Marketing Introduction was published on 15 September, 2026. You can view the original LinkedIn post by clicking here.

How do we do marketing with literally zero marketing budget and reach bootstrapped startups to venture-funded startups like YC, Speedrun, Techstars, etc.? Marketing is insanely hard. It's literally a pain in the ass. So, starting today, we're going to share step by step how we do marketing. In a few weeks, we'll also create a free book about it. Autheona started in February, and after the beta launch, we went public in April. Around that time, we got users from articles we wrote that were shared on Reddit, but we didn't get a single paid customer. We tried posting on different social media platforms, including LinkedIn, X, Reddit, etc. The only thing that happened was that we got some free users and got banned from Reddit. 😂 So we decided to try founder-led marketing. Since then, 100% of our paid customers have come through founder-led direct marketing. We were also able to get responses from cold outreach to company emails like support@ and info@ inboxes. The message structure we use has changed almost every week. We test each structure with at least 5 outreach messages, send them, wait at least a day, and then follow up. There are a LOT of things we want to share.