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Aug 08 • 3 min read

August Is a Terrible Month to Find Customers


Startup Brief

Issue #307

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That sounds like bad news.

It isn't.

It might be one of the best months to build your next quarter.

A new analysis of 59 tech and recurring-revenue companies found that new-customer acquisition falls 26% below normal in August. Seventy-one percent of the companies in the dataset sign fewer customers than their own baseline.

Revenue barely moves.

New customers do.

That's the interesting part.

The research, published July 29 by re, analyzed real monthly financials from 82 companies across Germany, the U.K. and the Netherlands, using 59 companies with enough history for reliable seasonal analysis.

The researchers removed each company's underlying growth trend and compared every month against its own normal.

So this isn't someone saying, "August is slow."

It's a dataset showing how much slower acquisition actually gets.

And there's another finding that matters more.

The customers don't suddenly come rushing back in September.

Acquisition remains soft from May through October.

January and March are the strongest months.


That creates an interesting GTM opportunity.

Most companies plan around the calendar.

August:

"Nobody is buying."

September:

"Let's turn campaigns back on."

October:

"Why isn't the pipeline moving?"

January:

"Why didn't we start this earlier?"

That's backwards.

If your market behaves anything like the companies in this dataset, August shouldn't be your selling month.

It should be your pipeline-building month.

Here's the play I'd run.

Stop asking for the meeting

Instead, use August to collect the information that makes September outreach better.

Take the 50 accounts you most want to win.

For each one, find three things:

What changed recently?

What are they hiring for?

What are they trying to accomplish before the end of the year?

Don't send a pitch.

Send something useful based on what you found.

For example:

"Noticed you're hiring five enterprise AEs. We pulled together the onboarding mistakes we've seen when teams scale from 10 to 30 reps. Thought this might be useful before the hiring wave lands."

That's a completely different outbound message.

You're not asking them to buy.

You're showing up before the problem becomes urgent.

Then, when the buying window opens, you're no longer a stranger.

This is the part I think founders miss.

A slow acquisition month doesn't necessarily mean you should stop selling. It means the value of immediate conversion may be lower than the value of creating future demand.

And the data gives you a reason to test that.

The re analysis found acquisition to be roughly 3.5 times more seasonal than revenue.

Existing customers keep paying, so the revenue line looks healthy.

But the top of the funnel is already weakening underneath it.


That means a founder watching only MRR could completely miss what's happening.

Your revenue can look fine while your future revenue is quietly getting thinner.

That's a dangerous metric mismatch.

So here's the experiment I'd run this month:

Take 50 high-value prospects.

Spend August researching them rather than blasting them.

Create one useful observation for each account.

Send it without a sales pitch.

Track who responds.

Then follow up in September and compare the conversion rate against your normal outbound.

You don't need a new tool.

You don't need an expensive campaign.

You need to use a month when acquisition is historically weaker to make your next batch of conversations much more relevant.

The bigger lesson is about timing.

Most GTM teams ask:

"Which channel works?"

A better question is:

"When is this channel most useful for this buyer?"

Because the same email sent in two different months isn't really the same campaign.

Context changes.

Budgets change.

Priorities change.

People go on vacation.

Planning cycles move.

Buying windows open and close.

Distribution isn't only about getting in front of the right person.

It's about arriving when the problem is becoming expensive enough to solve.

August may be a bad month to close.

It might be a very good month to become the person they remember when they are ready.

— Rajesh


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