Yesterday Laura Balik posted a hit piece on Klaviyo and Retention dot com that was both factually untrue and lacked any evidence supporting the claims.
She then blocked me from responding to the post on Twitter.
I would not typically dignify something like this with a response,
Every serious entrepreneur needs to study this person.
I’ve recently become a fan of MrBeast
And I’ve got 4 lessons for you that I’ve learned from him that you should take with you and implement in everything you do, starting right now:
I was talking to the CEO of a $150,000,000 a year Shopify business and he told me something about pricing Shopify apps that blew my mind.
There is something magic about $59/mo.
Not $9 or $99.
$59 is the magic number.
Triple Whale, Klaviyo, and Gorgias all crushed it ay $59/mo
GetEmails was stuck at $8M ARR, I was burnt out.
But after a couple of conversations with really smart people, I realized I had a money-printing machine that was sitting dormant
Now, we’re at $20M, on a path to $50M
Here's how I got out of my slump:
I'm the Founder & CEO of a $20 million/year company
This is what my living room looks like most days
While you're doing a 25 step morning routine and organizing your stuff for hours each day, I am closing deals
My goal is to be the most transparent CEO of a $1 billion software company
We're at $20 million now and growing
I share my financials, strategies, and all the wins & losses
There's no secret formula to what we're doing, so I'm happy to share anything and everything
So,
@ecomchasedimond
convinced me to give Twitter a try...
I'll be tweeting about:
→ How to make more $$$ from email marketing
→ My quest to bootstrap a SaaS company from $0-100M ARR (currently at $14M ARR with no VC funding)
Follow along if that sounds interesting.
Recently spoke with the CEO of a $150 million apparel brand.
His CAC is up by 32% since iOS14, and it’s up another 15% since mid-April.
He’s spending $1 million a month on ads and wants to 5x his adspend, but he can’t do it at these CPA’s.
What would you tell him?
2 things I’ve learned on DTC Twitter so far:
1. Everyone is starting a hard seltzer company
2. There is a DTC Dinner happening in every city, every single night with “just 1 seat left”
20 years ago, I watched my roommates build Vimeo from our apartment
2 years ago, I watched
@DaveRogenmoser
build Jasper into a $1.5 billion company from the office I rented from him
It's hard to not be massively inspired while watching greatness up close
Against the advice of counsel, I'm posting 's Q2 P&L.
Here's my analysis on the current state of our business:
Q1 was peak euphoria, mid-Q2 was peak disillusionment.
It seems like most (or all) of the vendors selling into our ecosystem had a hard time
We've bootstrapped from 0 to $20 million ARR.
Now I'm documenting the journey to $1 billion unicorn status with a cameraman who follows me around.
Check out the latest episode here:
Every major Shopify app — Gorgias, Attentive, Klaviyo, you name it — runs the same playbook to grow like crazy
The playbook only has 3 components:
1) Outbound sales
2) Partnerships
3) Events
If you’re looking for an available domain to start a business, you’re doing it wrong.
You need to buy a premium domain and drop a little coin.
People build big companies behind pretty crappy web domains and it holds them back in a major way.
If you’re confident go buy a $2-10k
Last month I was talking to the President of a $2 Billion tech unicorn.
He told me about their biggest growth challenge, and it's not what you'd expect.
He said that on their way from $6M to $100M+ ARR what slowed them down wasn't lead flow, marketing, product or churn but
2016 Facebook Ads vs 2023 Meta Ads:
2016 Facebook Ads:
- Upload a static creative
- Run it for 2, 3, even 4 weeks
- High quality event data from the Facebook pixel
- Super low CPMs
- 40X ROAS, money rolling in, you feel like a genius
2023 Meta Ads:
- Creative has to be
The Billion Dollar Challenge is LIVE!
EPISODE 1. CEO OVERWHELM - PART 1
This is the story of how chance meeting lit the fire under me to transform my bootstrapped, low stakes ‘lifestyle business’ into a category-defining rocketship.
Mine and the teams' limits are put to the
My SaaS company closed $7,738,080 in new ARR during Q1 of this year, bringing us to just north of $20M ARR.
And I believe we have 3 opportunities in Q2 to get us closer to our $50M ARR goal for 2023:
✅ Lead generation - improving and scaling out BDR, Agency Partnerships,
I’m revealing it all.
Maybe I shouldn’t do this — but who cares.
I meant it when I said we are building Retention in public. So I decided to post our full Q1 financials here on Twitter for you to dive into:
Over the next 12 months my SaaS is pushing to hit a $1B valuation
And we haven’t taken a dime of VC money. Wondering why?
Here are the 6 major reasons we decided to bootstrap from 0 → $15M ARR and beyond:
Tech CEOs need to stop complaining about remote work
My first company sold for 8 figures and was fully remote
I’ve built a company that does $20 million a year remotely
Forcing employees into the office is just a crutch for bad management
My bootstrapped $20M ARR SaaS shrunk our sales team from 15 to 4 reps and growth SPED UP (!).
The days of MASSIVE sales teams for startups are over.
The next crop of tech unicorns will have BDR orgs that look very different than Salesforce.
Here's the breakdown: 👇
The Old
2022 was a monster year for my SaaS startup — we bootstrapped to $14M ARR and are on our way to $100M
But it wasn’t all pretty
Today I want to confess 5 of the biggest mistakes we made in the last year (so you can learn from them):
I've sold a company for more than $10 million and built my new company to $1.6 million in monthly revenue
Here are the 7 biggest lessons I've learned about business building:
This guy is going to do $160,000,000 this year and at the beginning of COVID his business was just 3 sewing machines and an Etsy store.
Meet
@CurtisMatsko
, CEO of
@PRTLNDLTHR
.
How was he able to pull off such insane growth (so quickly)?
If you have to ask, clearly you've never
Last week a PISSED OFF customer about to churn sent me a Loom video that completely changed our business.
Here’s what happened (and why it’s going to help us add $300K MRR in the next 3 months):
On Tuesday, I had just come off yet another go-to-market meeting of teams saying
I asked the President of the fastest-growing Shopify store on the planet (with a $150M run-rate) what the biggest problem with DTC email marketing was. His answer is packed with insane insight.
I spoke with
@BYahalom
, the President of
@trueclassictees
last week.
Here's what he
What does it take to build a $1B dollar business in a year?
Well, we’re about to find out…
My new docuseries, Billion Dollar Challenge, is the ultimate peek behind the curtain.
Watch as we transform from a bootstrapped, low-stakes ‘lifestyle business’
Rookie CEO: “What if we get sued? Let’s not do this.”
Veteran CEO: “Let’s do it. If we get sued, we can use a tiny bit of the money we make to defend lawsuits.”
I learned that building a $20 million company takes basically the same effort and focus as building a $2 million company.
Now I'm trying to find out if building a $1 billion company takes the same effort as building a $20m one.
I'll report back.
Many founders underestimate how much they need to spend on marketing & sales
My business got to ~$3 million by spending $30k a month on sales & marketing
When we ratcheted that up to $80k, we hit $20 million shortly after
But many can't stomach spending that much in a month
4) There is great joy in the pursuit of excellence
I listened to him on Joe Rogan, and he goes on for hours about how much he loves the idea of being the best.
He commits every hour he has to make better and better videos for his audience. It’s all he cares about.
The playbook for launching a SaaS has completely changed
The Lean Startup and Predictable Revenue models worked great 10 years ago
But now you need to think differently
Here are my thoughts after building a SaaS to $20 million in annual revenue:
Every major Shopify app — Gorgias, Attentive, Klaviyo, you name it — runs the same playbook to grow like crazy
There’s 3 parts to it:
1) Outbound sales
2) Partnerships
3) Events
My company has gone from 0 → $20M ARR in ~2.5 years, profitably.
Here are 3 simple lessons I wish I knew before we started:
1) Velocity is king in startups. Whatever you’re doing, push to move faster.
2) The effort it takes to build something massive is pretty similar to the
My company ended 2022 at just shy of $15M ARR.
And in Q4, we hired 30 key employees for all revenue-generating roles (all of them will be onboarded by Feb 1). My prediction for 2023?
Might be bold — but I believe we will hit $50M ARR by December 31, 2023.
My hiring philosophy:
We’re pretty much only looking to hire people that would be great founders, but are too risk-averse to start their own thing
But the key is giving these types of employees free reign to own their area of the business
Try to control them, and they leave
More founders should have a bootstrapper mentality.
I just finished going through a rapid hiring period. It cost us $1.54M to get that done.
I didn’t hire another person until we added $1.57M to our ARR so we could pay for that last expense.
That’s just how I am.
The BEST eCommerce brands have their Welcome Flow dialed in
But too many brands get this flow wrong
(And miss out on sales)
So I figured I’d just give you an easy, high-converting 4-email flow for you to steal:
One of my most ambitious goals for 2023:
10x the trust and credibility of the Retention brand as we scale to $50M ARR
Here are 15 strategies I'm putting in motion over the next 9 months to make it happen (feel free to steal them):
1) Success is not random or accidental
When talking about virality, everyone always puts the blame on the algorithm. “The algorithm made you famous”, etc.
Virality is not an accident. Success is not an accident.
You bang your head against the wall for 10 years
And then you achieve as much success in one month as you had in the previous 10 years combined
This is what entrepreneurship is all about
99% of salespeople think the next generation of $1M/year earning AE's are current entry-level sellers at top-tier startups learning the ropes as BDRs.
They’re wrong.
The next generation of 7-figure sellers are aspiring YouTubers:
Here's the breakdown:
1) We’re moving into a
There are 4.12 million active Shopify stores
Just 32,990 of those are Shopify Plus stores, according to DemandSage
That's just 0.8% of all Shopify stores
Those 32k Plus stores are the ones you really need to work with if you want to make serious money in ecom SaaS
There are over 4 million Shopify stores.
Less than 1% will ever make it past 7 figures in revenue.
The ones that do, use these 5 fundamental Klayvio flows:
2) Choose your friends wisely
If you’re playing a big game and you don’t have friends that don’t point out your weaknesses, you’re never going to be as big as you’d like.
Underrated startup strategy: Walking right up to the line of legality and operating where others are afraid to.
Uber and Airbnb wouldn’t exist without this strategy.
The one word domain gives us instant credibility
This can't be quantified
But people trust us wayyy more than some company with a dash in their domain name or a .co domain
Every Twitter guru’s solution to every problem is raising prices.
But my business actually took off when I lowered my prices.
Our prices were just too high for our target market.
By slashing the price from $7,500/mo to $2,500, we went from $1m ARR to $20 million
In 27 months, I grew my SaaS startup from $1M-$10M ARR.
We did this with only one salesperson.
Doing 100% outbound sales.
Here’s my 7-step playbook for building a lean, high-velocity cold email machine:
👇
Step 1) Make sure you have product-market fit
- My thesis for 2023
I *really* thought we were going to turn the corner in July, but it was another hard month at .
Here are the dirty details: 👇
The Highlights:
- Client revenue was up 15% and email sends down 50% system-wide
- Our flagship product is now 100% Klaviyo
I used to want a ‘lifestyle business’
See, I had worked at Lehman Brothers in Manhattan for 10 years…
Putting on a tie every day and taking the subway to work every day at 6:00 in the morning.
The idea of a small, simple software business that supported my lifestyle with a
Ryan Pamplin bootstrapped his brand BlendJet to 9-figures in just 4 years
And I got to sit down and pick his brain for 1 hour
Here are the top 3 pieces of business advice he gave me:
When I first started building SaaS businesses, I tried competing on price.
I'd find a $50/mo SaaS and try to build a knock-off version and charge $25 a month
This was a race to the bottom
Now, I try to figure out which problems companies would pay $3,000 a month to solve
Aspiring founders are some of the best employees you can have
They won't be at your company forever, but they'll give you 2 or 3 years of superhuman productivity
You NEED to surround yourself with the right people as a startup founder.
It’s not an option. It’s not a cliche. It’s a requirement.
I share an office with the Jasper AI guys for a reason. We all give each other needed feedback and help each other grow.
You need to have
Affiliates have absolutely crushed for us in the last few months as we’ve scaled to $20M in ARR.
It’s a great way to complement your other sales and marketing tactics — and I wanted to give you an inside look at how we run our program (steal it):
I will mention that this can
Earlier this year, I was in Aspen with a friend who had been building a fintech startup for 7 years as the COO/CFO.
They sold for $275M 🤯
And she now has a cushy job where her salary is 3x what it was before…
Two weeks ago I walked into the woods of Colorado with just a backpack. No cellphone. No GPS. No plan except to avoid seeing another human being for 7 days.
It was incredibly therapeutic.
Here’s 4 reasons why I think every founder needs to try “social starvation”:
1. It
Last year
@Retentiondotcom
went from $600k-$1.3M per month.
Here are the 5 biggest breakthroughs we had scaling a SaaS product for Shopify store owners to near $20M ARR:
Klaviyo will IPO this week at a valuation of ~$9 billion
They did $321m in revenue in the first half of this year, implying a ~14x revenue multiple
Seeing how the market receives this IPO will be a huge signal for ecom software
I'll be eagerly watching and rooting for them
Why is everyone trying to be a "solopreneur"?
Having a reliable team is awesome. I've accomplished way more with them than I would have alone. And I can actually take time off and trust my team to handle everything.
What am I missing?
It was a HARD April at Retention
We basically got stopped dead in our tracks from April 1 - April 14
Here's an inside look at what happened, and how we're moving forward:
Everyone brags about their wins, but few publicly share their losses
So I'll share a loss
Last quarter, an operational issue caused us to miss 274 demos with qualified prospect who filled out our form and were routed incorrectly.
A huge hit for revenue and our brand.
After 5 months of getting smacked by the slowdown, crushed by churn and devastated by downsizing, I am *finally* confident
@Retentiondotcom
has turned the corner.
Here’s what I’m proud of (and not so proud of) that happened in August:
Proud of:
- We crossed a major milestone
Too many founders let ego get in the way of scaling. Truth is:
Stop building the product YOU want
Start building the product your audience wants
Unfortunately, most founders build for themselves by default
Retention(.)com wasn’t always what it is today.
I was the Founder/CEO of a failing company for years before we were on the road to a billion.
I worked on Robly. I was competing with giants. I couldn’t keep up…
We were barely profitable, and I was lucky to be able to get rid
A year ago, I could not get mid-level partnership people at ecom companies to even reply to my email
Now, I have execs at that same companies reaching out to meet me
What changed?
I started documenting my thoughts online
Underrated startup strategy: Walking right up to the line of legality and operating where others are afraid to.
Uber and Airbnb wouldn’t exist without this strategy.
We generated more than $1 million for a client in a month using a simple 6-part email strategy.
And that client, 9-figure brand Dr. Squatch, attributes millions in revenue to us.
If you want to see the exact strategy, reply "Retention" and I will DM it to you.
You don't have to choose work OR a family life
I bootstrapped a software business to $20 million a year
I'm also taking time for my family and living a balanced life
You can do both
Churn is everything.
I seriously believe if we put all of our energy on reducing churn a year ago and didn't hire a single salesperson we would be a head of where we are today.
MrBeast is proof that you can go viral again and again and again — if you have the right formula.
He’s spent over a decade developing an SOP for exactly how to get hundreds of millions of views and get the world to talk about you.
I bootstrapped my startup to $12M ARR with only 6 people.
Now I’m launching a brand new product and plan to get it to $10M ARR by the end of 2024 with no more than 5 people.
Small teams are the future of SaaS.