They Wouldn't Stay

This is Part 3 of a series on MonitorIntent. In Part 2, we built the MVP - a scraping pipeline, 5x LLM cost reduction, and the realization that LinkedIn likes aren’t buying intent. This part covers selling the product, churn, and the market collapsing around us.

We had 7 paying customers. All but one were startup founders. And here’s the thing about selling to startup founders - they’re desperate for leads, which makes them easy to pitch. But they’re also scrappy enough to leave the moment something shinier shows up.

That tension defined our entire go-to-market.

Selling to startups is selling on hard mode

Turns out it’s genuinely hard to sell a product when the buyer sees you’re a startup too. There’s this aura of unreliability that follows you into every conversation. We picked startup founders as our initial market because they understood the pain of finding leads. They got it immediately.

The disadvantage? They’re the most price-sensitive, least loyal customer segment imaginable.

More than half of our initial leads came from in-person conversations - events we attended in Seattle and SF, people we manually recruited, referrals from well-wishers. That works for your first handful of customers. It does not scale.

We built our own cold email machine

Eventually we started sending cold emails. And because we had a perfectly good codebase sitting right there, we built a Clay-like automation on top of it. Filter down lead lists from Apollo, produce semi-personalized email copies at scale - essentially what Clay does, but affordable for a bootstrapped startup.

It took about 1 day to repurpose our existing utilities into a ~1k LoC script. Our cold email reply rate was around 5%, with a positive reply rate of about 30%. We were pretty happy with that.

We also tried LinkedIn automation but didn’t have enough runway to test it properly. For the bit we did use, it yielded roughly the same results as cold emailing but at a higher cost-per-lead. Not worth it.

Network effects will crush you

One customer unsubscribed because they wanted to invest in Clay instead - “because their friend uses it.”

We had literally handed them a list with multiple people explicitly saying “we want XYZ.” Qualified, intent-rich leads. And they still left for Clay.

No amount of marketing beats word of mouth from a trusted friend. That’s the brutal math of network effects. When your competitor has them and you don’t, you’re fighting gravity.

The vitamin problem

We realized something painful when we tried to get feedback from churned users: they had absolutely no incentive to tell us anything. They’d already moved on.

The users who did convert from trial to paid treated MonitorIntent like a vitamin, not a painkiller. It wasn’t replacing any part of their existing workflow. It was a “nice to have” tool - something they’d check occasionally, not something they’d miss if it disappeared.

The hardest version of this realization: our oldest, most loyal customers had active subscriptions but were barely using the product at all. Some weren’t using it at all. They just hadn’t bothered to cancel yet.

Let’s be clear: when your best customers are paying out of inertia, not out of need - that’s not product-market fit. It’s just a ticking bomb. You can’t fill a leaky bucket that drains faster than you can ever fill it.

The market moved underneath us

Then the floor fell out.

Commoditized lead search arrived fast. Extruct, Websets, PeopleSearchAI, BrightData search - all taking qualitative criteria and returning relevant leads. These companies had massive, well-funded search infrastructure built on pre-scraped data. We simply couldn’t compete at their price points.

Data providers like BrightData started selling entire dumps of LinkedIn profiles, posts, engagement data - to anyone willing to pay top dollar. Just like that, our technological moat eroded.

And social media scraping - the “live data” advantage we’d built our product around - became increasingly untenable. We watched a social media giant sue data providers into oblivion. Building on top of that felt like constructing a house on someone else’s land.

Playing a game of (bad) incentives

Here’s what really killed us. We were asking customers to work hard. Try reaching out to these leads by cold call. Don’t spam them. Invest effort in quality outreach.

And we charged a premium for these curated lists.

Meanwhile, it was often cheaper for customers to just spam 10x more leads from a generic email list floating around. Automated cold emailing at marginally higher volume beat our product on pure economics - even though the leads were worse.

Game theoretically, this is the worst possible position. Your product requires more effort and costs more, while the inferior alternative is cheaper and easier. Customers don’t want to be the ones getting short-changed in a game of prisoner’s dilemma.