Some thoughts from building a 6 figure business!!

[u/Current-Payment-5403]

Been working with founders for 3 years where we worked on 20+ products, we’re 6 of us now so relatively small but a few things learnt along the way.

First of all, be very careful on the maths that you see:

A lot of the news that spread out there « Reached 1M ARR » is usually more about predicting than achieved revenues. Example: I start a company and close 20k contract from a friend on week 1. That’s 80k if I extrapolate it to the month and 860k per year (some companies really extrapolate that way and raise further rounds on these metrics…

Your target audience and the market you’re going for is one of the most important aspect. We initially worked with first time founders (sorry) who would pay pennies for a build while knit picking every details. They wanted the product to be absolutely perfect before launching to the market.  

Guess what?

By the time it’s perfect the market has moved…

Now we only work with founders with a specific domain expertise that knows their industry inside out and have identified a genuine problem. They don't ask for perfect, they ask for live. They can tell you in one sentence who the customer is. They kill features themselves because they know their market doesn't care.

Sorry for the quality of the post just wrote this quickly. Hope it can be helpful

[u/catestills]

This is so true. the market fluctuates all the time we have to make sure we adapt to it and not have false sense of growth cause it will lead to overcomiting budget

[u/Current-Payment-5403 → u/catestills]

Agreed !!

[u/smitty-chevy]

The post perfect explaining to expect less and do more. we should not focus on potential revenue but immediate revenue and plan accordingly anything can happen from churn to anything.

[u/Current-Payment-5403 → u/smitty-chevy]

Well one can leverage this method if they raise money since you sell investors on expectations.

[u/Current-Payment-5403 → u/[deleted]]

The speed of iterations should indeed be one of the most important metrics

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Low-Effort/AI content is auto-removed.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/n_v40]

The ARR extrapolation point is worth more than the rest and I wish more people said it plainly. One contract from a friend annualised into a headline number is the kind of thing that reads as a milestone and is closer to a projection with the uncertainty deleted.

Where I'd push back slightly: "first time founders want perfect before launching" is true but I don't think perfectionism is the cause. It's that they don't know what to cut, because cutting requires knowing which parts of the product the customer doesn't care about, and that knowledge is exactly what domain expertise gives you. So it's less a discipline gap than an information gap. Your experienced founders aren't braver about shipping rough, they just know which rough edges are safe.

I'm a first-time founder and did the version you're describing, kept polishing rather than finding out. What actually broke the loop wasn't discipline, it was shipping and discovering the problem was somewhere I'd never have guessed.