3,000 Outbounds
I want to paint a picture of what the first six months of building HUMN actually looked like. Not the version that sounds good in a founder story. The real version. Because I think there is a lot of value in being honest about what the early work actually is before the momentum kicks in and the narrative starts to clean itself up.
The Playbook Already Existed
When I left corporate in 2025 and started building HUMN, I didn’t have a roadmap for how to get a company off the ground. What I did have was 14 years of corporate experience and a very clear memory of what my first day at CDW felt like. You start with nothing. After completing the six month sales academy, you receive somewhere between 80 and 100 accounts with a total trailing twelve months spend of around $250,000. Most of that spend is concentrated in a handful of accounts. The majority are at zero. Your job is to turn nothing into something through volume, consistency, and showing up every single day regardless of what the scoreboard says.
When I started HUMN, I ran the same play. My accounts were the names in my phone, my connections on social media, and anyone who would agree to have a conversation with me. I drafted two scripts. One for people I had spoken to within the last year and one for people I had not spoken to in over a year. Then I got to work. Calls, texts, emails, direct messages, video messages. Whatever it took to get a conversation started. Over the course of six months I made over 3,000 outbounds. Most with no response. Some with light conversation. A few with real interest. That ratio is humbling and it is also exactly what I expected because I had seen that ratio before.
It Was Supposed to Be Uncomfortable
I want to be honest about the fear that was present in those early months. I was nervous about being judged. I had left a stable, well-paying career that people respected to chase something that didn’t exist yet. Every outbound carried with it the possibility that the person on the other end would think I had made a mistake. That fear was real and I chose to keep going anyway. I reminded myself that this was just the new mountain I was climbing. Every time I have reset the landscape in my life it has felt exactly like this. When I started at CDW I had to learn an entirely new industry with no technical background. When I got sober I had to rewire how I socialized and moved through the world. When I moved to Denver I had to rebuild my community from scratch. When I became an endurance athlete I had to build myself up to compete at a level that once felt completely out of reach. Building HUMN was just the next thing. Uncomfortable by design and worth it for exactly that reason.
What Volume Actually Teaches You
There is something that happens when you make enough outbounds that does not happen any other way. You stop being precious about it. The anxiety around any individual conversation drops because you have had enough of them to know that no single one is going to make or break you. You start to hear patterns. You learn what lands and what does not. You figure out which parts of the story resonate immediately and which parts need more context. You develop instincts that you simply cannot develop from preparation alone. That is what 3,000 outbounds gave me. Not just conversations but calibration.
By the end of that first phase I was no longer following the scripts I had written at the beginning. I had internalized the story well enough to tell it naturally and that made all the difference. The conversations started to feel less like pitches and more like genuine exchanges. People could sense the difference and it changed how they engaged.
When the Volume Gave Way to Strategy
Around month six something shifted. I noticed that the nature of my days was changing. I was spending less time thinking about outbound volume and more time thinking about specific relationships, specific conversations, and where each one needed to go. The deals were getting bigger which meant they were getting more complex. I was no longer selling features. I was selling outcomes and vision and a five to ten year picture of what HUMN could become. That required a different kind of discipline, one that my four years at Gartner had actually prepared me for without me realizing it at the time. The due diligence, the show me you know me approach, the patience to build before you ask. All of it started showing up in how I was operating.
The 3,000 outbounds were not the destination but the foundation. They built the calluses that made everything that came after them possible. I am grateful for every unanswered message, every conversation that went nowhere, and every pitch that didn’t land. That is not something I say because it sounds good. It is something I say because I genuinely believe that the version of me sitting in those more complex conversations today was built in those early months when nobody was watching and the scoreboard was empty.
