WP Engine booked customer interviews through LinkedIn before building a product

What they ran

In February 2010, Jason Cohen had an idea for a WordPress hosting service but no company yet. He searched LinkedIn by title and industry for web developers working in WordPress and asked each for an hour to talk about a startup idea aimed at them. He first looked up each person's market, location and recent blog posts so the message felt personal. As his own account of the outreach describes, the note offered any fee the person judged fair, framed as respect for their expertise.

What happened

By Cohen's count, 40 of 50 people agreed to talk, and 30 later became customers. Only one of the 40 asked to be paid. A Marketing Examples write-up quotes him saying thirty agreed to pay $50 a month, before he had a company name, slides or a server. Cohen founded WP Engine that year and bootstrapped it at first, per his author page.

What the account does not show

Every figure comes from the founder himself. The sources disagree on the count: Cohen's article says 50 requests, while the secondary page says he emailed forty. The sources give no baseline, so there is nothing to compare this reply rate against. They also do not say when the 30 converted or how long they stayed.