In the early days of HubSpot, we wrote two blog articles a week and competed to see who could generate more leads from them, emphasizing the importance of high-quality content and effective titles. We built our audience on a blog before we even started writing the first lines of code for our startup, which took us a couple of years to be seen as experts in our space.

In the beginning, our software was basic, so we compensated for its limitations by providing customers with valuable advice on optimizing their websites.

We had our first paying customer for Optimizely before writing any code, demonstrating the demand for our product.

In the early days, we set HubSpot's pricing at $250 a month, which remained unchanged for the first six years as we figured out our model.

We got our first customer by leveraging LinkedIn to connect and understand their needs better.

The first customers for Flexport signed up through Google Adwords and SEO, even before we officially launched the service.

I remember a significant moment when we realized the potential of self-service advertising after a lobster company became one of our first AdWords advertisers.

During the early days, I had to prove my concept without a website, relying on initial sales and mock-ups to validate my business idea.

The initial audience for Product Hunt was built through years of writing and engaging with the tech community, which helped when launching the platform.