March 2020 Summaries

This article discusses how to build a lead flow for startups quickly and efficiently without spending too much time on it. The author shares their experience with Airbyte, a proxy that unblocks analytics and attribution marketing tools for ad-blocked traffic while preserving user privacy. They emphasize the importance of understanding your ICPs and personas, choosing the right database (Crunchbase in their case), building a list of profiles to reach out using Phantombuster and LinkedIn, deciding on channels and preparing several campaigns, utilizing automated cross-channel outreach campaigns with LaGrowthMachine, and iterating on sequence and messaging. The author also provides tips for increasing lead flow by creating multiple identities on platforms like LinkedIn.

In January 2020, a company met with about 45 companies to refine their vision, understand their go-to-market strategy, and build a list of potential clients. They built the first alpha version of their product in five weeks and had their first paying customer six weeks later. The article discusses lessons learned during this period, emphasizing the importance of continuous customer meetings to identify patterns, understanding the context of customers' needs, using early mockups for intermediary validation, selling products immediately with order forms instead of letters of intent (LOIs), and offering free or paid proofs of concept (POC) when necessary. The author also highlights the value of having paying customers as a form of validation for investors.