There's a certain irony in building a lead generation tool and then struggling to find leads for it.
That was us about six months in. We had a working product, a handful of early users who found us through word of mouth, and no repeatable way to grow. We knew our ideal customer — early-stage SaaS founders who needed to find their own customers fast and couldn't justify $100+/month on Sales Navigator before they'd found product-market fit. We just didn't know how to reach them at scale.
So we did the obvious thing: we used Margo.
Defining the search in plain English
The thing about Margo's AI search is that you describe your ideal customer the same way you'd explain it to someone over coffee. We typed:
"Co-founders and CEOs at early-stage B2B SaaS startups, seed to Series A, US and UK"
Margo routed that to a LinkedIn search automatically — it knows that a query about people by role means LinkedIn, not Google Maps. Within a few minutes we had 60 profiles: founders, co-founders, CEOs at companies that matched our description. Each one came with a name, title, company, LinkedIn URL, and a work email.
We didn't touch a filter dropdown. We didn't buy a Sales Navigator seat. We described who we wanted and got a list.
What we looked for in the results
Not every result was right for us. We were specifically after founders who were likely doing outbound sales themselves — meaning they'd feel the pain of manual prospecting most acutely. We skimmed the list and deprioritised:
- Companies with more than 50 employees (they probably have a sales team already)
- Founders at pure product-led growth companies (they're not doing outbound)
- Anyone whose LinkedIn bio screamed enterprise sales (long cycles, wrong fit)
The outreach
We kept the emails short. The whole pitch was four sentences:
> Hi [Name], > > We built Margo because we were frustrated with how long it takes to build a lead list — Sales Navigator is expensive, Apollo has a learning curve, and manual Google searches are painfully slow. > > It lets you describe your ideal customer in plain English and get a list of contacts with verified emails in minutes. We use it ourselves to find customers like you. > > Worth a look? [link]
No fluff. No feature list. The last line — "we use it ourselves to find customers like you" — was intentional. It's proof that the tool works, told in one sentence.
The numbers
From that first batch of 40 emails:
- 14 opened within 48 hours
- 6 replied — all positive or curious
- 3 booked a demo
- 2 converted to paying users within two weeks
For context: the entire workflow — search, review, export, write the email, send — took one afternoon.
What we do differently now
We've run this process about a dozen times since. A few things we've learned:
Narrow beats broad. Our best-performing searches are very specific — "founders at bootstrapped SaaS companies selling to SMBs" outperforms "SaaS founders" by a significant margin. The more specific the query, the more relevant the list, the better the reply rate.
The summary line matters. Before results load, Margo shows a one-line description of what it's going to search. We actually use that line to gut-check our query before committing. If the summary doesn't sound right, we rephrase.
Follow up twice. The first email gets the opens. The second — sent three days later, two sentences, no pitch — gets the replies. Our best reply came from a third follow-up that just said: "Closing the loop on this — happy to share the tool free if you want to try it." That founder became one of our most active users.
Use the tool to test the tool. Every time we run a new search, we're also QA-ing Margo. If a result comes back wrong or an email bounces, we investigate. Eating your own dog food is how you find bugs you'd never catch otherwise.
Why we're sharing this
Most SaaS founders we talk to have the same problem we had: they know who their customer is, they just don't have a fast, affordable way to reach them. Building a list manually is slow. Big data platforms are expensive. And the gap between "I know my ICP" and "I have 50 emails in my outbox" is where a lot of early traction dies.
The workflow above took us from zero to a repeatable outbound channel in one afternoon. It won't work for every business — nothing does — but if you're early-stage and your customer is a person with a job title and a work email, it's worth trying before you spend money on anything else.
Margo gives you 25 leads free, no card required. Describe your ideal customer and see who comes back.