How Alif Sessions closed a paid in full deal in its first week on Saava
Alif runs a founder community in San Francisco. Sessions is its seven week sales program for founders who already have a product.
What wasn’t working
Alif has built one of the more active founder communities in San Francisco: a yearly summit, a no code hackathon run with Replit, founder dinners, demo days and office hours at its HQ. When the team started selling Sessions, a paid seven week program that helps founders land their first customers, lots of the right people were already reacting to Alif's posts on LinkedIn. None of that was turning into sales conversations, and as Imran puts it, they would never have thought of LinkedIn as a sales channel.
What they changed
Saava picks up the people who react to and comment on Alif's posts, checks each one against who Sessions is for, and drops anyone still at the idea stage or mainly looking to raise. The team deliberately kept people whose titles don't say founder, because a lot of Sessions' best fits are engineers and product managers building something on the side. Good fits go into a LinkedIn campaign: people already connected to the team get a message, everyone else gets a connection request first.
How it played out
Where the leads came from
Alif's posts get steady engagement from founders, operators and people thinking about starting something. That engagement became the list. In the first week Saava found 220 people who fit, most from Alif's own page and some from a single post about the Alif supper club with Rho.
Who was left out
Sessions isn't a fund. It doesn't invest or make investor intros, so a founder whose main goal is raising is the wrong call, and so is anyone without a product yet. Those rules are part of how every lead is scored, so nobody has to check them by hand.
The first days of sending
The campaign went live on September 21. Plenty of the people on the list already knew the team, so they got a direct message instead of a connection request. Eighteen people wrote back in the first three days.
The result
Within a week of moving to the Starter plan, Alif Sessions closed a deal paid in full. They have since moved up to Growth to put more into LinkedIn while it's working, and it is now a core part of how Sessions sells.
“The team at Saava helped us organize our LinkedIn outbound and create a repeatable sales motion on the channel. Before Saava we would have never thought to use LinkedIn as a channel. After working with them, it has become a core part of our business. The intent data has been a game changer.”
The steps, if you want to try this
- 01Start with the people who already engage with your posts. They know who you are before you write to them.
- 02Don't filter on title alone. If your buyer often still has a day job, engaging with you says more than the word founder does.
- 03Write down who you don't want. For Sessions that's idea stage founders and anyone mainly trying to raise money.
- 04Message existing connections directly and send everyone else a connection request, from the same campaign.
- 05Answer replies quickly, from one inbox.
