How to get strangers to trust you when your network is tapped o

You’ve sold to everyone in your address book.

You’ve scraped your way to $100k, then $200k ARR by leveraging every personal connection, favor, and introduction you could find. This is exactly how most technical founders reach this milestone – through people who already knew and trusted them.

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But now you’re staring at a brutal reality: to get to $500k, you need a new customer profile to discover you, trust you, and buy from you. People who’ve never heard your name, don’t know your background, and have zero reason to believe you can solve their problems.

And let’s not forget… you don’t have the marketing budget to interrupt their day with ads.

This is where many startups hit the wall. They can’t bridge the gap between relying on warm connections anymore, to building trust and credibility with people that don’t know them, and don’t care.

At Seattle Tech Week, growth expert Gregory Kennedy shared a series of tactics that help get you past this bump. Instead of trying to buy attention you can’t afford, you earn it through creativity and strategic thinking. I’m focusing on four here – feel free to ask me for the complete list – I’m happy to connect you to Kennedy’s presentation.

Tactic 1: Start your weekly show (and stick with it)

When Kennedy set out to build his name in the SaaS space, he began hosting weekly virtual sessions where he’d interact with other experts on a set topic.

The first week, nobody showed up.

The second week, one person came – someone well-connected in the local startup scene. That single attendee led to more attendees, and clients. Most important, it led to community, which meant Kennedy was crafting a flywheel which would spin off more clients with less effort, as he continued hosting his weekly sessions.

Why this works for getting strangers to trust you: While your competitors are spending thousands on LinkedIn ads hoping to interrupt the right people, you’re creating content that demonstrates your expertise week after week. Strangers discover you through your teaching, not your pitching.

The magic isn’t the format – it’s the consistency. Most founders create content sporadically when they remember. Kennedy committed to showing up every single week, regardless of audience size. That consistency compounds into authority with people who’ve never met you.

The strategic angle: Pick a teaching topic adjacent to your product, not about your product. If you sell marketing software, teach “Growth Experiments That Actually Matter.” There’s nothing worse than sales pitches thinly veiled as content, but everyone loves learning from someone who’s living the subject matter, warts and all.

Why this works when money is tight: Your time investment is fixed (aka this marketing tactic won’t take over your life). Your potential reach is unlimited. And unlike paid ads that stop working when you stop paying, valuable content keeps attracting strangers years later.

I’ve seen this play work beautifully. When I worked with Smart Sweets, I got to know founder Tara Bosch, and learned something profound about her company. The candy wasn’t the moat keeping massive competitors like Cadbury and Mars at bay. Bosch’s community was.

Tara spent countless hours building community on Instagram around the theme of quitting sugar while keeping candy. She shared setbacks, victories, and genuine empathy for people fighting the same battle. Complete strangers would discover her content, feel understood, and become loyal customers before they ever tried the product.

Consequently, when she announced new shipments at specific stores, her community would converge and clean out the Smart Sweets. Store owners were stunned by this mysterious candy that created flash mobs of strangers.

The product was great, but the community of strangers-turned-advocates was unbreachable. That’s what consistent content that builds connections delivers.

Tactic 2: Go deep, not wide, with cold outreach

Kennedy’s second insight was especially prescient, considering how AI tools are making it easier than ever to send warm-sounding but insight-barren emails en masse. His advice: prioritize quality over quantity.

That is, instead of sending 1000 generic outreach emails, send a few deeply researched, highly personalized ones.

Why this works for getting strangers to trust you: While everyone else is automating personalization, you’re connecting by delivering value. Strangers can immediately tell the difference between someone who actually understands their business and someone using their company name as a mail merge field.

The strategic angle: I now research one company deeply every day, then send an outreach to that company’s leader. Thirty minutes studying their product, recent hiring, competitive landscape, and market position – this research almost always sheds deep insight into their world. And it makes for great conversation starters.

Why this works when money is tight: First, let me preface this by saying that regardless of your marketing budget, cold bland outreach sucks, and highly intuitive, deeply researched outreach rocks. It’s a human thing. Everyone likes to feel understood – whether the person reaching out has been in business 20 minutes or 20 years.

But I digress. When money is tight, you need to create your own playing field to win on. To compete on insight, not volume. Personally, I’ve seen response rates are dramatically higher – I’m seeing close to 100% response rates and about 50% conversion to discovery calls. That’s exponentially better ROI than spray-and-pray approaches that treat strangers like database padding.

Tactic 3: Execute guerrilla marketing that’s strategically aligned

At a gaming conference, Kennedy placed a one-pager with a QR code advertising his client’s company on every seat in the main auditorium. The results were immediate: meetings until midnight in the hotel lobby with complete strangers who became clients.

It wasn’t particularly imaginative – we’ve all seen seat drops. But it was highly disruptive and, according to Kennedy, highly tailored to the people who would be sitting in those seats. Extra points: he pitched it to event organizers as a new sponsorship product they could sell, so it cost him only $2,000.

Why this works for getting strangers to trust you: True guerrilla marketing isn’t about being outrageous just for attention. It’s about finding unexpected angles that perfectly demonstrate your value, and more important, make it clear you understand your audience’s pain point. Strangers notice you because you’re genuinely helpful, not just loud.

The potential to amplify great ideas has never been higher – with cell phones, everyone carries immediate, spontaneous access to massive networks.

That said, they won’t share your idea unless you can cut through the noise – strategy is critical, but brilliant, head-turning creativity is a must. And that takes work.

The strategic angle: Start with a contrarian, disruptive insight about your industry, then find a creative way to prove it publicly. The creativity gets attention from strangers, but the insight gets their respect.

My favorite example remains Rethink’s campaign for 3M Scotchshield security film over 20 years ago. They applied the shatterproof film to a lightbox where bus shelter ads are normally hung, filled the empty box with money ($500 real, the rest not-so-much), and set up hidden cameras to record would-be thieves trying unsuccessfully to break the glass to get into the lightbox.

The footage went to local TV stations and exploded into international coverage – $1M in unpaid media. Their client was flooded with orders from complete strangers, leading to a monthslong backlog.

Why this worked: It wasn’t creative for creativity’s sake. It perfectly demonstrated the product benefit (unbreakable glass) in a way impossible for strangers to ignore. And considering it happened in the days before cellphones could instantly send ideas to the world, it worked very, very well.

Why this works when money is tight: You’re competing on creativity and strategic thinking, not media budgets. One well-executed guerrilla campaign can introduce you to more qualified strangers than months of paid advertising.

The key is ensuring your idea builds genuine trust with strangers, not just grabs their attention. That shatterproof glass film needs thwart thieves, not just attract them.

Tactic 4: ‘Tear down’ famous examples to build up your credibility

Kennedy’s next idea involved ‘tearing down’ (a misnomer – actually more of a deconstruction) to demonstrate your ability to help any client – even those who aren’t clients.

He cited Slidebean, a company trying to make their name as pitch deck experts. Their marketing? To rethink famous decks like Facebook’s, demonstrating how they could improve already-successful companies.

Why this works for getting strangers to trust you: Even if you haven’t worked on massive brands, this tactic demonstrates your ability to punch above your weight. If the Facebook deck felt better after the Slidebean treatment (the key word being if – you need to be confident in your ability to deliver), imagine how it would improve my startup’s deck?

The strategic angle: This approach solves a classic problem: how do you prove your capabilities to strangers before landing prestigious clients? By demonstrating your thinking on prestigious examples they already know.

The execution: Choose one famous company. Think about where they could improve… or more specifically, what you could improve for them. Create a detailed breakdown showing your specific recommendations with clear reasoning.

For B2B founders, this could mean:

• Redesigning Zoom’s enterprise sales page
• Improving Slack’s feature comparison chart
• Optimizing HubSpot’s free trial experience

The key is picking examples where your improvements are obviously better, not just different.

Then comes the hard part. Executing, and pushing your execution out into the world. It goes without saying that your improvement to Facebook’s deck be seen as an improvement. It’s equally critical that every founder aspiring to become as famous as Facebook knows about it.

Why this works when money is tight: You’re building authority through demonstration, not just claims. Strangers can see your thinking process applied to real scenarios. And since you’re using famous examples, it subconsciously telegraphs that you move in the right circles. When prospects google your name, they find concrete examples of your expertise applied to companies they recognize and trust.

The compound effect of earning stranger trust

Here’s what Kennedy understood but didn’t say explicitly: these tactics work because they force you to build genuine expertise, not just awareness.

When you can’t buy your way into strangers’ attention, you have to earn it through consistent value. When you can’t interrupt them with ads, you have to attract them with insights. When you can’t rely on warm introductions, you have to demonstrate capabilities they can see and trust.

The founders who successfully cross from $100k to $500k ARR aren’t necessarily the ones with the best products or biggest budgets. They’re the ones who get creative about building trust with complete strangers using intelligence instead of capital.

These constraints become competitive advantages. While your well-funded competitors are optimizing ad spend hoping to interrupt the right strangers, you’re building genuine expertise, real relationships, and authentic authority that draws people to you.

That foundation becomes unshakeable as you scale. Money can buy attention from strangers, but it can’t buy the trust and credibility you build through consistent value creation.

The math is simple: when you’ve exhausted your network, expert thinking and creativity scale infinitely. Marketing budgets don’t.

Photo courtesy of Pascal Bernardon and Unsplash.

Want to see how these tactics apply to your specific situation?

I’ve created a growth diagnostic that helps founders identify which approach will have the biggest impact for their business and stage.

Send me a quick email at marc@marcstoiber.com. Just write “DIAGNOSTIC” in the subject line, and I’ll send you the framework – no forms, no pitch, just the strategic tool.