Early on, Mintlify's co-founders performed the unscalable work of manually migrating new customers and even improving their grammar. This "extra mile" service, reinforced by Y Combinator's Paul Graham, was a key driver in sparking initial customer love and adoption.

In a world rife with shortcuts, Molly refused offers that would compromise her game's integrity, like letting pros play for a fee. This commitment to trustworthiness and investing in people built immense relational capital. This reputation became her core competitive advantage, creating a high-trust environment that attracted the best clients.

To overcome the high trust barrier of accessing user emails, Fixer identified early customers with large LinkedIn followings. They invested heavily in supporting these users, then asked them to post about their experience, effectively borrowing their credibility to acquire new customers.

The founders of billion-dollar companies like Wealthsimple and GoBolt demonstrated an insane level of focus on customer contact. This included calling every free user within 30 seconds and personally answering the 24/7 support line. This unscalable behavior generates deep customer understanding and powerful word-of-mouth.

For a 150-year-old brand like ADT, the most valuable asset is user trust, which is hard to build and easy to lose. Therefore, every product investment must first be validated against its potential impact on that trust.

Contrary to the belief they worked with thousands of influencers, Gymshark's early strategy focused on a small, "handcrafted" group of the most revered athletes in fitness. This "depth over width" approach built credibility by associating the brand with top-tier talent rather than using a broad, spray-and-pray method.

For communities or companies like Dave Gerhardt's Exit 5, the founder's personal brand can become the primary differentiator. This creates a 'category of one' in the customer's mind (e.g., 'The Dave Gerhardt Community'), making direct comparisons difficult and establishing a powerful moat that transcends feature-based competition.

Contrary to a 'frictionless' growth mindset, legal tech unicorn Clio deliberately added hurdles like a 30-minute webinar to its beta program. This strategy filtered out casual users, ensuring they worked with a small, highly engaged customer cohort to truly validate the product's value before focusing on growth.

Beehiiv's early, manual user approval process was a product flaw. The founder turned this negative into a positive by using the check as a trigger to personally follow and DM every new user, transforming a point of friction into a powerful community-building touchpoint.