every single thing we did during YC to scale from 0 to $1M ARR (now >$12M ARR) - in-person events and connections. your first ever customer is probably someone you know or someone who’s one intro away - there’s truly no playbook here, it’s just pure hustle and doing things that don’t scale: saying yes to everything, telling everyone you know what you’re working on + not being afraid to pitch something that isn’t fully built out e.g. "selling the vision" - reach out to every single person you know without asking for anything, we call it “warming up” relationships. someone just wrote a really great post? reach out and tell them that! how many people reached out to you this week without asking for anything? it’s insane how many doors opened for us by doing that over and over, and how often total strangers connected /referred us because of it - be everywhere, all the time. the entire team was commenting on and liking every post from our ICP, over and over. it was obsessive. we started getting demos from big logos just by doing that. it worked so well that we productized what we used to do manually into Watcher: watch every single person and company via filters (even if you don’t know exactly who they are yet) - find your “one”. instead of trying to scale right away, find one single person and meaningfully make their life better. once you find your “one”, you can reverse-engineer your way to similar profiles that match their ICP and go after those. we found our one, built a lead list of lookalike profiles and focused on getting calls with them - post, post, post, and get the entire team to post. if you’re starting from 0, you have to “engineer” your content. once we had our lookalike lead list, we started programmatically looking at what content our target accounts were engaging with and built our content plan around that go after the low-hanging fruit: download all your LI connections + connections of close partners/investors, enrich all of them, find warm paths, put them all into Watcher so you can track in real time every time one of them moves to a new company that fits your ICP there’s so much low-hanging fruit out there that we started helping other startups set up these workflows the benefit for us is that most of them run on data (Crustdata) and our hope is that these companies grow and scale their usage with us after we help them set things up