Toni sold his first company after 13 years, took some time off, then started building again. Here’s what the second attempt has taught him.
300 beta companies. Zero ad spend.
Toni didn’t run a single ad to recruit beta users for Landing Rabbit. He posted on LinkedIn his actual opinions, what he was thinking about, what he was building.
300 companies signed up. No waitlist hacks, no paid acquisition, no cold outreach blast. Just a founder talking like a human.
AI slop kills deals before they start.
Buyers can smell it. If your marketing looks like it was written by a bot, people write you off before the first call. This matters more now, not less. Because everyone has access to the same tools, the bar for what reads as real just went up.
AI makes it dangerously easy to skip talking to customers.
You can build for months, completely alone, and feel productive the whole time. That’s the trap.
Test with a dead-end prototype.
Before writing real code, Toni builds something that looks real but goes nowhere. Then he books calls and puts actual people through it. They click around, hit the wall, tell him exactly what they expected to happen. That’s your spec. Build that, not what you assumed they wanted.
Your customers already know what your product is.
Toni was mentoring a startup. They were overthinking their product. Their customers already had an answer. They loved the simple version and kept coming back for it.
“I recruited something like 300 companies for our beta just through LinkedIn. Nothing else. Just having discussions with people, sharing what I’m thinking to do.”
Full episode is live!
