucas: Yeah. Every new customer gets a welcome card from her, handwritten. And if a customer cancels, she sends a handwritten note thanking them for trying the product and asking for honest feedback. She says that alone has won back about 15 percent of churned customers. Luna: That's incredible. A two-dollar stamp can save a customer worth hundreds or thousands in lifetime value. Lucas: It's a reminder that in an age of automation, genuine human effort is a differentiator. Sarah didn't outsmart the system — she out-cared it. Luna: I think that's a great note to end on. Next episode, we'll talk about something completely different: how one founder used a $5,000 credit card debt to bootstrap a six-figure business. Lucas: See you then.