Outbound for SaaS founders, without hiring an SDR

Get your first B2B SaaS customers: a hypothetical first month

Take a made-up example: a two-person startup that sells billing-audit software to finance teams at SaaS companies with 20 to 200 employees. Three early users signed up without any outbound. The founder wants to win the first B2B SaaS customers from outbound, around product work and support.

Week one: founder-led sales on the Free plan

The founder works through four steps:

1. Pastes the website. FoxKnock reads it, writes a playbook and proposes segments, which the founder edits.
2. Pastes the domains of the three early users as seeds, plus one lost trial as a negative seed. Lookalike search returns a ranked list with a score and the reasons behind it for each company.
3. Accepts 10 companies, finds one contact at each, and finds and verifies their email addresses.
4. Runs one quick research report on the best fit.

FoxKnock uses Claude, by Anthropic, for its AI features, so text from your site and research is sent to Anthropic.

At default credit prices, 10 companies at 15 credits, 10 contacts at 5 and 10 verified emails at 11 come to 150 + 50 + 110 = 310 credits. The research report adds 100, so the week costs 410 of the 500 free credits.

The Free plan is for judging the list and the research, not for sending: sequences, the AI inbox and community radar are listed from Starter.

Weeks two to four: cold email for startups on Starter

Now the founder wants to send, so the month moves to Starter. Here is one month at default credit prices (they may change):

The other 40 contacts get a template email the founder wrote. Templates cost no credits but are not claim-checked.

The table assumes every lookup works. Failed lookups are free, but extra drafts and re-checks of addresses older than 14 days add credits. If you skip research and use templates only, 5,000 credits cover roughly 160 accounts at 31 credits each. Credit prices can change, so check pricing before you plan a month.

The daily routine

Each morning the founder:

• Opens Today to see who to contact and why now.
• Works through the approval queue (A to approve, E to edit).
• Reads the community drafts and posts the good ones by hand.
• Answers replies.

Sixty first emails a month, plus follow-ups, are well within what one mailbox can send, so volume is not the limit: credits and attention are. For the sending numbers, see how many cold emails per day.

Which plan fits a founder

• Free ($0). Judge the list and the research quality before you pay anything. One seat, one mailbox.
• Starter ($49 a month). The plan for a first real month: sequences, the AI inbox and community radar, 5,000 credits that roll over, 2 seats for a co-founder and up to 3 mailboxes.
• Growth ($149 a month). Move up for more features and credits: signal monitors and automated plays, website visitor identification (company-level, and it needs a Snitcher or IPinfo key), one-way sync to HubSpot, the REST API and 20,000 credits.

You can set a monthly spend cap in Billing (it is off until you set one), and spending stops when it is reached.

What FoxKnock will not do for you

• Promise replies. Reply rates swing with your offer, your list and your timing, and FoxKnock promises no reply rate and no inbox placement. Analytics shows your own numbers per sequence, segment and signal, with low-sample warnings. At 60 emails a month, treat early numbers with care.
• Approve for you. By default every email waits for you. Auto within limits can be turned on per sequence only after at least 50 emails you approved one by one, with under 10% edited and under 5% rejected. Nothing is ever approved by a timer. The only other message that can go out without a per-message approval is an opt-in reply with your own booking link to meeting requests, which is off by default.
• Post in communities. Community radar finds the thread and drafts the reply. You post it, as yourself, and disclose who you are.
• Send on LinkedIn. A LinkedIn step becomes a task with a drafted note, and you send it. FoxKnock does not scrape LinkedIn and does not use Apollo's API.
• Carry your compliance. It has built-in GDPR tools: country rule packs, lawful-basis confirmation, a privacy-notice link in first emails (you supply the notice), suppression lists and erasure. You are still the sender, and a postal address is required to send.
• Decide your positioning. It writes from your site and your playbook. Check the "Never claim" items it proposes, because the email writer and the claim checker treat them as hard limits.

FoxKnock launched in October 2026 and has no customer stories to show, so every example on this page is hypothetical.

Try it on your own market with the 500 free credits, and judge the list and the research before you pay for anything.