How We Booked 30 Meetings for a Client at Nordic Fintech Week

Before Nordic Fintech Week, Forte Growth scored the 890-name attendee list for SolvaPay and SolvaPay’s CEO emailed the best fits: 134 were emailed, 39 replied (29%) and 30 agreed to meet. The same two emails sent to a 132-person cold list in the same week got one reply.

The issue also covers why founders have started finding Forte Growth through ChatGPT, and the five things built to make that happen.

SolvaPay builds payment infrastructure for AI, for the moment an AI agent is the one paying. We run their go-to-market. In September that meant Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen, where they had a stand.

The work started well before anyone flew. We pulled the attendee list, 890 names, and scored it against SolvaPay’s ideal customer. Then Viggo, their CEO, emailed the people worth meeting. Two short emails, a day apart.

By the morning the booth opened, 134 attendees had been emailed and 39 had replied. That’s 29%. 30 of them agreed to meet: a slot at the booth or a call.

In the same week, Viggo sent the same two emails to a cold list: 132 people who hadn’t answered earlier outreach. One replied.

The emails were the same. Only the list changed. People who are about to be in the same room as you read your email differently.

Around the emails we built the rest: a LinkedIn lane from Ingemar, their CTO, for the technical people; the booth banner and team badges; and a follow-up for everyone we contacted but didn’t meet, which says so instead of pretending we did.

👉 If you’re going to an event this autumn, the list is the work. Pull it early, score it, and write to the people you want to meet before you land.

In August a founder got in touch who hadn’t heard of us a week earlier. They’d asked ChatGPT to help them find a senior GTM partner, and it pointed them to Forte. Our CRM now records that source as ChatGPT. They weren’t the only one.

It’s a handful, not a flood. But it’s a handful we didn’t chase.

What they asked for was telling. They arrived with a brief, and the questions were sharp: who actually does the work, what the full commitment is, what’s proven with numbers, and something short they could forward to a co-founder.

One of them chose someone they could meet in person. Fair enough. It told us what to publish next.

What we did to get there:

👉 One page per buyer question, answered in plain words.

👉 A file on our site written for AI tools to read first (llms.txt): who we are, what we do, what we’ve proven.

👉 One source for every number, because an AI repeats whatever it reads.

👉 AI assistants tracked as their own traffic channel, and the source written into the CRM when someone books.

👉 A fixed set of 50 buyer questions we run through AI assistants each month to see where we show up.

Next on the site: the answers these buyers keep asking for. Who does the work, the full commitment, and a one-page summary for a co-founder.

Playbook drop: Zero to $3M ARR, Founder-Led GTM

The workshop I ran for the YTU Startup House London Accelerator, written up: six lessons, five rules, three stages, and the Wealt case. It’s for founders who are still the company’s main salesperson.

Read it here: Zero to $3M ARR: Founder-Led GTM Playbook. The full deck comes to your inbox from the same page.

👉 Every client number on our site now has one source, one metric and one period. Live since 25 September.

👉 For Aether, new sign-ups now get an activation sequence automatically. Live since 23 September.

The best email of the month and the best inbound of the month had one thing in common: the buyer was already looking. Our job was to be in the right place when they did.

Going to an event, or wondering whether AI tools can find you? DM me and I’ll tell you what I’d do first.

-Alper

Ten posts from other people that were worth my time in September:

👉 Kyle Poyar: how HubSpot got itself recommended by AI search after its blog traffic fell, including what didn’t work. Read it

👉 April Dunford: when your AI product gains new features, check whether your positioning actually needs to change. Read it

👉 Jen Allen-Knuth: what to send when a deal goes quiet, for three different reasons it went quiet. Read it

👉 Jacco van der Kooij: deals that slip at quarter end showed it months earlier, and how to check yours now. Read it

👉 Anthony Pierri: why founders struggle to explain their product, and the fix: say what it does today, for one segment. Read it

👉 Rand Fishkin: why “how did you hear about us?” can’t tell you which channels work. Read it

👉 Chris Orlob: the difference between a real champion and someone who’s just friendly, and what to say when they won’t take you higher. Read it

👉 Josh Braun: a short cold call taken apart line by line. Read it

👉 Elena Verna: the sales habits that damage a self-serve product, and why. Read it

👉 Jason Lemkin: why SaaStr built its own outbound tool for key accounts: its own customer data is the edge. Read it

• We’re going to a conference next month. How do we get meetings out of it?

• Replies are positive but nobody books a meeting. What is wrong?

• Zero to $3M ARR: Founder-Led GTM Playbook

• All GTM Journal issues