We built two products for early-stage founders, crossed ~1,000 users, and launched our first ads
Over the past few months, we have been building Causo around two problems almost every early-stage founder runs into:
Finding the right investors and reaching out to them properly
Finding potential customers with a real reason to buy
Our fundraising product helps founders discover relevant VC funds and partners, research them, and run personalized outreach.
Our sales product finds companies that match a specific ICP, identifies why they may be a good fit right now, finds the right people, and drafts personalized outreach.
We recently crossed around 1,000 registered users across both products.
On the fundraising side, users are currently running hundreds of campaigns, and more than 300 individual VC funds have replied to them. There is some overlap, since certain funds have responded to more than one founder.
We also use the sales product heavily ourselves. Across recent email cohorts, our sequences have generated roughly an 11-14% reply rate. Not every response is positive, but it has become one of our most reliable ways to start conversations.
Our growth so far has come from a mix of:
Dogfooding our own outbound product
Founder-led sales
Sharing our progress on Reddit, LinkedIn, and X
Building a knowledge hub (SEO)
Product Hunt
Reddit ads, which we have only just started testing
We launched the fundraising product on Product Hunt earlier this year and finished #5 Product of the Day. We are now preparing a separate launch for the sales product.
The main lesson for us has been that product development and distribution cannot really be separated. Using the product ourselves has exposed problems much faster than internal testing, while sharing the journey publicly has brought us users, feedback, and sometimes very direct criticism.
We have now started experimenting with Reddit ads, although the early click-through rate looks unusual enough that we are not fully sure we trust the reporting yet.
So, a slightly specific request: if you happen to see one of our ads on Reddit, please let me know which subreddit it appeared in. A screenshot would be even more useful.
We will keep sharing the numbers as we go, including what works, what fails, and whether the ads produce anything beyond suspiciously good dashboard metrics.
Replies
Love seeing founders build products they actually use every day. That feedback loop is hard to beat. Out of curiosity which feature has surprised your users the most since launch?
Causo
@leo__z Thnx a lot of the kind words!
On the sales side we get a lot of positive feedback on our ability to process human (natural language) queries into something we can actually find, without sacrificing the user's intent.
On the fundraising side: it is the quality and the amount of data we gather and display, as well as that we adjusted in the direction of a productivity tool rather than full automation - which a lot of people seem to be afraid of.
Causo
@leo__z we have a little minigame that you can play while results load that always gets a good chuckle out of people
Using your own sales product to grow the business is probably the strongest validation you can have. Have you compared its performance against manual outreach or has it completely replaced your old workflow?
Causo
@thomas__bond
Tbh the product kind of was the workflow - so yes, fully replaced now.
The biggest perk of goign public with it was also the amount of live feedback we were able to get from other users to keep on improving the product AND our own flow - it's been awesome!
Causo
@mazin_assaf Maz!!! Thnx so much dude! And you are top 1 on both for sure!
P.s. Also sent you an email a few days ago :)
Causo
@mazin_assaf Mazin da OG
Sharing the numbers even the uncertain ones makes this much more interesting to read. Not enough founders do that. I'd definitely be interested in an update after you've tested Reddit ads for a few more weeks.
Causo
@james__chappel
Will do for sure! We also post a lot of stuff about our journey on reddit!
Causo
@james__chappel @ivan_sem update shall come! Building in public sometimes has meant climbing the cringe mountain but that's where the glory is
Congrats on reaching the 1000 user milestone! That's a great foundation especially while building two products. Which product has been faster adoption so far, fundraising or sale?
Causo
@misti__hassig Thank you! We launched fundraising first and about 1/3 of the people started using sales also, so it would be a little unfair to say. However, we also used the sales product to sell the fundraising one before it even became public - so it is a nice synergy.
Also kinda feels like picking which one of your children is better at this point haha
Causo
@misti__hassig it's a bit of a tricky question to answer as they serve slightly different niches. Overall, there are probably more companies in the world doing b2b sales than there are companies raising VC money at any given point in time, so it's a bit fuzzy:)
I like the mindset that product and distribution should grow together. It saves you from building something nobody wants. Looking back is there one distribution channel you wish you'd invested in earlier?
Causo
@kathe__jordan Thnx so much!
I might be a little bit biased but effort to outcome ratio is still the best on cold emails for us.
It took us a few (4-5) months to get it right for ourselves but I think we were pretty successful scaling everything we learned to work for others (most b2b cases).
We also had a very nice first burst of users from PH to be fair (we were top 5 on the day), haven't launched the sales product yet though - honestly, just didn't have a day to dedicate to it, and it is super hard work.
Causo
@kathe__jordan Probably should have had more waitlist signups while we built. But we're both heavy autistics and building was too much fun:)
Causo
Went a bit unhinged with ads assets. Curious if anyone spots them in the wild:)
Causo
@dawid_baranowski
🦝🦝 Raccoons will eat the world 🦝🦝
Causo
@ivan_sem chomp chomp
It's always interesting to see what people build when everyone has access to similar models. Makes you realize the real advantage is the idea execution not just the technology.
Causo
@dinesh__chaudhary Thnx!
Causo
Hub: hub.causo.ai
Fundraising: causo.ai/fundraising
Sales: causo.ai
Buffup.AI
I really appreciate that you're sharing both wins and uncertainty. What's one assumption you had about outbound that your own data completely disproved?
Causo
@sansa_grey Glad it helps!!
Professional style emails perform the worst, you have to be a little bit quirky - in a fun way!
We make a lot of Raccoon references in our emails, I am sure a lot of people start with "WTF", but then giggle by the time they get to the end - that's the goal at least :)