Startups should get AI agents to adopt their product through APIs and developer SEO before pursuing sales meetings with big companies. Supabase and Cloudflare grew fast by building agent ecosystems, while early enterprise meetings often waste time without real commitment.
It's agent-led growth. Have agents adopt your product first, then have meetings if needed. The companies that start with the meetings are likely not your ideal customers. The dangers of selling to big companies if you're a startup is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment, but it's not. They love having meetings. It's almost all they do. That's what big companies do. If you have a product, so imagine again, you have an API, you have an MCP, you have good documentation around it for AEO SEO purposes. The agents discover it and they start using it. Look at how fast Supabase is growing. You look at all these other products out there, people are using like these Cloudflare agents. You need to have an agent-led growth strategy. And I don't think product-led growth is necessarily dead. In fact, I think you need to have some product qualified leads in terms of the stuff that you give away for free, but you need to have an ALG strategy as well.
