I m currently trying to find the first customers for my startup, and I don t yet have the budget to hire a marketing specialist or agency.
AI has become my temporary marketing assistant. I use it to:
research potential customer segments;
review and improve outreach messages;
prepare questions for customer-discovery calls;
analyze replies and identify patterns;
turn marketing experiments into clear next steps.
However, I still research each company, personalize the message and send every outreach email myself. The difficult part is finding the right balance between saving time and sounding like another automated sales message.
A few years ago I was juggling a bunch of projects constant back and forth with PMs, designers, clients and actual design work in between calls. I didn t have the bandwidth to write correctly . I'd reply in less than a minute, typos and all, and get right on to the next fire. Months later I d read an old email and cringe at how rough it was, but nobody seemed to care at the time, or maybe I just never learned if they did. These days half the tools I use every day have grammar checks and sentence help built in Gmail, Slack, whatever I happen to be typing into. And somewhere along the way I started to trust them fully. I will type something, see it 'fixed' and send it without reading a word of it. I didn t decide to proofread myself. It just kind of quietly stopped needing to be. I honestly don't know if my writing improved or if I just stopped being the one to review it, which is a strange thing to notice in hindsight. They seem to be very different things but from the outside they probably look the same. I m curious what that has been like for other people who write a lot for work has it changed how carefully you actually write, for better or worse, to lean on these tools? Or did it never really make any difference to you at all?"
We had two full-time SDRs sending 150+ cold emails a day. The pipeline looked busy, but closed deals were painfully slow, and customers acquired through cold outreach had double the churn rate.
We stopped all cold outreach and shifted that energy purely into writing teardowns and technical case studies. Our lead volume dropped initially, but our conversion rate from lead to paid tripled prospects already trusted us before the call.
Have you ever killed an active sales channel because the quality of customers was hurting your business?
We spent almost three months building and maintaining a feature that 40% of our free users asked for. But when we looked at the data, that exact feature was causing 60% of our support tickets and confusing high-paying customers.
Last month, we ripped it out completely. We lost a few vocal free users, but our main product speed improved, support volume plummeted, and paid upgrades went up.
Have you ever sunsetted a popular feature to save your main core value proposition?
One benefit I see is that it will usually produces something very politically correct that will usually go through the endless censorship that has taken over the internet (personally on the web since beginning of the 90's it was something else entirely, a mix of academic papers & free flowing ideas on clumsy graphics all over the place - oh boy that was so much decentralized and fun).
But then I only see problems: flatness, falseness, shallowness, lack of originality, creativity and most of all the dependency it slowly develops.
I ve been watching a lot of recent launches, and honestly, the gap between solo indie hackers and backed startups with massive mailing lists is getting crazy.
When you launch with zero audience, even if your product solves a real problem, it feels like shouting into a void unless you constantly poke people in DMs to take a look. On the flip side, teams with existing distribution easily dominate the top spots within the first few hours.
For those of you who launched completely from scratch with no pre-existing email list or social following:
What actually worked for you to get those first 20 or 30 genuine conversations going? Did you focus heavily on Reddit, cold outreach, or just engaging here in the community weeks before launch day?
Honestly, looking at the current state of AI coding agents, building a simple SaaS MVP from scratch feels like reinventing the wheel. You can literally spin up a working prototype over the weekend. But I keep thinking about the hangover part: technical debt, messy code structures, and the pain of scaling it later. If you were starting a new project this week, would you actually trust an AI agent to ship the whole MVP just to test the market quickly? Or would you still write it manually to keep the architecture clean?
