In this talk, the speaker recounts how he turned a bare‑bones idea into the Traction conference, generating over $500,000 in revenue within three months. The narrative begins with recognizing a common founder pain point—knowing how to acquire, retain, and grow customers—observed during trips to the Middle East. He validates the market by interviewing seed‑stage founders, confirming willingness to pay $500 for a practical, case‑study‑driven conference. He then defines a precise target market, mapping their daily habits, challenges, and desired solutions. To reach these founders at scale, he builds Twitter and email lists, scrapes company data using the Kimono web‑scraper, and outsources email harvesting to Amazon Mechanical Turk, turning a raw list of companies into a usable contact database for outreach. While on a vacation in Peru, he secures a lineup of relevant speakers, aligning content with the validated audience needs. The combined effort—market validation, deep profiling, automated lead generation, and curated content—allows the conference to launch in March and quickly achieve half‑a‑million dollars in sales, illustrating a repeatable, low‑cost growth playbook for early‑stage ventures.
Chapters
So what stage of a company are you guys in? Idea. Idea. We're launching in March. Launching in March. Validation. Slightly past idea. So I thought that you guys are a little earlier, right? Idea validation. So I wanted to share a story from one of my companies, Traction, which we took from idea to over half a million in revenue in 3 months. Awesome. And how we validated it, how we came up with the idea, and all of that I want to share. Right now I run growth at Speakeasy. And Speakeasy is a conference calling online meeting solution for salespeople to help them become more productive. We've raised almost $7 million from Salesforce and Bessemer Ventures. And I take— I oversee all of revenue and growth reports to me. So that's the story. But I could talk about Speakeasy and some of the stuff we're doing there as well. But I thought the Traction story would be far more interesting because Speakeasy is funded. We've raised $7 million. And it's easy for me to hire. I have money and all of that stuff. But with Traction, we had nothing. We had an idea. And I was traveling in Dubai last January. I was born and raised in Kuwait. And I hadn't been back home in 17 years. And I went back to Kuwait and then traveled to Dubai with friends. And what I found is that there's a lot of entrepreneurs with passionate ideas, but they don't know how to get, keep, and grow customers. Hey, how do I get customers? Like, we're in the Middle East. We just feel like shy to approach people. And how— like, that was the recurring story. And so I came back to the US and connected with one of my friends in Canada. And he said, this is the same problem here. One of the biggest reasons why startups fail is they can't get traction. In VC terms, traction is a repeatable, scalable way to get, keep, and grow customers. So I said we should do a conference maybe on it, an educational conference that's not high-level entrepreneurship, but actually drills down and teaches you different concepts of getting and keeping and growing customers. And we just had this idea and had no money. My friend's like, I'm not going to give you any budget for this. My co-founder in another business, Bose Capital, he said, I'm not going to invest in this, so just figure out how you're going to launch it, right? And the story there was we said the first step is let's validate that people even would pay for this conference, right? And we built a list of our exact target market. So that's the first step you start with. Who's your target market? Who are you going after? And what problem you're solving for them? So for us it was entrepreneurs and founders who are struggling to get traction and who are repeatedly being rejected by investors. So we talked to more and more and more founders and they're like, yeah, we read all these online resources and there's just so much confusion, there's just lots of content out there, and when we go to conferences it's so high level that we don't understand, like, so I want to know what Slack exactly did, or I want to know what LinkedIn did to get from like $100 million to $300 million, but we don't hear those stories. So I asked them, like, okay, what if we did this conference? Would you pay for it? And they're like, yeah, it's like condensed. I'd pay $500 for it. Like, great. Okay, step 1 completed. We validated the market. Step 2, like, who would these guys be interested— these guys and gals be interested in listening to? Whose stories they would be interested in listening to? But having that conversation with them gave me a good sense of coming out with Okay, this is what they want. This is the content. These are the kind of people I should target. So the next step was, like, I had— these are some of the speakers who spoke, and we built the lineup for it, like, while I was vacationing too in Peru in 5 days, right? So how did I confirm that this is my product essentially, right? These speakers, like, how did I get these guys to confirm and then sell it? And we talked about target market. So how do you define your target market? Like, go deep into your target market, right? Who are they? Where do they eat, breathe, drink, and sleep? What are their goals? What are their behaviors? What are their challenges? Because your product has to deliver that value proposition, right? You need, you need to understand a day in the life of your customer. What specific challenges they're facing? What are they cobbling together right now? What are they doing? What are they forced to do right now because your solution doesn't exist? And if they had a magic wand, what would the solution look like, right? And that comes out of having numerous, numerous, numerous customer conversations. And feel free to stop me and ask any questions related to your specific company. Yeah, sorry. Can I take pictures? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I'll make it available too online. So that was the first step that I talked about. We mapped this out and we said, okay, it's a startup founder, from a seed stage or pre-seed company looking to raise money, looking to validate. And then we went and talked to them and came up with the idea of the conference. Right? So this was the exercise we did. We built Twitter lists. We built email lists for our target market. The next step was based on that exercise, I figured that if I could bring founders and CEOs and people who run growth at all these unicorn companies, there's like Probably 100 of them. My work is great, right? It's easy. So how do I get in touch with these people? I use this tool called Kimono, and it's a data scraper. And I went to— you can go to Crunchbase, or like there's tons of other sites, AngelList, and so on. And you run this data scraper, Kimono, and it pulls the list of all those companies for you. So you have this long email list, not email list, but name of companies, founders, and now all you need to do is mine their email. So this is how I did it at scale. I put it on Mechanical Turk. Anyone here know of Mechanical Turk? Right, so a couple of you know. And I can share my script, but there's a way you can find email addresses, right? But it's so hard if you had to do it yourself. It would take you hours to find hundreds of email addresses. So how do you do it at scale? Mechanical Turk is this online marketplace where you put tasks and you get the crowd to do it for you. And you could get an email address at like $0.07 to $0.10, right? And so I uploaded to Mechanical Turk. Next morning I woke up and my list was like done, right? I had the email list built. I'm like, okay, great. Step 1 is done. So you had the email list.
