How MarqVision landed LVMH as a customer within three months of launch

Executive overview

Global counterfeiting is a $3 trillion annual criminal enterprise. Traditional legal responses — law firms, manual enforcement — can't match counterfeiters who open a shop Friday, sell millions over the weekend, and disappear by Monday.

MarqVision automates IP enforcement across 1,500 online marketplaces and 120 countries using AI. The founders built obsessive sales discipline and customer feedback loops into the company from day one.

Getting your first 10 enterprise customers requires extreme persistence and a willingness to start with a product that isn't fully built.

Founding and product-market-founder fit

• Founders had law school and MIT engineering backgrounds — directly relevant to IP enforcement
• Identified anti-counterfeiting after researching where AI could make real-world impact
• Launched December 2020; hit first million ARR eight months later
• Built the website and dashboard before automating core functionality — shipped first, built second
• Applied to YC immediately after launch; got in

The YC interview reframe

• Founders pitched $5B maximum revenue with clear logic; interviewer Michael Seibel reversed it: "How do you get to $100B?"
• Quick mental model: 100,000 brands globally with $20M+ revenue × $1M average spend = $100B
• Realization: they weren't building an anti-counterfeiting tool — they were building IP infrastructure for the entire industry

Getting the first customers

• Co-founder DK had never sold software before; Googled how to become a SaaS sales leader
• Set a target of 200 potential customer meetings per month — 50 per week, 10 per day
• Used cold email, cold calls, and in-person cold visits to stores
• Rejection was frequent; persistence built the tenacity required for enterprise B2B sales
• First paying customer validated the product; excitement lasted seconds before focus shifted to customer two and three

Landing LVMH within three months

• Three months after launch, an LVMH portfolio brand in New York reached out
• Started with a single country; expanded globally as trust was established
• Luxury brand market is tightly networked — one brand adopting the product leads to referrals from peers
• Won the LVMH Innovation Award in the data and AI category, accelerating European market entry

Competitive edge and customer obsession

• Two differentiators: best product (radical automation of previously manual IP work) and culture of customer obsession
• Obsessive feedback collection from end users, economic buyers, and C-suite alike
• Strategy goes beyond removing counterfeits — understanding counterfeit patterns and building counter-strategies
• Platform covers detection, enforcement, filing, management, and monetization of IP in one workspace