How a pre-revenue startup used Make to secure essential funding

• Industry: IT - Software and SaaS

• Use case: Lead Generation & Management

• Country: UK

• Company size: 2-10 employees

• Apps used:Airtable, Apollo, Apify, Customer.io, OpenAI (ChatGPT, Whisper, DALL-E)

AUDITSU is a UK-based accessibility compliance platform for mobile applications. The AUDITSU platform helps non-technical stakeholders measure and monitor their compliance risk against the European Accessibility Act (an act regulating app accessibility for people with disabilities).

Jason Crispin had a compelling vision for this startup and a clear market opportunity. But he also faced a problem that almost every early-stage founder does: how do you prove to investors that you can find and win customers before you've even launched your product?

Jason found the answer where not everyone would think to look – automation.

He built a fully automated end-to-end go-to-market system in Make. With eighteen interconnected scenarios, Make monitors job boards for buying signals, enriches and qualifies leads, personalizes outreach, and manages entire campaign workflows, all without Jason lifting a finger. 

When he walked a venture capital firm through the system, they called it one of the most advanced go-to-market systems they had ever seen. 

A few weeks later, AUDITSU secured a £200,000 pre-seed investment.

"Without Make, I wouldn't have raised pre-seed funding. I wouldn't have raised venture money. The VC saw what we'd built and said, 'This is really incredible. It just makes so much sense.' And then they gave us £200,000."

Jason Crispin, Founder & CEO of AUDITSU

The challenges: Promising idea, missing resources 

Finding the right customers at the right moment

Accessibility is something that organizations don’t always prioritize. Too often it’s seen as a nice-to-have. 

But in June 2025, the European Accessibility Act came into effect, making it a necessity. And, more importantly, board-level liability.

To catch the momentum, Jason had to get his product out there fast. He needed to reach decision-makers at the exact moment they were most likely to use it.

However, browsing through thousands of companies with a potential accessibility compliance need and sending cold emails wasn't feasible. Every hour Jason spent managing outreach was an hour not spent building the product.

Raising pre-seed funding without a launched product

Jason had been trying to raise money for about a year. His conversations with angel funders and VCs consistently hit the same wall: come back when you have traction.  He had a 1,200-company waitlist, a credible founding team, and a well-defined market, but no live product, no revenue, and no way to hire full-time without funding. 

What he needed was something that could clearly demonstrate that he knew exactly how to get in front of his customers and convert them, even before his product launched.

The solution: Make secures the pre-launch startup £200,000 in funds

Automated lead detection via job boards

Jason spent about two weeks building a go-to-market automation in Make. He went from zero prior experience with the platform to running eighteen interconnected, comprehensive scenarios.  

It all starts with identifying a need for Jason’s product. 

When a company starts taking accessibility seriously, it starts hiring for it. They post roles mentioning the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), or mobile app development with accessibility requirements.

Jason built an automation in Make to monitor job boards for exactly these signals. 

When a company hits the right keyword combinations, it’s pulled into Airtable, where Make begins a qualification process. Using the Apollo integration, Make automatically fills out each company record with firmographic data (industry, size, location, and more), then uses that information to filter out recruitment agencies and misaligned businesses. 

Finally, automation identifies up to a hundred relevant contacts within companies that qualify. 

All on a single API token to keep credit usage light.

Intelligent contact ranking and outreach

Once a pool of contacts exists for qualified companies, Make ranks them by how likely accessibility is to be part of their job and chooses the top-ranked person. 

Make then uses Apify to verify the contact's LinkedIn profile. It checks whether they still work at the company and that their role hasn’t changed.

Next, OpenAI writes a personalized email, which kicks off a campaign in Customer.io. If an email bounces or someone unsubscribes, Make automatically removes them and moves to the next person on the list. If there's no reply after a week, it does the same. 

Only one person per company is ever contacted at a time.

"The go-to-market system replaces a 10-person sales team comfortably. We run through thousands of leads automatically. The only time I get involved is when someone puts a meeting on my calendar."

Jason Crispin, Founder & CEO of AUDITSU

The automation that won the funding round

When Jason entered PXN Ventures' “Praeseed” accelerator, a six-week program backed by the UK government's Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, he was among the earliest-stage participants. 

Most others had products in the market. Jason didn’t.

He relied on his Make workflow instead, demonstrating it to the VC's investment team and their marketing director. And it blew their minds. 

"The marketing director just nerded out over it. He said: 'What you've built is really complicated in its simplicity. It's an obvious thing as a concept, but making it stable, robust, and scalable is incredibly complex. This is one of the most advanced go-to-market systems we've ever seen’."

Jason Crispin, Founder & CEO of AUDITSU

The investment committee approved the deal. AUDITSU received £200,000 in pre-seed funding, in large part because Make had given Jason a way to prove he already knew how to capture his market.

Content automation for a lean team

Beyond go-to-market, Jason also uses Make to handle content creation. 

The team built an automation that takes a content idea, refines and audits it through OpenAI, and then pushes the output to Templated.io to produce finished carousel posts for social media. 

This saves approximately 90 minutes per content piece. For a three-person team building a company from scratch, that kind of efficiency is priceless.

The results: £200,000, more time, lower headcount

• £200,000 pre-seed investment secured, with Make's go-to-market automation directly cited as a factor in the VC's decision

• The equivalent of a 10-person sales team was replaced by an automated system that Jason built in two weeks with no prior Make experience

• Thousands of leads processed automatically, with only high-intent, fully qualified prospects reaching Jason's calendar

• ~90 minutes saved per content piece through automated carousel post generation

• Full go-to-market motion running 24/7 without human intervention

Without automation, there’s no AUDITSU

Vision and strong ideas are admirable, but they don’t win funding. Neither does a product alone. What wins funding is the ability to prove three things: potential, competency, and need.

Jason did that by building a sophisticated, scalable, production-grade system in weeks. 

He’s already automating new areas of the business and sees Make as his first stop whenever he needs to prototype a new workflow.

The value of Make is clear to him:

“Without Make, there's no automated go-to-market system. Without that system, there's no investment. And without investment, there's no AUDITSU.”

Jason Crispin, Founder & CEO of AUDITSU