Over the past year I’ve unpacked the zero to $1 million journeys of more than a dozen breakthrough startups including 11x, Attio, Copy.ai, lemlist and Pinecone. And I’ve advised countless others during this messy period between having a product to sell and a repeatable go-to-market machine.
Many of these startups have seen breakout growth. Copy.ai started with four MVPs, then struck gold and scaled to 10 million users in only four years. Jam went from seven failures to 10x usage growth. Pinecone saw signups explode to over 10,000 per day.
Not one of these journeys was preordained. And none followed what I’d consider to be the “conventional” startup playbook popularized over the past decade or so.
The conventional approach tends to look something like this:
-Build a minimum viable product (MVP)—you should be embarrassed otherwise you’ve shipped too late.
-Launch with a big PR splash—open your waitlist all at once to capitalize on the lightning strike.
-Push hard on cold outbound to prove you can spend money to make money.
-Write SEO-bait content for inbound leads—volume is what matters even if it is uninspired.
-Get to $1M in ARR to show product-market fit (PMF) and raise your Series A.
-Keep growing by hiring more reps—growth is an equation based on the number of ramped reps, quotas and average attainment.
-Goal marketing on qualified leads (MQLs) to feed the army of sales reps.
-Raise more money for external signaling—fundraises generate PR, close candidates and prove viability to prospects.
Each of these components makes intuitive sense. And collectively this playbook has served many startups quite well.
But the startups I’ve been spending time with lately — and in particular the startups that have gotten off the ground in a post-ZIRP, AI-first environment — have followed a different path. I’ll unpack what these next generation startups did instead, which collectively looks like an emerging startup playbook.
The emerging startup playbook
1.Build a minimum remarkable product that stands out.
People used to tell founders that they should be embarrassed by their initial product; otherwise, they’ve shipped too late.
That was fantastic advice when the predominant alternative was pen-and-paper or Excel. Now the alternative is mostly other modern software products.
2.Embrace storytelling to attract an audience.
Many startup founders stay in ‘stealth mode’ and steadily build up a waitlist until they’re ready to launch. Then the launch becomes a ‘lightning strike’ moment with as much fanfare as possible. Folks will open their waitlist all at once, work with PR to offer exclusives to top publications and drum up interest in early adopter communities like Product Hunt
3.Hire ops to test and grow potential channels.
Cold outbound became a part of the GTM playbook at nearly every enterprise software company. It might start with founders running their own outbound plays to find design partners. Steadily larger and larger teams would get built to turn outbound into a coin operated machine.
4.Lead with the product.
When startups wanted to supplement their lead generation beyond outbound, they’d typically turn to search engine optimization (SEO). The SEO playbook usually included creating a list of potential keywords, prioritizing the relevant ones that had the most volume and then writing lots of SEO-bait content to rank for those terms.
5.Strong retention and word-of-mouth = PMF.
$1 million ARR has long been a major milestone in enterprise software. Whether in fundraising conversations or popular blog posts, $1 million comes up as a near-mystical number that signals product-market fit and readiness to raise a Series A.
It’s not a terrible rule-of-thumb. The $1 million ARR milestone indicates customers are willing to pay for the product and that there’s some level of repeatability in finding, winning and serving these customers. It might have been particularly meaningful at a time when go-to-market was dominated by cold outbound plus inside sales.
6.Stay lean through automation and AI.
In a previous era, growing beyond $1 million ARR became more-or-less an equation in a spreadsheet. If you didn’t grow as fast as you hoped, it was usually because you hadn’t hired enough people quickly enough.
The spreadsheet-based approach to scaling has started to fade as go-to-market becomes more complicated and as startups embrace more efficient growth.
7.Embrace a unified GTM focused on your ideal customers (ICP).
Software businesses have been stuck with a mental model where marketing generates leads (MQLs) and then sales closes them. As we tied growth to a hiring plan, marketing became responsible for feeding new sales reps with more and more MQLs.
8.Maintain capital optionality and control your destiny.
To pull off the prior startup playbook, you’d need capital – the more, the better. Large fundraises not only provided the cash to hire armies of sales reps and xDRs, they provided powerful external signaling. Fundraises attracted press attention, which then attracted candidates and signaled viability to potential prospects. There were competitive dynamics at play, too, which big fundraises effectively taking the oxygen out of the room as smart VCs anointed a category leader.
Think of these as emerging best practices rather than a how-to guide. Some may not work for your specific business; you may also find yourself creating entirely new practices that better reflect the nuances of your product, market and team.
Regardless of where you land, it’s clear that we need to move past the dated (and expensive) approach of the recent past and craft a better future.
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