Two Years on Quora and Reddit Before the First Paying Customer

The Journey

Yega Kumarappan and his two co-founders launched Paperflite in 2018 with a working prototype and a 400K seed round.

For two years, they could not close a single customer through the website. Not for lack of trying. The prototype demoed well. CMOs and heads of marketing said the experience was good and that they'd buy it.

None of them bought.

The team did something most founders skip. They moved the entire top-of-funnel onto Quora and Reddit, treating forums as a paid sales channel except no one was getting paid. They stayed there until the inbound engine took over.

Years 1-2: Living in the Forums

Yega's team spent the first couple of years on Quora and Reddit, responding to questions, tagging the platform. This wasn't a marketing experiment. It was the primary responsibility of a small team inside Paperflite.

Their logic: when someone posts in a discussion forum about a sales content problem, a distribution issue, or knowledge management, that person is at the top of their buying intent. Yega's framing: "These are very highly qualified leads. Now it's about how do we get to them and how do we engage with them."

The motion was three-step:

• Answer the forum question
• Tag Paperflite in the answer
• Follow up on LinkedIn with a DM

They were running multiple threads at once around a smaller community of high-quality leads. That smaller community produced the first batch of customers.

The First Paying Customer (and the S&P Surprise)

The first paying customer did not come from forums directly. They pinged Paperflite through Intercom, having found the company elsewhere.

The most memorable early lead also came through Intercom: a request from S&P Global to host research materials for a conference called COP22. The team had never heard of COP22 and assumed a friend was pranking them. It turned out to be the UN climate change conference. Paperflite ended up being the platform that distributed the conference content.

The pattern: forums fed the awareness, Intercom captured the demand, and the team converted by responding fast and showing up real.

The Compounding Lesson

Yega's words on how it eventually flipped: "We started running multiple threads around these smaller community of high quality leads, which kind of got us the first bunch of customers to work with us. And then the inbound engine got a lot more effective because you have a set of customers working with you already. And over a period of time, Google kicked in and we were able to snowball that whole path."

Forums bought them two years of qualified pipeline at zero ad spend. The first 10 customers became the social proof. The social proof made the next 10 easier. Google indexed all of it and the inbound engine took over.

What You Should Steal

• Build a list of 20 forums and subreddits where your buyer asks questions. Answer one per day. Tag your product when it fits.
• Treat every Intercom ping as a Fortune 500 lead until proven otherwise. Yega thought S&P was a prank. It was not.
• Stop measuring forum work by direct conversions. Measure by qualified inbound 6-12 months later. Google needs time to weight your answers.