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My Seattle Tech Week Talk is Almost Full
We reached 200 registered participants in less than a week, which means the waitlist is now open. If you want to attend, join the waitlist. Spots will open up as we get closer to the event.
July 28, 2026: Seattle Tech Week
From Zero to $1M+ in ARR: How to Market Your AI or SaaS Startup
1700 Westlake Ave N, Suite 200, Thinkspace Seattle, Washington
Starts at 5:30 PM
A follow-up to my hit Tech Week talk from last year, this is for AI and SaaS founders who want to learn how to build a repeatable growth engine.
SF Bay Area Events in 2026
September 10, 2026: At Snowflake HQ in Silicon Valley
Vibe Your SaaS Startup Pitch Competition + VC/Founder Mixer
135 Constitution Drive, Menlo Park, California
Starts at 5:30 PM
Founders pitch your startups to our panel of experts, plus networking with founders, venture capitalists, and startup leaders from across the SF Bay Area.
November 19, 2026: At Atlassian HQ in San Francisco
Vibe Your SaaS Startup Pitch Competition + VC/Founder Mixer
Starts at 5:30 PM
Founders pitch your startups to our panel of experts, plus networking with founders, venture capitalists, and startup leaders from across the SF Bay Area.
Trotta: AI-Powered Social Engineering Defense
Founder & CEO: Fela Akinse
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, USA
Stage: Pre-Seed
Website: trotta.io
Social: LinkedIn
💥 The Big Idea:
Trotta is building a new layer of cybersecurity focused on the biggest vulnerability in every organization: people. Instead of training employees to spot phishing emails or deepfakes, Trotta blocks those threats before they ever reach them.
🧠 How It Works
Trotta uses machine learning models trained on social engineering attacks to analyze emails, messages, voice content, and other communications in real time. Rather than relying on awareness training, Trotta removes humans entirely.
🔥 Why We Like It
Most cybersecurity tools assume employees will eventually make the right decision. Trotta assumes they won't, and designs around that reality. Trotta is building for the next generation of cyberattacks, not the last one.
The limiting factor for frontier AI is no longer intelligence, talent, or another keynote about agents. It's electricity, land, substations, transformer lead times, and whether anyone remembered that the cloud still has to plug into the physical world. Cold synths, industrial electronica, post-SaaS dread, and billion-dollar extension cords for everyone watching software become heavy industry.
A Startup Distribution Quickstart Guide
If distribution has become the new bottleneck, founders need to rethink what they focus on in a startup's earliest days. Just building the product is no longer enough. You need to build an audience at the same time.
Here are five ways to start before you've found Product-Market Fit.
1. The Startup Founder Channel Strategy
When you’re first starting out, you need to pick one or two channels and stick with them. For B2B, I generally recommend starting with the following:
LinkedIn: All serious B2B founders and customers are on this channel. Yeah, the content can be cringe. But you need to have some presence on here, and it still works for outreach and customer acquisition.
X: You have to be on here if you’re serious about building a reputation in tech. Most of the brand names VCs make a huge investment in this channel and are noticeably absent from LinkedIn. (Marc Andressen, for example.)
YouTube: This is now a primary SEO channel on Google, and some data indicate it’s the most cited channel. This means no serious SEO/AEO strategy is complete without YouTube content.
Reddit: The rise of Reddit has been incredible, and its ability to drive SEO/AEO is why it’s not one of the most important channels for tech founders. But be careful. Do it wrong and you will get banned.
I recommend founders start with X first by posting at minimum 5 days a week. It’s very forgiving. Most posts just die an anonymous death. And it’s a great channel to learn what resonates and what doesn’t.
You should also be posting on LinkedIn 2 to 4 times a week and building up your connections. LinkedIn is one of the few platforms left where the number of followers and connections matters.
2. What You Should Post
Don’t overthink it.
The single biggest problem that most founders run into in the beginning is that they work way too hard on a single piece of content only for it to flop, and then they are disappointed. Don’t do that. Just post.
Here is how I like to break down content categories for social posts:
Trending quote posts: Find trending content from accounts you like and repost their content with your perspective at the top. Both LinkedIn and X offer this feature, and it’s a great way to build awareness with other accounts while participating in conversations about trending topics.
Memes: I am a huge fan of memes and post them frequently. Memes that poke fun at industry topics are a great way to go viral. A mainstay format on X. If you can master the trending meme, you’re nearly guaranteed millions of free media reach. And you look cool as a bonus.
Essay: The crappy ChatGPT-generated essay that ends with, “What are your thoughts?” has given this format a bad name. But they can still be a powerful way to express your ideas. Keep them focused, bulleted, and actionable. You will lose readers if your essay rambles with no clear focus.
Research and charts: Quoting publicly accessible research and data is a hack that few take full advantage of, but should. If you want to be taken seriously by a large enterprise, using data to back up your claims is an essential part of any B2B marketing strategy.
Observations: This can be an excellent strategy for generating viral content for X. There are some very large accounts that do a great job at just providing timely insights on trending tech topics and just posting observations about business, politics, and current events.
Daily life: This is not quite as popular as it once was. But I still think people post photos of their runs, their morning coffee, and other updates from daily life. While they have a low chance of going viral, they prove that the account is backed by a real person.
3. How to Manage Replies and Comments
Commenting and replies are a big part of any successful social strategy.
If you can reply to every comment that you get, that’s ideal. And if you can also comment on posts from other accounts, that’s even better.
When you get negative replies, it’s important to handle them correctly. You don’t need to reply to every single one of them. However, you should use it as an opportunity to calmly and professionally state your case when a valid counterpoint is raised. Yes, this is a test. You need to be able to make your case, particularly if you post an unpopular or counterintuitive perspective.
For obvious angry trolls, mute/block and move on.
If you have some time and can be the “Reply Guy,” you should do it. Using the reply section of other, larger accounts in your niche to borrow their audience is a tried-and-true tactic. Leaving a highly insightful, value-added comment on a top account’s post within the first 15 minutes after it goes live can often drive more profile visits and followers to your page than your own standalone posts.
4. Create Distribution Assets That Compound
Every social post disappears. Social media algorithms have a half-life of mere hours, meaning you are trapped on a content treadmill.
But a newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, event series, or open-source project will compound. Six months from now, you'll still be benefiting from work you did today. Your goal on social media should be to borrow renter attention from platforms like X and LinkedIn, and immediately convert it into owned attention.
Here is the breakdown for section four, using distinct, high-signal bullet points for each distribution asset to show exactly how they compound:
The Newsletter: This is the only audience you can actually own. Algorithms throttle your reach overnight, but an email list lets you communicate directly with your audience without the social feed as a filter.
The Podcast: Content co-creation, not a sales pitch. It’s an excuse to sit down with smart people in your industry, argue about real problems, and record the insights so your audience can learn from them in real time.
The YouTube Channel: A powerful, long-term asset because it acts as a primary search engine. High-quality video content continues to pull in relevant, organic search traffic and drive brand awareness months or years after you upload it.
The Event Series: Moving people off the timeline and into a room. Whether it's a dinner, a coffee meetup, or a high-signal networking event, it builds immediate trust that you can't fake with a post.
The Open-Source Project: A growth hack for developer-facing startups. Providing a free, valuable tool builds immense goodwill with engineers, drives organic human proof on forums, and establishes your technical credibility before you ever pitch a commercial product.
5. Invest Real Money Into Distribution
As a founder, you need to treat distribution like product development and budget for it from day one, even if it's just $500 a month to start.
Paid Social Amplification: When an organic post, insight, or meme performs exceptionally well on X or LinkedIn, do not let it die. Put ad dollars behind it to boost it directly to your target buyers. You are buying guaranteed reach on validated content.
Niche Newsletter Sponsorships: Stop burning thousands on broad Google Ads. Find the micro-newsletters, indie creators, and curated industry digests that your exact target audience already reads religiously. Sponsoring a small newsletter with 3,000 highly targeted subscribers yields real high-intent leads.
Retargeting Infrastructure: If someone visits your landing page because of your organic content, make sure you have basic retargeting pixels set up. It costs pennies to run simple, low-budget ads that keep your brand top of mind for people who have already shown initial interest.
If your engineering budget is seven figures and your distribution budget is zero, you’re just burning cash in the dark. Stop treating distribution like an afterthought and start funding it like a core feature.
🎙️ 053 Gregory and Paul Show - OpenAI's Leaked Financials and the Data Center Boom
This week Gregory and Paul break down OpenAI's leaked financial statements and what they reveal about the real economics of AI. The conversation explores why even the fastest-growing company in history spends billions on sales and marketing, why the AI jobs apocalypse narrative continues to fall apart, and how enterprises are racing to reduce AI token costs through smarter engineering.
I'm a former creative director, 3x head of marketing, and founder of Vibe Your SaaS. After two decades in Silicon Valley, convincing people to click on things, I went rogue and created Vibe Your SaaS.
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