Post by Lasan Nishshanka

This post will probably backfire on me. Anyway, here are the complete results of the marketing we did. Reading this might be annoying to some people. The product is Autheona, and the problem we are trying to solve is: "Every product that has a free tier and focuses on PLG needs to apply something like Autheona inside their signup flow to fix free-tier abuse, fake account creation, and multi-account farming problems." Autheona is now 8 months old, fully bootstrapped, and self-funded. We did not try paid marketing. ✅ Who We Targeted: We targeted different categories: 1. Bootstrapped, solo-founded startups 2. Bootstrapped small teams 3. Invested companies, such as YC, Accel, etc. We only targeted these positions: 1. Founder / CEO / CTO 2. Co-Founder / CEO / CTO ✅ What We Tried - Posting on social media (mainly LinkedIn) - Sending emails to prospects' personal emails and product general/security emails - Adding comments to prospects' posts - Sending DMs or InMails on LinkedIn ✅ What Worked and What Did Not - Posting on social media did not work. Not a single user came from it. - Sending personal emails to founders worked sometimes. We got around 1 reply for every 40 emails. - Sending emails to general product emails worked sometimes when we explained the problem and asked them to forward the email to the relevant person. - Sending emails to security emails never worked. I am surprised by this result. - Adding targeted comments worked well when we needed to get attention. - Sending DMs or InMails worked well compared to every other strategy. ✅ Results When Educating Prospects 1. For founders with past experience, it was very easy to explain the problem. 2. For founders without past experience, it was extremely hard to educate them about the problem. ✅ The Age Gap 1. Prospects in their 30s+ were very easy to explain and communicate with. 2. Prospects aged 18 to early 20s were very hard to explain and communicate with. ✅ Funding Stages 1. Bootstrapped startups care about everything when we explain or educate them. There were no major issues based on the prospect's age. 2. Invested startups also care, but the percentage was very low compared to bootstrapped startups. This also seemed to correlate with age: early 20s had poor results, while 30+ had good results. ✅ Results 1. From posts -> No users 2. From personal emails -> Got customers 3. From security emails -> No users 4. From comments -> Got customers 5. From DMs -> Got customers 6. From InMails -> Got customers ✅ What We're Going to Try Next - We will only focus on founder/co-founder-led cold outreach. - No posts, no articles, etc. - We will focus more on SEO.