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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
14 Data Technology Founders
GTM Channel Lessons
Run Cold Outbound to Pressure-Test Messaging Before You Commit to It
Datalogz treated cold outbound as a messaging lab before it ever became a brand asset. Logan and his team ran LinkedIn outreach from nearly every team member’s account, cycling through more than 30 different openers to find what actually landed. The winner was simple: “Got BI sprawl?” That line got “data leaders from massive enterprises, fortune 50s, Fortune 100s to take meetings with us that for the most part don’t normally book with kind of early stage startups.” The team didn’t retrofit the message into their brand after the fact. As Logan put it, “We validated first with just kind of cold outbound. And once we validated, it just stuck.” It became the company motto, went on t-shirts, and traveled to conferences, where “people stop us all the time.” Cold outbound is cheap enough to run 30 experiments. The message that converts strangers is the message worth building a brand around.
Use Open Source Community Building as Your Primary Inbound Channel
Suresh built Collate’s entire go-to-market motion on the back of an open source community rather than outbound sales. For the first two years, the team focused almost entirely on the open source project, shipping at high velocity and engaging contributors directly. “Our go to market strategy was centered around open source,” he said. “That investment in building a community has paid off. Today we have 12,000 plus community members, around 3,000 plus open source deployments.” Those deployments weren’t paying customers, but they were something arguably more valuable at that stage: a constant feedback loop. “It’s a product manager’s dream. You get to interact with your customers on a daily basis.” When community members eventually needed someone to handle deployment and infrastructure, the path to Collate was already obvious. “People use our open source project and then they want to use world class experts. Instead of having to actually support, build and take care of the infrastructure and the deployment, they want somebody who are experts to do that for them.” A well-run open source community doesn’t just build awareness, it pre-qualifies buyers and shortens the sales cycle before your first sales rep ever picks up the phone.
Anchor Early Demand Generation in Events and Customer Stories
When Alation launched in 2012, the team made a deliberate decision to keep outbound out of the equation almost entirely. Satyen described his early head of marketing as “literally maniacally opposed” to outbound, which meant “90% of our leads were from marketing and literally the other 10% might have been [from me], just like running around the world talking about stuff and doing whatever, which could be a form of marketing.” The motion that filled that pipeline was event-heavy; trade shows served as the primary stage for building awareness. The content they brought to those events wasn’t product demos or category manifestos. It was customer stories. Satyen described the approach as “go to events, spread the word, tell customer stories, have customers talk to each other and produce leads.” In a category with no established competitors and no existing demand, peer-to-peer credibility at live events did the work that search volume and outbound sequences couldn’t. When you’re creating a category, your customers are your best salespeople, and getting them in the same room with prospects is more valuable than any outbound sequence.
Create a Content Destination That Educates Buyers Before Sales Reaches Them
Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy, designed his content strategy around a specific outcome: getting prospects to self-educate before they ever spoke to a salesperson. He built a standalone video content site where visitors could go deep on the category, not just the product. When inbound leads started arriving, the results validated the approach. “When we started to get inbound prospects and they would hit our site and they would go to Cinchy TV and they would talk about how they would watch literally hundreds of hours of the content, it was crazy. And that just reinforced our conviction to that.” The business impact was concrete. As Dan described it, “The best lead that we could ever get is one that stumbled across, went to our site, watched an initial video and then many hours of content watching later, they reached out to us and they’re already educated, they already know the story, they’ve already seen the platform.” Buyers who arrive already educated compress the sales cycle and reduce the overhead of every conversation that follows.
Gather Customers Together to Solve Problems With Each Other
Barr built small roundtables into her regular rhythm as a way to deepen customer relationships and stay close to the market. Rather than positioning these as sales events, she structured them around peer-to-peer problem solving. “I actually spend a lot of time also in small sort of roundtables meeting customers, having them speak to each other about their problems,” she said. The framing was simple: “At the end of the day, it’s kind of about helping them solve problems together.” When customers talk to each other instead of just to you, they validate each other’s pain, surface problems you didn’t know existed, and build a sense of community around the category you’re trying to create.
Build Your Launch Audience Before You Have a Product
Before Airbyte had anything worth shipping, Michel and his co-founder were already building the audience that would make the launch matter. They spent months on the phone with data engineers, and critically, they kept every person in the loop on their progress: “We were keeping in touch with every single person that we are talking to, and we’re keeping them in the loop about what is the progress.” The pitch itself became a demand signal. “Whenever we are describing our idea,” Michel recalled, “yes, let us know what is available because we want to try it.” When they finally released, they stood up a Slack and invited those same people in. “We started to get people that were just downloading Airbyte, testing it, and giving us a ton of feedback.” No ads. No launch campaign. The audience was already warm because the relationship predated the product. Start working the community during discovery, not after you ship.
Test Every Digital Channel Before Committing Your Budget
When Jayashree joined Nexla, she didn’t pick a single digital channel and scale it. She ran structured experiments across multiple platforms at once: “We tried the Reddit audience as an example, we tried different messages, different subreddits. We did go into LinkedIn, again, with a few different approaches, few different tests on LinkedIn, Google, PPC.” Budget constraints made daily measurement non-negotiable. As she put it, “each digital expansion had a bunch of tests behind them and to figure out what is resonating because again, being in a startup, we don’t have the luxury of throwing a lot of money. So I had to also be looking at that pretty much every day, how are we facing, what’s our cost per click? Are we getting conversions from there, are we getting meetings that can pan into opportunities?” Committing to a channel before you have conversion data is how startups burn budget on reach that never becomes revenue.
Center Your Inbound on the Communities Where Your Buyers Already Live
Jeremy Pease runs two distinct acquisition motions at Hivelocity, and the inbound side is built entirely around SEO and developer community marketing. “The way that we’re focused on our SEO, the way we’re focused on our marketing programs to developers, to specific communities, we really are bringing in those opportunities,” he said, describing a program that generates 90 to 120 new logos per month. Those logos start small, but Jeremy frames that as the point: “our top 20 customerse, they started as $1,200 to $1,800 a month customers and are now significantly bigger than that and they’ve grown with us over time.” The inbound channel isn’t just a volume play; it’s the top of an expansion motion. When your product serves a technical buyer, owning the communities and search terms where those buyers self-educate gives you a compounding acquisition engine that grows accounts without a sales team touching them.
Offer a Free Tool That Delivers Value Before a Sales Conversation
In a crowded data space full of buzzwords and competing claims, Roy Daniel found that messaging alone wasn’t enough to break through. Definity launched a free assessment tool that gives engineering teams a full picture of their data platform health and costs before any sales conversation happens. Roy described the approach directly: “by taking a completely different product approach and making sure that we hone on this messaging in every channel and avenue possible, including providing actual value in terms of the ability to share. For instance, we just launched a couple of months ago a free tool that helps teams have a full assessment of their health and cost in their platforms.” The tool created an entry point that leads with utility rather than a pitch. When prospects can measure a real problem themselves, the conversation shifts from “do we have this problem” to “how do we fix it.”
Turn Your Co-Founder's Credibility Into Your First Demand Channel
When Grid started selling its first paying customers, Ethan had no marketing function to speak of. The pipeline came from one source: his co-founder’s existing credibility in the SaaS world. Ethan described this directly as their “unfair advantage as a company,” explaining that his co-founder was “really obviously passionate about SaaS, extremely knowledgeable about SaaS and loves metrics.” That passion translated into public visibility on podcasts and at conferences, and the inbound interest followed. “Just by him talking about Grid and why companies need to get smart and disciplined around the metrics, we’ve had a ton of leads and a ton of companies interested in using Grid,” Ethan said. Before you build a demand gen function, look at who on your founding team already has an audience, and put them in front of it.
Make Your Best Customers a Distribution Channel
When Ian reflected on how Tonic grew its customer base, referrals emerged as one of the most reliable acquisition sources. More than standard word-of-mouth, a specific pattern repeated itself: customers who changed jobs brought Tonic into their new company. “We’ve even had customers where they were working somewhere, they moved somewhere else, and they brought us into the new company.” Ian described this as deeply validating, noting it “always makes us feel really happy and confident that we are helping the people that we think we’re helping.” The mechanic only works if the product earns genuine loyalty at the individual user level, not just organizational buy-in. When your users become your sales force at their next job, your distribution compounds without additional spend.
Target Industry Events Where Your Buyers Already Gather
When the cybersecurity conference circuit felt too crowded, Rina looked elsewhere for pipeline. Rather than competing for attention at broad industry events, PVML shifted toward conferences where their actual buyers were already concentrated. “The cybersecurity space is so crowded,” Rina explained. “We do try to look for clients not specifically in cyber events, but maybe branch out more to domain specific events that we’re seeing traction specifically in fintech, mobility, healthcare.” The logic was straightforward: get in front of buyers in the context where your problem is most acute. “Going directly to clients in the space, and not just in the broader context of cyber or data protection, is a decision that we strategically decided to take.” When your category is crowded at the top, you find your buyers where they think about the specific pain you solve.
Invest in Free Community Support Before Charging Anyone
Ajay Kulkarni built Timescale’s early customer base through a free support channel before any monetization existed. “Early days, first couple of years of the company, we did not really think much about monetization and really focused on building the community. And so everything we built was open source, everything was free.” He and his co-founder ran a Slack channel where they personally answered questions alongside their engineers, responding directly to community members rather than routing support through layers. The logic was explicit: “Let’s build something for free, build a community and provide a ton of value and then we’ll figure out how to monetize it.” That channel became the trust foundation that converted community members into paying customers later.
Prioritize Community Over Paid Acquisition Channels
When well-funded competitors were spending heavily on marketing and corporate gifting to win customers, Ethan Aaron took a different approach. “In 2021, in 2022, there was a lot of money that flew into the data space. People were raising $30 million rounds, $150 million rounds,” he said. “But what it led to was a lot of marketing and a lot of free stuff being shipped to people’s houses as gifts to buy stuff.” Rather than matching that playbook, Ethan focused on organic relationship-building: “I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I put on some happy hours in the city and go to conferences and talk to our clients all the time.” The question driving his channel strategy was simple: “How do we get in the door with clients without that, how do we solve a real pain point?” Getting in the door through direct relationships and events became how Portable built pipeline without a paid acquisition budget.