If you had to start from zero again, what would you focus on first?

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The biggest mistake we have seen our clients at Frizerly make is trying to do things in scale and hoping for results! Scale and automation only helps once you have a manual workflow that is nailed down really well. If you are getting started, assuming you have a product that actually solved a problem, first identify your ideal customer persona! Who are the exact set of users who badly need your solution right now! Once you have the ideal customer persona, list down all the marketing channels you can use to find them- wherever they hang out- be it reddit, manual out reach on linkedin or even meta/google ads! once you have this list, your goal is to run time boxed and budget constrained rapid experiments in parallel to find out out which marketing channel works best for you at this stage. Ideally you will find one that outperforms rest! Once you have this channel you can essentially scale up till it breaks. Once it breaks, you kinda have to repeat the process all over again. But that doesn't usually happen until you cross $1M in revenue etc! Hope this helps :)

This is nearly exactly what I saw starting at zero. \~ What took us by surprise, more than how hard growth was, was how quiet the early phase felt. It felt pointless to consistently show up to the same small audience. Looking back, that stretch did the majority of the work.

Your friend figured out the golden rule: Automation is a multiplier, not a generator. If you automate a bad process (or an unproven offer), you just scale your rejection rate. When I started, I did everything manually not because I didn't know how to automate, but because I needed the feedback loop. When you DM someone manually and they ignore you, you can tweak the next message instantly. When you blast 1,000 people, you just burn the list. I think people skip this phase because it hurts the ego to grind for small numbers, but that 'grind' is actually just R&D.

This lines up with what I’ve seen too. Early on, the slow and manual work is actually an advantage because the cost of mistakes is low. The shift came for us when errors started compounding: inbox reputation, brand perception, and team time all get expensive fast. That’s when we moved away from ad-hoc experimentation and leaned more on approaches that were already working in live environments (ColdIQ helped us a lot here). Same fundamentals, just a different execution once scale enters the picture.

Good question for me. I run Vooz - random chatting platform. This month we’re hitting over 200k unique users on our platform, next month I think we’ll hit 250k. $0 raised so far so it’s been ALL of my own money. First couple months after a beta launch we kinda were figuring out where to get users. Than over the summer we burned a lot of money in areas that work, but it’s not good long term. The costs were too high. But 1 thing really started to work for us, that was SEO. So in September I cut everything we were doing and focused solely on SEO and building. No money going in ANY other direction. I knew it was going to be a little bit of a drag for a couple months but I did know for a fact it would start paying off hugely and now that’s really showing. I think in a couple more months and some monetization we’ll be at a break even and I can start to spend again in other directions to help us grow even faster. I DO NOT suggest launched a B2C product unless you know exactly how you’re going to scale and how much it’ll cost. If I were to do it all over again I’d just focus on SEO and building and not spend a dime anywhere else.

This resonates with my experience building things on the side. The consistency part really stands out - so many people expect overnight wins when the founder in that story just kept showing up. I've found that boring repetition actually compounds way more than chasing the latest tactics. Also really agree on the "keep it simple" point - I wasted 3 months building fancy features nobody wanted when I should've just validated demand first.

I was part of a rather large at the time forum and a lot of our traffic was built on personal reach out. Nothing advertising. Just a hi and appreciation your post or what your doing, etc. the key is be genuine

This lines up with what I’ve seen too. Starting from zero is usually a lot more unglamorous and manual than people expect, but that’s where the real signal comes from. Picking one channel, keeping things simple, and staying patient long enough to let it compound seems to matter way more than clever tactics early on.