Shensi cold messaged 50,000 engineers to build Merge. She worked 9am-9pm every day, gave her first customers two months free to prove herself, and refused to hire anyone remote—even during peak COVID.
She purposefully didn't collect a single dollar of revenue until she knew she could hit $1M in a months. "Startups are all about momentum."
She lost their biggest deal to a competitor who copied them, then won that customer back years later. She outbounded her way from zero to $10M through sheer force of will, doing demos all day until her calendar was completely booked. Today Merge has raised $75M and powers integrations for hundreds of B2B companies.
This is raw, unfiltered founder advice from someone who believes you just have to "man up" and outbound your way to success.
Why You Should Listen:
- Why you should wait to collect revenue until you see a clear path to $1M ARR.
- Why you need to outbound thousands of people to build your team.
- You can will your way to $10M—but you'll need something else to hit $100M.
- Why they are an in-office company, even for remote rockstar devs.
Keywords:
Startup podcast, Startup podcast for founders, Merge, Shensi Ding, integrations, B2B SaaS, outbound sales, seed funding, product-market fit, API, developer tools, startup growth
00:00:00 Intro
00:02:55 From coding in middle school to investment banking
00:06:45 How she found the problem
00:09:09 100 customer conversations
00:13:51 Quitting during COVID
00:16:16 Raising $4.5M seed in 3 weeks
00:21:01 Outbounding 50,000 engineers
00:25:32 Landing first customers through cold LinkedIn
00:31:37 Not collecting revenue on purpose
00:37:47 When product-market fit actually hit
Send me a message to let me know what you think!
