Don't run ads to get your first customers. Especially if nobody knows you exist yet. Before paying for attention, find 5–10 people who have the problem. Get them to pay. Watch how they use your product. Ask what's missing. Warm intros are massively underrated. Your first 10 paying users won't just give you revenue. They'll teach you who your ICP actually is. Ads work better when you know what you're scaling.

raising venture is easy. getting a company acquired is 10x harder - nobody's running after you. that's @rohitdotmittal for you, YC W16 alum, someone who raised $375Mn in equity + dept, sold his company for millions of $$, and is now the CEO of @heliumventureco and @jitsucom. he's seen 9 figure deals die at the finish line because the buyer changed CEOs In the video I speak with Rohit about his journey at YC, raising venture and running his own company to now running his own PE firm and acquiring venture backed companies upto $10M ARR. We also talk about what makes Jitsu a great product for mid market/enterprise customers and what the future roadmap is going to look like. Full session's in YouTube. Link's in the first comment. Super excited for this one

Hey X, I'm doing my first ever LinkedIN Live today in less than 12 hours 🙂 The news is what every founder building a company dreams of. Getting Acquired... @heliumventureco announced last week that it acquired @jitsucom , and i'm hosting @vl_klmn (jitsu's co-founder) and @rohitdotmittal (helium's ceo) on how the deal came together and what's next come hang out with us and say Hi It's gonna be a bangerr session with a lot of insights from 2 YC founders who've raised Millions of $$, built and sold to enterprises and F500s 10am PT / 10:30pm IST, register here: linkedin.com/events/75179372…

When a company gets acquired, its roadmap stops being its own. Our biggest competitor is now the memory layer for someone else’s AI agents. These are the receips, all from @Twilio: Oct 2020: Twilio buys Segment for $3.2B in stock. Dec 2023: Twilio’s CEO tells the company “Segment is core to CustomerAI.” Q2 2025: Segment revenue is “nearly flat” year over year. Net expansion 95%, from “churn and contraction affecting our existing customers.” Q3 2025: Twilio stops reporting Segment as its own segment. It’s folded into the rest of Twilio. 5 Oct 2026: Segment’s new GA release syncs customer profiles into Twilio Conversation Memory, so Twilio’s AI agents can read them mid-conversation. An acquired product serves the acquirer’s strategy. Twilio’s strategy is communications and agents. But 95% net expansion means existing customers, as a group, spent less on Segment than they did a year earlier. Put that next to the timeline. Customers are spending less, Twilio stopped reporting Segment on its own, and this month’s Segment GA release was built for Twilio’s AI agents. If your events run through Segment, you’re paying for a product whose next move gets decided by what Twilio needs. @jitsucom takes the same tracking calls as Segment, so switching is not a rewrite. It’s MIT licensed and self-hostable, so the code you run is yours, permanently. If you’re renewing Segment this year and want to see what moving over looks like, DM me. I’ll personally get on a call and answer your questions.

Thanks for reading my post. I may not be able to personally get back to each one of you today because of the sheer volume of requests but I'll try my best to so by Sunday Eve. Incase anybody wants to try jitsu.com for their data pipelines, please feel free to DM me - I'll help you get started. We're an open source segment alternative and are paving the next generation of customer data platforms. The number one reason why enterprises trust @jitsucom is because of jitsu transformation functions and data transformation capabilities. We not only have a profile builder that can track anonymised users (this is big for marketing use cases) but also we don't charge you for MTUs like segment. Enterprises and mid market customers are saving hundreds of thousands of $$ on their segment bill with jitsu. If you're a VP of data engineering/CTO you can directly book a meet with me from my profile - completely free. Hope you Have a great weekend!

i got to $120k revenue without doing half of this. no product hunt. no 50 chatgpt blog posts. no facebook ads. what actually got me my first 100 users (no bs): 1) dm'ing people who had already complained about the exact problem i was trying to solve on LinkedIn and X. keep it short and simple. 2) replying under every post in the niche for 30 days. not “check out my tool.” actual answers with insights. 3) obsessing over the first 20 users. be it calls, loom videos, or fixing their setup myself. 4) posting the $$ numbers. $0. then $10k. people trust authenticity. ads and blogs only start working after some users are already paying you. before that 90% of the job is just talking to people who already have the problem. are you stuck at getting users for your product? comment the product link and i’ll tell you how i'll go about acquiring your first 100 users. first 10 comments get a loom video. Disclaimer - I lead growth at a YC startup

it still amazes me how our @jitsucom MCP launch on X went viral beating companies like @salesforce and @RudderStack ( mind blowing, right? ) jitsu mcp is one of the biggest things i've posted, with over 280k views and hundreds of DMs from you guys salesforce's data 360 mcp server went live 20 days before us and rudderstack posted theirs 28 days before we were third and still outperformed them. If you're a CTO/VP of data eng and are fed up of managing complex data pipelines or tired of your $250k Segment bill, DM me. Link to the post in comments 👇