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  "description": "Why Val Town is selling inbound lead qualification to B2B startups",
  "path": "/pickling",
  "publishedAt": "2025-12-08T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "> tl;dr – If you are a technical founder doing b2b sales, please reach out to me\n> at steve@val.town. My focus this month is working closely with you to solve\n> your sales problems with code on Val Town.\n\nVal Town sells compute. Selling a commodity can be hard. Imagine if you wanted\nto sell cucumbers. Not many people want to buy cucumbers from a new vendor –\nthey already get their cucumbers from their grocery store. However, people might\nbe open to a new bespoke pickle vendor. So we're pickling some compute and\nselling that.\n\n<div style=\"padding-bottom: 15px\">\n  <img src=\"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/e73b1146-5e79-44c3-a2da-e2871dd1cf00/public\" />\n  <div><em>An American Pickle.</em> Warner Bros. Pictures.</div>\n</div>\n\nOur pickle flavor this month is inbound lead qualification and our target\ncustomer is seed-stage b2b founders who code in typescript.\n\nImagine you're a seed-stage founder who is trying to sell to other businesses.\nYou have some inbound traffic to your website, folks submitting forms, or\nsigning up for your product. You have a problem: the vast majority of these\ninbound folks are not in your target market. They're just random fly-bys from\nthe internet. How do you figure out who these people are and if you should\ncontact them?\n\nThis is inbound lead qualification.\n\nFor example, one of our users is a devtools startup. They're using a tool called\nrb2b, which helps you de-anonymize website traffic into\nenriched leads, including visitors' LinkedIn profiles. However, 95% of their\nvisitors are not in their ideal customer profile. So\nwe created a val template for them that receives webhooks from rb2b, spins up an OpenAI agent with search capabilities,\narmed\nwith a prompt about their ideal customer profile,\nto deep research that person for fit.\n\n<div style=\"padding-bottom: 15px\">\n  <img src=\"https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/37e3fbd8-907c-4d9d-1417-4dc4e2773c00/public\" />\n  <em>Generated by Nano Banana Pro. Pretty neat, huh?</em>\n</div>\n\nFor another user, we built\na similar template for new-user sign-ups.\nFor yet another user we built a val that does the same idea, but for GitHub\nstars. (This last one isn't an official template yet. Email me if you'd like to\nuse it.)\n\nWhat's particularly neat about this focus is that it's recursive: we can build\nbetter go-to-market automations for our customers, which we can also use\nourselves to sell better. We're now using\nthis rb2b val at Val Town.\n\nTo be clear, we are not pivoting to this niche forever. Our mission is to spread\nthe joy of programming, both in people's personal lives and at work. We spent\nthe first couple years of the Val Town spread thin across all of those myriad\nuse-cases. We're now choosing to focus on these extreme niche because these\ntarget users – technical startup founders – have the good taste to point us in\nthe right product directions, as well as the ability to pay well for useful\nsoftware.\n\nWithin this target demographic we've chosen the further focus of inbound lead\nqualification to make it easier for us to delight folks with well-built\ntemplates, patterns, and libraries. Our medium-term plan is to land-and-expand\ninto other areas that early technical founders want to automate, such as social\nlistening (alerts when your product is mentioned on socials), GitHub automation\n(proper tagging of issues, automatic change-log generation, etc), and more.\n\nAs an aside, this path has been partly walked before us.\nClay is a successful no-code tool in the go-to-market,\nenrichment, and lead qualification space. You may be surprised to learn that\ntheir original product was incredibly similar to Val Town: hosted in-browser\nJavaScript functions. I was a passionate early customer of that product. When\nthey shifted their focus to go-to-market, they also changed their target user to\ngo-to-market folks, who historically have been less technical, and thus unable\nto write JavaScript. Thus Clay went from a code tool to a no-code tool. We think\nthere's a small but interesting gap in the market: technical founders doing\nfounding sales who want go-to-market tools, but feel more at home in TypeScript\nthan a no-code tool.\n\nI wrote this blog post for two audiences.\n\nFirstly, to our existing customers, users, and community members who use Val\nTown for a diversity of things: please do not feel like we are abandoning you to\nchase after startups. We intend for Val Town to remain general purpose computing\nplatform. We want to sell the world's best cucumbers. We're currently selling\npickles to build a sustainable business, which will hopefully allow us to invest\nmore into our core cucumber production.\n\nSecondly, to our prospective customers, if you are a technical founder doing b2b\nsales, please reach out. I'm steve@val.town. My focus this month is working\nclosely for you, doing things that don't scale, including white-glove customer\nsupport, writing code for you, to solve your sales problems.",
  "title": "Pickling Compute"
}