Landing your first big customer is a rite of passage for startups. If you’re an early-stage company, bigger customers want to see that you’ve work

How we signed a world-famous AI company with a HackerNews post

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-21 13:30:02

Landing your first big customer is a rite of passage for startups. If you’re an early-stage company, bigger customers want to see that you’ve worked with others like them. This is even more true if you sell infrastructure your customers trust for important parts of their business like billing.

But getting those customers means you’ll face the dilemma of a recent graduate who can’t get a job for their lack of experience and can’t get experience for their lack of a job: You can’t get the big reference customers because you don’t have big reference customers.

And even when you get a demo scheduled, enterprise procurement is arduous: It often takes months (or even years) from the first demo to closing. With our first big customer Mistral AI, it took 17 days. Less than 2 months after they first inquired, we were live in production. 

Mistral had just raised their $113m seed round a few months earlier and was starting to productize their models and needed billing. Through a form on our website, Mistral’s head of engineering told us: 

Leave a Comment