Leverage your existing network to find initial customers.

"We got our first customer through a relationship we had at 42 Floors where Taskus was basically our outsourced customer support and data entry company."

Focus on the three L's: lettuce (cash), learning, and logo.

"We always wanted to get two out of the three. And so in a case with like Taskus where we weren't getting a lot of lettuce, we weren't necessarily growing spend. We wanted to learn a ton from them and we wanted to get their logo to go leverage into getting other customers."

Be flexible with your early customers and adapt to their needs.

"We took bets on young emerging companies and took an early bet on Canva when they were like 40 people. We took DoorDash was one of our first customers."

Stay motivated by setting concrete goals and celebrating wins.

"We would do workations back in the day...finding somewhere where you can kind of fly the entire team in, build those relationships once a quarter, once every six months, whatever it is. I think that that has been super critical for like celebrating the wins remotely as well."

Be open to pivoting and adapting your business model.

"We spent like six or nine months...actually building out all of these like machine learning models to assess...And then we would, you know, show this to companies and they'd be like, that technology is incredibly impressive. What we actually want is just like a multiple choice test that you can do on your phone instead of on, you know, pencil and paper."