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, from 300 users to 3,163 registered users in 5 months. So here goes.

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

1. Namedrop someone your potential user is likely to know, whether by reputation or personally
2. Pique curiosity
3. Trigger FOMO

With that in mind, the GTM hack is this: I have a prospecting agent that sends a cold email to people in similar roles at competing companies for every new user that signs up on NinjaPear.

The idea is simple. If a user signs up and tries out NinjaPear, that person is likely to belong to our ideal customer profile. And if that is true, then their competitors, and people in similar roles at those competitors, are likely to also be in our ICP.

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

• Jack Zhang of Airwallex
• Christian Owens of Paddle
• Pieter van der Does of Adyen
• Jack Dorsey of Block
• Kristo Käärmann of Wise
• Dan Engel of FastSpring
• etc

These people are also likely to be part of our ICP.

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

Subject: Your competitor just signed up

Hey ,

A peer of yours from 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 's customer list?

With this email, sent at the right time, you will:

1. Namedrop your new prospect's competitor by company name
2. Pique curiosity about what that competitor may now be able to do
3. Create FOMO so the recipient signs up quickly to find out what is 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 form an ICP hypothesis, figure out who else sits inside that ICP, then call or email them.

We are doing the same thing, except autonomously, with an AI agent and NinjaPear's competitive intelligence data.

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