Case Study - How a YC founder generated so many leads he had to temporarily turn off marketing

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Sam Ross, the founder of Numeral Tax, about his experiences as a founder. He started out his career as a Growth Product Manager at Teespring, spent some time in growth at Airbnb, then leveraged his learnings to build and scale multiple ecommerce businesses to the tens of millions of dollars top line range. While scaling his ecommerce businesses, he experienced first hand the challenges of dealing with taxes appropriately across all 50 states. Despite his flourishing ecommerce businesses, he realized that “he wouldn't achieve a billion dollar outcome via ecommerce” and thus decided to pursue Numeral Tax full time. When it comes to lead generation, it pays to work smarter not harder. Sam could have sprayed out marketing messages to every ecommerce store, but instead took a very tactical and intentional approach that led to higher hit rates. His first step was finding leads. To do this, he had a friend scrape together a database of every store on Shopify by sales estimate. He then used a tool to find people with the appropriate job titles at these companies. Great, now he has his outreach list. He knew that his outreach would fall on deaf ears if it wasn't personalized, so he set out to deliver as much value in that initial email as possible. The best way to make his message land would be to know which stores were NOT handling taxes correctly today. To figure this out, he had his team build a bot that added an item to cart in each state & determined whether they were calculating tax correctly. If they weren’t, he included the number of non compliant states in his outreach, highlighted the problem, and offered to fix it. This level of personalized outreach received fantastic response rates to the point where he had to turn off the marketing funnel to catch up with all the high-quality leads coming in. There's a lot to be learned here and Sam's clever outreach method can be replicated in many other industries. Think about how you might be able to apply this to your own business! If you found this post interesting I chatted with Sam about a number of other topics as well, including product validation and distribution, which you can read further on in my most recent newsletter article: https://www.growthinclined.com/p/sam-ross