Rujul Zaparde on Landing Zip's First Enterprise Customers

This post summarizes a 74-second Y Combinator video published in January 2025, in which Rujul Zaparde, co-founder of Zip, explains how he and his co-founder, Lou, approached their first customers. Everything below is his own account in that clip, not independently checked.

Key Takeaways #

• Zaparde and Lou decided the first ten customers would be sold cold, with no referrals or friends.
• Early on they asked prospects for advice rather than pitching, to learn the space and its problems.
• He says it produced 107 pages of notes in two or three weeks, and that Zip is still a significant majority outbound-driven business.

The Importance of Time #

Zaparde says your time is the most valuable thing, so you want to prove to yourself that this is the right thing to invest it in.

The Cold Outreach Strategy #

Zaparde and Lou decided that the first ten customers they closed would be sold completely cold, through cold LinkedIn outreach or similar, “but not referrals, not friends, not anyone we know”. The test: if ten different companies take out their “proverbial credit cards” and buy when they owe you nothing, you are more likely to have market fit. He says that is what they wanted to prove or disprove.

Why Cold Outreach? #

• A test of market fit: If strangers who owe you nothing will pay, Zaparde says, you are more likely to have market fit. It is not proof.
• Outbound became a habit: He says they “built the muscle for outbound”, and that Zip is a significant majority outbound-driven business even today.

The Process of Reaching Out #

Every morning they maxed out their LinkedIn connections, then messaged the people who added them back. Zaparde says messaging people who accept costs nothing, because it does not use InMails.

Steps They Took #

1. Max out LinkedIn connections every morning.
2. Message the people who accept.
3. Ask for advice, truthfully. He says that initially they asked for advice because they wanted to learn more about the space and the problems people had. He says that was helpful.

Gathering Insights #

In two or three weeks, Zaparde says, they had a document with 107 pages of notes from these conversations. The clip does not say what is in the notes, so this post does not guess at what they learned.

Building Outbound Sales Skills #

Zaparde says Zip is a significant majority outbound-driven business today, not inbound. The clip gives no figures or results, only that the early outbound habit stuck.

Conclusion #

Zaparde’s account is one founder’s approach to getting early customers. If you are starting out, the useful part is the test he describes: ask strangers to pay, and use the first conversations to learn. The clip does not give how many of the ten they closed or how long that took, so it is not a recipe with known odds.