As an early-stage founder, you know the cycle: sales often feel reactive, relying on unpredictable referrals or exhausting manual prospecting that simply doesn’t scale. The pressure to generate a consistent pipeline while wearing every hat can lead to burnout and stagnant growth. Join Innovation Factory for Sales PWR Hour: Bootstrapped Founder’s Guide to Product-Market Fit, a session designed to help you break that cycle.

In this workshop, Gihan Fonseka will share a practical framework for building a repeatable outbound sales engine using AI and automation. You will discover how to identify high-intent prospects and create a consistent lead flow without the need to increase your headcount. We will dive deep into how close customer discovery leads to early product-market fit, ensuring your sales efforts are grounded in what your customers actually need.

What you’ll learn

This interactive session is designed to provide you with actionable strategies to refine your product and scale your outreach. You will walk away with:

• Mastering customer discovery: Learn a practical approach to talking to customers that drives genuine insight rather than just surface-level feedback.
• Strategic product decisions: Identify exactly what to build and, perhaps more importantly, what to ignore to maintain focus.
• AI-driven sales engines: Explore how to use AI and structured messaging to automate your outbound lead flow and find high-intent prospects.
• Scaling insights: Hear first-hand lessons from scaling to 200,000 users, including a transparent look at what worked and what didn’t.
• Repeatable growth: Apply a simple framework to turn customer conversations into real growth decisions that drive revenue.

Founders often struggle to find the balance between building a product and selling it. This session bridges that gap by showing how strategic customer discovery directly fuels a scalable sales process. By learning to leverage AI and automation, you can focus on high-value strategy while your outbound engine runs consistently in the background, helping to strengthen the local innovation ecosystem.

Who should attend

• Early-stage founders and bootstrapped teams looking for scalable growth.
• Entrepreneurs seeking to validate their product-market fit through customer discovery.
• Sales and marketing professionals interested in AI-powered outbound automation.

Meet the speaker

Gihan Fonseka, Founder and CEO @ Knockd & Powered by ARC

Gihan is a seasoned entrepreneur with a proven track record of scaling platforms to hundreds of thousands of users. As the leader of Knockd and Powered by ARC, he specializes in helping founders build lean, efficient, and highly automated sales engines that drive predictable results without the overhead of a large team.

Accessibility and accommodation requests

This event will be delivered virtually via Zoom with Closed Captioning (CC) available. If you require additional accommodations, please contact info@innovationfactory.ca.