How we failed in AI but found ourselves in sales tech

A little over a year ago, my co-founder and I started https://tothepoint.tech -- a startup that bridged AI models and enterprises ensuring a high level of safety of confidential information. We spent nearly a year talking with hundreds of people and reframing the product until we gave up accepting that our product does not guarantee a satisfying level of security.

Even though we failed with To The Point, there was one thing where we definitely did pretty well. It was sourcing relevant companies and finding touchpoints to communicate with them. Not to be unsubstantiated we pitched to 11 top execs in huge European enterprises without having any prior acquaintance with them.

This experience has led us to embark on a new venture: https://bijection.tech. Reuniting our original team of two, we productized the strategies that worked in our previous venture and automated a lot of work we did manually during the To The Point days.

We reached $1k MRR after starting in early September, here is what worked for us:

Prioritize quality over volume.
Filter leads as much as possible, leveraging any indicator and score available. E.g., we scrap industry/size/HQ from Linkedin and other sources as well as score leads with GPT4 assessing the alignment of the company with the ICP provided by a customer.
The source of leads should define the touchpoint.
What you sell has to be relevant to the lead. So scrap from the industry-specific networks. E.g.:

Extract the attendees of the conference and utilize the conference as a touch point to engage with your target industry.
Scrap the vacancies for job posting websites to identify industry demands.
Find your ideal customers in a particular geographic region via Google Maps.

Enhancing your offers with personalized context.
Write tailored messages to stand out in the recipient's inbox. What worked really well for us was bringing value from the very first interaction:
- Recommend a blog post, video, or paper
- Congrats on the recent achievement
- Ask them questions

We implemented all these strategies in Bijection Tech, and now we are working with the first 10 clients to shape our product. While it is still not released publically, we offer it as a service now. We take your definition of ideal custom and your best wins, then scrape the web seeking for similar profiles, score ideal leads, enrich the list with LinkedIn and email information, and finally generate offers that resonate on a personal level.

We'd greatly appreciate feedback from the IH community. Have a wonderful day! ❤️