Three Sales Strategies SR007 Founders Are Using to Build Pipelines

This week's highlights

• Hedra (SR002) unveiled its autonomous inference and training platform designed for real-world model development
• The speedrun team is actively recruiting a product engineer
• Primateria gave early access to its chemical simulators built to mirror real-world behavior

The Growth Meta examines emerging patterns in tech marketing and growth strategies that founders leverage for competitive advantage. While the strongest edge comes from shipping excellent products, these tactics function as multipliers on that foundation.

Founders inevitably become salespeople, regardless of their original intentions. Before assembling a dedicated sales organization—often before the product itself is complete—the responsibility for discovering customers, building trust, and converting them into paying users rests with the founder. Speedrun's Head of GTM Macy Mills captured this reality in her analysis of seven common mistakes founders make when pursuing initial deals: "If you can't sell it, a salesperson definitely can't."

Sales methodology continues to shift, so we spoke with founders from speedrun's SR007 cohort about their approaches to constructing robust sales pipelines using current tools and techniques. Three strategies emerged as particularly compelling.

1) Turn sales calls into brainstorming sessions

Rollup develops proprietary on-device models that transform camera-roll history into actionable, real-time user context for applications. According to Rollup CEO and co-founder J Yim, her most effective growth approach this year has involved reframing sales conversations as collaborative brainstorming. "We explored what customers were excited to build, then found where Rollup could naturally fit into that vision," she explains. "Creating that vision together helped us land our first 10 customers and made those relationships feel like real partnerships from the start."

Yim notes that customers frequently envision the experience they want to deliver before understanding what enables it technically. "So you need to ask, what do they REALLY want, who are they competing against, how can they win, and what's getting in their way?" For a video creation app partnering with Rollup, the answer involved developing better mechanisms for the app to surface relevant clips without requiring users to scroll through their entire camera roll.

Yim experienced a breakthrough when she recognized that collaborative brainstorming also aligned both parties on success metrics. "Once you agree on the specific moment you want to improve for the end user," she says, "you have something concrete to build and test toward."

Gifting is coming back into fashion as cold email becomes less and less effective. I saw enterprise-focused SR007 founders finding gifts that were cool and personal, but not creepy, for folks in their deal process. Also, start earlier than you think on selling. It's going to take longer than you want it to, no matter what. And you'll be able to get market signals on what's working or isn't.

Macy Mills, speedrun's Head of GTM

2) Lead with proof, not a pitch

Kairo, an AI security company that "models how humans and AI agents use your application, then tests the attack paths that emerge before they reach production," has found success with what CTO Ankit Chandra calls "Proof-of-work outbound." Chandra describes the approach: "We start with a scoping call to learn how the team builds and ships, what they're worried about, and where their stack is exposed. Then we offer to scan their site so they can see what Kairo finds in their own environment instead of in a demo. We treat the scan as the start of a conversation and partnership, not as a lead generation tool."

This strategy proves especially effective for security-focused companies, where established norms and procedures govern how white-hat researchers disclose vulnerabilities to affected organizations. Offering a complimentary scan upfront demonstrates immediate value delivery while simultaneously serving as a functional product demonstration.

3) Start enterprise GTM on day one

Primitive Labs creates AI models of human behavior, with its Instinct platform enabling enterprises to simulate customer population interactions with products before launch. Co-founder and CEO Rohit Talluri credits his network for Fortune 500 introductions as his primary tactic, emphasizing the importance of viewing relationships as extended commitments even when immediate fit seems unclear.

"We stay close to companies that may not fit our ICP today because that can change in six months," Talluri says. "We keep them updated on our progress, make time for dinners when we're in their cities, and consistently look for ways to strengthen those relationships."

Primitive Labs also prioritized hyperscaler partnerships early, recognizing that "almost every large enterprise has an existing relationship with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud," while its backing from Sony Innovation Fund provides credibility that "would otherwise take a young startup much longer to earn." Talluri's guidance for other founders:

I think one of the biggest mistakes early-stage founders make is treating enterprise GTM as something that starts once the product is ready.

Rohit Talluri, Primitive Labs