The Core 4: the only four ways to get customers
Marketing looks like two hundred separate jobs. Ads, SEO, newsletters, DMs, launch posts, podcasts, communities, referrals, conferences, affiliate deals. Then you ask two questions about each one and the whole list collapses into four. Does this person already know me? Am I reaching one of them, or a lot of them at once?
The four are not ours. Alex Hormozi is an American businessman who writes plainly about selling, and in his book $100M Leads he calls them the Core 4. His version assumes a team, a budget, and somebody whose whole job is this. What follows is the version that survives being one person who writes the product, answers the support email, and has about ninety minutes a day left for anything else.
Two questions, four answers
The first question is about who is reading. Someone who has met you, worked with you, bought from you, or replied to something you wrote is a different person from someone who has never heard your name. The gap shows up in numbers rather than in feelings about it. A message to someone who knows you gets a reply somewhere between 30% and 60% of the time. A good cold campaign to strangers gets 2% to 5%. Same words. Twenty times the answer rate, purely because of who is on the other end.
The second question is about how many people you touch at once. One at a time costs you minutes per person and works well, because you can say something true about that exact person. Many at once costs you the same effort whether four people see it or four thousand, and works badly per person seen. Neither is better. They break in different ways, they take different amounts of time to tell you anything, and they suit different weeks.
Every tactic you have ever been told to try sits in one of those four boxes. A cold LinkedIn DM and a cold email are the same thing with different plumbing. A podcast, a newsletter, a Substack and a build-in-public thread are all posting. Referrals, a launch-day message to your old team, and asking a happy customer to introduce you to their boss are all warm outreach. Google, Meta, sponsorships and paid newsletter slots are all paid. Four groups. About forty tactics dressed up as strategies.
The four, defined
Warm outreach
Warm outreach is messaging people who already know you, one person at a time, with a specific ask.
Nearly everyone skips this one, and the reason is social rather than strategic. Sending 40 cold emails to strangers costs you nothing emotionally, because you will never meet any of them. Messaging the person you worked with in 2021 means being seen to want something, by someone whose opinion of you you actually care about. That discomfort is why the highest-converting option on the board sits unused for most founders' first six months.
The arithmetic should be embarrassing. One warm reply is worth ten to twenty cold sends, and the conversation skips the whole "who are you and why are you in my inbox" part, which is where most cold threads die. If you have shipped anything before, you are sitting on something other people would happily pay for.
Your list is bigger than you think and smaller than you need. Former colleagues. Everyone from every company you have worked at. Anyone who replied to you online in the last year. Every contact in your phone with a job. And the group founders forget every single time: people already using the thing, who have never been asked for anything at all. That last group is the least worked and the most likely to hand you a second customer. The first 100 customers playbook has the specific asks, sorted by channel.
The catch is the ceiling. Most solo founders have between 40 and 300 people worth contacting. At ten a day you are through the list inside a month, and then it closes until you have made more warmth somewhere else. This is the opening move, not the plan.
Posting in public
Posting in public means putting something where people can find it, seen by many at once, on a platform somebody else owns.
This is the slowest of the four and the only one that keeps paying after you stop working it. A post from March still brings people in September. A cold email from March is in the bin. That difference is the whole argument for publishing, and it takes about ten weeks to show up, which is the whole argument against.
Budget 45 to 90 minutes for a post, and count the replies as part of the job rather than as extra. Twenty minutes answering comments usually produces more conversations than the post itself, because a reply is warm outreach that arrived without you having to be brave first. Founders who treat publishing as a broadcast get reach. Founders who treat it as an inbox get customers.
The way it fails is quitting at week nine. Thirty posts across twelve weeks is the smallest honest test, and the first ten are you working out what you sound like. Starting with no audience? Write to the one person who replied to you last week, not to an imagined market of thousands. Specific posts travel further than general ones, which is unfair and consistent.
Cold outreach
Cold outreach is messaging strangers who look like your customer, one at a time, about something they never asked for.
This is the only one of the four that works on day one with no audience, no list and no money. Supply is effectively unlimited. The answer comes back inside a week, and what you learn is worth more than the meetings you book. Twenty replies tell you which words a stranger uses for your product, and that vocabulary then improves your landing page, your ads and everything you post.
It needs one thing the others do not: a precise description of the customer. Job title, company size, the problem in their words, and a findable pile of at least 500 of them. Without that, cold outreach fails for reasons you will blame on the channel.
Fifty messages is the smallest honest test. Below that, a reply rate is noise. One reply out of 15 is either 6.7% or luck, and you cannot tell which. The classic mistake is sending 15, getting one polite no, rewriting the pitch, and starting the count again from zero forever. Send all 50 with the same message, then change one thing. The cold email templates give you a reasonable first message, and the outreach volume estimator works out how many sends your actual target needs at your actual reply rates.
Paid ads
Paid ads are buying attention from strangers, many at once, by the view or the click.
Paid buys speed. It never buys judgement. A campaign takes whatever message you hand it and shows it to more people faster, which is lovely when the message works and expensive when it does not. Running ads before one of the other three has proved a message means paying for a quick answer to a question you have not asked properly yet.
The most common way it goes wrong has nothing to do with the pictures or the targeting. It is the event you tell the platform to optimise for. Ask for installs or signups and the platform will deliver exactly that, brilliantly, and hand you a pile of people who will never pay. We spent 258 euros learning this. Twenty-one signups, zero customers. The fix is to send the paid subscription event back to the ad platform, and to accept that this makes early tests slower and more honest.
Set two numbers before the first euro leaves: a total cap and a date to stop. Somewhere around 250 to 500 euros over seven to fourteen days is the smallest test that reads above noise for a cheap subscription product. Put the stop date in your calendar, because that decision is much harder to make on the day, when the graph is nearly working.
The four compared
The same four side by side, with the numbers that decide which one belongs in your next 30 mornings. Read the last column first.
| Channel | What it is | Time to first signal | Cost | When it is yours | How it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warm outreach | People who already know you, messaged one at a time. | Same day. Ten messages usually return two or three replies before dinner. | No money. Four to six minutes per message, including the thinking. | You can name 30 people who would open a message from you and remember why. | The list runs dry in three weeks and you read an empty list as a broken channel. |
| Posting in public | People who could find you, reached many at once. | Six to twelve weeks, or roughly 30 posts. The first ten are rehearsal. | No money. Forty-five to ninety minutes per post, replies included. | You have opinions from doing the work, and you can stand nine quiet weeks. | You post into silence for two months and quit a fortnight before it turns. |
| Cold outreach | Strangers who match the profile, messaged one at a time. | 50 messages, about a week at ten a day. Below 50 a reply rate is noise. | Nothing to about 80 euros a month for data and sending. Two to four minutes a message. | You can name the job title, the company size and where 500 of them are findable. | You send 15, get one reply, rewrite the pitch, and never send the other 85. |
| Paid ads | Strangers reached many at once, bought by view or click. | Seven to fourteen days and roughly 300 to 500 euros before the numbers mean anything. | Real money before any result. The smallest honest test is about 250 euros. | One of the other three has already produced a message that converts. | You optimise toward installs instead of subscriptions and buy 21 people who never pay. |
How to choose a marketing channel
Most advice about choosing marketing channels for SaaS assumes a team and a quarter. You have one person and a morning, so the decision has to be cheap to make and hard to argue with later. Four rules, in order. The first one that fires is your answer.
- Count the warm names. If you can list 30 people who would open a message from you and remember who you are, warm outreach is where the next month goes. Nothing else on the board converts anywhere near it, and nothing else pays back the same afternoon. Empty the list before you get clever.
- If the list is genuinely short, can you describe the customer? Job title, company size, the problem in their words, and a way to find 500 of them. If yes, cold outreach. Fifty messages a week, same message, and you will know inside a fortnight whether strangers care.
- If you cannot describe the customer yet, publish. Posting is a way of finding out who wants this, as much as a way of selling to them. Thirty posts will tell you which of your guesses about the buyer were right, and the people who reply become the warm list you did not have in rule one.
- Paid is never the answer to this question. It answers a different one, which is which already-working message deserves a budget. Come back to it when one of the other three has produced a sentence that reliably makes strangers reply.
For most solo founders shipping a B2B tool, the honest order is warm in month one, cold in month two, posting running underneath both from day one at a low cadence because the clock only starts when you publish, and paid somewhere after month four if the numbers ever justify it. If you want the rules applied to your situation instead of a generic one, the marketing channel quiz asks seven questions and gives you a starting split.
When to stop one and start another
Picking is the easy half. The expensive mistakes are staying put because of what you already spent, and walking away two weeks before the thing would have worked. Both are fixed the same way. Write the exit condition down before you start, while you still have no ego in it.
Notice that three of the four point upstream. A cold campaign sitting at 1% after 200 sends is usually telling you the list is wrong or the offer is weak, and switching to posting will carry both problems along with you. The channel is rarely the broken part. Fix the offer, then decide whether to move.
One a morning, all four a week
A framework is only useful if it survives a Tuesday. Ninety minutes split across four channels produces four efforts too small to tell you anything, so you finish the week having learned nothing about any of them and feeling busy. One channel per session at full intensity is what makes the result readable.
The rotation that works happens at the day level, not the hour level. Monday is warm and only warm. Tuesday is posting. Wednesday is cold. Weight the week toward whichever one you already have stored energy for: two years of half-written drafts means posting gets three mornings, and a hundred users nobody has ever asked for anything means warm gets three. The Rule of 100 compressed to a two-hour day covers how that survives a hundred repetitions.
One last thing worth doing before you start, and it takes four minutes. Work out how many actions your goal actually needs at your actual conversion rates, because the answer is usually either "far fewer than you feared" or "this target is arithmetic fiction", and both are worth knowing on day one rather than day fifty. The 100 in 100 goal calculator does the sums.
That is the whole thing. Two questions, four answers, one of them running each morning, exit conditions written before you get attached. Everything else in marketing is a tactic sitting inside one of those four boxes, which means the hard part was never picking between two hundred options. It was noticing there were only ever four.
Frequently asked questions
- What are the only four ways to get customers?
- Reach out to people who already know you. Post something in public where people can find you. Reach out to strangers. Pay to get in front of people. Those are warm outreach, posting, cold outreach and paid ads. Every marketing channel a startup can run is one of those four wearing different clothes, which is why a podcast and a newsletter behave the same way, and a cold DM and a cold email behave the same way.
- What is Alex Hormozi's Core 4?
- Alex Hormozi is an American businessman who writes about selling, and the Core 4 is the name he gives these four ways in his book $100M Leads. He sorts them by two things: whether the person already knows you, and whether you reach them one at a time or many at once. That produces warm outreach, posting, cold outreach and paid ads. His version assumes a team and a budget. The version on this page is the one that fits a single founder with about ninety minutes a day.
- Which marketing channel should a solo founder start with?
- Warm outreach, if you can list 30 people who would open a message from you and remember why. It converts at 30% to 60% against the 2% to 5% a good cold campaign gets, it costs nothing, and it pays back the same afternoon. If that list is honestly under 30 names, start with cold outreach instead, because it is the only one of the four that works on day one with no audience and no budget.
- How do I choose a marketing channel for my startup?
- Count your warm list first. Thirty or more names means warm outreach this month. Under thirty, ask whether you can describe the customer precisely enough to find 500 of them, and if you can, run cold outreach. If you cannot describe the customer yet, post in public, because replies are the cheapest way to find out who is actually out there. Paid ads answer a different question, which is which already-working message deserves a budget.
- Should I focus on one marketing channel or run several at once?
- One per session, all four across a week. Splitting a ninety-minute morning across four channels produces four efforts too small to tell you anything, so you learn nothing from any of them. Running one per morning and rotating through the week keeps the intensity that makes a channel readable, while stopping you from going blind in the other three for a quarter.
- How long does it take before a distribution channel shows results?
- Warm outreach shows something the same day. Cold outreach needs about 50 messages, so roughly a week at ten a day. Paid ads need seven to fourteen days and 300 to 500 euros of spend. Posting in public is the outlier at six to twelve weeks, or about 30 posts, which is why most founders drop it just before it starts working.
- Do paid ads work for a bootstrapped SaaS?
- They work as an amplifier and fail as a discovery tool. Ads scale whatever message you give them, so running them before one of the other three has proved a message that converts buys you a fast answer to a question you never asked. Set a budget cap and a stop date before the first euro goes out, and measure paid subscriptions rather than installs or signups.
- What are the best distribution channels for a startup with no audience?
- Warm outreach and cold outreach, in that order. Both work at zero audience because neither depends on anyone finding you. Posting in public is worth starting in parallel at a low cadence, one or two a week, precisely because it is slow and the clock only starts when you publish the first one.
- How much time a day does distribution actually take?
- A hundred minutes of primary action plus fifteen minutes of replies is enough to run any single channel properly: 40 cold messages, or six warm conversations, or one post and its comments. The total matters less than the shape. The block happens before the day gets loud, and it covers exactly one of the four.