Our two biggest customers both came from people we already knew. I don't think that's a strategy.

We have 260 seats signed across two companies both real estate, both through direct relationships. Great for revenue, useless as a repeatable channel. Nothing about it tells me whether a stranger will buy this.

That's the whole reason we launched here: the first honest test of whether the product sells without a warm introduction.

So for the B2B founders: what was the first channel that actually worked for you outside your network? And how long did it take before you could tell the difference between a real channel and a fluke?

We spent our first six months building double-entry accounting instead of features. I still don't know if that was right.

Here was the argument: anyone can generate a CRM now.
What you can't generate is the boring stuff underneath a real ledger, a payroll engine, a shared inbox that writes to the same records. So we built that first, and shipped the impressive-looking parts later.

The cost was real. We had nothing demo-able for months while people shipped AI tools every week.

For anyone who's made this call: did you build the unglamorous foundation first, or ship the visible thing and backfill? I'm curious whether the "boring first" bet actually pays off or just feels virtuous.