Startup, how to get companies to take you seriously?

The simple truth is that even small companies get solicited a dozen times a day. Managers at larger companies get hit up even more. Even if they get past the spam filter, most go strait into the trash.

So to answer your first question: at a minimum you MUST get a company domain, set up a company website and email addresses, etc. This is the absolute bare minimum bar. Even dog walkers have this. Further, you must setup an actual company (LLC, corporation, whatever). No business will sign an integration deal with a random individual (if for some reason you need that) -- it's just not gonna happen. No company is going to spend a lot of time helping a non-customer individual integrate into their system without a very good specific reason.

You need to understand the motivation for these other enterprise SAAS companies to setup an integration API. It will vary, but generally it often boils down 1) trying to increase sales for them or 2) trying to increase customer lock-in.

If, for whatever reason, you really need to talk to someone at these companies, your best bet is to look for a connection through your personal relationship network. This is one reason why things like LinkedIn still are still valued by some despite its drawbacks. You may be surprised at who people you know know.

I've gotten emails from random people/ companies in the past. They found my name on LinkedIn and proceed to spam firstname.lastname@company.domain

These get ignored first time round. Second time they get marked as spam. Third time onwards, well I just get a bit annoyed. But I never reply. I should probably try to block that email straight up.

For example, I've received emails from someone every Monday for 5 weeks in a row. And then a few weeks of silence, and then a "circle back on this" email, followed by another few weeks of emails.

I've been through this and can definitely offer some advice, assuming you are pursuing a partnership:

- Buy a domain for your email and have a website; the website can just claim it's "coming soon" and look modern and promising.

- Ensure your email is personalized and targeted, and include direct propositions to how you will increase revenue or decrease cost or offer growth — something, anything — to the company. Super short cold emails don't work as well for startups in my experience.

- Address your emails to everyone relevant you can find, but surprisingly, C-level execs appear more likely to respond than lower-level people. They'll often forward your email to the most relevant person who will then feel obligated to reply and hear you out.

- Once in meetings, your advantage as an early startup is your flexibility. Know what you're capable of, and then listen well. Tell them what they want to hear as long as you're capable of building it and it's worth it to get them on board.

If you want to talk further on this, let me know and I can send you an email if you put it in your HN profile, and good luck!

I recommend you setup a landing page and get your own custom email domain. Doesn't take long, it's cheap to do, and will help move one one level above the random spam emails employees at large enterprises get.

Even then, having your emails being ignored is pretty standard, just from previous experience I'd expect to send out hundreds of emails before getting any kind of response, so a warm introduction if you can get one is much faster.

In my CTO role, I run into a lot of people who want to integrate with my company. It will certainly help to have a company site and use a company email address to show legitimacy. Have a specific use case in a tailor emails and explain why you want to integrate with my API and why it will benefit my company.

I can say from experience on the other side that asking random employees of the company for API access on LinkedIn could work. People will inevitably drop a screenshot into Slack, ask who can help with this, and the right people will get tagged to take a look. No promises they actually do anything, but its probably a better shot than cold emails.

One of the things that has consistently shocked me as I've gotten older is how hard some companies make it for people to actually give them money! I'm like, "Hey - I'm waving these hundred dollar bills here for you to take in exchange for your product." And they're like, "Meh.."

What type of API integrations would you need? In my experience, it can be very difficult to get any type of support from a big company if you're not paying. If possible, I would offer a free POC to a potential customer, who is also a customer of the services you want to integrate with.

Starting a startup is starting a company. Starting a company is a business thing, not an engineering thing. Think of it as being able to sell a product, before you even have a product to sell. You cannot really operate 'as a company' without having an actual licensed company. You may need to do a bit more leg work before you start this venture in earnest.

Then reach out to the enterprise. You have to know exactly who to route your request to in the company; you can't just talk to "sales" or "customer support" as those people have no idea how to talk to their own engineering groups. You'll need to know the language that the particular group in an enterprise speaks, so they will actually consider your message, prioritize it, and do some work on it. Cold-calling generally doesn't work unless you are very good at sales. You will probably need to engage with someone at the enterprise on a different pretext, and slowly shift the focus over to the thing you actually want, and hope whoever you're talking to will do some leg work for you to get you to the right group.

Try to position your request as an offer to do something for them. I am building a product that delivers your product more customers, I am building a product that supports all of your competitors and figured you might want to be supported too, I want my development team to work with your API and give you feedback about how well it works for us and report bugs to you. But don't make it sound like a sales call. Make it sound like somebody in the company already expects this and you're just trying to coordinate with them on something they already want to do.

But if they actually don't want a lot of use cases right now, you may have to position it as a test case that isn't being released to new customers, so they don't have to worry about building out their production support infrastructure and being on the hook for it going down. SLAs and EULAs are also a concern. Then of course there's data privacy, regulations, etc to consider. In many cases you may need to establish a legal contract in order for both parties to be covered.

Depends on the org. It definitely makes a diff to look professional.

Keep at it. Thats the secret. With covid everyone has their hands full. If you are that guy who shows up every 2 days for a month or two someone will remember you and decide to respond. Otherwise the chance of forgetting about you and your mail within 2 minutes is quite high inside a busy workplace.

Best way ofcourse, is to get someone you know to put you in touch with someone inside. Then you spend time circulating till you find someone with authority to take the decision. Unless you are extremely lucky or your project is extremely interesting the whole process can take months (depending on what type of data it is).

Typically, api is charged based on usage, which means you use the api first, then you pay.

It’s likely that some users sign up, use the api, and never pay, e.g., use a debit card with low balance.

Turn the table. If you were running such an api, what would you do to avoid situations like this?

I operate a podcast api business [1]. Initially we allowed anyone to sign up. Then we got tons of malicious users who abused the api and never paid us. Then we have to manually review every signups.

[1] https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-...

I've had this issue, I've literally gone months without a reply when trying to buy access to an API for $1,000 a month... i don't know either... it def showed they are not a place to do business.

When I have worked at a big corp and have integrated with a third-party API, there has always been an 'engagement' with the enterprise company's Professional Services/Sales Engineers/??? about a contract and SLA for use of the API. This might get your foot in the door. If you can bring $$$ to the table, that's another helpful approach, even if it's a token offering - $10/mo or whatever at least tells them that you're serious.

What my last company did was to find any way to integrate with the apis without contacting them. Throttle and cache calls to avoid hitting limits, use web scrapping to access any data you can to avoid restrictions. Some companies may never interact with you whilst you are small. But if your customer is also their customer you might be able to make headway, and if you can onboard without the relationship then it may lead to one

To sell to enterprise you kind of have to have an existing network for introductions. They get tons of cold emails and phone calls everyday.

Really depends on the context, but I would mostly disagree with folks saying you need a "landing page" for this. It would probably be enough to just have an email that isn't your private one, and give yourself a relevant title such as "CTO" or "VP Partnerships". Also, if in doubt, call the companies.

Try to get to know someone that work there through LinkedIn. Ask for introduction to someone you know. You don’t need to directly get to the person you are looking for, just someone in the company. Then ask this person who would be the best person in the company to interact with and ask for an introduction.

Getting there from inside is much easier

Cold emailing people has an incredibly low success rate. Though getting a professional looking website and email address might help.

The emails often end up at some assistant who's afraid to bother the big boss. If you can, try to get in direct contact with people who call the shots, and ask them to take a 10 min meeting or phone call.

- Set up a domain with a landing page, or ideally a one-page company site. Explain what you are building/selling.

- When reaching out, reach out to the "VP of Partnerships"

- Seek warm intros via people you already know

Calling usually works if you are not trying to sell something.