11 The first 100 customers, by name · 7 pages · 11k words
The first 100 buyers
A directory of more than 100 small agencies, GTM-engineering shops and operators who run cold email for clients. Each entry carries its stack, the evidence and the lawful way to reach them. Around the directory sit the ideal customer profile, the three clusters, where they gather and a plan to turn twenty of them into design partners. Only public business information is used.
The read
Who the first hundred are, and the ideal first customer.
The first 100 buyers
105 named agencies and operators from three research passes, merged by website domain and company name. Most are 2–10 person shops on Smartlead, and their public pain is reply handling across clients, not sending. Only 40 can be cold-emailed by name under the rules Julian's product will enforce, and 26 of those are best-fit (4–5).
Ideal first customer
The first customer is a 2–20 person operator agency in the UK, France, the Nordics or Benelux, with 10–50 clients on Smartlead or Instantly, replies spread across workspaces, and someone who has already built glue to cope. This page sets out the ICP, the anti-ICP, the discovery questions and the 1–5 fit rubric used in the directory.
Clusters
European agencies, GTM engineers and Clay shops, visible operators.
European outbound agencies
Forty named small outbound agencies across 16 European countries, mostly 1–10 people on Smartlead, Instantly or lemlist. Their public complaints are about per-workspace cost and replies scattered across client workspaces, not about sending. More than half cannot be cold-emailed by name: 15 sit in consent countries and 7 in generic-address-only countries.
GTM engineers and Clay shops
41 named Clay-certified agencies and solo GTM engineers, 25 of them in Europe and the UK, who run outbound for several clients at once, a quarter of them on two or more sequencers, and wire replies together themselves in Make, Airtable or n8n.
Visible operators
42 named cold-email operators outside the EU (US, Canada, India, Dubai, Vietnam, or country unstated), found through vendor case studies, expert directories and operator blogs. Their public pain is reply chaos, support and outages, not price. The best of them already pay for reply handling in cash or code.
Reaching them
Where they gather, and how to contact them lawfully, country by country.
Where they gather
The first 100 buyers are listed in five vendor partner directories, meet at Clay Clubs in Berlin, Munich, Paris, London, Copenhagen and Warsaw, talk in Clay's 30,000-member Slack, and listen to vendor-run podcasts. Events, public posts and introductions are lawful first contact everywhere. Booking links and DMs to named people in consent countries are not settled.
Reaching the first 100
An eight-week plan, 12 October to 6 December 2026, to turn the 108-entry directory into about 20 design partners. Channels are set per recipient country: named email only in the UK, France, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Portugal and the US; LinkedIn, Clay Clubs and introductions everywhere else. Julian does not cold-email German businesses, and his own outbound follows the rules his product sells.