Honglei Liu

Building AI for B2B marketing @Tofu_HQ
Co-founder & CTO
Ex-Meta, Twitter, Affirm, Fast

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@retttx What’s the reason that personal crm hasn’t worked?

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@willccbb @franciscojarceo Post-training a model is cheap. What’s costly is maintaining the model. Do you think these companies are ready to make this long-term bets?

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

A lot of fun to read. Future is still yet to be decided.

[Fryd Wiatrowski @frydwia]

https://t.co/qjizIO8bS1

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@andrewchen I’ll vibe it

[FounderCoHo @FounderCoHo]

"Never scale your team until you have true product-market fit."

Honglei Liu (@ppuliu) - Co-Founder and CTO of @Tofu_HQ & former AI researcher at Meta—explains the lessons of the collapse of Fast (raised $100M+ before shutting down) and the playbook of finding PMF.

Here are 5 brutal lessons for early-stage builders: 👇
• 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴: Hiring before PMF kills focus and slows pivots.
• 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁: 1.5 years of working together—even at the same startup—to validate alignment.
• 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻: 50+ CMO interviews; ignored polite feedback, chased “I need this now.”
• 𝗣𝗶𝘃𝗼𝘁: SMB churn → enterprise demand for integrated AI marketing.
• 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁: Big pay cuts to build a lasting B2B system, not a point tool.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@paulg So true. I always value the “annoying” users more.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@IAmMattGreen Some basic index (e.g. link pointers) on unstructured data is good enough for agents to figure it out.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@zenorocha first derivative is insane. congrats. we use resend

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@alexwtlf Go to events where your users show up.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@JayHoovy Harder said than getting done. I asked -30 founders in the past week and most of said distribution is at the top of their mind. But hard to get it right.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@ivanburazin What about a gtm company for gtm companies with anthropic in the middle 😆

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@vivianmshen Getting a startup to commit into a $60k annual contract is not easy! How did you do it?

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@aryanlabde It’s the opposite. Too many, too fragmented.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@patrickc How do we get on the list?!

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@kathrynwu1 $20k MRR means 5-10 customers if they are target mid-market or even more if targeting SMBs. That’s pretty good. Is that the average?

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@fin465 which one of these steps do you think is the easiest to break?

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@daxeshpatel the 47% gap is real but not because of tooling. it's because demand gen still optimizes for mql velocity and abm optimizes for deal probability. you can't fuse two things that have different success metrics without someone losing their bonus.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@GoldilocksOrbit Is this reply from your agent? Gotta say pretty good.

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

Asked ~30 startup founders their biggest challenge over the past two days.

One answer stood out: go to market.

Some want to accelerate the growth they’re seeing.

Some are still hunting for their ICP and how to reach them.

Some have adoption in their base and want a new segment.

Some want to turn founder-led growth into a repeatable playbook and a GTM team.

Feels whoever cracks repeatable GTM for startups will have outsized impact.

(full disclaimer: I actually think startups are the worst customers. Eager to try anything, always pivoting, never sure what they actually need. 😂)

[Honglei Liu @ppuliu]

@ClaudeDevs I feel this should be a skill, not a model effort option