Virio

We're adding $1M ARR per month. Here's the exact GTM strategy I used to get here, and what I'd do again if I was starting from zero: 1. Validate with cold calls before anything else. In the beginning, you want to start with something time-consuming that doesn't cost much. The fastest thing you can do is talk to as many people as possible. My friend Max Woo taught me the power of cold calling. In the early days we were doing 2,500 to 3,000 cold calls a week together. There is no faster way to validate your market and your messaging than to see what actually lands with your customers. You cannot have that many real conversations that quickly any other way to validate or invalidate your idea. Cold calls are great for validation. What is the value prop people are actually willing to pay for? 2. Get your ICP in a room. When you have zero case studies, zero references, and you're a nobody startup starting in stealth, yeah, they'll take a call. But they won't sign, because they need to trust you more. The fastest way to build trust is in-person community. Being in the room, becoming the aggregator and hosting. I started hosting dinners: → Five to ten extremely curated, high-quality people per room. → CMOs at billion dollar companies. → Founders who have scaled companies 10x my size. And somehow I'm in the same room as them; as peers and as friends. I would send a sh*t ton of LinkedIn DMs and emails to invite people to these events and experiences. In the early days it's just putting in the work. That's how I got my first couple of customers. 3. Pick a channel, and start posting. My first pieces of content were my event posts. I would post about the dinners I was hosting, tag all the people, almost soft ABMing them. And I'd reach out after the dinner, book a meeting. That's when things really started taking off. I stopped doing any cold outbound, any of the cold calls. 4. Convert the people already watching. Once my LinkedIn started compounding, I was able to scale a warm outbound motion and evolve my content from building in public to more niche topics within my ICP. Content creates the signal, and warm outbound converts it. The conversion rate from warm versus cold isn't even comparable. 5. Rinse and repeat. Cold calls validate → Dinners build trust → Content scales → Warm outbound converts. But none of it works if you stop when it gets hard. I wake up, I operate as though every day is existential to Virio. That feeling hasn't gone away at +$1M ARR per month. It's gotten louder. DMs are open to anyone who wants to chat GTM strategy ✌️

I've spent 150+ hours building outbound systems inside Claude Code. Here's the complete playbook I wish I had before starting. 1️⃣ BUILD YOUR COMPANY LIST Pull from Apollo.io, Exa, Clay, or Sales Nav → Drop it into companies.csv → Start with 50 companies → Claude reads it -- no formatting needed 2️⃣ SCORE & TIER ACCOUNTS Create scoring-criteria.md with your ICP filters → Industry fit, company size, funding stage, tech stack → Claude runs Python against your CSV → Outputs Tier 1 / 2 / 3 -- zero manual review 3️⃣ FIND CONTACTS + ENRICH Hit Saleshandy Lead Finder (800M+ contacts) → Filter by title, seniority, department → Multi-provider waterfall until verified emails are found → Removes risky addresses before anything reaches a sequencer 4️⃣ WRITE + DEPLOY Claude pulls your copy-framework.md → Writes the sequence, injects personalization tags → Uploads leads and sets all delivery settings → Campaign goes live -- all via API The 4 files you set up once: → CLAUDE.md -- the brain; reads scoring, copy rules, API docs → scoring-criteria.md -- ICP filters in plain English → copy-framework.md -- your email frameworks and tone → .env -- API keys; Claude loads them, never exposes them What Claude automates end to end: → ICP scoring at scale → Enrichment waterfall → Copy generation with A/B subject lines → Campaign creation and deployment → Analytics and optimization brief I built this with Manthan Patel. Comment "OUTBOUND" for the full setup: folder structure, brain file template, scoring rubric, 3 copy frameworks, and the 7 exact prompts to run the whole pipeline.

Coinbase cut 700 employees. Brian Armstrong is replacing them with AI. The CEO of a 5,000-person public company just said out loud what most leaders are still afraid to admit: Two forces converged at once. First, a business that is still volatile quarter to quarter, now in a down cycle. Second, AI has changed what a focused team can actually ship. Armstrong's framing from the email: "The biggest risk now is not taking action." What the restructure involves: → Org chart caps at 5 layers max below the CEO/COO. "Layers slow things down and create coordination tax." → No pure managers. Every leader must be a strong individual contributor alongside their team. Player-coaches, not administrators. → AI-native pods, including "one person teams" where engineers, designers, and product managers exist in a single role. → Leaders carrying 15 or more direct reports. Armstrong has been building toward this for over a year. On the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe co-founder John Collison, he described requiring every engineer to get onboarded with GitHub, Copilot, and Cursor by end of week, not the quarters some teams had planned for. The results from that mandate: roughly 33% of Coinbase's code is now written by AI, with a stated goal of 50% by end of quarter. The company runs monthly internal "AI speed-run" sessions where top-performing teams teach the rest how they work. Armstrong's own decision-making framework, RAPIDS, now includes an AI participant writing its input alongside the humans. He told Collison they are testing when AI can start being the decision-maker outright. The people steering this from here: Dan Kim, BD and GTM for Coinbase's Developer Platform. AI agents, wallets, stablecoins, payments, and the x402 protocol. At the center of where this company is heading. Keith Grose, leading UK operations. International expansion is central to the long-term strategy regardless of what the domestic restructure looks like. Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer. Building the legal architecture as the regulatory environment around crypto shifts in the US and internationally. Katie Harries, Head of Policy for Europe. Former Goldman Sachs. Building the regulatory foundation the platform depends on. Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer. Overseeing the platform and partnerships layer as it gets rebuilt. Daniel Seifert, VP and Managing Director, EMEA (ex-McKinsey). International markets are not pausing for the domestic org change. Emilie Choi, President and COO. Running a 5,000-person company through its most significant structural shift in its 13-year history. Fred Ehrsam, co-founded Coinbase alongside Armstrong in 2012, now at Paradigm. Watching the company they built take this step. Brian Armstrong published the full email on X. The full text is worth reading. Coinbase has not released the complete list of who was affected. There is real talent in this wave. If you know someone landing somewhere new, they are worth a conversation.

The white house is improving our nation with better design. Virio is hiring for a design eng. :) link in the comments

We're hiring.

I've been talking to a lot of GTM leaders at some of the best companies out there for the past two weeks and I'm realizing something kind of wild. There's no secret sauce. Everyone's doing the exact same thing. List building. Outbound engine. That's it. No one's doing anything special. There's nothing to gate, no ultimate playbook that only a few people know about. I posted a hiring post about looking for GTM engineers who could hit 50% response rates. The comments went insane. People said we were lying. Said it was impossible. Said they'd love to see proof. So I posted my campaign results screenshot and everyone went silent. And that's when I realized why we're actually getting those numbers and why everyone else thinks it's impossible. We didn't start with the outbound engine. We started with our product - LinkedIn content that drives pipeline. The outbound came after. That's the difference. The thing is, after all these conversations, I don't think GTM is actually complicated. I think it's just been siloed. Marketing does their thing, sales does their thing, ops does their thing. GTM-E just build lists and runs outbound campaigns with lack of context. No one's looking at the full picture. What actually works in my opinion is seamlessly connecting the dots between marketing, sales, and operations all moving towards the same goal - revenue growth. Full visibility. Everyone understanding what's happening. That's what we're looking for in the GTM engineer we're hiring. Someone who sees that connection and wants to actually build it. But more than that, I'm realizing we need to talk about this as a community. Because right now the GTM role is stuck. It's just become "use Clay, build lists, run outbound." And yeah, that works, but we could be doing so much more! So I'm thinking about pulling together something small and genuine - a real community where GTM leaders can actually talk about how to make this function different and better. People who are willing to being open and honest about what's working, what's not, and what we're all trying to figure out. If this is something you're interested in, please drop a comment or send me a DM! We're looking for people who is excited for this new chapter of GTM ❤️

If you'd asked a founder two years ago if they thought GTM was important, they wouldn't have said no. (Obviously.) But any founder today knows that to stand out in an ever-more crowded market, GTM and distribution are first-party priorities. The question is just...how. To answer that question and peek behind the veil, we're hosting an event with - Nishit Asnani (Hiring Founding AEs) - founder of Sybill - Eric Lay - my cofounder - David Abaev - founder of Databar to talk about all that tactical good stuff, this Friday, at SPIN SF 🏓 If you have a competitive streak (in ping-pong or in business), come by! Comment and I'll send you the link.

This week is a big one for the team at Salesbricks 🧱. Find us tomorrow in Vancouver at #WebSummit26. Visit us on Tuesday, May 12 at Booth G1-14 alongside some of the most exciting growth-stage startups. Our CTO & Co-Founder, John Louis Swaine, will also be taking the Centre Stage at 9:30 AM. Then on Wednesday, May 13, we’re taking over La Honda Winery with our partners Sprinto, Virio, and Lightfield for Uncorked: Reversed Pitch at a Winery, happening after Day 2 of #SaaStrAI2 in San Mateo. We’ve officially reached registration capacity, but if you’re a founder of a Seed to Series B B2B SaaS or AI startup and still want to join us, send us a message. We may be able to squeeze in a few more great founders.