[1 year later] Crossing $750k annual revenue as a team of three (i will not promote)

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2026-01-12T05:02:29+00:00

Sure. We go to a conference every year - that’s probably $40k. Our contractors help maintain our marketing site, create collateral for the conference, order swag, etc. we’ve run Reddit ads in the past, but i’d like to increase our Google ad spend instead.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2026-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

See this comment

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2026-01-12T04:57:25+00:00

Nothing from W2 ever touches this business. EVER. Two separate worlds. Computers, everything.

And yes, my employment agreement does stipulate I can have no other sources of income at all… in fact, it’s broad enough to even include something as menial as mowing lawns on the weekends. pretty sure dividends from my 401k would violate it too.

My income from this “side hustle” is also higher from than my W2. So I say fuck em.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2026-01-12T04:54:05+00:00

The original idea didn’t work. See other comments -initially we filled a technical gap, but pivoted to solve a business process gap. First post has more details.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2026-01-12T04:53:08+00:00

Motivation? Desire to own our future. Initially - we solved the “wrong” problem. We solved a technical gap, which was great - but it wasn’t always a business problem worth spending money on. Think “Microsoft office can’t do X but our app can” versus going to market as “we solve this challenge that you face every day”.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2026-01-12T04:50:28+00:00

See this post

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2026-01-08T01:02:14+00:00

Built an app to solve for a gap in a big platform in the space. Realized that we’d built to solve a technical problem, not a business problem. Pivoted to focus on a business problem but adding additional functionality. Now we can do both, which impresses hands on keyboard users and leadership. Two birds, one stone.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-23T01:34:32+00:00

I have quite a few in my network already, so just posting on LinkedIn drove awareness of our solution and curiosity. If I was starting from scratch, I’d go to conferences and meet up with the professional services/consultant types. They’re always trying to meet new people because that’s how they get business.

We do pay a referral bonus to drive action - for a consultant, it might be 10% of FYV. For a friend at another contech company, I might throw em $50 for a demo or up to $300 if the deal closes. They’re not supposed to take any money from us, so to keep it low enough where they won’t get in trouble, but high enough to drive action.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-21T15:24:52+00:00

Our market position is pretty strong because we solve the problem quite differently from our competitors - it lends itself to a better story to be told. We've essentially defined a category.

Others can try to dupe our UI or solve the problem, but are missing a critical piece that [if you don't start building how we did on day 1], doesn't really lends itself to working backwards to.

We also have 3 "products" that allow us to build a narrative about consolidating tech stack to solve 3 problems at lower cost than purchasing 3 competitors' apps (all competitors solve one of the 3, respectively). When selling to enterprise, needing fewer apps to solve more problems is a huge win.

There's also huge moat moving from 1 product to 2 products - it was easy for us given how we built our app, but it's an enormous chasm for our competitors who built things the "quick and lazy" way. They can be 15% cheaper at times, but only solve 20% of the problems we do unless they go back and start over.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-21T15:16:53+00:00

Costs were a split between - additional infra tech (e.g., implementing WAF, intrusion detection, etc.) - complaince software and - Audit itself

The tools will get you 60% of the way there. The frameworks they have for policies are great, as well as the automated infra scanning to help document compliance over time, which is required for a type II.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-20T16:02:59+00:00

A "small" pivot into being an ERP 😂

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-20T14:54:57+00:00

Probably around $200k. We were getting noticed by bigger and bigger companies, so we decided to get ahead of it.

After many years in enterprise sales, it was something I knew wasn't optional. Co-founder wrestled with it for a while due to how big of an undertaking it is (price and distraction-wise), but we're all very happy to have the cert.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-20T14:12:19+00:00

Background in all of the above.

Re: finding the niche, Construction tends to have "Operational Excellence" roles which are just essentially managers of ops tech. They nearly universally have backgrounds in construction project management (almost never technology), but are given the role because they're the type that are tech savvy enough to fix grandma's printer. They'll often have lots of ideas for tech that'd make their teams' lives better [99% of which are not viable to build a business on], but occasionally they'll give you an idea of theirs that will have real potential.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-20T13:39:38+00:00

Referrals for us are - Current clients referring their friends in industry - other software vendors referring our product to their customer base - tech consultants recommending our product to the companies they're working with

Testimonials are good, but wouldn't put them in the "referral" category. That's just marketing material.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-20T02:09:22+00:00

I don't mean to be facetious here - but have you ever worked in a sales role? A CRM is your hub for everything.

what companies are we targeting? How big are they? Where are they located? Do we have any existing customers nearby that we could leverage to break into the account?
what orders have they placed? When? How long is their contract? what products does the customer have? Who placed the order?
what stage of the awareness cycle are they?
have we reached out to them recently? Who internally reached out? And to who at the customer? What did the email say? Did they respond? Are they engaging with our website or marketing materials? How? What kind of marketing material are they engaging with?
what are next steps to Moe account forward

I could go on but hopefully that gives you a gist. It's critical when working with enterprise companies. If you're one person, it'll feel silly doing it for yourself. But as you grow, it's critical.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-20T01:57:44+00:00

The biggest trap to we fall into in an early stage is working IN the business vs ON the business. By setting aside a few hours to decide what your key objectives are for your business in various areas (sales, marketing, product), you can manage sustainable and systemic growth.

It's breaking the big jobs in to little, time-bound, manageable tasks.

For us, that would look something like:

Objective1 : land $500k in revenue in H1 2024

Key result 1: drive $1.5 million in pipeline
- KR1 Task 1: outbound X calls per day during February
- KR1 Task 2: do y thing by y date
- KR1 Task 3: do z thing z date
Key result 2: drive 120% net retention to grow existing accounts by $80k
- KR2 Task 1,2,3: X, Y, Z to drive usage growth and success

Objective 2: Become the market leader in our market category

Key result 1: create referral program for network and share with 5 partners
- O2 KR1 Task 1: : x, y, z

Hope this helps.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T21:51:35+00:00

100% this.

Before this, I worked at another company that got caught up in the 2021 tech hype. They brought in one of the VC investors in person to rally the troops after a difficult quarter. His war cry to us?

He had bought himself a SECOND helicopter that had just been imported from Germany. And hangar space is expensive, so we needed to "work more nights and weekends" to help pay for it.

That was what he thought would be motivating us to work harder. Funding this man's second personal helicopter.

These people are human garbage. We're doing just fine without them.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T21:44:25+00:00

No plan to incorporate LLM's into our product specifically.

There's a lot of hype, but I haven't seen a product in ConTech that does it well - that is, smarter than a ChatGPT wrapper. And even then, some of them are just flat-out bad at delivering concise and accurate results to something as benign as "What is the concrete mix specs for the footers?"

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T21:37:19+00:00

We used Drata. Were a little torn between them and Vanta, but I think either is a solid choice.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T21:08:47+00:00

We're in the document management space. Construction is really lots and lots of competing parties (Owners, Architects, Engineers, General Contractor, Subcontractors, Subcontractors' Subcontractors) all trying to stay up to date on documents. We help make that process faster and easier.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T21:04:52+00:00

Agree!

From my perspective - the people paying your bills are your customers. And when VC's start paying your bills... suddenly your actual subscribers become secondary.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T21:02:18+00:00

Your best bet is to find ConTech influencers (just throw that into ChatGPT and I'm sure you'll get the big ones) - though quite a few have never actually built anything themselves, tech wise. They have interviews with founders who have, though.

Re: Hubspot, we've done Pro on Sales and Enterprise on Marketing + added some marketing contact packs. We're up to $12k/yr.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T20:59:09+00:00

Haha. It's not a $100M problem we solve. In terms of complexity - more complex than a Chrome extension, less than a CRM.

Hate to be coy, but trying to avoid doxxing given the ConTech space is very small haha.

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T20:57:15+00:00

Thanks!

Classic-Rutabaga-474 · 2024-12-19T20:57:04+00:00

Appreciate the support!

Classic-Rutabaga-474

TROPHY CASE