StartupGTM.com | I help b2b founders hack traction | Profitable founder (YC)

Transforming a startup from early to repeatable sales is HARD.

If you’re a B2B founder with early sales, then you've done many things right to win your first customers.

BUT - to raise a round A, your startup will need to have a product that's ready to scale because it can be 𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙮.

To get repeatable sales - there are four blockers. 
 
You'll need to change each one from "not working" to "working": 
 
1️⃣ Consistently creating a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of conversations with customers 
 
2️⃣ Converting these conversations into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of first meetings 
 
3️⃣ Converting these meetings into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of trials 
 
4️⃣ Converting trials into a 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 of deals. 
 
These blockers need to be removed 𝙨𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 - i.e. one by one. 
 
💡 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗡𝗢𝗪. 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀.

—

I'm a former co-founder and CEO at ApolloShield - a profitable YC startup.

I work hands-on with B2B founders on turning their early sales into repeatable sales through a combination of disciplines:

1️⃣ 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: Understanding the market, identifying target customers, and analyzing competitors.

2️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴: Defining how the product fits into the market and crafting compelling messages to appeal to the target audience.

3️⃣ 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀: Developing strategies for selling the product, including choosing sales channels and partnerships.

4️⃣ 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵, 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Creating and executing campaigns to build brand awareness and generate leads.

5️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀: Managing discovery and commercial discussions with clients and partners to get their business.

5️⃣ 𝗢𝗻𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸: Gathering customer feedback and continuously adapting the product and strategies accordingly.

6️⃣ 𝗜𝗧 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: Building support systems to holistically orchestrate and manage your GTM efforts.

7️⃣ 𝗥𝗮𝗽𝗶𝗱 𝗜𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Developing a method to move forward quickly, iterate and get market feedback - doubling what works and tossing what doesn’t.

🚀 Let's connect and accelerate your startup together!

Nimo Shkedy

Roman Hipp

Building BetterContact | Helping early-stage B2B SaaS companies with insights & ready-to-use templates

Currently building BetterContact, a B2B SaaS that aggregates various data sources to find and verify any email and mobile phone number.

Growth Co-Founder

In 2024 alone, BetterContact lost $1.02M ARR to churn. In a fight to save the company, we turned the product into something users actually love. Monthly churn: 31.6% -> 8.4%.

From the beginning, we were solving a painful problem (bad email/phone enrichment quality), but our execution was shaky.

↳ Our contact data accuracy had gaps
↳ The enrichment execution was *super* slow
↳ The UI created friction (and users left quickly again)
↳ And we were missing a key piece: a proper list building engine

We knew that with >30% monthly churn rates, we couldn't build a company (without new customers, we’d lose almost everyone every 3 months).

So we threw everything we had at fixing the foundations:

↳ We ran 100's of A/Z tests on the data providers to refine our algorithm
↳ We invested a ton in our infrastructure to improve execution speed
↳ We onboarded +12 new data providers to close accuracy gaps
↳ We redesigned the entire UI to remove friction

And finally, we launched the first Waterfall Lead Finder - turning us into a full waterfall list building engine.

Super excited for what's to come in 2026, and how quickly we'll reach our target of sub-5% churn!

Building BetterContact | Helping B2B companies win outbound through more and better contact data

🎉 BetterContact officially partnered with Instantly.ai (we just went live!)

This is an especially exciting partnership for us because:
- we have a large joint customer base
- we ourselves are users for over 2 years now
- we’re getting along with the Instantly team very well

The big news for our users now:

You can now find emails from +20 premium data providers bundled in a single provider, directly inside one of the leading cold email sequencers.

The best thing:

They're verified and scored through 4 layers.
If they're invalid/have a low score, there will be 0 charge!

We've been in close contact with the Instantly team for a good while now, and really enjoy working together - kudos to the team for making it happen. 

Big things ahead in 2026!

Every "Find Contacts at Company" API is broken, because too often, the data is outdated. The person simply doesn’t work at that company anymore, or the job title just isn't the right one.

That’s why at BetterContact, we spent the last 8 months fixing it.

The result is the most advanced waterfall “Search People at Company” API endpoint, because:

1. It aggregates data from multiple sources (waterfall) - like we do with our enrichment waterfall + AI-powered web crawling & graph expansion

2. To ensure quality, AI Agents verify things like (in real-time):
- Does this person actually work there?
- Is this really their job title?
- Are they still based in that country?

The best thing: it doesn’t cost anything to source the leads, just the typical email/mobile phone enrichment rates apply (only charges if it’s triple-verified).

We’re opening up the endpoint to the people that comment, before we publicly release it soon.

The guide shows you how to easily set up the API.
(for Clay users, it also includes a template you can just use)

📩 Comment “Live” and I’ll send you the full setup step-by-step.
(And yes, you can use it today)

This is the allbound engine I used to bootstrap BetterContact to a 7-figure ARR SaaS - running 100% of sales and marketing myself with an inbound-led outbound motion.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 1: Gathering Intelligence

The best way I’ve found to truly understand my ICP’s pain points and how they design their workflows is by having real 1:1 conversations with them.

This gives me deep visibility into their exact use cases, while also helping me stay sharp on industry trends and competitor strategies.

This is what I’m using for that:

Call recordings & transcripts: Fathom.ai
Reddit keyword alarms: F5Bot
LinkedIn keyword alarms: Trigify.io

I automatically connect with ICP leads through HeyReach.io, and make sure to track their posts & activity through Breakcold.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 2: CREATE RELEVANT CONTENT

Those conversations directly fuel the ICP-relevant content I publish on LinkedIn.

When I have less skin in the game (i.e. fewer real customer and prospect conversations) the quality of my content drops fast.

That’s why STEP 1 underpins every step that comes after.


𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 3: TRACK ENGAGEMENT

I track profile views, post engagement, and other key signals using Teamfluence™.

This lets me spot people who might be interested in giving our solution a try.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 4: QUALIFY ENGAGEMENT

The engagers are being sent to Clay to qualify & enrich the leads.
(currently also evaluating tools like nRev, BitScale, Baseloop, and Genesy for that)

ZenRows for scraping, GPT o4-mini for ICP-fit scoring, and BuiltWith (occasionally) for technographics and integration angles.

For qualified leads (ICP Tier 1 & 2) I’m enriching the email address with BetterContact, and ICP Tier 1 leads also with mobile numbers.

GPT o4-mini to write personalized email copy.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 5: OUTREACH

My next step is reaching out to the different ICP levels.

The structure & cadence is the same (3 touches), but if there is no reply for ICP Tier 1’s, I try my best to call them. 

For that, I’m using BetterContact to find the mobile number, and Aircall to dial (depending on geography).

Something we recently added is Masterinbox.com to centralize all of our LinkedIn/email messaging (big helper there).

Outreach responses, from highly enthusiastic to openly annoyed, are a huge feedback loop for refining my understanding of the market and my ICP. 

Those insights, in turn, fuel better content, and the cycle repeats.

Would love any feedback on this process, or tool suggestions to make it more efficient 👇

Last week, a VP Sales at a Fortune 500 got personally offended after I told him we wouldn’t build a new feature into BetterContact for them to get onboarded.

Honestly, it was quite hard. Part of me wasn’t even sure if it was the right thing to do.

But looking back, I'm proud - it was the only right thing to do.

Because I knew: They’re currently not our ICP.

Sure, it’s tempting to say yes to a shiny logo like that.

But we've done this too many times in the past.

And ultimately, it always ends up in building the wrong product, for the wrong people, with the wrong priorities.

As our inbound requests increase significantly month-over-month, I'm sure there will be many more of those shiny temptations.

And every time, it's all abount reminding myself (albeit it's *really* hard):
Focus > FOMO

2025 has been a rollercoaster for BetterContact: $1.9M+ ARR in churn, 21% MoM growth, DDoS attacks, and much more. Here are some of our biggest fails and wins.

THE FAILS:

- $1.91M ARR churn (with >28% monthly subscriber churn spikes)
- Our best developer needed to leave due to personal reasons (we onboarded a new one though)
- Burned >$84k on features we couldn’t launch (things like a Sales Navigator extension)
- We still face occasional DDoS attacks which are very resource-intensive to defend against
- Major downtimes in Q1/Q2 that led to big customers churning

THE WINS:

- We kept innovating as first-movers (launched first waterfall lead finder)
- First in-person event co-hosted (Clay x BetterContact Christmas Party)
- Big accuracy boosts, especially with new partnerships like Trestle on the mobile phone side
- First time churn below 10% (currently at 8.2%!)
- Still very lean team with high EBITDA margins 
- We reached full data compliance with GDPR, CCPA, etc.
- Big new partnerships (Clay, Instantly, and a lot of other exciting ones I’ll share more about soon)
- No downtimes in Q4 (we struggled a lot with them in Q1/Q2)

In 2026, we’re doubling down on our mission: finding every discoverable email/mobile number, and thus enabling meaningful, mutually beneficial B2B connections.

Also, a big focus will be on improving & distributing our waterfall lead finder (we already get strong traction there).

Most importantly, we’ll do our best to stay laser-focused on building what our users actually want (and not chasing shiny objects or requests that won’t truly benefit them). 

Excited for the new year!

Six months ago, one of our biggest customer churned from BetterContact.

And honestly (kind of tough to say as the founder): I get why.

Back then:
↳ the UI was scrappy
↳ each enrichment took >5 minutes
↳ we had plenty of bugs and regular downtimes

Fast forward to today, we got this message 👇

“keep building, loving the product”

What makes this so great for us though isn’t the positive feedback itself.

It’s the person that it came from.

It's someone who left our platform when things weren’t good enough back then - and came back a month ago after we rethought and rebuilt the whole product.

Every improvement over the last six months came from moments like those early frustrations from our users. 

Still plenty to do, but moments like this remind me why the grind is worth it!

In the last 12 months, BetterContact grew primarily inbound, driving thousands of demos & signups by word of mouth. 3 weeks ago, we started cold calling again - and I forgot how crazy powerful it is.

The reason why we are picking up dialling again is:
1. AI makes everyone sound the same - but the phone is still where real human nuance can win
2. Our own data sourcing & enrichment is a competitive advantage

Up until now, our growth engine has been primarily inbound (word of mouth). 

But now we want to 10× what’s already working organically by layering cold calling back on top.

Below is a screenshot of our first campaign which went nuts.

65% connect rate (never seen that before - our big focus on mobile validation & scoring inside BetterContact seems to be paying off big time).

Based on those results, it would honestly be silly to *not* triple down on calling (we might put some open positions out there soon).

Are you currently picking up the phone? 👇

How to book a demo with billion-dollar CROs (this worked two timed for me in 2025):

→ build a data company
→ cold call them on their mobile
→ they reply a bit surprised: “I never get cold called - how did you find this number?”
→ they add: “…we actually need this for our sales team”
→ meeting booked

I never expected to get attention *this* way for BetterContact, but not complaining!

“We just launched the most accurate lead database”. And still, it thinks I’m working at my cold company. This is the reason why many outbound set ups are broken (and what we did about it) 

The big problem with these databases is the following:

They only periodically scrape platforms like LinkedIn, and as they need to scrape 10’s of millions of profiles regularly, there is a significant data loss.

Scraping timeouts & omitting data points on purpose to be more efficient (LinkedIn gets better and better at preventing that at scale).

And if someone changed jobs recently, tools like Apollo still have their old info, rendering these prospects useless for your list building.

That’s the reason why 8 months ago, we wanted to fix that at BetterContact (primarily because it was the most requested feature by far).

Based on our +250 beta testers (just quoting some users here):

“It worked very well, especially compared to what the legacy databases can do”
“I’m annoyed with Apollo’s shi*** data. This is a game-changer”
“Definitely the freshest people search API I used so far”

Because this is what our waterfall API does differently:

We waterfall databases in order to solve the issue of the coverage.

And to solve for quality/accuracy, we use AI Agents to crawl the web in order to verify that the person *actually* works at that company/has that job title/lives in that country.

We already have it realeased in the app, and next week we’ll release the API publicly. Keen on every feedback!

taplio

The Battle

Nimo Shkedy

Roman Hipp

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The Battle

Nimo Shkedy

Roman Hipp

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Roman Hipp's LinkedIn Performance

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