Our GTM hack that 10x our registrations from 300 users to 3163 registered users in 5 months

I want to share this GTM strategy that is unorthodox and will not sit well with some of you. But it works and it contributed to the 10x growth of our user base in 5 months. So here goes.

As a solo founder scaling NinjaPear to 1M ARR, I have to be very creative and deploy strategies that are leveraged; a small input from me, but with a high risk and hopefully a high expected output. My goal is to grow NinjaPear aggressively, and I always found that the best way to to get new potential users is to engage them directly. In fact, It is in my opinion that the best way to arouse a stranger's attention to action is to:

1. Namedrop someone that your potential user is likely to know whether by reputation or personally
2. Pique his curiousity
3. Implement FOMO

With that in mind, the GTM hack is that I have a prospecting agent that sends a cold email to people in similar roles (lookalike persona) in competing companies of every new user that signs up on NinjaPear. The idea is that if a user signs up and tries out NinjaPear, that he is likely to belong to our ideal customer profile (ICP) and so will his competitors since they are in the same industry and so will the person with a similar role as the new user.

For example, if the Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe signed up on NinjaPear, then he is likely to be an ICP of NinjaPear and my prospecting agent will also reach out to:

• Jack Zhang of Airwallet
• Christian Owens of Paddle
• Pieter van der Does of Adyen
• Jack Dorsey of Block
• Kristo of Wise.com
• Dan Engel of Fastspring
• etc

And these people are also like to be an ICP of NinjaPear.

From a technical perspective, what our prospecting agent does is that it will perform a lookalike person lookup with NinjaPear's Similar People Endpoint, and lookup the work email for each lookalike person and send a cold email that looks something like this:

Subject: Your competitor just signed up

Hey <Alex>,

A peer of yours from <Acme Corp> just signed up on NinjaPear, a business intelligence data platform and might be prospecting your likely customers with our data. Would you like to also prospect <Acme Corp>'s customer list?

WIth this email, sent at the right time, you will

1. be able to namedrop your new prospect's competitor by name (although we do not namedrop by name, only company name)
2. pique his curiousity as to what his competitor can do to him
3. establish FOMO so the user can quickly sign up and find out what's going on

And if you think about it, this is essentially what GTM and BDR teams do manually. They look through their existing customer base or establish an ICP hypothesis, find out who else is in that ICP and give them a call or send them a cold email. Except that we're doing it autonomously with our AI agent and NinjaPear competitive intelligence data.

Hope this little hack forms yet another piece of your engine to 1M ARR as a solo AI founder!