Finding Clients

She Skipped the Website and Called Strangers Instead: Noemi Kis's Lesson for Stuck Founders

November 12, 2026 · Bradley Jacobs

Noemi Kis got her first customer before she had a business bank account. Someone on the other end of a cold email said yes, asked where to send the money, and her response was essentially: good question. She had to go set one up. The website came later. The LLC infrastructure came later. The yes came first.

That sequence is the whole lesson.

In this issue:

• Why the "safe" prep work is usually productive procrastination
• How Noemi found an unglamorous industry and turned it into seven figures
• What it actually looks like to keep choosing discomfort after the business is already working

The Prep Work Is the Trap

Most founders do it the other way. They register the LLC, pick the logo colors, build the website, set up the business bank account, maybe write a mission statement. It feels productive. It is productive, technically. But none of it tells you whether anyone will pay you.

Noemi is direct about what that behavior actually is. She called it "productive procrastination" in the conversation we had on Founder Unfiltered. You're doing things. Real things. Just not the thing that actually grows the business, which is finding a customer who says yes.

The reason founders do the prep work first is obvious: it's safe. Setting up a bank account carries zero risk of rejection. Cold-calling strangers carries enormous risk of rejection. So the brain finds a way to feel like you're making progress while avoiding the part that actually hurts.

Noemi skipped all of it. She had a contract job that she knew would end in six months, and she made a decision: when it ends, I'm not looking for another job. That gave her a deadline. And then she sat down and called and emailed everyone she could find on Google. No website. No business bank account. Just volume and the willingness to hear nothing back for weeks at a time.

This became the core of her TEDx talk: founders need to do the hard things first.

How She Found the Business

Noemi went to a networking event specifically looking for a business idea, and she met someone named Bob who worked in the industry.

What she heard from him made sense to her for three specific reasons. First, high barrier to entry: you had to know people, build trust, handle compliance and liability. That meant less competition from people who weren't serious. Second, necessity: clean water isn't optional. Third, recurring revenue. When you sell filtration supplies to industrial companies, they don't buy once. They refill. The customer relationship compounds.

That last point turned out to matter more than she probably expected. The water filtration business is actually hard to break into precisely because buyers already have suppliers and don't switch unless they're unhappy or starting something new. But once Noemi got a customer, they stayed. Then she got another. Then another. Trade shows accelerated it because she could build relationships face to face. Eventually she had a government contract, and clients like SpaceX and the US Navy were on her list.

Seven figures, from cold calls and a business bank account she had to set up after the first yes.

The Discomfort Doesn't Stop

Here's the part that doesn't make the highlight reel: hitting seven figures didn't mean Noemi got to stop doing uncomfortable things. Every new goal required a new version of her.

She described it this way: every goal she wants to reach requires her to bring on a new identity or a new skill set. Want to do a TEDx talk? Learn public speaking. Want to grow to $2 million? Build systems and hire people and become a real leader. Want to grow a personal brand? Learn how to communicate in a way that actually translates to a LinkedIn post or an Instagram post, which is its own specific skill.

That last one is particularly interesting given that Noemi describes herself as an introvert who loves solitude. Building a personal brand means being visible, consistently, in public, under your own name. She now has around 180,000 followers on LinkedIn, built by treating it the same way she treated the cold calls: this is the uncomfortable thing that actually grows the business, so I'm going to do it.

The pattern is consistent from 2012 through today. The form of discomfort changes. The requirement to choose it doesn't.

There's something worth sitting with in the story about the boss who let her go. Noemi drove off the lot devastated because she realized how dependent she was on that paycheck for her entire sense of stability. The boss called back a few hours later and asked her to return. Noemi went back. There was a welcome card. And that moment, she said, was when she realized she was staying for the paycheck and nothing else. No fulfillment. No ceiling high enough for what she wanted to achieve.

The actual starting point was earlier than any of that. It was Noemi being honest with herself about why she was staying somewhere that wasn't working for her.

What to Do This Week

Pick the one thing you've been avoiding because it risks rejection, the thing that actually moves the needle because someone has to say no to you first.

Do that before you do anything else this week. The infrastructure can wait.