“Stop doing X. Start doing Y.”

Old behavior → new behavior. Old tool → new tool. Old story → new story.

Ramp nails it: “Stop dealing with receipts. Let software do it.”

It’s primal. Directional. Binary.

And when strong products fail to grow, it’s almost always because the founder never defines the X they’re eliminating.

Marketing is storytelling. Storytelling is tribal.

And tribal logic is brutally simple:

1. There is a villain.

2. The hero (you) fight them.

3. The hero wins.

If you refuse to name the villain, the narrative collapses.

No villain → no story.

No story → no attention.

No attention → no growth.

This is the silent failure for first-time founders with no GTM instinct:

They try to “market” without declaring an enemy.

But marketing without a villain is just decorative writing.

Attention comes from tension.

Tension comes from conflict.

Conflict requires a target.

As a startup, you must be comfortable making enemies.

The 5 Ways Your Customer Solves Their Problem Today

Every market sorts itself into the same predictable ladder:

1. Early-Stage Startups

   Scrappy wedges. Cheap. Rough edges.

2. Mid-Stage Startups

   Feature-rich. Fast-moving. Clean UI.

3. Late-Stage Startups

   Well-Funded. Dominant. Polished.

4. Legacy Incumbents

   Ancient. Bureaucratic. Expensive.

5. Manual Processes

   Spreadsheets. Copy/paste chaos. Email chains.

This pattern repeats across verticals:

HR Software

• Early: Glide, Gale

• Mid: Warp, Juicebox, Plane

• Late: Lattice, Deel, Rippling

• Legacy: Paycom, ADP, Workday

• Manual: Payroll from spreadsheets and ACH transfers

Customer Support Software

• Early: 14.ai, Open, Atlas

• Mid: Pylon, Giga

• Late: Intercom, Front, Zendesk

• Legacy: Oracle, IBM

• Manual: Email, phone calls, and spreadsheets.

The 3 Rules of Startup Marketing

Now, if you want to be successful in startup marketing there are only three core rules:

Rule #1: Never punch down.

Attacking anyone below your weight class signals insecurity.

There is no upside, and punching down only makes you look like a bully.

Rule #2: People on your level are for collaborating or ignoring.

When you’re small → collab sideways.

Data drops, shared content, cross-distribution.

Once you grow → ignore sideways.

Your brand becomes gravitational; collaboration ROI decays.

Rule #3: Always punch up.

This is where asymmetric marketing lives, by stealing attention from giants.

When punching up you need to expose the weaknesses of giants, namely how they are:

• Slow.

• Bloated.

• Expensive.

When you attack a giant there are two possible outcomes:

a. The giant ignores you.

Great. Your message spreads uncontested and you capture their frustrated users.

b. The giant responds.

Even better. You win free traffic, free attention and free distribution.

This is why Pylon directly targets Zendesk and Intercom. It’s not “mean”, it’s strategy.

As You Scale, Villains Disappear

Once you reach late-stage, almost nothing remains above you except legacy systems.

So your villain becomes generalized:

• Inefficiency

• Complexity

• Manual work

• Compliance risk

Rippling is the perfect case study of a high-quality and amazingly run late-stage startup.

Their marketing often doesn’t mention a single competitor besides the buried “Rippling vs (insert Legacy system here)” pages.

That’s because villain must be inefficiency itself, framed through credibility and competence.

This is the natural evolution.

A fun exercise: open the Wayback Machine and watch how every late-stage winner gradually shifts from “we’re better than X” to “we are the standard.”

The hard reality is that a great product doesn’t guarantee adoption.

You need distribution. If you want to grow, pick your villain and punch up.

Everyone thinks LinkedIn is the only place to launch a startup and find customers. That’s a trap.

When I first started building startups, I thought the same. I posted once on LinkedIn, sent a few DMs, and expected customers to roll in. The results? About 1,000 views and zero traction.

Most founders try one LinkedIn post, get a trickle of views, and complain, “getting customers is hard.” The truth? If you only launch on LinkedIn, you’re invisible.

Where you launch matters. Don’t market a $100k+/year product on TikTok. And don’t post about your $5/mo product on LinkedIn. Know your price point, and pick the platforms that actually work for it.

Here’s how I think about platforms by price point…

For B2C products, TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit all work(and X.com if your product is higher ticket):

• TikTok is great for low-ticket ($5–$50/mo), viral-friendly, easy reach, but almost no business buyers use TikTok.

• Instagram (Reels) works for mid-ticket ($5–$200/mo) aspirational or visual products

• Reddit works for B2C for mid-ticket products ($5–$500/mo) as well, because the post-based virality lets you reach buyers directly, and it ranks extremely well in ChatGPT, driving extra discovery.

For B2B products, your approach depends on your product pricing as well:

• Low-ticket ($5–$200/mo): Use Reddit + X.com, with a small LinkedIn presence for credibility.

• Mid-ticket ($200–$1k+/mo): Use LinkedIn + X.com, with Reddit on the side for ChatGPT ranking.

• High-ticket ($1k+/mo): You need to primarily use a combo of LinkedIn + YouTube for authority and credibility, and X.com as a top-of-funnel awareness channel. You can reach prospects, build visibility, and get people interested before hitting them on LinkedIn. (Honestly, Reddit doesn’t help out as much here besides ChatGPT ranking).

Here’s where I’m going to get some hate: Elon buying Twitter was great for startups.

He cleaned up the platform, improved discoverability with the “For You” feed, and turned X.com from a meme pit into a professional playground.

Personally? I’ve closed tens of thousands of dollars in deals from X for my startup Rivin.ai just by:

1. Tweeting + replying to peoples’ tweets

2. Getting engagement on those tweets

3. Finding those leads on LinkedIn and connecting with them.

4. Messaging them on X, LinkedIn, and warm email.

5. Closing them.

Attention is easy to grab than ever. Conversations happen fast. And leads convert quicker because they know who you are personally.

You can do this process manually, but because this strategy worked so well for my startup, I decided to make my internal tool that does this, called Lynx, public.

So you can automatically enrich people who have interacted with your tweets, find their LinkedIns, and add them to your CRM.

Because, honestly? I think Reddit and X.com are the most underrated platforms right now. Both let you get attention faster than LinkedIn, reach buyers directly, and compound over time via ChatGPT and post-based virality.

If you want customers fast, don’t just post once on LinkedIn. Launch everywhere that makes sense for your price point, whether that’s YouTube, Reddit, or X.

If you’re working on a travel app, social media app, or productivity tools— you’re screwed.

I know because I almost made the same mistake. When I first started building startups, I thought building “productivity tools” and “social apps” would change the world.

But no one cared and I couldn’t close a single paying customer.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: No one cares about your little “smart calendar” startup. They care if you can make them money.

Almost all valuable startups share one thing in common: they directly make their customers money. If your product is more than one or two steps away from directly making your customers revenue, you’re in for a brutal uphill battle.

Doers build revenue tools. Talkers build apps no one buys.

Here’s the framework I use now, the same one that helped me launch my latest multi-million dollar startup and raise money from Jason Calacanis:

1. Draw the chain. Write out exactly how many steps it takes your customer going from “using your product” to “making more money.”

2. Count the steps. Every maybe is a weak link.

For example, if you’re building a social scheduling tool: maybe posting is easier → maybe more posts → maybe more followers → maybe more leads → maybe more sales calls → maybe more revenue. That’s six leaps of faith, and it’s almost impossible to sell.

3. Cut the distance. The closer your product is to money, the easier it is to sell.

4. Prove it fast. Customers want ROI in days, not months.

5. Price with confidence. When the revenue impact is clear, you can charge premium rates without pushback.

The “hack” most founders don’t want to admit is that your idea doesn’t need to be sexy. It needs to be profitable for your customers— fast. Travel apps sound fun. Social apps feel cool.

But the “boring” products that directly move revenue always win.

That’s why Google, Meta, and Salesforce are some of the most valuable companies in the world. Their products don’t just “help.” They directly generate money for their customers.

That’s the same reason I built Rivin.ai. We directly help Walmart brands and e-commerce sellers make more money:

• Sellers use our data to source profitable inventory to make money.

• Brands optimize listings to win the buy box and grow revenue.

• Agencies and software providers plug our Walmart data into workflows to increase sales directly.

There are no vague promises. Or endless chains of logic to justify our product. There just the proof that our product makes our customers more money.

And it works. We charge $1,500/month on average without pushback, ROI is proven in days, and billion-dollar brands trust us.

If your product is far from the money, you’ll face long sales cycles, endless objections, and constant pricing pushback. But if you can prove your product directly makes customers money, you’ll close deals faster, charge more, and keep customers longer.

Don’t build what’s cool. Build what’s close to the money.

Prospecting tools don’t have secret data.

When I first started cold outreach, I was desperate for shortcuts. I didn’t know how to prospect. I didn’t know my ICP. So I did what most people do: I bought into the hype.

Every “AI prospecting tool” promised me magic. Perfect lead lists, flawless enrichment, and inboxes full of replies.

So I paid for them. Tested them. Burned money on them. And guess what? They were just shiny LinkedIn wrappers with worse UI and worse data.

There are two kinds of salespeople:

• People who build lists manually, actually learn their ICP, and close deals.

• People who pay for wrappers and pray the software does it for them.

Only one of those groups actually wins.

1. Start on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the source of truth. Every serious B2B buyer has a presence here. Period.

If your lead isn’t on LinkedIn, good luck enriching an accurate email or phone number. They probably aren’t buying through cold outreach anyway.

2. Pay for sales navigator and filter like crazy.

Don’t spray and pray. Use Sales Navigator to filter by job titles, company headcount, industry, geography. This is how you build a tight ICP. You’ll learn who actually buys and who’s just noise.

3. Enrich properly.

LinkedIn is the backbone for every enrichment tool like ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Clay. Without LinkedIn as the starting point, your enrichment is garbage-in, garbage-out.

4. Write better messages.

Your copy matters 10x more than your tool. Stop copy-pasting generic garbage and praying AI saves you. Write like a human. Show you understand the prospect’s business. That’s what gets replies.

Using LinkedIn I booked hundreds of thousands in pipeline using nothing but:

• LinkedIn filters

• Enrichment through reliable data providers

• Strong cold emails + cold emails.

There’s no “secret AI database.” No magic software. Just fundamentals done well.

When scaling my startup, Rivin.ai, we learned this lesson the hard way. We provide Walmart data to brands and e-commerce sellers and burned money and time testing out “ai prospecting tools” like Apollo, Instantly, and Lemlist to find prospects…

Before realizing the only real data comes from LinkedIn. Once we switched our prospecting over to LinkedIn only, our ICP narrowed down, outreach became predictable, and our pipeline rose up.

If you can’t find your leads on LinkedIn, you won’t find them anywhere.

Stop wasting money on wrappers and stop overcomplicating your prospecting. LinkedIn is the data source. Everything else is noise.

Master the fundamentals of LinkedIn Sales Nav, enrichment, and copy. And you’ll never need to pay for fake “AI prospecting tools” again.

Cold emailing isn’t dead. Most people just do it wrong.

I used to send long, 3–5 paragraph emails… and hear nothing back. As an engineer, sales felt like a foreign language. Frustrating, confusing, and honestly terrifying.

Most cold-email advice? Garbage.

Forget “AI personalization” and “mass outreach”— those are lazy shortcuts.

The truth? In a world flooded with AI email slop, standing out is easier than ever if you write authentic, human emails.

Sales isn’t magic, it’s a science.

Every email and call is an experiment to see what triggers a response.

The goal? Tweak your sales variables until your positive responses and revenue rise.

Most people say cold outreach doesn’t work because they quit too soon. They send 10 emails, get ghosted, and give up crying “cold outreach doesn’t work!”.

Meanwhile, the real winners send 50, 100, even 200 messages a day— constantly failing, iterating, and improving until they crack the code.

The secret: send thousands of emails. Track what works. Change what doesn’t.

——

Here’s the simple, step-by-step framework I followed to land my first 10 customers and $8.4k in revenue for my startup Rivin.ai, providing Walmart data for Walmart sellers and brands…

1. Build a high-quality lead list first.

If you email the wrong people, no outreach will work

You need to precisely target your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using LinkedIn. Anything besides LinkedIn for lead finding is irrelevant unless you’re in some weird industry where no one is online.

Better yet: find people complaining about the exact problem you solve in online conversations.

For Rivin.ai, our primary customers are Walmart sellers and brands, so we researched brands and sellers on Walmart and found them on LinkedIn.

2. Write concise, 3 to 5 sentence emails using this structure:

“Hey [Name]

Personalized one sentence to show you’ve done your research.

Frame their problem + briefly explain how you solve it.

Clear call to action (CTA) — always ask a question.”

Sales is a numbers and iteration game. Every message you send sharpens your approach and improves your data.

3. Track key metrics like open rates, reply rates, and positive responses to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Use this feedback loop to constantly tweak all four variables: your personalized sentence, problem framing, solution value proposition, and call to action.

Truthfully, the more emails you send, the larger your data becomes and the better your results will get.

4. Don’t rely on email alone.

You need to combine your cold emailing with:

• LinkedIn connection requests and personalized messages

• Engaging authentically with prospects’ social posts

• Cold calls

Every interaction— no matter how small, increases the chance that your prospect will recognize your name and respond to your outreach.

Relying on email-only sales automation tools like Smartlead.ai will not get you results.

You need to be everywhere.

5. Follow up.

Send 2–3 polite follow-ups spaced a few days apart.

Most replies come from follow-ups, not just the initial message.

But here’s the catch: follow-ups can’t just repeat your original message.

If people didn’t respond the first time, you need to change your messaging to address why.

For example, try a 3-4 sentence follow-up email with a different value proposition and a similar CTA, like:

“Hey [Name],

Reference the last email or personalized stated priorities.

Frame problem differently.

Present your solution differently.

Clear call to action (CTA) — always ask a question.”

——

Cold outreach may seem overwhelming or complicated, but it isn’t.

Stop overthinking and build a repeatable process.

Send lots of messages. Adjust based on what works.

Use every channel you can: email, social, phone.

Keep going and you will get customers…

And know your “sales math”: How many outreaches equals how much revenue?

I followed this exact method— to close my startup’s first $8.4k in revenue.

Since then, my startup Rivin.ai has gone on to work with billion-dollar Walmart brands and sellers, giving them the data insights they need to win on Walmart.com.

Cold outreach didn’t just bring in customers, it’s the reason we landed our legendary investor, Jason Calacanis.

Our cold emails sparked a conversation. That conversation turned into multiple calls. And those calls ended with him backing us.

From zero revenue, we:

1. Closed $8.4k from our first 10 customers

2. Started working with billion-dollar Walmart brands

3. Secured investment from a world-class investor

All from one repeatable cold outreach framework.

Sales is not complicated— but it is hard.

This cold outreach strategy took my startup Rivin.ai from zero to working with billion-dollar Walmart brands and sellers— all by mastering cold outreach.

What has your experience with cold email been? What software tools do you use and what are your reply rates?

P.S. I’m currently doing a 2-week outreach challenge and live-streaming it to show you all exactly how simple and repeatable cold outreach really is.

youtube.com/@emilianolgu

I constantly see founders whine “how do I get my first customers?”.

I too used to think that getting first customers was hard.

But truthfully, getting your first customers for your startup is really simple— you just post on the internet.

As long as your product is actually as good as you think it is…

If you dedicate yourself 12+ hours per day— you will get customers.

This is the story of how I got my first customers for my startup Rivin.ai— and how I used that traction to close an investment from the legendary angel investor Jason Calacanis.

There are two main ways you can get your first customers:

1. Posting On Social Media

The primary way you will get customers, especially for lower priced products, is through posting on the internet. Grinding out on LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Facebook Groups, TikTok, etc.

These platforms were the main drivers I used to get my first 10 customers, but all platforms are not created equally.

There is a difference between follower-based platforms and post-based platforms:

a. Follower-based platforms are social platforms where the numbers of followers you have strongly effects your post views, such as LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.

If you post on LinkedIn and X with no followers you will get zero reach.

b. Post-based platforms, on the other hands, social platforms are where the primary determinant of your post virality is the post content itself. The main post-based platforms are Facebook Groups, Reddit, and TikTok.

As a founder, if you have no followers you need to start by focusing on post-based platforms and slowly build up your presence on follower-based platforms.

So how do you get views?

Simply talk about something you are knowledgable on in the same niche as your startup.

For example, if you are building an influencer-to-brand partnership startup. Just start writing posts on Reddit about how hashtags work, how influencers can draft collab emails to brands, etc.

You can really write about anything as long as it’s somewhat relevant to your startup and is:

• Interesting

• Relatable

• Controversial

… and Valuable

Besides that there’s no advice to follow— I personally have a method I use, but you should write what you enjoy talking about and over time you will get good at it.

2. Messaging People

The second way you will get customers is by directly messaging people.

There are two primary ways to do cold outreach:

a. You reach out to people who have posted about having the problem your startup solves

Search for keywords and keyword phrases on Reddit and X. If you run an influencer-to-brand partnership startup, search up keywords like “influencer collab”, “influencer brand partnerships”, etc.

Then pop into conversations, read them, and message that person on every platform you can find them on.

Message them some version of:

“Hey (name)!

Noticed you posted back in 2024 about (topic). I’m actually building (one liner about your company).

Would love to get your feedback on what I’m working on :)

P.S. Love (personal note about them)”

b. You outreach to people who are your target ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

The second outreach strategy is more work, but is better for expensive products.

You need to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find people with your target customer profile.

Continuing the influencer-to-brand partnership startup example, you would search for anyone on LinkedIn who mentioned YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram on their LinkedIn profiles with the words “influencer” or “creator”.

From there you would find their emails and phone numbers. (Google it, there are plenty of providers)…

Then message them a short 4-5 sentence email that’s similar to the above message.

If people don’t respond, send them 1-2 more follow ups and then move on.

Above all, be thoughtful and genuine with your messages.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do to get your first 10 customers.

Post on social media and message people. It’s not complicated.

Yes, your posts will suck initially and 85%+ of people will not respond to your messages.

But, you have to power through and grind out 12+ hour per day.

Is finding customers hard and a little scary?

Yes. Absolutely.

But at the end of the day, sales is a numbers game.

Post consistently and message enough people, and you will eventually get customers if your product is as good as you claim it is.

Today, my startup Rivin.ai is trusted by Walmart sellers and multi-billion dollar brands to power their Walmart data, so they can make smarter inventory and purchasing decisions.

But we didn’t start out this way, just two years ago we had zero customers and no one knew who we were.

So do you know what we did?

We kept posting and messaging people until we got our first 10 customers and raised an investment from Jason Calacanis.

If you want something, then put in the work and go get it.

I used to think going viral was hard.

Two weeks ago, I had zero views, zero followers, and zero clue how Reddit worked.

But here’s the truth: going viral isn’t hard— if you understand how the game works.

There’s a repeatable formula anyone can learn. With enough effort, it can generate millions of views and real revenue.

You might be telling yourself you’re not a good writer, marketer, or salesperson.

But there’s no such thing as “I can’t learn”.

Only “I haven’t tried yet.”

Just one week ago, almost no one had heard of my startup, Rivin.ai.

Today, after writing just three Reddit posts, I’ve generated:

• 1,000,000+ views

• Thousands of upvotes and comments

• Tens of thousands of dollars in revenue pipeline

Every post has been a hit.

This is the exact playbook I used to go from zero to 1M+ views in about one week— and launch a product now used by billion-dollar Walmart e-commerce brands.

Writing Is Like Engineering

It’s creative, but it follows a structure.

To write something that goes viral, you need to balance:

• Interest

• Relatability

• Controversy

• Real value

And yes: it is hard.

But every one of my top posts follows this exact structure…

The Viral Post Framework

1. Title — Flex what you accomplished in 10–20 words. Establish authority.

2. Hook — Say an uncomfortable truth in 8 words or less. A slight jab to spark curiosity.

3. Sympathy — Make readers see themselves in you. Be the underdog.

4. Attack — Divide your audience into doers and talkers.

5. How-To — Break down your process step-by-step. Go deep. Show your work.

6. Controversy — Within your “How To” steps you need to include the controversial secret or “hack” that most people don’t know— that led you to your success. This is the #1 most important part of your post and needs to spark comments and engagement.

7. Conclusion — Tie it all together. Reaffirm the outcome. Remind readers they can do it too.

To get customers, you need to reference or link to your startup somewhere in the framework above in a respectable way that is vital to the post.

My Most Successful Post:

“I Launched 39 Startups Until One Made Me Millions. This Is What I Wish I Knew.”

This single post generated 500k+ views and created a massive wave of inbound interest for Rivin.ai.

It followed the framework exactly, and the results speak for themselves.

Other Viral Post Styles

The “How I Did It” post is just one approach. Other high-performing formats include:

• “How I Did It” posts – Stories + lessons = trust

• Shitposts – Clever or absurd takes that insiders to a community get

• Question posts – Invite reflection or debate

• “Help Me” posts – Vulnerable rants that attract empathy

• Absurdity posts – So extreme/emotional they’re impossible to ignore

These five buckets account for 95%+ of viral content on Reddit, X, and LinkedIn.

Why Founders Should Stick to “How I Did It”

If you’re building a company and want to be taken seriously—this is the structure you should master.

Yes, shitposts and absurdity can go viral (see: JoinWarp.com).

In fact, they often go more viral than “How I Did It” posts.

But they often lead to low-trust, low-retention growth.

If you want real users, customers, and partnerships, “How I Did It” is your best bet.

What Happens After You Go Viral?

Once your post takes off, the comments will flood in. You’ll see four types of replies:

1. Positive responses

2. Talkers/Haters (people who’ve done nothing)

3. People who disagree without proof

4. People who disagree with results (i.e., successful critics)

How to respond:

• Positive responses → Answer questions. Ask what they want next.

• Talkers/Haters → Ask what they’ve actually built (with a smile).

• Disagreeing without proof → Ask what they have done that worked.

• Disagreeing with results → Respect it. Acknowledge that multiple paths can work.

The goal is to keep comments flowing.

More comments = more reach = more awareness = more revenue.

Final Thoughts

Going viral isn’t luck. It’s a skill.

If you learn how to structure your posts, engage with your audience, and speak directly to your market; you will drive attention, traffic, and growth.

You don’t need to be a writer.

You just need a system.

And now, you have one.

A system that can get you hundreds of thousands of views and real revenue.

Most “founders” never launch anything.

They build a project for months, never complete it and eventually scrap the product. Or launch it and get no customers.

Startups are truthfully a numbers game. Even the best founders have hit rates under 10%. Just look at founders like Peter Levels.

So how do you maximize your chances of success, the honest answer is to increase the number of startups you launch.

I’m going to get hate for this: but you should NOT spend hundreds of hours building a product… until you know for certain that there is demand.

You should launch with just a landing page.

Write a one pager on what you will build, and use a completely free UI library like Magic UI to build a landing page.

It should take you under a day.

Then what do you do?

Add a stripe checkout button and/or a book a demo button.

And then launch. Post everywhere about it(Reddit, X, LinkedIn, etc) and message anyone on the internet who has ever mentioned having the problem you are solving.

Launch and dedicate yourself to marketing and sales for 1 week straight.

If you can’t get signups or demo requests within 1 week of marketing it 24/7... KILL IT and START OVER.

Most “startups” are not winners. And there are only THREE reasons why someone will not pay you, either:

1. They don’t actually have the problem.

2. They aren’t willing to pay to solve the problem.

3. They don’t think your product is good enough to try and pay for.

If people do sign up and check out with a stripe link you simply come clean with a paraphrased version of:

“I actually haven’t finished the product yet, but I’d love to talk to you about the problem you’re facing. I put a sign up link on the website to see if anyone would actually care about my product enough to pay for it”

Then you refund the customer.

This is where I’m going to get hate:

1. It is not unethical to advertise a product you have not finished building.

2. It is not unethical to put a checkout link and collect payments for an unfinished product to test demand… as long as you simply refund “customers”.

When you do eventually get sign ups or demo requests, the demand is proven. Only then do you invest 2 weeks in building a real product.

Do not waste hundreds of hours of your valuable time building products no one cares about.

Test demand with a landing page and check out link/demo request link.

If demand is proven: build it.

If demand isn’t proven: start over with a new idea.

Repeat.

You will get a hit if you do this… eventually.

This is personally how I tested 39 different startups… and killed 37 of them with little to no revenue to show for it.

For context: Of the 2 startups that DID get traction from this strategy:

1. One went on to help Amazon sellers generate $50M+ in GMV

2. Rivin.ai went on to raise an investment from Jason Calacanis and works with multi-billion dollar e-commerce brands to analyze Walmart sales data.

Stop wasting your time building products no one cares about.

Validate. Build. Sell. Repeat.

Hey all— after my last post on how I raised money from one of the most famous angel investors of all time, Jason Calacanis, the response blew me away. It went semi-viral with over 60,000 views on Reddit— and honestly I’m happy that many of you found it valuable :)

Here’s the original post for context if you missed it:

🔗 How I Raised Money From One of the Most Famous Angel Investors of All Time

Since then, a bunch of you DM’d me asking for the actual email templates I used to raise the round.

So here we go!

⸻

🧠 TL;DR from my last post: You Only Need 2 Things to Raise

1. A beautiful, working product

2. Real paying customers

Nothing else matters.

Then comes Step 3: Getting in front of investors — even if you have no network.

The Strategy? Act Like They Already Invested

When I was raising for Rivin.ai, I didn’t have warm intros or VC friends. I just made a list of 50-100 angel investors I respected and started emailing them like they had already invested.

No pitch deck. No “ask.” Just regular, short updates showing momentum.

Here’s how I structured my updates:

⸻

📬 1. Weekly Product Updates

Purpose: Answer the question: What did you ship this week?

Subject line: Rivin.ai Product Update v1.2

Hey [Investor Name] 👋

This week at Rivin we launched [feature or improvement] and [feature or improvement] !

[Explain in one sentence what each feature or improvement does]

Customers are giving feedback [feature or result — ideally with a short quote or stat]

[ sign off with focus for next week e.g. improving feature or working toward big launch]

Best,

Emiliano

Founder @ Rivin.ai

⸻

📈 2. Monthly Traction Updates

Purpose: Answer the question: How is business going this month?

Subject line: Rivin.ai – June 2025 Update

Hey [Investor Name] 👋

June Stats

– Users: [Number] (% MoM)

– MRR: $[Amount] (% MoM)

– Expenses: $[Amount] (% MoM)

– Cash: $[Optional] (% MoM)

[ This month’s biggest win: E.g. “This month we landed our first $1k MRR customer in the CPG space, (ABC Brands), super excited to get them rolling and onboarded to our ___ product.”]

[ What we’re focused on next month: E.g. “For July our #1 priority is improving our onboarding flow and outbound to enterprise brands. Our goal is to use ABC Brands as a case study and go after similar sized brands.”]

Until next month,

Emiliano

Founder @ Rivin.ai

^Note: For each monthly update for each metric you NEED to include (+__% MoM) for each metric

⸻

🧲 What Happens Next?

After a few updates, most investors are in a state of semi-confusion and ask themselves:

“Wait… did I invest in this startup? Why am I getting updates?”

That’s exactly what you want.

Eventually, their curiosity takes over. Investors will check out your product. Some will even sign up. And when your updates consistently show momentum, they’ll reach out and ask for a call or more info.

You don’t need a warm intro. You don’t need a pitch deck. You don’t need to beg.

You just need to build, sell, and update.

It's not complicated.

When your product and traction are good enough, they’ll respond.

Note: As mentioned in my previous post these emails will vary slightly from startup to startup. For context, my startup Rivin.ai builds software for e-commerce sellers to analyze Walmart sales data— we are a pure SaaS startup.

If you run a deep tech or hardware startup your emails will have to be more product centric since funding for these types of startups usually depend on technical breakthroughs.

Let me know if you have any questions or which post you’d like to see next :)

Here’s the truth.

Fundraising is rigged.

If you didn’t go to Stanford or an Ivy League college, most investors simply don’t believe in you.

They’ll say they do. They’ll say they “back misfits.” But when you look at their portfolio it’s the same old story. Harvard graduate, MIT graduate, etc.

Here’s the brutal truth: VCs and investors love to use Ivy League degrees as an IQ filter.

The typical founder? Attends a Tier 1 university decides to partner up with their roommate to “build a startup”…

And builds nothing. No product, no customers. Not even a clear idea.

Yet, gets into a program like YC and gets a massive “pre-seed” investment of $500k-$2M.

Product? Idea? That comes after the money hits their bank account.

That’s wasn’t me. That’s not most founders, especially if you’re reading this.

I was the odd kid in school blasting Kanye, skipping class to hit the museum, and flipping electronics online.

I never graduated college. Never worked at Google (or for anyone for that matter).

Still, I raised money from Jason Calacanis, one of the most prominent angel investors of all time (3rd/4th investor in Uber and one of the first investors in Robinhood).

Without any degree. Without any network. Without any co-founders.

Here is how I did it.

🛠️ Step 1: Build a Beautiful Product

Stop talking. Ship something real.

Your product must be:

• Real. Functional and live

• Beautiful. Polished enough to impress users

This shows investors you’re not just a talker. You are a doer who can actually build.

Example: I single‑handedly built Rivin.ai software for Walmart sellers and brands to analyze Walmart sales data. Before Rivin, I built software for Amazon sellers that drove $50M+ in GMV. I knew how to build a beautiful product from my last startup and used that knowledge to build the beautiful product we have today at Rivin.

You don’t need a fancy resume. Or a degree. Just a beautiful product to PROVE you can build.

💵 Step 2: Sell It (Even If It’s One Customer)

A flawless product is meaningless if no one will pay for it.

Most engineers think “if I build a good product, they will come.”

Nope. This is not how the world works.

Look around.

If you don't see any salespeople, you're the salesperson.

You need:

• A handful of paying customers

• Clear, documented feedback

• Real revenue (not a forecast)

Within 1 week of launching Rivin.ai I had a full calendar of sales calls, a handful of Walmart sellers paying for Rivin.ai to analyze Walmart sales data, and customers giving me product feedback. They paid me. That’s traction.

🧠 Step 3: The Secret Weapon? Pretend They’ve Already Invested

This is the game‑changer.

The step that most founders skip: Instead of waiting to “be ready” and then pitching, start by sending updates.

Here’s how I did it:

1. Curated a list of 50+ investors I respected

2. Sent weekly product updates and monthly financial snapshots

3. Shared:

• What I built that week

• Monthly MRR, burn rate, cash on hand, and MoM growth

Crucially: I never EVER asked for money.
I just acted like they were already invested.

👉 After a few weeks? This happened:

“Wait. Have we invested in your company? These updates are 🔥”

Exactly the reaction I wanted.

That’s how I landed Jason Calacanis’ firm to invest in Rivin.ai. There were no “VC lunches”, I never asked for money, and I don’t even think had a pitch deck.

Just undeniable traction and momentum.

That’s the secret.

💡 Why This Works

If you don’t have an Ivy League degree, you need to prove yourself:

1. Build = Show you can build something beautiful

2. Sell = Prove your product is needed by closing real customers

3. Update = Be disciplined and transparent

⸻

🔑 Moral of the Story?

You don’t need:

• An Ivy League degree

• A network

• Demo day

• A polished pitch deck

You do need:

• A working, polished product

• Real customers

• Regular, disciplined updates

• Relentless follow‑through

That was the story of how I raised initial investment for my startup Rivin.ai.

For context: Rivin.ai builds software for Walmart sellers and is trusted by multi-billion dollar brands to power their Walmart sales data insights, so they can make smarter inventory and purchasing decisions with Walmart data.

If you are not a pure SaaS startup your fundraising process will likely be pretty different. For example if you are a hardware or deep tech founder your fundraising will likely rely on hitting certain product development milestones since that’s the main “selling point” of your startup.

Hope this helps you out!

But over time, you begin seeing patterns—not just personalities, but archetypes.

There are 3 types of founders that almost every founder can be consistently grouped into: Insiders, Storytellers, and Redeemed Crashouts.

And knowing which one you are (and who your co-founders are) can mean the difference between startup magic and total misalignment.

1. The Insiders

Insider founders come from stable families, elite schools, and high-prestige jobs.

They know the jargon, the unspoken rules, the pipeline from sales to support, and often have deep networks within tech and venture capital.

But every superpower has a catch. Insiders sometimes believe too strongly in chasing “hype”.

See: e-commerce in the 1990s, green-tech in the early 2010s, AI agents in the 2020s.

Yet don’t underestimate their value.

Insider founders will often close deals that other teams can’t even pitch — simply because they “get it” and have the right background.

Whenever you hear about a “Stanford dropout prodigy who’s now building AI climate tech,” you’re looking at an Insider founder. Investors love betting on them because they’ve already passed the “IQ filter” elite universities have in place, and these founders speak the right language.

Famous Insider Founders include:

• Larry Page & Sergey Brin – Built Google while finishing PhDs at Stanford. Their academic credibility and insider knowledge helped them raise money and recruit early talent.

• Mark Zuckerberg – Harvard dropout who created Facebook. Used elite connections to raise early capital and gain credibility.

• Bill Gates – Dropped out of Harvard to build Microsoft. Already deeply embedded in the computer science scene and well-connected within early computing circles.

• Patrick & John Collison – Irish-born founders of Stripe. Both dropped out of MIT and Harvard after gaining traction. Came from a background of success in academic competitions and early tech ventures.

• Most YC Founders – Many are alumni of top-tier universities and tech companies, well-versed in startup culture, and trained to pitch cleanly and build fast.

2. The Storytellers

Storyteller founders are hype machines, vision-crafters, and live off attention.

They dominate Twitter, TikTok, stages, newsletters, and podcasts. Storytellers aren’t usually technical, but they’re master communicators who bring excitement and rally support. Even in crowded markets, they make companies stand out and bring in tons of customers.

But they also come with risk.

Storytellers can overpromise, underdeliver, and burn their audience if the product doesn’t match the pitch. If a TikToker promotes a broken product to their massive audience— the backlash can be swift and brutal.

World-class Storyteller founders include:

• Adam Neumann – Co-founder of WeWork. Turned a commercial real estate company into a “tech unicorn” through raw charisma and bold vision. Raised billions without sustainable fundamentals.

• Naval Ravikant – Co-founder of AngelList. Grew a cult following with tweet-sized philosophy and sharp writing. Positioned himself as the sage of Silicon Valley.

• Peter Levels – Indie hacker behind Nomad List and Remote OK. Turned solo building into a media brand by sharing his journey in real time.

• Roy Lee – Creator of Interview Coder and Cluely. Built a massive social media presence teaching how to cheat software engineer interviews and now building Cluely.

3. The Redeemed Crashouts

Then there’s the third type of founder — the Redeemed Crashouts.

They often come from untraditional backgrounds and are fiercely independent— often “dropping out” of traditional society for years at a time.

Crashouts are tinkerers, risk-takers, and obsessives.

They may have missed the Ivy League pipeline, but they make up for it with pure grit and technical depth— these founders don’t care about anything but building products people love with their bare hands… and often spend years doing so “off the grid”.

Their technical knowledge is deep— but they often spend so much time building alone, they forget they are building for other people.

These founders tend to be high-risk, high-reward. They make up the smallest percent of VC-funded companies, but when they hit, they hit hard.

Famous Redeemed Crashouts founders include:

• Palmer Luckey – Built Oculus VR out of a trailer at 16 after dropping out of Cal State Long Beach. Sold to Facebook for $1B. Now runs Anduril, a $30B+ defense tech company.

• George Hotz – Known as the first person to jailbreak the iPhone. Later founded Comma.ai, an open-source Tesla rival, and TinyCorp, a GPU optimization company. Brilliant, eccentric, and totally self-made.

• Jan Koum – Co-founder of WhatsApp. Grew up poor in Ukraine, dropped out of San Jose State, and built one of the most successful messaging apps ever. Sold to Facebook for $19B.

• Markus “Notch” Persson – Creator of Minecraft. A self-taught programmer who dropped out of high school and later released Minecraft as a side project— eventually sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5B.

• Chris Wanstrath – Co-founder of GitHub. Dropped out of college, worked odd jobs, and eventually helped build the backbone of open source software. GitHub sold to Microsoft for $7.5B.

Why It Matters

After years of building startups and meeting thousands of founders — one thing’s clear: people build companies, not pitch decks.

And when you zoom out far enough, almost every founder falls into one of three archetypes: Insiders, Storytellers, or Redeemed Crashouts.

Each type has different advantages — not just in personality, but in fundraising, team building, go-to-market, and even which business models are viable for them.

Some founders can raise a $5M pre-seed on a slide deck. Others have to ship a working deep-tech product and grind their way to revenue. That’s not about fairness — it’s about founder positioning.

Insiders win trust.

Storytellers generate attention.

Redeemed crashouts build from technical depth.

If you don’t understand your type, you might pursue a strategy or idea that simply doesn’t fit you.

Because in the end, startups aren’t just about product-market fit.

They’re about founder fit too.

In January I flew to Southern Morocco and spent 80+ hours per week programming!

For 3 months straight, I sat overlooking the beach in Morocco and programmed everyday— with breaks for surfing on the weekend.

After releasing Rivin's MVP and getting first customers, I flew to Croatia and lived in Bosnia & Herzegovina for 3 months.

Those 3 months were spent refining Rivin's product and closing more customers.

In those 3 months we also raised our Pre-Seed investment from Jason Calacanis.

From there, I moved to Serbia for 3 months, where I continued speaking to customers and iterating on Rivin's product.

I ended my travels with a week in Budapest, and after 9 months of traveling I returned to the USA in October!

It was crazy not seeing my family for 9 months.

Since returning in October I have been visiting family and friends around California and working on Rivin!

In short— in 2024 Rivin's initial product was released, Pre-Seed investment was raised from Jcal, Rivin's product was refined, and customers have been providing feedback to iterate on.

Professionally, 2024 was a successful year.

My 2024 Schedule

How I Spent My Time

This year I invested:

• 3,328 hours into programming & talking to customers

• 3,285 hours into sleep

• 630 hours into working out (walking, lifting, swimming, surfing, rock climbing)

• 547 hours into reading

• 401 hours into chores (cleaning, shopping, cooking, eating, showering)

• 278 hours into solitary self reflection

• 91 hours into social activities

Reflecting On How I Invested My Time

This year I worked more than I slept and my social activities hit an all time low.

Reflecting, I see this was unsustainable and frankly— unhealthy.

2025 will focus on increasing social time with friends and family.

I will:

• Move 200 hours from chores and invest these hours into social time; by ordering groceries online, ordering delivery more, investing in cleaning robots, and having a weekly cleaning service.

• Move 156 hours from programming to social time by taking weekday lunch breaks with friends.

• Move 200 hours from reading to social time.

• Reduce solitary time to 100 hours and invest these hours in social time.

This would 9x my social time and result in 2 hours and 15 minutes per day with friends.

Reading

Books have always been my healthy escape from the world!

This year I read about 20,000 pages across 56 books— I love books!

Learning About Myself

Strengths

To those who don't know me well— I appear indecisive.

This is true both personally and professionally.

Take 2023-2024, for instance, when I tested 15 different startup ideas.

Some might view this as a lack of commitment, asking, "Does this guy have conviction?"

But there's a method to my apparent indecision. I believe in deeply exploring life's major decisions—far more thoroughly than most people do.

I try moving in a few directions, look at data, and self reflect for a long time— without taking action.

I'll spend weeks or months just thinking.

Then, one day, I'll calmly stand up and go all in—betting every single chip I possess into the pot on one single critical decision with full confidence.

This pattern often surprises people who haven't known me long enough to witness the full cycle of how I make decisions.

I take a long time with big decisions, but once convinced, I commit totally.

This approach unsettles many, yet it's precisely what most people value most about me.

What I’m Working On In 2025

1. Deepening Technical Expertise. In 2024 I became a great programmer, but technical architecture has always both fascinated me, and intimidated me.

   I’ve never worked in a large organization so I have a blind spot when it comes to scalable systems design— it’s something I need to dedicate a few weeks to really learn and understand.

2. Optimizing Health. Between 2023 and July 2024 I lost 50 pounds over 12 months(195lbs → 145lbs), and only recently began reprioritizing my health. I’m in good health is now! But in 2025 I want to prioritize my diet and get my health into great condition.

3. Working on my people skills. I have great family and friends. But truthfully, I've always been an inconsistent communicator. I have a poor habit of falling out of touch due to delayed responses to texts and calls. It’s something I’m working on.

What’s in store for 2025?

1. Moving back to San Francisco— I’ve enjoyed traveling the world for four years, but all of my traveling has confirmed that San Francisco is the place I need to be. Queue “Don’t Assume What You Don’t Know“ by Grace VanderWaal.

2. Scaling Sales For Rivin.ai— Rivin is now at an exciting time where the product is refined and beautiful with our V3 release. Now it’s a question of nailing down distribution(sales).

   In order to successfully raise a the next Seed funding round:

   1. NRR must be 100%+

   2. Rivin must break $XXk per month in subscription revenue

   If there is a reasonable path forward to scaling sales and the “sales math” for Rivin is known, a large multi-million Series A round is possible in 2025.

3. 2nd Job?— I’ve only ever worked for myself. Every dollar I’ve ever made since 18 years old has been earned from paying customers for products I’ve built with my own hands.

But as I’ve become older, people have found out about technical talents and many friends have offered me roles in their startups.

Being a founder is financially lucrative, but taking a 2nd job and working like a dog to clear $500k+ per year in cash is really tempting.

This would set me up to afford my dream family home in my dream neighborhood in San Francisco within 3-4 years— which is insane to think about.

I love being a founder.

But even the most stubborn founders would work for someone else as a 2nd job if the pay, problem, and team(most importantly) were great enough.

In Conclusion

2024 was a crazy year.

But overall, 2024 was a great year both professionally and personally.

If I could rewind time, I would change nothing from 2024— and I'm proud of that.

What do you know that no one else does?

If you want to change the world, you must discover something hidden.

But sadly most people believe all the great discoveries have already been made.

Our maps contain no blank spaces and if there were still secrets out there…

Wouldn't someone from the global pool of smarter people than you have found it already?

But the world is still full of secrets— if you're willing to look where others won't and bear the discomfort of being unpopular.

1. Secrets of Nature.

What frontier of science is just being discovered?

“Secrets of nature” mean you find some undiscovered aspect of the physical world.

Examples include the combustion engine, nuclear fusion, and Pennicilin.

Nature's secrets reveal themselves to those who understand their field deeply enough to invent the next big technical innovation.

Look to the Manhattan Project, where hundreds of physicists across the UK, Canada, and the United States worked to understand nuclear fission.

Predicting the next of nature’s secrets is hard unless you have deep technical skills.

Of course, AI models today are at the cutting edge of computer technology…

But material engineering also seems promising.

After all, who is creating new metal alloys and researching materials in depth today?

The next breakthrough may come from understanding materials we think we already know.

2. Secrets of People

What are people not allowed to talk about? What is forbidden or taboo?

Other opportunities aren’t technical puzzles— but social ones.

Opportunities that others are afraid to touch.

Consider the police.

The police are incredibly unpopular and even saying you "support the police" has become a statement that could get you "canceled" or invoke society's outrage.

While "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police" have dominated headlines recently, a massive opportunity is being overlooked: modernizing law enforcement through technology.

Software for body cameras and police software in general could build billion-dollar companies, increase police efficiency, and hold the police more accountable…

We have the technology today, but everyone avoids the space simply due to controversy.

Similarly, consider NGOs.

Society views these organizations as angels, and their mission statements are filled with noble goals like "helping the homeless" and "solving poverty."

But beneath this veneer lies an uncomfortable truth: many NGOs are simply government corruption in plain sight.

While some genuine organizations exist, many merely rent a few vans to distribute the occasional sandwiches and blankets— yet collect multi-million dollar government contracts.

Often run by politicians' family and friends, these organizations operate with minimal oversight.

Basic questions like "How many homeless people are in San Francisco?" or "How exactly does this NGO help?" remain unanswered.

Here is another opportunity: a software platform that brings transparency in this sector.

Every dollar spent, every service provided, and every person helped— all recorded in a centralized database.

Finally revealing what these "social" organizations actually accomplish with their millions in funding and who they truly help.

3. Secrets of Nature and People.

There is a third category…

Secrets in nature that people do not go looking for— because they are taboo.

What frontier of science is taboo?

Genetics is the perfect example.

After the Nazis' horrific abuse of genetic “science”, the field became both technically challenging and socially taboo— leading to the stagnation of the field for the last century.

“Frankenstein” has also been a horror story for centuries.

The reality is that genetic engineering could solve countless diseases and extend human life drastically.

But scientists are not working on "designer babies" because it's both hard and unpopular.

Similarly, genetic nutrition remains unexplored(“Nutrigenomics”).

While around 90% of East Asians are lactose intolerant, under 10% of Northern Europeans share this trait.

This isn't a flaw—it's evolution at work.

East Asians historically did not consume dairy, so they never developed the genetic mutations that emerged in European populations after thousands of years of dairy farming.

Yet even suggesting there could be minor genetic differences between ethnicities remains deeply taboo.

Just mention "genetic differences" and "ethnicity" in the same sentence, and you will face immediate backlash.

But this cultural sensitivity has blocked us from exploring legitimate scientific questions.

Humans evolved with genetic adaptations to local environments.

Just as Tibetans developed genetic mutations for high-altitude living, our bodies have evolved to process local diets over countless generations.

There’s an opportunity here to personalize nutrition based on genetic heritage.

This would transform human health—if you're brave enough to tackle both the science and the cultural sensitivity.

Don’t worry.

You don't need to be a genius.

Most people assume technical secrets are harder to discover than social ones.

But this is not true.

In today’s world, courage is in an even shorter supply than genius.

What you may lack in innate brilliance, you can compensate for with eccentricity.

The world is full of secrets, waiting to be uncovered.

But are you brave enough to seek them out?

This post was heavily inspired by Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Often the answer is— Direct Sales!

Cold emailing and calling your prospects, booking demos, and closing them.

But before you fire off 1,000 cold emails, you should know that cold emailing is science.

The first part of science is setting up your infrastructure correctly…

So your emails end up in your prospect’s primary inboxes, not their spam folder.

So how do you do it?

1. Setting Up Your Domains

Go to porkbun.com to purchase domains.

Why are we purchasing additional domains?

Domains that you buy will send users to your main website when visited.

You buy domains because you want to avoid email accounts from getting “burned”

“Burning” your domain means it ends up on Google’s or Microsoft’s spam filters.

If you use your main domain to email prospects and it gets “burned”, it’s nearly impossible to get it off the spam lists/filters.

So it’s best to use domains as “burners”.

If one of your domains gets “burned”, you can always set up another one.

Purchasing domains

Navigate to the home screen of Porkbun and search for your domains.

You can use the bulk search feature.

You need to purchase “.com” domains for the best performance.

Sending emails from domains like rivin.io vs. getrivin.com… the “.com” domains will see higher performance.

What to avoid:

• “-”

• Numbers

• Weird characters

All of these will hurt your campaigns.

For reference, at Rivin we use domains like:

• getrivin.com

• tryrivin.com

• hellorivin.com

• rivinapp.com

Use pre/post-fixes like “get”, “try”, and “join”— the cost should be $6.99/year per domain.

Setting Up Redirects

After you purchase your domains, you want to redirect these domains to your main domain.

1. Head to ACCOUNT and then Domain Management

   

2. Tick the boxes on the left of your domains

3. Click Bulk Actions and General Bulk Options

   

4. Head to URL Forwarding

   

5. Leave the Hostname blank and enter your main domain under Forward Traffic

6. Then click Toggle advanced settings and select Permanent Redirect (301).

   

7. Click Submit.

Great! You have now purchased outreach domains and set up your domain forwarding!

2. Creating Your Email Accounts With Outlook

(In the future, I’ll update this guide to work with Google Workspace too!)

Now you need to create email addresses for each of your domains.

To do this we will be using Microsoft Outlook:

1. Go to: https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/business/compare-all-microsoft-365-business-products?rtc=1

2. Click: For business > Microsoft 365 Business Basic > Buy now

3. Enter your main domain email as your login email.

4. Fill in your details and click Next.

   1. Ensure you select company size - select 5-9

5. Enter the number of licenses. You want 3 email accounts on this Microsoft admin account— one for each domain. So select 3 licenses.

6. Press Update after— this will cost $7.20/month per email.

7. Then Add payment method

   1. Enter your details and then press Place order

   2. Press Start using Microsoft 365 business basic

8. The first user you’re logged into is your admin account login. We do not want to use a license for our login email, only for the domains we will be using.

   1. Click on the user

   2. Click Licenses and apps

   3. Untick this box then press Save changes.

9. We will now add the Domains to your Microsoft account and set them up for outreach.

   1. Ensure you’re logged into the Microsoft admin center: https://admin.microsoft.com/#/homepage

   2. Search Domains in the search bar and select it under Navigation

      

   3. Click add domain

      

   4. Enter the domain name. This will be one of the outreach domains that you have purchased

   5. Select the first option to verify your domain by adding a TXT record to the domain’s DNS record

      

   6. Open Porkbun domain management and add the TXT record that Microsoft gives you inside the DNS records of the domain in Porkbun.

      

      

   7. Once the DNS record has been configured— which can take up to 2 hours, press Verify

   8. Next we need to configure the MX, CNAME, and TXT records. This is done the same way we added the TXT record, except we select the appropriate name from the Porkbun dropdown and then copy and paste the values from Microsoft.

      

   9. Once done, press continue. This can take up to 2 hours to configure.

   10. Repeat for the rest of your outreach domains, remember we can only have 20 domains on 1 Microsoft admin account. If you require more, go back to Step 1 and make a new Microsoft admin account.

10. We will now add DKIM & DMARC Records. DKIM is a “signature” added to your emails that tells email providers it is coming from the owner of the domain(you). DMARC validates your identity using DKIM and tells email recipients what to do if your email is “fishy” and has mismatched authentication data.

    There is another authentication method called SPF that is similar to DKIM. When you set up your accounts on Microsoft they take care of your SPF record for you.

    SPF, DKIM, & DMARC are extremely important and massively improve deliverability. This is because they authenticate your email and domain owner status— and thus help email recipients fight phishing and fraud.

    1. Search DKIM in the search bar and select the option below

       

    2. Click the domain that you want to generate a DKIM record for

    3. Press Create DKIM keys

    4. The CNAME records will populate on the screen. There will be 2. Head back to Porkbun to add the DNS under “CNAME” from the dropdown.

    5. Repeat for the second record

    6. They may take a few hours to configure. Once ready, turn them on.

       

    7. Repeat for all domains

    Now we’ll add the DMARC as a TXT record to your domain.

    1. Here is how it should look

       

    2. Save and repeat for all outreach domains

11. We will now create the email accounts for each of your domains.

    1. Search user and Manage user templates

       

    2. Select Active users

    3. Select Add a user

    4. Enter the details for the email account. First name, Last name, Display name (The display name is what shows up in recipients’ inboxes so make it the full name), Username (this will be the first name), and Domains (this will be the outreach domain you want to use for this user).

    5. Uncheck Automatically create a password and Require this user to change their password when they first sign in. Add a password for the account and store it somewhere safe. Select Next.

    6. Select the location and assign a license to the user. Then press Next.

    7. Skip Optional settings and Finish adding the user.

12. We now want to add a profile photo to the accounts

    1. Go to https://admin.microsoft.com/#/users

    2. Make sure you're logged in with your Microsoft admin account email address

    3. Click on the user, change the photo, update the photo, and save.

13. We now want to disable security so we aren’t prompted to enable 2FA.

    1. Login to the admin panel with the admin account

    2. Head to Properties

    3. Select Manage security details

    4. Select Disabled under Security defaults, select a reason, and Save

3. Warming Up Your Emails

Great! Now you have purchased domains and created email accounts for each of them!

But there’s still one more crucial step: warming up your emails.

What does “warming up” your email mean?

Companies like Google and Microsoft can see your email is new and contains no history— so they will send you to spam ASAP.

The way we avoid this is by joining an “email pool”.

An “email pool” is a network of thousands to millions of companies that agree to send each other emails to boost their internal email “rating” within Google, Microsoft, and other email mailboxes.

“Warming up” an email involves joining a pool and automatically sending and replying to emails you receive from other “pool” members.

By signing up for a trial for software like instantly.ai, smartlead.ai, or lemlist.com….

You can get email warming for free!

Your outreach software of choice will likely also provide email warming.

These are the settings you need to use to maximize performance.

1. Set Warming to 20: Configure the warming setting to 20, indicating the number of warm-up emails to be sent per day.

2. Gradual Increase: Increase the warming rate by 3-5 emails per day. This gradual increment helps establish a positive sending reputation over time.

3. Two Weeks Warming Period: Allow the warming process to continue for a minimum of two weeks. This duration ensures an adequate time to build up your emails’ reputations.

4. Initial Cold Email Volume Sending Schedule

• Week 1 - Send 5 emails per day per email address

• Week 2 - Send 10 emails per day per email address

• Week 3 - Send 20 emails per day per email address

• Week 4 - Send 30 emails per day per email address (don’t send more than 30 emails per day per email)

4. Connecting Your Email Accounts To Your Outreach Software

After all of this:

1. You have domains

2. You have mail addresses for each of them

3. Your email accounts have good ratings with Google & Microsoft

Lastly, connect your email to your outreach software of choice like Lemlist.com, Outreach, or Salesloft… and you’re ready to go!

You can now send cold emails to prospects and land in their inbox— not spam or promotions.

5. Next Steps: How To Structure Emails To Keep Your Email Rating

There are tons of things to avoid in emailing prospects…

If you don’t follow them, your email rating with companies like Google and Microsoft will quickly degrade until all your emails end up in “Spam” and “Promotions”.

The list of what to avoid is long— so I’m making another post about it in the future!

Want to be notified? Sign up as a subscriber— it’s free!

The ability to split-test different AI models

Many AI models exist: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and hundreds more.

There should be a way with one line of code to split test model performance based on speed, accuracy, and user feedback… So companies can ensure they are using the best model for their use case.

Modernizing police databases and database enrichment

Imagine if every time a police officer pulled someone over they could see basic public information such as where they work, their family details, and more.

This data could be crucial to preventing cases of human trafficking.

For example, if someone is hundreds of miles away from their place of work on a Monday and claims the child in their back seat is theirs, but their “family Christmas photo” does not show that child, this data could be crucial to prevent human trafficking.

Police Software in General

Everyone has shied away from building software for law enforcement

Not because it is hard— but because it has been socially unacceptable.

We see this with the political movements “Defund the Police” and “Abolish the Police”.

These people are wrong.

The way to fix our broken law enforcement is to build more technology.

This will allow current enforcement agencies to be more efficient and transparent.

There are hundreds of billion-dollar startups to be built here.

Missiles

Whenever a decades-old military system becomes synonymous with a function, such as “Stinger” missiles with surface-to-air anti-aircraft capabilities, there is likely an opportunity to make it cheaper and better.

Stinger missiles have been a crucial part of the US arsenal since the 1970s and have proven a critical defense weapon for militaries and peacekeeping organizations.

But there’s one minor problem… these missiles cost $120,000 to $150,000 per missile, with costs expected to rise 50% due to increased demand in the next few years.

Similar to Stinger missiles, “Javelin” anti-tank missiles first invented in the 1980s cost around $200,000 to $240,000 per missile— with increasing demand as well.

There’s some opportunity here for someone who does not shy away from building military technology to build missiles with better capabilities than our current Javelin and Stinger arsenal.

Government Spending Software

Local NGOs and organizations spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

But most of this money disappears into the pockets of NGOs run by politicians’ friends.

The “impact” of most NGOs is just renting a few vans, handing out the occasional sandwich, and collecting multi-million dollar contracts.

No one truly knows if this “investment” is really effective in combating drugs, violence, and homelessness in our inner cities.

We need a centralized system for social organizations to log their activity into…

With logged salaries, services rendered, and the specific people helped.

Think of a “CRM” but those in most need— that can be used to track government and NGO organizations and their true effectiveness.

Data products are powerful at scale with large datasets.

Interestingly, the organization with the largest datasets to ever exist, the US government, doesn’t seem to be using their data at all.

The product is buildable.

But sales is the bottleneck— you’d have to start mobilizing the voting population of small local governments and expand from there.

Bidding system for inventory

For highly in-demand products, like Nvidia GPUs, there should be a marketplace with buy-and-sell orders instead of fixed prices.

Virtual Bio Labs

Biotech innovation is held back by iteration speed.

For software, you can deploy code and get feedback immediately. But running a single experiment for biotech can take weeks, months, or years. We need the ability to run biotech experiments “in the cloud”.

Software to simulate the entire human body would be great!

But simulating every cell interaction is beyond current computing power.

It would be great to have labs run completely by robots, where you can control the robots in the lab to run experiments with code.

The Ethereum network built Solidity for crypto-specific use cases.

We need a similar programming language or unified API for Biotech.

Need to run an experiment?

Enter a few lines of code, hit submit, and the instructions for your experiment will be sent to robotic labs.

A robot will follow your instructions, conduct your experiment, and send you the results.

This would create a world where anyone can run biotech experiments, speed up iteration speed, and lead to radically more biotech innovation.

Challenges? This isn’t strictly a software problem of creating a new programming language, you need the software to control hardware.

You would have to significantly augment current machines or even completely build new biotech machines from scratch.

Initially, you could work with people with co-working lab memberships to run the experiments manually.

It's a hard problem with massive payoff potential for Humanity.

Nutrigenomics

There are ethnic and racial differences between humans.

Tibetans have evolved for high-elevation living, East Asians have evolved to be lactose intolerant, and Dutch people have evolved to be tall.

These differences are undeniable, but since the Nazi’s defeat in 1945 no one has wanted to touch genetics— it has been too controversial.

But to deny these differences between humans is immensely harmful.

Is it crazy to say different people who evolved on different continents with different local food sources have evolved to process foods differently?

Probably not.

If your ancestors lived in Portugal or the Chilean mountains for tens of thousands of years wouldn’t you have evolved to better process local foods from these regions?

In short— there is a huge opportunity to personalize nutrition according to genetic heritage.

But the challenge in Nutrigenomics isn’t standing up to the mob and saying the controversial— it is also a feat of science to do the technical genetics research.

All-in-one AI Sales Software

Everyone talks about “compound startups” with centralized data such as Rippling in HR Tech…

But no one has built a compound startup in the sales space.

CRM, AI Agents, Dialer, and Sequencing all in one place.

Bus tracking software for school districts

Ability to track pickups, dropoffs, and live mapping for parents.

Video/Audio Translation

Only 18% of the world speaks English.

Large YouTube channels like Mr Beast and major movie producers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year translating their media.

There is an opportunity to auto-translate and dub videos, movies, and more with software.

It could also grow organically allowing everyday people to translate a YouTube video for free.

AI Created Docs & User Onboarding

Most API products and software companies have documentation for their products that need to be updated every time they update their product.

Instead, there should be an integration into their code base that then updates their documentation and onboarding experiences automatically for every product update.

This would remove tons of tedious work.

AI Data Extraction

Today, all large data startups are created through complex HTML regex and JSON intercepts.

Engineers must constantly monitor web structure changes and spend hours searching through JSON intercept structures for each site when building datasets.

The ability to plug any site or dataset origin and automatically extract data would save thousands of engineering hours.

Genetically Altered Chickens

1/2 of all chicks are born male, as a result— 260,000,000 chicks are euthanized per year in the USA alone.

In Europe they are scanning eggs before hatching to sort out male chickens… but a better solution is to make male chickens only produce X chromosomes, or even at a higher rate.

This would significantly increase the ROI for farmers and prevent billions of chicken lives from slaughter globally

Book Writing AI Platform For Authors

Today, all authors use Google Docs or Microsoft Word to write their books.

There must be a better way to keep track of plots, subplots, and the progressions of stories.

In the same way that programmers have IDEs, authors need BREs— book writing environments.

AI Account Manager & Customer Success Managers

With the rise of AI, hundreds of AI sales software and “AI SDR” startups have popped up.

These startups are all focused on generating revenue from new customers.

In addition to AI sales startups…

There are late stage startups like Zendesk and killer upstarts like Pylon, focused on customers service and solving customers issues.

Uniquely, I believe there is a position for AI account manager and customer success startups— that track how customers interact with your product and cater to them.

Increasing customer satisfaction, reducing churn, and increasing upsells/NRR.

This could be done through a ton of ways such as tracking clicks and product usage of customers— then scheduling calls with customers or sending them a product how-to guide whenever they encounter product friction…

Or even better, when customer product usage indicates interest in premium features $$$

A platform that lets anyone create and manage custom relationship contracts that replace traditional marriage licenses and relationship NDAs.

The Government has no place in defining marriage as a legal status.

Think "LegalZoom for relationships" - handling everything from disclosures and property rights to healthcare decisions through smart legal agreements that work with existing systems.

With 2M+ marriages annually in the US and growing demand for prenups, there’s a $100B+ market of people who want to define relationships on their own terms.

Cursor for sales teams.

Control your sales CRM and outreach with natural language.

Warm CRM Linking.

Many founders and sales teams have a multitude of potential leads in their Instagram, LinkedIn, and X followings… but for some reason this data is not added to CRMs automatically.

If a potential customer likes your tweets or follows you, don’t you want this data logged automatically?

Vertical AI Operating Systems SaaS for Legacy Industries

There is lots of opportunities in old “Legacy” industries with:

1. High customer ACVs (Jewelers, Funeral Homes)

2. Recurring business (Country clubs, Veterinarian, Optometrists, Yacht Clubs, Therapists, Nursing, Commercial Cleaners, Dentists, Churches, Spas)

3. Complex Operations (Fisheries, Timber, Pharmacies)

These industries are thousands of years old, but often lack a centralized AI powered “operating system” that keeps track of inventory, sales cycles, customer relationships, and more.

Today there are general inventory management/PoS systems like Netsuite and CRMs like Salesforce, but legacy businesses often have complex needs that are not being met by these general solutions/softwares.

Is this another hit? I believe so.

We have some exciting discoveries and updates we want to share with you all :)

Discoveries

The initial target customers of Rivin’s MVP were Amazon sellers.

But: Successful Amazon sellers do not only sell on Amazon, they sell omni-platform.

In truth— we knew this from the beginning.

As such, we’ve spent the past months gathering feedback on how to meet this omni-platform need.

In addition to this assessment, we have also come to another key product conclusion…

Sellers consider two factors when purchasing inventory— the expected sales and the profitability of those sales.

However, inventory purchased is rarely purchased at the initially listed price.

Almost all inventory prices are negotiated.

Thus:

The primary focus of Rivin is not to strictly analyze the profitability of products from supplier-listed “prices”.

Our focus is to:

1. Help customers understand a product’s in-depth historical data

2. Give them the data-rich tools necessary to negotiate an optimal purchase price

In the past, Rivin has calculated profitability based on supplier prices.

Our new approach involves being a complete omni-platform analysis tool and having our software be flexible and responsive.

This means supplier prices will still be used to attain estimated profitability, but will not be the core data used within analysis.

We strive to provider sellers with a data-driven platform where purchasing decisions happen.

Product Update

Our MVP landed initial customers, whom we have talked with at length for feedback.

Rivin’s MVP was built to prove demand— and it did.

But, based on newly acquired discoveries, we decided to rewrite our code from scratch.

It took 3 weeks of non-stop building, but Rivin.ai is finally here!

We now provide AI-powered in-depth data across all Amazon and Walmart marketplaces and are adding all other major platforms to be truly omni-platform.

Pricing

Our pricing was originally platform access-based with usage being unlimited.

Amazon data was $49/mo, and Walmart/Noon data was $69/mo each.

With the change to omni-platform data, we’re also changing our pricing.

We now allow sellers to analyze inventory across all major platforms with our:

• $69/mo Base Plan: Under 50,000 products analyzed per month

• $499/mo Pro Plan: Up to 1 million products analyzed per month

• Enterprise Plan: Custom limits and any platform data or integrations on request

We believe this will allow us to serve customers both large and small— and offer a unique omni-platform data solution that does not exist.

Rivin will be the ultimate inventory intelligence software to analyze and drive purchases.

Raising Money

Exciting news— Rivin has raised our first check!

Shoutout to Kelly and Jason’s Calacanis from LAUNCH Fund for taking an early bet on us and being an all-around great person to work with.

Looking forward to using this initial capital to serve and grow our amazing customer base :)

Thankful

I want to thank my friends Mitchell, Sergio, and Alperen.

These guys are incredibly skilled at sales, marketing, and programming respectively and most of them are or have been Founders themselves.

I am immensely grateful to have supporting friends who are always willing to answer a late-night phone call and let me bounce ideas off them.

It’s rare to have friends as intelligent, helpful, and selfless as these guys.

getcannoli.com

Problem

Small fast-growing influencers struggle to get paid partnerships.

Solution

Use AI to reach out and book influencers paid partnerships.

How Do You Know The Problem Exists?/Why Me?

I have influencer friends who have this problem and I am deeply familiar with the influencer MarTech space(it’s where I built my first successful startup)!

Target Customer(ICP)

Micro Recipe Influencers → Micro Reviewer Influencers → Micro Travel Influencers

“Competition”

1. Manual Outreach/Inbound — Currently 80%+ of the market

2. Agencies <10% of the market

3. Matching platforms <10% of the market

Why The “Competition” Is Not Competition

Most influencers don’t do any outreach for partnerships— they play pure “defense”.

Some influencers attempt manual outreach with little to no success.

The reality: Influencers are not good at sourcing partnerships. They are good at content.

Many startups are focused on helping companies find influencers or building marketplaces that connect influencers and companies.

Grin, Impact.com, & Captiv8 all have had recent layoffs and trouble.

I believe:

1. Current platforms and agencies that “connect” influencers to companies are bad.

2. The best partner opportunities are done in private $$$

3. Everyone else believes in connecting companies to influencers, I believe there is demand for connecting influencers to companies.

Our Differences

1. Focused on influencers → companies

2. Hyper specific customers

Why Now?

1. Short-form content on Reels/TikTok/Shorts/Facebook/LinkedIn/Snapchat has given food influencers a new popular medium where none existed.

2. Many channels are now being built to millions of subscribers with “shorts”.

3. “Shorts” are a high-volume, high-velocity content engine. This has increased possible “ad spots” compared to traditional long form.

Pricing

1. $197/mo — 1,000 outreaches per month + metrics website

2. $297/mo — 3,000 outreaches per month + metrics website

3. Custom Plan — XXk outreach per month + personal assistant + metrics website

Risks

1. Will influencers pay $197+ per month? Many influencers are broke.

2. Will paid partnerships justify the subscription? Customer ROI question.

3. Will influencers cancel after a handful of recurring monthly partnerships?

World Domination

1. Charge $197/month for our software and focus on ~10,000 micro recipe influencers— $23.6M+ ARR

2. Shift ICP to include ~30,0000 restaurant and food review influencers — $100M+ ARR

3. Add features & up pricing to ~$297 — $150M+ ARR

4. Expand to travel influencers ~30,000 — $200M+ ARR

5. Expand to all influencers — $XXB+ ARR?

Traction

May — reaching out to potential customers and getting 100 responses.

The Playbook

Stage: Currently reaching out to potential customers to get responses.

After many requests to make my startup theses public…

Here we go.

getrivin.com

Problem

Suppliers have giant spreadsheets of in-stock inventory.

There is no good way to analyze this inventory at scale.

Solution

Scan spreadsheets in seconds to find profitable products on any marketplace.

“How Do You Know The Problem Exists?”

I’ve had this problem, my friends have had this problem, and paid solutions exist.

Target Customer(ICP)

Intially Amazon Sellers → Walmart/Amazon Sellers → Noon/Amazon Sellers → All Sellers

“Competition”

1. ScanUnlimited.com — Currently 40% of the US Amazon market at $70/month

2. Analyzer.tools — Currently 30% of the US Amazon market at $49/month

3. Manual Sourcing — 20% of the US Amazon market

4. Other tools — 10% of the US Amazon market

In emerging markets, manual sourcing is 100% of the market. People copy and paste product codes into google one-by-one from their spreadsheets.

Why The “Competition” Is Not Competition

The incumbents are focused on creating “depth” for US Amazon sellers.

They are building supplier databases, IP databases, and adding services for US Amazon sellers.

I believe focusing on developing markets(“width”) is better.

People are familiar with the problem, know the software exists for the US Amazon market, and have no switching costs— as no solutions exist for their markets.

This means Walmart, Noon, and emerging market sellers.

Our Differences

1. More accurate

2. More affordable

3. Work across all Amazon + Walmart + Noon marketplaces

Why Now?

1. In developed marketplaces with the release of Walmart.com, many sellers are now selling on both platforms. There are no good tools that help them optimize operations across both platforms.

2. Emerging markets (e.g. MENA) have no tools for Amazon sellers.

Why Me?

I’ve been in e-commerce since 2018, and previously scaled two Amazon businesses to over $25,000+ per month.

In addition to being a seller, my last e-commerce SaaS startup scaled to $125k+ ARR before failing.

I know the space.

Pricing

1. $49/month for Amazon Sellers

2. $69/month for Walmart Sellers

3. $69/month for Noon Sellers

Risks

1. There may be no reliable distribution (Dead Zone).

2. Large developed market sellers may be hesitant to switch.

World Domination

1. Charge $99/month for our software when it works across more marketplaces

2. Every seller in our emerging markets buys our software (~600,000 sellers)— $712M+ ARR

3. Every seller in developed markets buys our software (~3M sellers)— $3.5B+ ARR

4. Every seller in all developing marketplaces buys our current software (~8.5M sellers) — $10B+ ARR

5. Add features and up pricing to ~$299— $30B+ ARR

6. Sell the data as an API to startups and companies like Honey — XXB+? ARR

We will become how businesses analyze inventory throughout the world.

Traction

Note: “MRR” means monthly subscriptions

$49 MRR — January(Beta)

$147 MRR — February(Beta)

$352 MRR — March(Beta)

$607 MRR — April(Launch)

The Playbook

Stage: Currently talking to customers and making our product better.

“How do you learn to code and set up servers?”

“How do you do marketing and sales to get first customers?”

Many people want to found their own startup— but don’t know where to start.

In this short guide, we’ll answer every detail you can imagine...

From big concepts to the small details of setting up your servers and what to say to close your first deals.

And the best part is— building a startup will cost you nothing but your time.

1. How Do You Get An Idea? (Day 1)

Everyone loves to talk about startup “ideas”.

But, customers don’t pay for “ideas”— they pay for problems you solve for them.

So find a problem you’re capable of solving.

First ask yourself: “Do I have any problems I pay, or would pay, to solve?”

Then, ask your friends: “Are there any problems you pay, or would pay, to solve?”

Still have no good answers? Use another method...

Find software you already pay for or know about, and find out what market they aren’t serving.

Then make a better solution for a small specific market!

A great way to do this is by visiting review sites like G2, Capterra, or Reddit and seeing complaints people have about specific companies.

An example of this is Toast.

Stripe already had payment software and payment systems, but Toast made a system specifically for restaurants.

Toast is now worth over 12 Billion dollars.

Now you should have an idea/problem to start with!

Let’s say for example you speak Chinese and know a lot about writing.

Most current AI blog writing startups do not work with Chinese.

So, you can be the AI blog writing startup specifically for Chinese companies!

Don’t worry if your initial idea isn’t that good, while building your startup you’re bound to run into more problems yourself.

To make your life easiest — you should be building as close to the money as possible. For example, building sales software or marketing software is by far the easiest way to close customers… because your product directly leads to your customers making more money.

Okay, now that you have your idea… it’s time to start building!

2. Designing Your Product (Week 1)

Now that you have your idea, it’s time to spend 100+ hours building your product!

Sike! Just kidding!

I used to believe you should work intensely on building an MVP for two weeks, but I’ve changed my mind.

Your time is valuable, so don’t spend 100+ hours building a product that no one may care about.

Instead, build a beautiful landing page in an hour with Unicorn Platform, Framer, or Magic UI if you are technical.

Then design a mock-up in under 20 hours with Figma, or if you’re technical use a UI library like Shadcn and Magic UI!

It’s easy.

Go and download an amazing basic template for free from Figma’s community marketplace and change it up a little bit.

Make it beautiful and make navigation work.

Then record a quick demo of your “product” using Screen Studio, OBS, or Loom.

It will look like a real product… except you didn’t spend 100+ hours writing the code!

Lastly, link your landing page website to Stripe, and add a 3-day free or paid trial— but only after customers enter their credit card!

A good starting price is ~30% less than the industry leader, and try to choose an idea you can charge at least $49/month for.

In the 100+ hours it would’ve taken you to build a single product, you can design five ideas for absolutely free!

3. Proving Your Idea (Week 2)

So you have your website and your demo live!

Now comes the hardest part, getting people to visit your website, enter their credit card details, and click “start trial”.

Where do you find customers?

There are two main methods you can use to get customers:

1. Find where people are complaining about the problem you solve and message them.

Platforms like Fiverr and Upwork can also be a goldmine for finding people who offer complimentary services.

Let’s build on our earlier example: You have an AI startup that generates Chinese blogs.

Go find people who build websites for Chinese companies and message them:

“Hey ____ 👋 saw you create websites for Chinese companies. ____ helps Chinese companies generate blog posts with AI! Would you be interested in referring your clients? We would pay you for every person you refer! $$$ ”

Then send your website link and demo video.

Want to go more direct?

Find potential customers doing manual research and then use Seamless.ai, or Apollo.io to find the contact information of 1,000+ potential customers.

Then build a cold outreach sequence using tools like Reply.io, Close, Clay, or Salesloft

Email potential customers, message them on LinkedIn, and most importantly— call them.

2. Post on Facebook Groups, Reddit, TikTok and other post-based social platforms depending on your price point.

Using these strategies, you will get 100+ responses within a week.

People will either sign up and enter their credit card details— or they won’t.

If they don’t sign up, it is for one of 3 reasons:

1. They don’t actually have the problem.

2. They aren’t willing to pay to solve the problem.

3. They don’t think your product is good enough to try and pay for.

Do not quit until you get 100 responses.

After getting 100 responses, you will know the flaws in your thinking.

Either people have signed up or they haven’t.

If they don’t have the problem— start again with a new idea!

If they aren’t willing to pay to solve the problem— spend 2 hours making your website and demo better by “adding” new features, or restart with a new idea!

If they don’t think your product is good enough to try and pay for, spend 2 hours making your website and demo better by “adding” new features!

Most of your ideas will not work.

So, don’t get stuck “adding” new features, or features you can’t build.

The right choice is usually to start over with a new problem.

Okay, now your first idea either worked out and people signed up, or you retried 2-10 times until people finally entered their credit card information and clicked “sign up”!

Congratulations!

But wait…. you don’t have a real product!

4. Building Your Product(Weeks 3 & 4)

Okay, now that you have an idea that people are interested in and willing to pay for— it’s time to spend two weeks building your product.

Set a 14-day deadline and stick to it— no matter what.

“But I don’t know how to code!”

Go to Vercel.com, open ChatGPT, and download Cursor.

Vercel is a company where you can download a template to build software, and then deploy that software to your website with one click for free.

They handle everything from the servers to uploading your code.

Don’t understand something? Ask ChatGPT, Cursor, or any AI chatbot.

Use Javascript or Typescript for your website and PostgreSQL for your database.

Javascript/Typescript are not the most beautiful or fastest programming languages, but they are the most popular— think of them as the English of the programming world.

Everyone “speaks” and “writes” Javascript/Typescript because they are popular, and most “books”(websites) are written in them.

Use a template library like Chakra, Tremor, Daisy, or Shadcn… and make your code match your Figma design from your demo as much as possible.

For your backend functions, use external APIs or scrape websites with ScrapingAnt, Smart Proxy, BrightData, or ScrapingBee.

For a database use Supabase or something like Xano!

But don’t strive for perfection— work fast and focus on 1-2 features.

It will be a two-week grind, but stay positive.

After two weeks have passed you will have a basic first version done!

We call this an MVP, or “minimum viable product”.

It’s not pretty— but it will work.

Now it’s time to get your first real paying customers.

5. Your First Customers (Week 5)

Your first customers will be hard— but the good news is you have done this already!

The only difference is you have a real product now, besides this difference, just follow the same playbook from step #3!

Grind out and don’t stop until you get 20+ signups (regardless of whether they end up paying after their trial ends).

Your goal here is to get customers on calls to get feedback.

When you speak to people your goal is not to talk their face off.

Make some small talk: “Tell me about yourself/your business”!

Then ask these 3 questions:

1. What made you sign up for a trial?

2. Why did(or didn’t!) you pay after your trial?

3. What do you wish our product did better or had?

Then shut up and listen while taking notes.

6. Implementing Feedback (Week 6)

Okay, now you’ve had 20+ signups and have spoken with 10+ customers…

It’s time to implement their feedback.

By now you have a long list of requests.

So look for trends in your requests list and use your intuition.

What is easy to build and takes a week to add?

Spend a week and add these small improvements.

Spend a week— no more, no less.

7. Repeat(Weeks 6 to 8)

There is no magic sauce, there is no silver bullet.

It’s time to reach out to people who have canceled their subscriptions and reach out to new potential customers again.

You will now spend every waking hour improving your app and getting revenue.

Get new customers. Talk to customers. Make small improvements. Repeat.

8. A Stable Customer Base (Months 2 to 4)

A major problem that you will encounter is churn.

Churn is just a fancy word for “What percent of customers cancel their subscription every month?”

At first, churn will be high, 10-20% of your customers will cancel each month.

This is normal.

You must discover: Why do people cancel?

Then fix your product accordingly.

There are two reasons why churn happens:

1. Your product needs improvement.

2. You are targeting the wrong customers.

Taking our earlier example…

Let’s say your AI Chinese blog startup has 20% of customers cancel each month!

Maybe the problem isn’t your product— you might be targeting new small businesses that are just struggling, failing, and closing up shop.

In other words, the problem is not your product— it’s who you are selling to.

Try selling to blog writers, and your churn may be much lower.

You need to get your revenue to $2,000/month AND churn below 5%.

This phase is brutal and for complex products can take months— we call it in “The Loop”.

Once you have at least $2,000/month in subscriptions and get churn under 5% per month— it’s time to scale.

9. Automating Sales (Month 4-6)

Now you have $2,000/month in subscriptions and under 5% of your customers are canceling each month!

You’re doing great!

Until now, you’ve got all your customers by simply reaching out and speaking with them.

So should you try to scale with Google and Facebook ads? Right?

Hell no.

“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” is great advice.

What you are doing is working, you just need to automate it.

Use LinkedIn to find potential customers, MillionVerifier or Clay to verify email addresses and phone numbers, and use Lemlist to automate your outreach!

If you want to really invest in a system that’s working, get Outreach or Salesloft.

Your goal is to do exactly what you’ve been doing— but use software to automate your processes.

You should now also be hard “marketing” on follower-based social platforms.

Posting on LinkedIn, hitting Facebook Groups, launching on Twitter, etc.

Your goal shouldn’t be to go to $1M+ in subscriptions next month.

Your goal should be slow and steady progress on your metrics.

Increasing revenue, fewer cancelations, and happier customers.

This is also the stage where you can(and maybe should) raise a little money!

10. Hard Scaling (Months 6+)

Now you will have $10,000+ in monthly subscriptions!

You are doing amazing!

You now know people love your product, now it’s just getting them to sign up.

You’ve now probably raised or are raising big money.

“But how do I scale?” you may ask.

Always chase the answers to these two questions:

1. How can you expand the number of people willing to pay for your product?

2. How can you charge people more?

This will lead you to develop new sales strategies, features, and products!

At this stage, there is no easy answer for how to scale— it depends on your business.

You need to know:

1. Who are your customers?

2. Where are your customers?

3. How much do you charge customers?

Different companies will have different answers.

If you’re selling a low-ticket product, you should probably be doing marketing and ads.

If you’re selling a product that costs on the expensive side, you should probably be doing outreach and eventually hiring salespeople.

When you first reach this stage, you should consider changing from a “cheap product” to a premium product.

Add a killer feature, do a beautiful redesign, and update your pricing structure to get:

• Higher paying customers

• Lower churn customers

• Better sales economics

Instead of “30% less than the industry leader”, aim for 2-5x their pricing.

Why?

Selling a product for $499/month isn’t much more work than selling it at $199/mo.

The difference in work is marginal for 2.5x the revenue.

You should make your product nicer and go premium as fast as possible.

But remember, always remain strict with your spending.

Conclusion & Disclamer

Building something new is extremely hard.

Honesty, you probably don’t have what it takes and should get a cushy tech job instead.

Or even better, work at early-stage startups!

Risk-adjusted, early employees make the most money.

As an early-employees:

• You get less stress

• You get paid a six-figure salary

• You get equity that could be worth tens of millions

• You get freedom. You are not tied down to one startup and can bet on 10+ startups

At a $1 billion-dollar startup, normally:

• The two Founders make $200M each

• The first 10 employees make $5+ million each

• The next 10 employees make $2-3 million each

• The next 10 employees make $1-2 million each

At each unicorn 30+ employees become millionaires, make a six-figure salary, and guarantee a $250k/year salary for any future role.

It’s way better to be the first 30 employees than to be a Founder.

But if you’re really set on being a Founder, know what you’re getting yourself into.

You will probably be a loser for years— possibly decades.

So, I genuinely wish you endure as much pain and suffering as you can bear along your journey to make you aggressive and bulletproof.

Otherwise, you will not make it.

All that said, Founding is not complicated.

Find a problem you’re passionate about, find people willing to pay for your solution, and you have a startup.

I hope this playbook helps you and wish you the best of luck conquering the world.

Shoot me an email— I’d love to help you out and maybe invest in you :)

emilianoguerrero22@gmail.com

“He risked everything and it paid off.”

“You gotta risk it for the biscuit!”

These common sayings— are horrible advice and untrue.

Successful Founders are not the risk-seeking trailblazers you think they are.

Successful Founders hate risk.

“What? What do you mean???”

Let’s start by asking a simple question:

What is risk?

Risk is the number of decisions that are out of your control between your direct input and your desired output.

When you start looking at the world from this perspective— Founding makes sense.

Founding is the best way to limit the number of decisions out of your control.

Need a better product? Design and write code.

Need more sales? Prospect and outreach.

What seems more risky to you?

Working for a company that can fire you are a whim due to circumstances out of your control?

Or, founding a startup where your success is determined by your own abilities?

Founding is the lowest risk you can take— it’s betting on yourself.

If you fail, you fail because you weren’t good enough.

Not because it was someone else’s fault.

It’s all on you— and that’s a good thing.