Dalton Caldwell: belief

Transcript context

…Makes so much sense. So the Airbnb is a classic example of they went to New York and talked to their host and things like that. Is there another startup that comes to mind that did this really well, that found just a really cool way and hustle to talk to customers? Well, again, some of the companies we talked about, I mean, for Brex, they were just talking to other people in their batch and that worked extremely well. Same with Retool is they just sold it inside of the YC network. I think with Zip, they were just beasts at getting companies on calls with them to ask them about procurement. And I think they had way more than 20% of their time. When you looked at their calendars, oh man, they were talking to customers a lot to build their first product and pre-selling it before they built it. Same with PostHog I guess that's a different go to market. They launched this open source thing to start with and their calendars are filled with people that were trying to implement the first open source version of PostHog or were so excited about it. And people on Hacker News were excited about it and they had this huge influx of people that were excited that PostHog existed and had lots of feedback and web reports. It wasn't always positive, but they never lacked for people that wanted to talk to them once they launched that, which was very helpful. On Zip, I actually have a lot of their story in one of my series on how to build a B2B startup. And what they did actually, as you know, is they just called, DMed people on LinkedIn and ask them for advice on, "Hey, we're trying to understand how you enjoy your current procurement products." And then they ended up being early beta testers. And I think they did hundreds of these. They just-…

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