Yeah, part of this is the benefit of being in a startup hub; other startups are used to working with new teams, and it’s easier to build personal connections with founders. ’
We started working with Amplitude when they were only about 20 people, so very much a startup! We found every startup we had a personal connection to and then also cold emailed all recent YC startups with our pitch. That allowed us to have interest before we built a product, and then we built the product alongside our customers.
One mistake we made was to revamp our early product after we raised our seed round. This meant we went back to the drawing board and spent ~9 months bringing the revamped startup to market. In that time our existing product (which was semi-functional) didn’t see any progress, and so we lost some of the customers (including Amplitude) that were using it. We believed it was important to revamp the product so that we didn’t get locked into bad/poorly considered design decisions, but in hindsight this was not a lean approach… we should have focussed on evolution rather than revolution, even in those early days!