The first thing to understand is that we were the underdog. We were a two-person startup with no brand, no network, and no marketing budget. We were going up against companies with millions of dollars in marketing spend and established user bases.

That meant we had to be smart about how we got users. We had to find the channels where we could reach our target audience without spending money on ads or sponsorships.

It boils down to this: finding an edge, a loophole, or a hack that lets you get the attention of your audience in a way that is not saturated by the big players. You either get attention through controversy (take Cluely for example), or through a grey area that may harm the public perception of the big players if they try to compete there.

One of the highest-leverage things we did was reverse engineer the attendee messaging flow in the Consensus Austin app. Attendees could message each other through the platform, so we built a custom landing page for Portrait and sent that out to all attendees.

It worked absurdly well. Out of roughly 20,000 people on the Consensus app, we got around 10,000 signups to the Portrait beta. Many of those signups came from notable companies, including the ones shown at the top of this article.

The image below captures the feeling of it better than the numbers do. We spent most of the conference in our hotel room watching beta applications roll in. Later we took an Uber to the venue, sat down at a random talk, and the person next to us was browsing on the Portrait website. I managed to snap a quick photo of it.

We also had branded Portrait T-shirts, so people started recognizing us and we ended up having numerous conversations off the back of that momentum. All of this came from a two-man team with free Consensus tickets because we were also speaking at FILAustin, a Filecoin and Protocol Labs side event that effectively funded the trip.

That contrast is the real point. Large companies were spending hundreds of thousands on booths and conference branding, while we got more out of the event with almost no spend at all. As a startup, it is David versus Goliath. You have to be smart.

We also got a lot of signups from launch partners, especially Coinbase and Base. It is important to provide a clear value proposition to the partner and to their users, that is not just about "we want to be on your platform.".

If you are building interesting products, it is likely that you will find launch partners who are excited to share them with their users. If you are building sloppy products, it is likely that you will not find launch partners who are excited to share them with their users.