Securing initial customers is widely recognized as one of the most grueling and uncertain challenges in the entire business lifecycle. Even when young companies manage to generate early interest and capture the attention of a prospective market, there is rarely any guarantee that those customers will stick around for the long haul.
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, industry experts and successful founders gathered to address this perennial hurdle. Elia Wallen, the founder and CEO of travel startup Engine; Grant Lee, the founder and CEO of AI-powered presentation software company Gamma; and Crystal Huang, a general partner at venture capital firm Google Ventures, took the stage to share practical advice on how early-stage startups can effectively attract and retain customers in a rapidly shifting technological landscape.
Navigating the Social Media Era
In the current business ecosystem, young artificial intelligence companies like Cluely and Instinct are building massive audiences not merely through their software products, but also through the colorful, highly visible online presences of their founders. In this environment, social media can easily seem like a magical silver bullet for reaching early customers with minimal upfront capital. However, founders who want to elevate their business strategy with modern digital marketing must approach the channel with deliberate strategy, according to Grant Lee.
Gamma managed to scale its business exponentially by deploying a sophisticated social media strategy that leveraged individual creators through its Ambassadors—or "Gambassador"—program. The company adopted this ambitious plan well before influencer-based marketing had become a tried-and-true strategy for smaller B2B and enterprise companies, ultimately propelling Gamma to a multi-billion-dollar valuation.
Despite the incredible success of Gamma’s approach, Lee cautioned that simply handing creators a platform and instructing them to promote a brand online does not automatically translate to reliable sales or sustainable growth. There is significantly more nuance required to make creator-led marketing genuinely effective.
"If you have a product that can serve many different segments or use cases, then you want to basically have creators that can target each one of those," Lee explained during the panel discussion. "If you have folks that are in consulting versus people that do all their marketing and create all the decks for their CMO, there’s all these different segments you might want to go after."
Lee noted that founders sometimes fall into the trap of treating creator and influencer marketing as a passive "set it and forget it" operational task. True success requires active collaboration and deep investment of time from the founding team.
"I think you’re better served by really spending a lot of time with these creators, because if they’re not able to understand how to articulate the value of your product, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, it’s just going to fall flat," Lee added.
The Power of Traditional Sales and Offline Engagement
While digital channels and influencer partnerships dominate current startup discourse, the actual effectiveness of social media depends heavily on the specific nature of the business model. Other, more traditional ways of reaching customers can be just as effective—if not considerably more so—depending on the target demographic.
Elia Wallen understands this reality firsthand. His company, Engine, which manages lodging and travel bookings specifically tailored for midsize businesses, bootstrapped its way to $150 million in bookings before ever taking on outside venture capital funding. Notably, Engine achieved this remarkable milestone with virtually no visible social media strategy during its formative years. For Wallen, old-fashioned, traditional sales tactics can prove far more useful than a viral TikTok video or an influencer endorsement.
"We did events and we smiled and dialed," Wallen said, reflecting on the company’s early days. "We still have a lot of people picking up the phone. A lot of people who didn’t grow up with that or don’t understand it think that it’s outdated or it doesn’t work, but it does. It’s a hard thing. There are a lot of companies that just refuse to do it or don’t know how to do it well. But they’re missing out on a very big offline client base." He emphasized his point simply, adding, "The phone still works."
Wallen also shared a uniquely memorable in-person marketing tactic that Engine deployed during its scrappy early days: hiring a professional magician named David to perform close-up tricks for prospective clients at industry events. The magical entertainment served as an icebreaker, encouraging attendees to visit Engine’s booth and engage in meaningful conversations. The anecdote underscored Wallen’s broader message that old-fashioned personal engagement can work just as effectively as the latest digital marketing trends.
Transforming Users into Evangelists
From an investor’s perspective, Crystal Huang, who has guided numerous early-stage startups toward sustainable success, emphasized that the customer acquisition journey does not end at the initial sale. Once a company secures a customer, an immense amount of strategic value can be derived by closely examining how those users interact with the product on a day-to-day basis.
"Can you look into usage data and figure out if it’s recurring, if it’s increasing, if they are referring their friends?" Huang asked the audience. "It can come across in early usage and retention information as well. And then also, do you see some super fans, right, who even want to work at the company, promote the company, be attached to the brand?"
Building on this insight, Huang stressed the vital importance of cultivating a passionate community around a product rather than merely treating buyers as transactional metrics.
"You need to have ways to create evangelists who are really passionate about the product," she concluded.
