I have a background in mathematics and computer science.

I’ve built a receipt text extraction API. A friend of mine is helping me and has committed to be my first customer when I release it (he’s not happy with accuracy and cost of current provider).

It’s 1/3 of the price of current offerings (at $5K per month for a few million receipts). It’s roughly comparable to / slightly better in accuracy of transcription.

It’s at a point where it’s close to being ready to release. This week I will be doing proper benchmarks running my system against the competitors on thousands of receipts to benchmark accuracy in a statistically robust way.

Within the next few weeks, before I release, I want to start selling to more customers or at least have a clear plan for how I will get customers #2, #3 and #4.

What would your sales plan be?

I’m currently thinking about cold emailing the 1000 or so customers of current providers. Is this a good idea? What would you put in this?

What kind of sales cycle should I expect for this kind of software?