The 'Scrappy Marketing' Playbook for Pre-Seed Founders

The Scrappy Mindset: Your Most Valuable Asset

You have a game-changing idea, a nascent product, and enough caffeine to power a small city. What you don't have is a marketing budget. Welcome to the pre-seed stage. It’s a thrilling, terrifying period where the pressure to show traction is immense, but the resources to generate it are virtually non-existent. Many founders believe they need to wait for a seed round to “turn on” marketing. This is a fatal mistake.

This is where scrappy marketing comes in. It’s not about being cheap; it’s about being resourceful. It's a mindset rooted in creativity, relentless execution, and a deep understanding of your customer. It’s about trading budget for hustle, ingenuity, and time. Before you can spend money on marketing, you must earn the right to, by proving you can generate interest through sheer force of will and cleverness.

At AgentWeb, we see how powerful AI and big budgets can be, but we also know that the most successful marketing engines are built on a foundation of scrappy, hard-won early traction. This playbook is your guide to laying that foundation.

Embrace a "Do Things That Don't Scale" Mentality

The most famous piece of advice from Y Combinator's Paul Graham is to "do things that don't scale." For a pre-seed founder, this should be your marketing mantra. While your investors and long-term vision are focused on scalable systems, your immediate goal is to survive and learn. Scalability is a problem for tomorrow; acquiring your first, crucial users is the problem for today.

What does this look like in practice? It means:

Manual Recruiting: Instead of running ads, you personally find and email your first ten users. You find them in LinkedIn groups, on Twitter, or in niche forums. You craft a personal message explaining why you think they, specifically, would benefit from your product.
White-Glove Onboarding: You don't just send users to a sign-up page. You offer to personally walk them through the product via a 15-minute Zoom call. This gives you invaluable, real-time feedback and makes the user feel incredibly valued.
Personalized Thank Yous: When someone signs up, becomes a paying customer, or gives you great feedback, do something memorable. A handwritten note, a short personalized Loom video, or even a small gift card for coffee can turn a user into a die-hard evangelist.

These activities are time-consuming and utterly unscalable. But they achieve something no automated system can: they build genuine human relationships and provide a feedback loop of unparalleled quality.

Obsess Over Your First 100 True Fans

Your goal is not to get 10,000 sign-ups from a TechCrunch article. Your goal is to find your first 10, 50, then 100 true fans. These are the users who don't just use your product; they get it. They understand the vision, forgive the early bugs, and are eager to give you the raw, unfiltered feedback you need to survive.

Why this obsession? Because these first users are your most important asset. They are your:

Feedback Engine: They will tell you what’s broken, what’s confusing, and what’s brilliant.
Validation Signal: Their willingness to use (and maybe even pay for) your buggy, feature-light MVP is the strongest signal you have that you're on to something.
Marketing Flywheel: Delighted early users are the seed for all future word-of-mouth growth. They will provide testimonials, case studies, and social proof, and they will tell their friends.

Forget broad demographic targeting. Create a hyper-specific Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Who is exactly the person that feels the pain you solve most acutely? Now, go find ten of them.

Measure Everything (That Matters)

Scrappy doesn't mean flying blind. In fact, because your resources are so limited, you must be even more ruthless about tracking what works. You don't have the luxury of wasting time on channels that produce zero results. But don't get lost in vanity metrics like website visits or social media likes.

Focus on the pirate metrics (AARRR), simplified for the pre-seed stage:

Acquisition: Where are our users coming from? (e.g., a specific Reddit comment, a LinkedIn post, direct outreach).
Activation: What percentage of sign-ups complete the key first action in our product? (e.g., create their first project, send their first message).
Retention: Are users coming back? Day 1, Week 1, and Month 1 retention are critical early health indicators.

Use free tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel (free tier), or Hotjar (free tier) to get this data. A simple spreadsheet can work wonders in the beginning. Every week, ask yourself: What was our single most successful marketing action? Double down on that.

The Scrappy Marketing Playbook: Core Strategies

With the right mindset in place, it’s time to execute. These are not mutually exclusive plays; they work best when combined. Pick one or two that align with your strengths and your audience, and execute relentlessly.

Play #1: Build in Public

This is the single most powerful strategy for a pre-seed founder. Instead of building in a secret garage, you build in a glass house for everyone to see. You share your journey—the wins, the losses, the metrics, the bugs, the learnings—openly on social media.

Where to do it: Twitter/X is the de-facto home for the tech build-in-public movement. LinkedIn works brilliantly for B2B founders. Platforms like Indie Hackers are dedicated communities for this.
What to share: Don't just post product updates. Share your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), even if it's $0. Post screenshots of user growth charts. Write about a difficult technical challenge you just overcame. Ask for feedback on a new feature design. Be vulnerable and authentic.
Why it works: It builds an audience before you even launch. People become invested in your story and your success. It builds trust and credibility, making people want to try the product you're pouring your heart into. It also attracts potential hires, advisors, and even investors who admire your transparency and hustle.

Play #2: Content as a Trojan Horse

Forget “blogging for SEO.” At the pre-seed stage, content marketing is not about ranking for high-volume keywords. It's about solving a specific, painful problem for your ideal customer so effectively that they can't help but notice you.

This is “Problem-Led Content.” Instead of writing “5 Tips for Better Project Management,” you write “The Exact Template We Use to Manage Our Engineering Sprints (and a Free Notion Template You Can Steal).” The second title solves a tangible problem and provides immediate value.

Find the Pain: Go to Reddit, Quora, and industry forums. What questions are your target users asking over and over? What are they complaining about? Write the definitive, most helpful answer to that question in the form of an article, guide, or free tool.
Be the Expert: Your content should position you as an expert in your domain. It builds trust and makes your product the logical next step. If you offer the best free advice on a topic, customers will assume your paid product is even better.
Repurpose Aggressively: Your work isn't done when you hit “publish.” A single deep-dive article can be repurposed into a 10-tweet thread, a LinkedIn carousel post, a short video tutorial, and an answer to five different Quora questions. Squeeze every drop of value out of your content creation efforts.

Play #3: Weaponize Your Personal Brand

In the beginning, nobody knows your company's brand. But they can know your brand. As a founder, you are the company's first and most important marketer. You need to become a trusted, recognized voice in your niche.

This is not about being an “influencer.” It’s about consistently providing value to the community you want to serve. Pick one or two platforms where your audience lives (e.g., LinkedIn for B2B, Twitter/X for tech, Instagram for D2C) and commit to them.

The 90/10 rule applies here: 90% of your content should be giving value, and only 10% should be asking for something (like checking out your product). Share insights from your industry, comment thoughtfully on posts from bigger accounts, offer advice, and engage in genuine conversations. Over time, you build social capital. People will start to associate you with your area of expertise. When you finally do mention your startup, your audience is already warmed up because they trust you.

Play #4: The Community Infiltration Mission

Your future customers are already gathered in online communities. They are in Slack channels, Discord servers, Facebook Groups, and subreddits, discussing their problems and looking for solutions. Your mission is to find these digital watering holes and become a valued member.

This is a delicate operation. If you just drop a link to your startup, you will be rightfully banned as a spammer. The key is to play the long game. Join the community, listen to the conversations, and look for opportunities to be genuinely helpful.

Answer questions: Use your expertise to provide thoughtful answers to other members' questions.
Share resources: Link to helpful articles or tools (ideally not your own, most of the time).
Ask for feedback: When appropriate, you can post, “Hey, I’m working on a tool to solve [problem X] that we've been discussing. Would anyone be open to giving me some early feedback on the idea?”

Only after you've established yourself as a giver can you occasionally mention your product—and only when it is the perfect, organic solution to a problem being discussed. You're not a salesperson; you're a helpful expert who just happens to be building a solution.

The Scrappy Toolkit: Essential Free and Freemium Tools

Scrappy marketing is powered by free and low-cost tools that let you punch above your weight class. Here are a few essentials to get you started.

For Content and SEO

Canva: Create professional-looking social media graphics, carousels, and presentations with zero design skill.
Google Docs & Grammarly: Write and edit all your content. The free version of Grammarly is a lifesaver for catching typos.
AnswerThePublic / Ubersuggest: Find out what questions people are asking around your keywords to fuel your problem-led content strategy.
Google Analytics & Search Console: The non-negotiable, free foundation for understanding your site traffic and search performance.

Buffer / Later: Free tiers allow you to schedule a batch of social media posts in advance, saving you time and ensuring consistency.
Tweetdeck (now X Pro): An essential, free tool for managing and monitoring conversations on Twitter/X.

For Product and User Feedback

Hotjar: The free plan provides heatmaps and session recordings for up to 35 daily sessions. Watch how real users interact with your site—it’s marketing gold.
Tally / Typeform: Create beautiful, user-friendly surveys and forms to collect feedback. Tally offers a very generous free plan.
Loom: Record your screen to create quick, personalized demos or thank-you messages for users. It adds a powerful human touch.

When to Evolve Beyond Scrappy

Scrappy marketing is a phase, not a permanent state. It's the rocket booster that gets you off the launchpad. The goal is to use these strategies to find product-market fit and generate your first trickles of revenue. Once you have those things, it’s time to think about building a scalable engine.

The signs it's time to evolve include:

You have clear evidence of product-market fit (high retention, users telling others).
You have identified one or two acquisition channels that are predictably working, even at a small scale.
You have revenue that you can strategically reinvest into growth.

This is the point where a seed round often comes in. It’s the moment to graduate from “doing things that don’t scale” to “building systems that do.” This is when you start layering in paid acquisition, building a dedicated content team, and investing in more powerful marketing automation. Once you've proven you can build a fire with sticks, it’s time to pour on the gasoline. At AgentWeb, this is where we thrive, helping companies use sophisticated strategies and AI to turn that initial spark into a wildfire.

But you can't get there without first mastering the art of the scrappy. Your greatest asset right now isn't a blank check; it's your creativity, your proximity to the customer, and your unrelenting hustle. Now go build, market, and win.