Instead of charging doctors for its valuable productivity tools, Doximity offers them for free to maximize user engagement. This creates a highly concentrated, valuable audience of physicians, which is then monetized through targeted advertising from pharmaceutical companies, its primary revenue source.

Avoid pursuing prosumer and enterprise motions simultaneously. The optimal sequence is to first build massive bottoms-up love and brand trust with individual users. This creates internal champions within target companies, providing crucial momentum and turning a cold B2B sale into a pull-based motion.

Instead of using reports as teasers to force sign-ups, Read AI made them comprehensive and easily shareable. This demonstrated immediate ROI to non-users who received them, creating a powerful viral loop that drives a million monthly signups with no ad spend.

Convex built 'Chef', a functional AI coding app, not to win end-users, but as a marketing tool. By open-sourcing it and demonstrating the power of their backend, they successfully attracted other AI coding platforms to build on their technology, turning potential competitors into customers.

Beyond its technical capabilities, OpenAI's app ecosystem within ChatGPT functions as a new distribution platform. For founders, this creates a strategic opportunity to build apps that serve as an interface layer to their product, opening a novel and potentially powerful channel for user acquisition and growth.

Amplitude's CEO explains how incumbents counter "feature-not-company" AI startups. They rapidly build the startup's core functionality, give it away for free, and leverage it as a powerful lead generation tool for their existing business, commoditizing the startup's value proposition overnight.