Thank the people who helped you before you were impressive. They took the biggest risk.

Helping somebody who is already obviously good is a low-risk move. The person who backed you when there was no evidence spent their own credibility on a guess, which is the version worth noticing, because being wrong about you would have cost them something real. Later supporters are joining a result. The early ones were taking a position.

Make a short list of who was in that first group for you. Then tell one of them, in specific terms, what their help let you do. Do it before you get much more impressive, because the point is not the display.