Prioritize 1–2 channels

One day, we had this post that took off, and it got almost 2,000 likes, it got 300,000 impressions, and we saw a spike in demo bookings. So we looked at the post, tried to analyze it, and understand what did well. It turns out people love storytelling, and they love hearing not just about what you're building but the story of how you built it.

A lot of people in the community had the problem that we were solving, so [other members] were like, ‘Hey, cool, Patrick's working on this thing. Oh, we should talk to Patrick,’ or, ‘Hey, I have this problem—go talk to Patrick’.

I just cold emailed people that I knew would need this kind of product. I knew they needed this kind of product was because I had a background in this space before. So I just looked for people that would fit this profile. And we would be able to successfully get on calls with these people. In fact, with cold emails, we had about a 35% response rate.

The thing that has consistently worked really well for us is networks. Just finding ways into companies through people we know. There's a certain set of companies where we would ‘meet with the janitor.’ In other words, we'll talk to anyone, we'll try and learn from them, we'll try and understand something about the business and the opportunity, use what we learned to come back to the next conversation better and more prepared.

Once we found a few little niches that worked for us, I would just do a bunch of cold calling. Especially if they were in Sydney and I could meet them in person and give them a demo. Eventually, we started building out a simple outbound motion and doing more.

My tactic was to go partner with some of these big-name CMOs and get them close to me, so I started doing a weekly AMA with one of them. My pitch to them was, `Hey, zero prep, I'm going to go and do some research and just pick your brain on topics specifically around what you're seeing in AI and things around how marketing is going to evolve.’ And almost everyone said yes.

The more that you can just be you—authentic, real, and true to the world —the more the world responds to that in a really positive way. I think content is a way of doing that, but content has to be done with that intention.

At my first startup, Iteratively, we had over 50 companies on the program, and over the course of a few months, we converted dozens of them into paying customers. They were replacing their incumbent CRM with Clarify, which gave us the conviction that it was time to launch publicly.

We started going to conferences where we thought a buyer would be, just to see who the people are, understand the words they're using, and validate the problems we heard.