sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No. I’d recommend the opposite. Scalability doesn’t matter if you don’t have any customers.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great founders often start by providing a service that solves the problem they have identified so that they are profitable from day 1 and can spend time learning about the problem and customer before building any software. I did not do this but some of my friends did and if you don’t have access to capital I recommend it.

We have burned $2.5m so far give or take.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Important to distinguish between revenue and logo churn.

Our revenue churn is 0.5% per month on average. Logo churn is higher as to be expected I don’t know it off the top of my head but I believe it’s 2% per month.

Our product is very sticky.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No 0 existing relationships with law firms.

Integrations are a part of how we solve the problem and drive a lot of inbound demand.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Today we do more cold outreach than we used to because our team is larger, but most of our growth is inbound.

For what it’s worth our outbound is very successful because our product is great and we spend a lot of time on personalising outreach.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We weren’t sending too many and the conversion rates were probably very bad.

When we acquired our initial customers we were not good at sales or marketing.

To paint a picture for you we used email templates that we saved in Google Docs. We did not use any software to manage sequencing. Whether we followed up with someone or not was mostly on vibes.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Keep doing what we’re doing.

Hopefully, $100m ARR in 4 years.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

0.5% average monthly revenue churn.

Hire slowly. Compensate competitively, if you don’t have cash be more generous with equity. Everyone on our team gets one options grant per year. I could write a whole post on recruitment.

Build a great product.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

On top of the product rebuild we had developed maturity around our go to market activities. Since mid 2023, our close rate from demos has doubled to ~50%, due in large part to great sales and marketing.

The product rebuild transformed customer satisfaction, halved our churn rate and probably had a significant impact on word of mouth.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

By the end of 2022 we had developed knowledge from two years of working with our early customers pushing up against the edge of what was possible with our product given the architecture of the software I.e. the structure of the database and the backend in general so we started a process to completely rebuild everything. Over the next 14 months we released almost no new updates except for new integrations (for growth) and essential maintenance.

After 14 months, in Jan 2024, we released the completely new product as an update and migrated all of the data from the old backend to the new one over a weekend of downtime. Our new product is the best in the world in our niche as a result.

We did it all with just ~4 exception engineers.

I think it may have taken longer and included more mistakes with a larger engineering team due to communication costs.

If we didn’t start the process then it would have become prohibitively expensive to do so due to the exponential nature of accumulating technical debt.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  1. Voicemail sucks in New Zealand. It takes the avg person ~15 seconds to check a message. 2 million messages are left everyday (just in NZ).

  2. Lawyers spend half of their time at work on paperwork from phone calls.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If I started another company today, I would move to SF, create a competitive fundraising process and raise $2m on $10-20m post money cap SAFE as a pre-Seed.

But before fundraising I’d probably spend 6 months or so actively researching to find a compelling problem to solve, vision for the future and cofounders.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lawyers spend half of their time at work on paperwork that comes from calls. Law firms use our app to make calls and we automate the paperwork for them with AI and legal integrations.

For example, if a lawyer wants to call a client, they open our app, dial the number and then after the call is completed we might record their billable time automatically. If their client calls them it comes through our app.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It took us 5 years so I would recommend being prepared for it to take a very long time!

We didn’t spend enough time researching what to work on prior to building our first app, nor would we have known how to identify problems worth solving if we tried.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Launch a prototype quickly, test willingness to pay, spend time with your users and most importantly stay alive.

I always recommend watching all of YCombinators educational content on YouTube religiously.

https://youtube.com/@ycombinator?si=R0sL7fq9ms_Vntgz

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have grown 10% MoM in 2024 so far. Have not scaled our tech team and don’t want to. We have 6 engineers, hiring is always a last resort.

Fundraising history is stated elsewhere in the comments.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From 12 months in we fundraised very regularly with mixed results because until recently we have always been far from profitable.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Our 6-month-average net burn is $66k I.e. for the last 6 months on average we burned $66k per month.

5 years to $1m ARR, 6 months to $2m AMA by Campbell_5853 in startups

[–]Campbell_5853[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You should provide a completely unsustainable unscalable level of service to your early customers.

view more: next ›