Zachary Murray

Foreplay.co

Bootstrapping the fuck out of foreplay.co

Creative Director / Growth Design

Stephen Hakami

Co-Founder (Company Acquired, Nov 2020)

When I was 15 years old, I started my first software company. "Restaurant Solutions" was an iPad app that let you order food and get your bill without waiting on your server.

Ok, fine... it was never actually an app. I couldn't afford to get it developed, so for Christmas in 2012 I asked my parents for $500 to help me pay a designer to make wireframes.

Then, I went door to door at different restaurants in Toronto trying to sell them a subscription to my non-existent app with those designs.

Needless to say, it didn't work out, but starting things with little to no resources is comfortable for me.

12 years later, I'm bootstrapping Wiza.com into the most accurate contact data tool in the world.

Our amazing small team, has built a tool that outperforms billion-dollar companies by thinking a little differently.

Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Wiza is a prospecting tool in a league of it's own, helping sales reps across the globe find thousands of valid leads. Learn more at www.Wiza.com

$150,000 later, and I can confirm that sun, sand, and piña coladas are very effective morale boosters.

Last week, the Wiza team landed in the DR for our annual offsite 🌴

No packed agenda. No trying to squeeze a quarter’s worth of strategy into two days.

What we actually wanted from this offsite was simple…

People spending quality time together. That’s it. 

So that’s what we aimed for…

🍹 Plenty of food and drinks

🛟  More pools than anyone could reasonably use.

🛥️ Boat trips, beach games, late nights at the casino that had our sleep scores in the ground.

…and a very heated debate about the definition of a baked vs loaded potato 🥔 (sound off in the comments)

The team worked incredibly hard this past year and this felt like the right way to say thank you.

& if this is how we start the year, I’m excited for where we’re taking Wiza in 2026.

We didn’t come here to slow down. We came here to get ready.

No alternative text description for this image

Your ego is the only thing standing between you and your next level of growth. 

Let’s break it down 👇

Comfort is a slow death for a startup.

We’ve reached a point where mediocrity is becoming culturally acceptable.

We celebrate "trying" more than "winning," and we’ve made comfort a virtue.

But here’s the reality: You cannot change the world from your comfort zone.

To build something great, you have to be harder on yourself than anyone else could ever be.

You have to look at yourself and be brutally, uncomfortably honest about what you suck at.

Most people want a "realistic" starting place that feels good. 

I want a realistic starting place that hurts a little.

I’m not saying you should be miserable. I’m saying you should be critical. 

If your product is average, say it’s average. If your sales pitch is weak, say it’s weak.

The first step to growth is self awareness.

& growth starts the moment you stop protecting your own feelings.

"Collect user feedback" they said, "It will be fun" they said...

What makes Fernando Mendoza the best QB in college football? 🏈

It’s not just arm talent – it’s how he reads the field 👇🏼

Elite QBs do these three things better than anyone else:

🏈 Adapt to the defense in real time.
🏈 Adjust when the play breaks down.
🏈 Experiment early to find what works.

All on display during the National Championship. And it got me thinking…

That’s exactly how the best sellers prospect.

While most outbound today continues to run on an old playbook:

❌ Same out-of-the-box filters everyone else uses
❌ Same titles, same lists, same messaging
❌ Same plays -> same predictable results

So we built an AI-powered tool to help your sales team take the field, play elite, and get nonstop wins like Fernando + Curt Cignetti + Indiana University Bloomington.

🔎 Adapt to each prospect’s reality by asking ANY question and get instant results.

🎯 Adjust and refine list before outreach with structured, filterable insights
🚀 Experiment at scale across one prospect or an entire list

No more spending hours on manual research.

No profile stalking (like sending a coach to film another team’s practice).

No forcing throws into coverage.

Just better reads, cleaner lists, and personalization that lands in the endzone.

AI Research is now live inside Wiza Prospect ✨🔮

Sign up today (or hit the transfer portal from your data provider) and get 100 free credits.

#Wiza

Being hyper focused on the "other guy" is a trap for 3 reasons 👇

1. You lose your unique voice.

2. You solve problems your customers don’t actually have.

3. You become a follower, not a leader.

If you want to build a $100M company, stop building to win the comparison chart.

Competition matters way less than people think.

I’ve watched founders spend months building features just because a competitor had them.

Result? A bloated product that no one asked for and messaging that sounds just like everyone else. 

The best use of your time isn’t checking a rival products website or social posts. 

It’s asking your users: "What is the most annoying part of your day?" 

The answer to that question is where your growth is. 

Not in your competitor’s feature log.

Stay in your lane. Talk to your people.

Your customers have the answers. 

Your competitors just have the same questions you do.

Cutting costs is keeping you broke 💸

We’ve been conditioned to think that being "frugal" is a virtue. Spoiler: we were wrong 👇

We celebrate the person who negotiates every line item and cuts every "unnecessary" expense.

Here is the math: There is a hard floor on how much you can save. 

If you spend $1,000, the most you can ever "win" by cutting costs is $1,000. 

That is your absolute ceiling. 

But there is no ceiling on how much you can earn.

If you take that same energy and focus it on the upside, you can turn a $1M opportunity into a $10M reality.

One is playing defense. The other is playing offense. 

Defense prevents you from losing, but only offense allows you to win.

If you focus on saving, you are playing a game with a fixed limit. 

If you focus on making more, you are playing a game with no rules.

The people who win won't be the ones with the lowest overhead. 

They’ll be the ones who know how to ignore the small costs to chase the big wins.

Stop managing your expenses and start managing your potential.

Five words that kill more momentum faster than a lack of cash ever could... 

💀👇

"Let's hop on a call" 

So many people complain about "not having enough time" while sitting in 6 hours of status updates every. single. day.

The math doesn't add up.

Most people use meetings to figure out what they think while they are talking. 

It’s messy, it’s inefficient, and it drains the team.

The "quick 30 minute sync" is the biggest lie in tech. 

By the time you’ve context switched, done the small talk, and dealt with "can you see my screen?" you’ve lost 2 hours of deep work.

The best output happens when people have the space to be heads down. 

At Wiza, I’ve found that moving things to Slack or async isn't just faster, it’s better.

Async forces you to:

→ Distill your thinking.
→ Provide a searchable paper trail.
→ Respect everyone’s focus.

Clear writing is clear thinking. A calendar full of meetings is just a lack of discipline.

Khaby Lame just retired at 25 after a $975,000,000 deal. 🤯

The buyer is projecting roughly $4B in revenue this year.

But this wasn’t a normal content acquisition.

He sold his entire identity. 

The deal includes an AI digital clone clause that’s hard to wrap your head around, that includes:

• His likeness
• His voice patterns
• His behavioral style

& because Khaby never speaks in his content, it removes the language friction entirely.

In practice, that allows his AI clone to:

🧋Promote a beverage brand in Mexico City
🧥Appear in retail ads in Asia 
🎧Sign on for brand deals across the US

All happening simultaneously across the globe.

Brands are cutting $1M checks for ads featuring the digital clone.

And he’s absent from the process.

No travel.
No filming.
No involvement.

all while the real Khaby is probably on his own island, enjoying the kind of freedom money buys. 🏝️

The progression of this man’s life is wild.

2020: unemployed after a factory layoff in Italy
2026: $975M deal achieved without ever speaking.

It’s hard to believe, but that’s a billionaire story almost entirely built on pointing at things.

Your $50k deal is actually a $100k loss. 

I’ve seen it happen dozens of times... 

A company gets offered a check that’s hard to say no to. 

The only catch? 

"Just one small tweak to your model."

You take the cash. You feel like a genius.

But then the entropy effect kicks in… 

Complexity breeds more complexity. 

Once you say yes to one custom model, the "guardrails" are gone. 

It becomes easier to say yes to the next one, and the one after that.

Before you know it, you don’t have a scalable SaaS product anymore. 

You have a services business masquerading as a software company.

Every custom tweak is an anchor.

💻  Your engineers move at half speed because they’re maintaining special code.

💸 Your sales team has to explain a pricing model that’s now a mess.

⚒️ Your support team is drowning in edge cases.

In 2026, we’re doing the hard work of cleaning up "smart" decisions we made years ago. 

It’s painful and it’s expensive.

The math is simple: You took $50k in cash today, but you burned $150k in future speed, focus, and growth.

Revenue is great. 

But a clean, scalable engine is what actually builds a great company.

taplio

The Battle

Zachary Murray

Stephen Hakami

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreStephen Hakami's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Zachary Murray

Stephen Hakami

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Stephen Hakami's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreStephen Hakami's LinkedIn Performance