How Fornax grew from 0 - 1,000 users in 6 months

Meet David Peng.

David is from New Zealand but currently living in Berlin. He started his career as a corporate lawyer before becoming the General Counsel at a Series C SaaS company where he learnt about running a scalable business.

David and his team built Fornax, an AI-powered tool that gives founders slide-by-slide feedback on their pitch decks.

The story told by David Peng

My role is everything other than product and development (that's my co-founder's role). That means sales, marketing, partnerships - it's a lot of running around and having (virtual) coffees with people.

We started building the product in October 2023 and went live in December 2023.

We were lucky enough to be able to get 100 customers quite quickly as we built our product as part of a program called Build Space Nights and Weekends wherein anyone who had an idea was encouraged to build it, on nights and weekends, over the course of 6 weeks. Luckily, our target users are early-stage entrepreneurs and Build Space had put them all into one virtual space for us.

We are coming up on 1,000 users. This is a combination of:

• Paid users

• Users on free trials

• Users that come through our partners who use our API (universities, accelerators, VC platforms) using our white-label solution

We promoted the product mostly through X, Reddit posts (example below) and cold emailing relevant communities where founders hang. We also targeted advisors, accelerators etc on LinkedIn (example below).

This is all bootstrapped and to date, we have not paid for any marketing.

We also focus heavily on SEO and experienced significant increase in trafic (+300%) as a result over the past 6 months.

However, the biggest struggle is being able to broadcast our product to a large group of potential users. Finding founder communities is easy but getting them to care is hard. These communities are often either gate-kept (for good reason) or flooded with so much information that our message gets lost.

Playing the numbers game worked for us – simply identifying as many relevant people, groups, communities and casting a wide net, hoping at least 10% of our outreach gets back to us.

You can see the end result of a pitch deck review here.

You can reach David by email or find him on X.