We're launching ScoutTide here on Tuesday, and building it made me curious how other small teams find their first customers.
Our bet is that the best leads are people who already said, in public, that they need something: a post asking "can anyone recommend a tool for X", or a public tender from a council or a development bank. Cold outreach to lists has worked less and less for us.
ScoutTide finds people asking for what you sell on Reddit, LinkedIn, Stack Exchange and Upwork, plus tenders from 156 official sources in over 180 countries. AI reads each post and tender against your products and you get one ranked list every morning.
Standard AI ignores existing Access Control Lists, risking massive corporate data leaks. We built an air-gapped RAG engine and native secure file drive that enforces permissions at the document level. By extracting content into clean Markdown, we eliminate heavy data duplication. With hybrid retrieval and audit logging, the LLM only generates answers from authorized data. Deploy on-premise and securely search without sacrificing compliance.
