The 600 Decision-Makers Map
The Story
Nathan didn’t try to grow a list. He tried to reach 600 specific people.
“I realized that in the newsletter space, there are maybe 300 companies he wanted to work with. Since each has about 2 key decision makers: 1 CEO and 1 Growth/Marketing — that’s 600 people total” (Source 1).
“It takes this giant, nebulous world — like, oh my god, how do I do this? Do I run ads? Do I write cold emails? — I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. You just need the 600’” (Source 1).
“Can you just get 200? Of the 600 I, I can do that” (Source 2).
His core buyer was the CEO or Head of Growth/VP of Marketing at a newsletter company. So he stopped thinking about acquisition channels and started thinking about a finite list of named humans (Source 1).
He had close to “$1 million in ARR. When I had maybe a thousand, maybe 1500 people on the list. I had no following on LinkedIn” (Source 2).
Lesson for Creators
When the buyer is high-ticket B2B, “growth” and “audience-building” are the wrong frame. Count your buyers. Most niches have a tiny universe of real decision-makers. Reaching 200 of them by name beats reaching 100,000 strangers. The work of identifying the 600 is what separates an outreach problem from a marketing problem — outreach is a solvable, finite task; marketing is infinite. Nathan’s $1M ARR didn’t need a funnel. It needed a list.
Related
- The “Mind If I Add You?” LinkedIn DM — The outreach script he used to reach the 600
- Niche Within a Niche - The Wet-Dog-Food Agency — Why hyper-specific beats general for B2B services
- How to define your niche: deductive approach — A complementary framework for picking a niche from the buyer side
- Two Years to Land Notion - The Sponsorship Patience Play — Milly Tamati’s named-target approach to a finite list of sponsors
- 1,500 Cold Pitches at One-in-Two-Hundred — Olivia Wickstrom: the inverse — what unmapped cold outreach math looks like when you don’t have a list of named buyers