She cold messaged 50,000 engineers—then grew to $10M+ ARR. | Shensi Ding, Founder of Merge

A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

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5d ago 40:16

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Shensi cold messaged 50,000 engineers to build Merge. She worked 9am-9pm every day, gave her first customers two months free to prove herself, and refused to hire anyone remote—even during peak COVID.

She purposefully didn't collect a single dollar of revenue until she knew she could hit $1M in a months. "Startups are all about momentum."

She lost their biggest deal to a competitor who copied them, then won that customer back years later. She outbounded her way from zero to $10M through sheer force of will, doing demos all day until her calendar was completely booked. Today Merge has raised $75M and powers integrations for hundreds of B2B companies.

This is raw, unfiltered founder advice from someone who believes you just have to "man up" and outbound your way to success.

Why You Should Listen:

Why you should wait to collect revenue until you see a clear path to $1M ARR.
Why you need to outbound thousands of people to build your team.
You can will your way to $10M—but you'll need something else to hit $100M.
Why they are an in-office company, even for remote rockstar devs.

Keywords:

Startup podcast, Startup podcast for founders, Merge, Shensi Ding, integrations, B2B SaaS, outbound sales, seed funding, product-market fit, API, developer tools, startup growth

00:00:00 Intro

00:02:55 From coding in middle school to investment banking

00:06:45 How she found the problem

00:09:09 100 customer conversations

00:13:51 Quitting during COVID

00:16:16 Raising $4.5M seed in 3 weeks

00:21:01 Outbounding 50,000 engineers

00:25:32 Landing first customers through cold LinkedIn

00:31:37 Not collecting revenue on purpose

00:37:47 When product-market fit actually hit

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

Chapters

1. Intro (00:00:00)

2. From coding in middle school to investment banking (00:02:55)

3. How she found the problem (00:06:45)

4. 100 customer conversations (00:09:09)

5. Quitting during COVID (00:13:51)

6. Raising $4.5M seed in 3 weeks (00:16:16)

7. Outbounding 50,000 engineers (00:21:01)

8. Landing first customers through cold LinkedIn (00:25:32)

9. Not collecting revenue on purpose (00:31:37)

10. When product-market fit actually hit (00:37:47)

223 episodes

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