customer-acquisition
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Mixergy: Ask what went wrong.
Andrew Warner spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building the wrong thing. Mixergy became useful when he started asking other founders how they had done it.
Perpetual Traffic: Stop rewarding the last click
An ad can introduce the customer and still get none of the credit. Perpetual Traffic turns that awkward truth into a working education in how businesses buy attention, measure sales, and decide what to try next.
Good ideas deserve a test drive.
The Startup Ideas Podcast turns business brainstorming into something you can watch, question, and try. Greg Isenberg’s real subject is the distance between an interesting idea and a paying customer.
SaaS Club asks the expensive questions.
Omer Khan has spent twelve years asking software founders what actually worked. SaaS Club turns their wrong turns, first sales and uncomfortable decisions into something the next founder can use.
BRIIA gives AI founders a map before asking for a stake
A San Ramon accelerator turns startup building into a sequence of measurable steps. Its wager: help founders prove the business first, then earn the right to invest.
Snoball spent $250,000 learning to ask less of salespeople
A referral app failed because busy salespeople had another job to do. Snoball’s answer was to take over the follow-up - and put a person behind the automation.
Jobble learned that a shift is only the beginning
The Boston company began by organizing gig work. After events vanished during COVID, it widened its sights - first to essential work, now to finding customers and putting people behind the jobs.
Pie wants your next customer to get an answer
A local business can buy attention and still lose the sale to a ringing phone. Pie is joining advertising, AI search and automated bookings into one unusually practical pitch: bring people in, then pick up.
Localised: The world is your market. The customer is still local.
A foreign brand can be desirable. A foreign shopping experience can be exhausting. Localised builds and runs country-specific stores that let retailers keep their identity while learning the customer’s habits.
ConsumerAffairs sells the power of asking
A complaint can warn the next buyer. A phone call can change the evidence. Inside the review publisher that turned consumer uncertainty into a business for brands.
JumpCrew grew by giving up its first good idea
The Nashville company traded social media management for the harder business of turning interest into sales. Its lesson: the handoff between marketing and sales deserves a business of its own.
Adteractive and the Price of Free
Adteractive turned online attention into customers for advertisers. Its history exposes the awkward distance between a lead that can be counted and a customer who actually wants to be there.
The Party Was Never the Product
Interluxe began by putting luxury customers in remarkable rooms. Then it built a company around the harder question: what happens after everyone goes home?
Streamline Connections Bet the Sale on a Human Conversation
While advertising chased clicks, this small Southern California firm kept betting on eye contact. Its public record reveals a hands-on customer-acquisition shop where campaigns, sales training and telecom enrollment meet.
Parcon Put a Marketing Department Behind the Fractional CMO
The Orange County firm has a tidy answer to fragmented marketing: pair a virtual CMO with the people who buy the ads, make the content, shape the message and fix the path to purchase.
Next Step knows when fewer leads are better
A behavioral design agency finds growth in the details companies overlook: the wrong prospect, the intimidating message, the feature nobody asked for.
RB Marketing puts a person between a cause and a crowd
The Pleasanton marketing company recruits people to bring nonprofit campaigns into the community. Its most revealing detail is what happens after the conversation: someone has to record the result.
SmartUp Academy Wants Your First Customer Before Your Finished Product
ZoomInfo co-founder Yonatan Stern teaches entrepreneurs to sell early, spend carefully and build for profit. At SmartUp Academy, the classroom can lead to a lasting co-founder partnership.
IWCO's $50 Million Bet on a Smarter Mailbox
The direct-mail company put digital presses, audience data, and postal economics into the same business. Its story shows why a better letter needs more than better copy.
Upstream Finds the Sale After the Click
The mobile marketing company turns operator channels, fraud checks and well-timed messages into customer acquisitions. Its most revealing work happens where an ordinary advertising campaign would stop.
The Company That Reverse-Engineered America's Closet
Rob McGovern built a database of what 99% of American shoppers actually like to wear. Now fashion brands rent it to stop wasting ad money on people who were never going to buy.
The Call Center That Wants to Know More Than the Call
Avantive Solutions runs the conversations large brands cannot afford to mishandle - then turns those calls, chats and signals into data for the next one. Its wager is that the useful contact center is neither fully human nor fully automated, but measured in real time.
King Kong Put Its Money Where the Marketing Metrics Are
The Melbourne agency built its pitch around a nerve-rattling promise: improve a qualified client’s results by 30 percent within 90 days, or keep working for free. Behind the swagger is a tightly engineered business of funnels, media buying, conversion work and sales education.
Centerfield Built a Customer-Acquisition Machine. Now It Wants to Own the Moment Before the Click
The Los Angeles company reaches shoppers through its own media network, routes intent through Dugout, and gets paid for measurable outcomes. Its latest bet is that the most valuable click may be the one an AI answer makes unnecessary.
PebblePost Put the Pixel in the Mailbox - Now It Wants the Living Room
The New York ad-tech company made direct mail behave like digital retargeting. Its next act is applying the same transaction-powered engine to connected TV - with the household, not the cookie, at the center.
The Marketing Agency That Knows Your Mailbox Is Still a Media Channel
Amsive connects consumer data, search, media, creative, and industrial-scale mail into one performance system. The proposition is practical: find the next best customer, reach them in more than one place, and prove what happened afterward.
Jirnexu
Jirnexu is a Kuala Lumpur-based fintech company that runs RinggitPlus, Malaysia's largest financial-product comparison platform, and builds XpressApply, a digital application and CRM stack that banks and insurers use to acquire and onboard customers online. It pairs a consumer-facing comparison site with white-label technology, positioning itself as a full-stack customer-acquisition and lifecycle-management provider for financial institutions across Southeast Asia.
Proxima
Proxima is a New York-based predictive data intelligence platform that helps consumer and DTC brands find high-value customers and scale paid media efficiently. It turns billions of anonymized ecommerce transactions from a proprietary network of tens of millions of shoppers into AI-powered audiences, conversion attribution, creative guidance, and industry benchmarks across Meta, TikTok, and Google. Founded in 2022 by Alex Song, the company raised a $12M Series A in April 2024 led by Mucker Capital.
Disco
Disco is a San Francisco-based commerce media network that connects brands to high-intent shoppers through AI-powered, personalized offers across more than 800 digital touchpoints. Founded in 2020 by former Facebook and Affirm operator Conner Sherline, Disco started as a post-purchase ad network that lets independent DTC brands recommend each other to customers at the checkout 'thank you' moment, lowering customer acquisition costs without relying on Big Tech. It has since grown into a broader commerce media layer powering endemic and non-endemic advertising for retailers and B2B2C SaaS companies, built on one of the largest commerce graphs in the market.
Talkable
Talkable is a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company that builds referral and loyalty marketing programs for e-commerce brands. Founded in 2010 as Curebit and backed by Y Combinator, the platform turns existing customers into marketers by rewarding them for referring friends. It offers referral tracking, incentive management, A/B testing, segmentation, fraud detection, and real-time analytics, and is used by 250+ retail and D2C brands including TOMS, Rothy's, L'Occitane and Alo Yoga.