I want to share this GTM strategy that is unorthodox and will not sit well with some of you. But it works and it contributed to the 10x growth of our user base in 5 months. So here goes.

As a solo founder scaling to 1M ARR, I have to be very creative and deploy strategies that are leveraged; a small input from me, but with a high risk and hopefully a high expected output. My goal is to grow aggressively, and I always found that the best way to to get new potential users is to engage them directly. In fact, It is in my opinion that the best way to arouse a stranger's attention to action is to:

1. Namedrop someone that your potential user is likely to know whether by reputation or personally
2. Pique his curiousity
3. Implement FOMO

With that in mind, the GTM hack is that I have a prospecting agent that sends a cold email to people in similar roles (lookalike persona) in competing companies of every new user that signs up on NinjaPear. The idea is that if a user signs up and tries out NinjaPear, that he is likely to belong to our ideal customer profile (ICP) and so will his competitors since they are in the same industry and so will the person with a similar role as the new user.

For example, if the Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe signed up on my site, then he is likely to be an ICP of ours and my prospecting agent will also reach out to:

• Jack Zhang of Airwallet
• Christian Owens of Paddle
• Pieter van der Does of Adyen
• Jack Dorsey of Block
• Kristo of Wise
• Dan Engel of Fastspring
• etc

And these people are also like to be an ICP of ours.

From a technical perspective, what our prospecting agent does is that it will perform a lookalike person lookup with our Similar People Endpoint, and lookup the work email (again with our own API) for each lookalike person and send a cold email that looks something like this:

>

WIth this email, sent at the right time, you will

1. be able to namedrop your new prospect's competitor by name (although we do not namedrop by name, only company name)
2. pique his curiousity as to what his competitor can do to him
3. establish FOMO so the user can quickly sign up and find out what's going on

And if you think about it, this is essentially what GTM and BDR teams do manually. They look through their existing customer base or establish an ICP hypothesis, find out who else is in that ICP and give them a call or send them a cold email. Except that we're doing it autonomously with our AI agent and NinjaPear competitive intelligence data.

Hope this little hack forms yet another piece of your engine to 1M ARR as a solo AI founder!

> This article is part of the 1M ARR Solo AI Founder newsletter, handwritten by myself without any AI, sharing my experience scaling NinjaPear to 1M ARR as a solo founder and my past experiences building products and companies. I am a seasoned operator and I have sold two companies, including Proxycurl hitting ~10M ARR. Follow me on @nubela on X and subscribe to the 1M ARR Solo AI Founder newsletter!

I shared an article on Reddit and someone made an allegation stating that I said I'd never sell Proxycurl. He said:

> ... Also the "I'll never sell, never take investment" framing reads great but you wrote nearly the same kind of post before selling Proxycurl.

Fake news! I'm now working on NinjaPear but when I was building Proxycurl, I never said I'd never sell! In fact, I tried to sell Proxycurl multiple times! One time on Acquire.com, and and a handful of times via FEI International!

I wanted to sell Proxycurl as early as possible because scraping LinkedIn was not a sustainable business. In fact, everytime I tried to sell Proxycurl, I was given terrible offers. Let me give you an inside look to what Proxycurl acquisition offers looked like.

Attempt 1 and 2: 30K MRR and 140K MRR

I first attempted to sell Proxycurl in November of 2020 when Proxycurl barely hit 30K in monthly recurring revenue, which if extrapolated, works out to be $360K / year. I was hoping to sell it for between 2-3M.

At this time, Proxycurl was around 6 months old, like what NinjaPear is as of now.

And FE International declined to even market Proxycurl, and this is the rejection they cite:

> The Valuation team is currently analyzing your business but require an income statement that is on an accrual's basis to proceed with the valuation. We noticed a significant percent of revenues comes from pre-paid credits. Because sales have started so recently, it is difficult to forecast what the expected renewal rate will be or where will monthly usage stabilize by looking only at cash trends. Buyers are also likely to ask for unearned revenues to be transferred, which at this point could significantly decrease the net transaction value. > > If you do not have this available, we request you hold on to the business to for another 6 months. Then we would have adequate earnings history and data to adjust the income statements in house and accurately value the business.

I attempted to get FE International to market Proxycurl for sale in AUgust 2022 when Proxycurl hit 140K MRR, or around 1.7M in ARR. Nada.

> I sat down with the Valuation team and, unfortunately, your product offerings still appear too focused on LinkedIn data for us to proceed with handling a sale. > > The revenue trend has been impressive with year-on-year growth over 100% and margins have been steadily improving as the business has scaled up. The complication here is still the focus on LinkedIn derived data. On your website, almost all of the products still appear built on the premise of pulling data from LinkedIn, whether the data is from a company profile or a list of employees who work for a given company. To be clear, this is legal. The challenge is that potential investors see it as a very potent risk. As the business continues to grow the likelihood that LinkedIn tries to take some kind of action disrupting the business also grows which, in our experience, greatly diminishes interest. The only kind of deals that we’ve seen close with this kind of risk profile end up being heavily tied to future performance with 30% or less of the transaction value paid up front. Obviously, this is not favorable structure.

To be fair, they are right. Proxycurl did get sued in the end and the LinkedIn risk was the reason why I was trying to sell Proxycurl.

No offers despite a fast-growing product. I always take my shots.

April 2023: $16M offer from a major Proxy Service Provider

In April 2023, the Head of M&A of a major proxy provider reached out expressing interest in acquiring Proxycurl with their $50M M&A budget. After certain discussion, they offered $16M, with $6M in upfront cash. I consider everything else just a bonus. This is an excerpt from the LOI.

> Our preliminary estimate of the purchase price is USD 16.0 million: USD 6 million upfront > cash, USD 6 million upfront equity, USD 4 million earn out based on the Revenue/ EBIT > target milestones for 2 years (USD 1.0 million in cash and USD 1.0 million in equity per > year), this subject to further due diligence and subject to final legal documentation and > assuming a net cash/net debt position of the target business on the closing date.

I'd love to tell you who they are, but I have a signed NDA.

I tried negotiating further:

> Hi X, thanks for the offer. How about 12M in cash, 2M in earnouts (payment in cash only) and 2M in equity as what we discussed? I prefer a heavier upfront cash portion.

And my counter-proposal was rebuffed:

> Hi Steven -- I've had quite a long internal discussion with our board and unfortunately we would not be able to go beyond the last proposal we made. > > (..)

This entire process with said proxy service provider kickstarted in May 2023 and concluded in July 2023. A solid two months. At this juncture in time, Proxycurl's ARR was $3M USD. As you can already tell, Proxycurl was doubling its revenue every year, and so it really didn't make sense to sell for 6M USD because that's how much I'd get if I waited 1 more year with Proxycurl, and still retain 100% of all equity. So I turned down the offer.

February 2024: 12M offer from a public MarTech company

Third time's a charge as FEI decided to market Proxycurl. On February 9th 2024, a initial LOI from a public MarTech Company for $12M arrived with a term sheet.

This is an excerpt from the term sheet that you might be interested in:

> The aggregate transaction consideration (the “Purchase Price”) to be > paid by Buyer for 100% of the Company’s fully diluted equity of the > Company would be $5,900,000.00. > Of purchase price, $3,900,000.00 shall be in cash, and $2,000,000.00 > shall be in freely trading shares of Buyer’s stock (shares of which > currently trade on the NASDAQ), The stock shall be valued at the price > determined by the volume weighted average price (the “VWAP”) in the > trailing five trading days prior to closing. > The Purchase Price assumes that the Company will have a debt-free > balance sheet and will be cash-free other than an appropriate amount of > working capital at closing. Buyer will not assume any indebtedness or > transaction expenses of the Company, and the Purchase Price would be > decreased on a dollar-for-dollar basis to the extent necessary to pay-off > and satisfy in full, at the closing, any such outstanding indebtedness or > unpaid transaction expenses. The Purchase Price would also be > increased or decreased to the extent that the Company’s working capital > at closing exceeds or is less than a mutually agreed target amount.

Following pushbacks from the deal team, they counter offered with an updated offer of $12M total consideration (2M upfront, 3M holdbacks and 7M in equity). I should note that at time of the offer, said company's market cap was around $10M. As of now, the market cap is $6.5M. So the "final offer" would be much smaller as of today. This was a worse deal than the offer by the proxy provider, and naturally I turned it down. I mean, why would I since Proxycurl's revenue doubles every year and we were on track to hit 10M in ARR. For which 80% was pure profit.

July 2025: Proxycurl was acquired

Due to NDA, and the fact that the acquisition was in fact executed, I'm not able to share the details of the acquisition. But in July 2025, I have just settled with LinkedIn and a long-time competitor swooped in and acquired Proxycurl assets sans anything that would violate the settlement agreement. At this juncture, Proxycurl could no longer scrape LinkedIn and I decided that it was a good soft landing for myself for which the sum of cash helped bolster my ETF holdings.

Thoughts on acquisition

I'm just going to say one thing. I hate that Proxycurl was acquired, especially how it all unfurled after the acquisition. Certain events happened after the acquisition that demonstrated the hypocrisy of people. For example, to have a competitor company changed some of my blog posts and renamed my accomplishments as his own. Have some self-respect. I won't say more, but let's just say that I'll never sell my company again.

It was exhilarating bootstrapping a fast growing company that was Proxycurl. I met a bunch of talented people and made a lot of friends with these people. Proxycurl also FATFired me, because the profits were fat and the company grew exponentially as a bootstrapped company.

I might have averted shutting Proxycurl down had Proxycurl been acquired by a larger entity before the lawsuit, but even on hindsight I wouldn't do it any different. Just from a financial aspect, I made more money not selling Proxycurl. The profits that Proxycurl made took care of my family and I for an entire life. I also think I'd have hated working for someone else.

I'm no longer motivated by money but by meaning. Today, NinjaPear is my passion project that I use to derive a challenge and certain productivity in life. And you bet your ass that NinjaPear would never be sold.

Background: I'm a seasoned bootstrapper operator and I have built many profitable companies in the past. From a VPN, to Proxycurl which was the largest LinkedIn scraping API I sold last year after settling a lawsuit with LinkedIn. I also write code (before the advent of Claude Code). Also, no AI was used used in writing this article. I'm publishing this post with warts and grammar mistakes as it is.

I intend to share how I'm going to build a 1M ARR company as someone who has done this multiple times, albeit this time as a solo founder with no intention of hiring. I'm determined to make the first 1M with NinjaPear solo. So far, I've been making more than 10K in the last 2 months. So NinjaPear is already profitable :)

First things first, I really don't know what I'm doing so don't take what I say as gospel. Instead, use my story as a sounding board in your repertoire of stories of operators are building solo founder startups. Sure, I have had some startup building experience and they allow me to sidestep mistakes that I have made in the past, and hone in on things that worked out well for me historically. But I'm still struggling. For example, right now, I personally feel like I have not found product market fit with NinjaPear.

I never intended to start another company after Proxycurl's exit because company building is very exhausting. However I fractured my foot in January this year and I was stuck infront of my keyboard and I started to toy around with Claude Code. And lo and behold, I started building out of habit and ended up buiding and deploying the NinjaPear prototype in two weeks. I wrote a blog post and launched it. I was sold that I never needed to hire another (grunt work) dev. Case in point, Proxycurl had around 60 employees with more than half of them as SWEs before I shut it down).

So, NinjaPear is 6 months old, this has been my process on a macro level:

1. Reducing operational expenses to the bare minimum.
2. Iterating non-stop to reach product-market fit with customer feedback.
3. Agentically automating whatever that can be automated.

What's more important are the things that I'm not doing:

1. I am not tokenmaxxing or trying to automate everything. To be specific, I'm not automating taste. There is significant human in the loop, that is myself in decision making.
2. I am not automating marketing. Humans buy from humans, and not AI. (Or why I think Polsia is an amazing spam machine but a shit product).
3. I am not using AI to figure out the product plan or the pitch.
4. Not trying to be a lifestyle influencer/content creator (hah).

Reducing operational expenses

I'll let you in on a little secret. NinjaPear's hosting costs $0 including cost of electricity. Hah, I found an old Intel NUC that I had purchased many years ago that was used to power the signing of transactions with the hot wallet of NuMoney (cryptocurrency exchange startup), wiped it, and plugged into my home internet. And it turns out that I live in Singapore and I have solar panels at home, hence electrical bills are $0!

Compare and contrast it to my time at Proxycurl, for which our monthly spend on hosting on the managed Kubernetes clusters and backups at Digitalocean were $6000-$8000/month. It was ridiculous. The justification was that money spent on DO is far cheaper than hiring engineers to manage backups and orchestrate scaling.

Turns out with Claude Code/Codex, setting up a Kubernetes cluster is trivial. Since then, I have further invested in a Framework desktop, so now I have a cluster of two nodes, all hosted the same way, for $0 ignoring the cost of the home internet I was going to pay for anyways. (Yes, I'm conveniently ignoring the initial capex to purchase these computers).

What do I pay for then?

That said, I still have expenses.

1. I have a 5x max plan for Codex, and a 5x max plan for Claude Code. That's $200/mo.
2. I have some underlying vendors that serves as raw cost for the data enrichment pipeline.
3. Openrouter LLM costs.

But other than these, nothing much. In other words, minimal expenses to keep NinjaPear running.

Non-stop iteration in search of PMF

Based on experience, you will roughly know when you achieved product-market fit because your focus will move from trying to iterate on the product message fit, to having to focus on scaling the product for use. Also, churn goes down and recurring purchases will increase.

I thought NinjaPear had it about two months ago but the revenue this month dipped so I'm not there yet. So if you notice NinjaPear's home page iterating again and again, this is why. I'm still figuring out the definitive answer to "What is NinjaPear". Right now, NinjaPear is a B2B enrichment and competitive intelligence data platform.

As a solo founder in the age of the AI, the product is practically free in the grand scheme of things and it is all about marketing and solving the right problems for your potential customer persona. And iterating means doing this, repeatedly, until you find something that seems to work ok, then hone on it until it works even a bit better, repeatedly.

Agentic Automation

In my previous companies, we have team responsibilities as such:

• Customer success - to provide a point of contact for paying/would-be customers to find out what they like about our product; and to prevent them from churning.
• Customer support - to assist customers with support questions. These include billing.
• Administrative / Bookkeeping - to get your books in order for annual reports, etc.
• Sales team - to close larger Enterprise deals

As a solo founder, some responsibilities/roles disappeared (phew). These usually include managerial role.

Remember how I said that with AI, building is "free" in the grand scheme of things?

Well. What used to take a dedicated headcount as the role of the book-keeper to add receipts/invoices into Xero, is now automated as a Kubernetes deployment.

I don't have a sales team because I don't have PMF yet; can't sell if I haven't got the product messaging figured out.

For customer support, I reused an early version of an AI live chat widget that I had launched before the current rendition of NinjaPear.

For customer success, I built out an agent that sent an AI customised email, something like this:

>

Emails that were sent out based on various action triggers of a customer's journey in our product.

There is a lot more that I have agentically automated at NinjaPear; actions that used to be a full-time position but now automated away. AI that doesn't seek "career growth" or annual bonus payouts. Honestly, I'm happier than ever.

One more thing

This time, I'm spending every cent I earn from NinjaPear and reinvesting it back into the business. Specifically, I'm doing things like boosting tweets/X posts, sponsoring newsletters, Reddit ads. I don't know. I haven't done it yet other than it sponsoring a Japan vacation that I just went for.

I have an unfair advantage this time. For the first-time in my life, I'm able to build a venture for which I have no need for the venture to provide sustenance to myself and my family. This time, I'll never sell NinjaPear. Nor will NinjaPear ever accept an investment :)

I'm going to keep rambling

Obviously, NinjaPear is not anywhere near 1M ARR and I'm going to keep sharing what I'm doing as a solo founder. I'm going to keep writing about my journey and you can follow me on X @ `nubela` !

I intend to share a story every work day. Trying to work my writing muscle again. My next article will be about what I'm not automating. And why I think having myself in the loop matters.