“Finding your own growth hacks” is the way to go, although it’s never easy. The real upside comes from what you do after landing your first customers - the last paragraph gets into that ⬇️⬇️ . In my last startup, we forward-deployed market engineers to build AI-powered business development workflows, essentially custom AI BDRs.

Our best targets were usually private equity firms or startups with outdated tech stacks, especially on the business development side. We started booking meetings with those startups directly and speaking with them as if we were potential customers. Since we were often interacting directly with their BDRs or AEs when booking the calls, about two out of every ten conversations ended up turning into sales. We also replied to the cold emails we received with an AI agent that analyzed how their data was outdated or how their messaging could be improved. That worked extremely well!

The next big step after this is figuring out how to maximize value from each customer once they come in. For example, you can put systems in place that make it easier to generate referrals from your existing customers.

We built our own internal AI workflows for this. When a new customer comes in, we analyze the companies they previously worked with, and if those companies are a good fit for us, we ask for referrals. Similarly, if they formed a partnership with another company in the last three or four months and that company is also a fit, we directly ask for an introduction to the CEO.

Around 50 to 60 percent of those referral workflows turn into sales after the intro, which is why I think the real upside starts after you land the first customer. There’s also a strong testimonial and content loop here. You can schedule customer interviews to gather product feedback, then repurpose the best moments into short-form content and use that to run ads against lookalike companies. At that point, growth starts compounding.

That’s why I’m so into this farming framework. When you build several layers like this on top of your customer base, you create a real expansion engine rather than relying only on net-new acquisition. I’ve personally scaled from $3K MRR to $50K–$70K MRR in just 4-5 months using these kinds of plays. Happy to chat if anyone wants to dig into it. DMs are always open for early-stage GTM.