How We Went From $0 to $10m+ ARR in 18 Months...The Playbook!

uh my name is Steven London I am the co-founder of fellow and I am super super excited to share how we went from zero to 10 million in ARR in 18 months we can actually change that title in two weeks to 0 to 15 million in 24 months uh hopefully um so first of all who is fellow we are a marketing engagement platform uh AI powered we're building

more and more AI capabilities every day so that's a huge emphasis for us we started in residential real estate and uh our heroes are real estate agents however we're going to expand over the next couple years both products and capabilities in real estate and then also to other verticals um so how did we do it um first of all uh ton of hard work

and pain and ups and downs and uh a lot of luck but uh here's our Revenue growth this is my personally my favorite chart uh that we have we went from zero we launched in October 22 and then uh we're about to cross 15 million hopefully uh within the next two weeks as I mentioned we'll be at 20 million by the end of the year so wild I mean it's crazy to see a

chart that encompasses so much uh pain in one place and it looks so pretty and easy to understand but it definitely is not uh so what is the story and what are the lessons and hacks that I can share uh with you guys and hopefully you can take a couple nuggets away from today and and maybe apply them to your business so uh quick show of hands before we start who is in the kind of zero to one stage of their company one who's in 1 to

10 okay and who is in 10 plus all right so most in 1 to 10 perfect I think uh generally in terms of these three stages which is pre-revenue kind of 0o to one and then product Market fit uh at some point in the 1 to 10 and I call it dots ants and Rockets So I always think about it like um dots are connecting the dots these are the framework of your idea it

actually applies throughout the life cycle of your business but but these are the things you need to nail up front so first comes uh Team if you don't get this right it's like a bad marriage your life is terrible uh you got conflicts um and so I think the the key there is upfront you really have to know yourself and be honest because I think if you're not honest it's very hard and you're a little delusional and all of us in the room are entrepreneurs we think we are smarter and can solve more problems than

everybody else and if you say no you're lying because you probably do uh so the more that you know yourself I think it's easier to understand where you need to supplement and where your co-founders can help out um one other thing uh the guy on the right uh Ryan is one of my uh childhood best friends and for a long time I was always we were talking of VC is always embarrassed and would hide that and all this stuff and what I've realized is that's actually one of the strongest assets we have as a company is

that both from a culture standpoint and from a resolving conflict standpoint you have somebody uh that you understand how to work with um and once you figure that out I think we've hit our stride it took us a couple years to really hit our stride as as Founders but you start to let go and you can start working with your team uh more and more understanding who's doing what I think that's that's critical uh if somebody can do something 80% as good as you can they should probably be doing it as you

scale so quick uh idea Point here uh great ideas always sound crazy uh so don't worry about sharing them uh often times as entrepreneurs we have this idea we want to launch this product and then we don't share it and uh you know we don't want somebody to take the idea the best ideas when you say to somebody here's a little trick they will go right over their head or they'll think it's so crazy or weird that it doesn't resonate that's how you know you may be on to a

good idea um so stay fluid with the idea we launched actually not in software we raised a seed round in 2021 off of the I buying concept so it's asset based um and we pivoted because we had the software in October of 22 and it's just taken off ever since then so we raised a $3 million seed round so while the idea isn't important I think the story is everything and I'm going to get more into the personal brand and the how

important brand is these days but a quick question on the story as you're going out to the market and telling it to to me you know this is one of the most important things you can nail who's going to be the face I'm fairly confident uh to grow very fast in this day and age depending unless it's a highly technical um aspect you need somebody to be the face so first you have to figure out who's going to be the face what is that origin story and then who is your hero so our hero are real

estate agents we uh build everything so we can decentralize real estate for them that has been something that's been at the threat of everything we've done so next phase now you're in the zero to one you have your idea you have your team um and you have your story you are now ants and everybody laughs when I say ants what I mean by ants is uh you know a long time ago I read a book I think it was called emergence um but it was about how the organization of ant

colonies and I always took away that it's fascinating to me that you have these tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of creatures that just go out in the world trying to find food when one finds something you relay the signal and everybody pivots towards that idea and I think as you're you know trying to find that market fit the more experiments you run the more you can kind of test that the faster the better so how do you do that uh one you need power users all the way down so one of our advantages are uh Ryan re he is a

real estate agent he has a team he is a power user everything we build he test with his team uh our CPO and CTO who are the two other guys in that picture co-founders um are obsessed they you know I think I work hard you think you work hard these guys are psychopaths they just are obsessed with the product and just keep working all day long um and the third hack we had actually investors as users so after the seed Round We pivoted ideas

and had to raise a million dollar is in safe uh kind of funding and we made a conscious choice to not you know work with VCS not work with um other entities and raise from uh users of the product so top real estate teams and that's been immensely helpful both from a feedback loop probably a little less from feedback more from just the social proof of it um here is a quick uh you know something I'm I'm personally really

proud of uh we uh you as you start being ants you're running as many experiments as you can uh we created a very flat organization I think I would recommend that for for anybody that's certainly sub 10 as many people that can be empowered to do as many tests as possible wins we spent so in 2023 we went from 400,000 in ARR to uh 7 million in ARR and we spent

$80,000 on marketing which is wild uh and I'll talk a little about how we did that but I think an important lesson from that is spending money on marketing does not make good marketing you have to spend money on marketing when you have product Market fit and you know what you're doing from a marketing perspective otherwise you are spinning your wheels so here are some experiments we ran uh we gave away the product for free we did free onboarding we hired people without an exercise which is a terrible

idea uh we ruined our email domain we hired demand gen agencies didn't work out um but some random fund things that worked uh we threw a free party so we kind of convinced this other larger organ ization hey I want access to real estate agents we said okay great uh why not you throw the party we'll pretend like we're hosting it and then you guys and your team can attend so we threw this party for 200 people worked out great at a conference we ran a 30-day

challenge so we gave away the software for free for a year uh to whoever won this 30-day challenge it engaged our entire Community uh text message post people text oh man this software is awesome everywhere um so the social proof of that get on as many many podcasts and webinars as possible it is one of the most uh you know easiest hacks both from it helps you practice telling that story but also it's just free you can repurpose that I think Nathan talked about it talked about it

um and then building a community that that is the engine that can take you to a billion dollars in AR but you have to start building that early on so this this slide uh you know the Madonna song we live in material world uh I I think if you're going to take away one or two things this is one of the slides I would encourage you to take away

uh how many people get forwarded something on Instagram or see a YouTube short or listen to something on a podcast and three weeks later you remember it you don't remember where you heard it from or where you saw it from and these little cultural pieces of information you know which is a meme not the funny frog joke of what a meme is but a meme in terms of sharing cultural information this gets into our heads and we forget where we hear things so as a

hack of from a marketing standpoint if you can provide enough social proof in enough places it's going to start implanting in people's heads and you know we have an expression hit them from every angle you hit them from every angle meaning um podcast social media all that stuff and ultimately you know my favorite line I hear at conferences all the time now from us is I see you guys all over the place how how do how have I heard about this or I heard somebody say it was great I can't remember who said that and that is

because we are blasting the airwaves with social proof and it's all honest people saying positive things about us we're not making any tricks but it's the just constant getting into the subconscious minds of your users that is incredibly powerful all right so now you have product Market fit you're in the let's call it 1 to 10 three whatever that range is for us it was three I remember saying to our co-founders at three uh if

we and I remember I was at dinner uh when it happened if we hit three we can hit a 100 like I'm very confident but we just have to get to three first and we hit three and then it is now different game and you have to kind of stop at some point you'll know when that point is and say okay I got something here now how do I grow this as fast as humanly possible so one exercise i' love you guys to do when you get home uh or on the plane or

or for wherever uh I think it's it sounds very simplistic it'll take you five minutes but it will change your business if you do it right take a piece of paper and a pen and sit down and not with your mind because you're going to say well I can't do that and I don't have salespeople and we can dream something big for next year uh or next next month whatever you want to do dream something so big that it makes you uncomfortable if it's not big enough and it's not making you uncomfortable you

are not uh dream big so if you say I want to grow 50% next year I want to raise a series a at this valuation double it make it so uncomfortable that you in your mind is just constantly saying we can't do that we can't do that we can't do that once you have that Big Goal I think this is the important part you have to dissociate from reality you're going to say I can't do this we have no AES well we don't have a marketing budget well we don't have this or that this is where

the genius happens pretend you're just playing a game okay it's not me it's somebody else how would I do that you know we can make affiliate percentage 50% we can give people $ Z salary and 70% commission it doesn't matter what it is what the variables are but I think um the important thing is you have to separate yourself from the dat to day reality of your business and and pick something huge and you will be shocked

if you do this right how powerful this exercise is last couple things um culture another thing we learned uh from rocket ship standpoint your internal culture reflects your out uh external culture um and it's not uh some words on a slide so we used we had five 10 employees we used to write these exact uh core values down and have people read it every meeting

and it's just um it's only because your real core values are what you are every day it's a radiation of kind of the team and to determine them it's very simple uh you just have to think through which employees didn't make it and why and which employees made it and why and those are your core values so as you think about you know this person didn't make it because they weren't gritty enough or they got pissed when I asked

them hard questions or at 4:30 they checked out every day and that just made me so angry those are your core values as a company um and that reflects and and radiates outwards into your external uh culture which is so important and this goes back to the community I would say overspend on your community if you want to get to build a massive company you need a community uh we have Facebook groups I'll talk about that in a second

um but we every conference we go to we get testimonials we have the top right there uh one of our clients we couldn't attend we had them accept uh the awards for us uh we gave uh you know this is again going back to the growth hacks put on conferences to promote our uh icps as Heroes that's the listing Challenge on the bottom right we made a wrestling belt uh which was really fun so the culture of uh you know this vibr

especially if you're in dying uh or slow growth IND industries that have haven't adapted and changed in a long time you bring some life to that industry I think it's going to be so well received and and that can be your culture uh last slide I heard a couple people talking about this yesterday I I think again there's only one way to hyper growth uh and that is leverage so leverage can mean a lot of different things leverage

content for marketing um Affiliates has been a huge angle for us uh people love us we want to reward them for sharing that uh shared knowledge for CS so we have uh bottom right is our Facebook leadership we actually have two Facebook groups one leadership and one for single agents I think we have 2,000 in the leadership group now it's uh we have had a community that really talks a lot uh about what we do shares knowledge

we have a fellow Academy which we just launched uh a couple months ago where we're doing master classes and uh tips and webinars and so the goal there is just uh how do we leverage everything that a different user figures out or asks a question and just Mass uh broadcast that uh last to Quick plug for founder path uh early on we actually uh did a quick uh deal with them and was super easy I remember uh

Nathan called me on a Friday and I was like who is this he just kind of went on said I want to make sure you're a real person um so uh debt is good if you have Roi behind it and it's not great if you don't have Roi behind it um and last thing that's been a huge hack for us is leveraging the world for talent so we are a covid baby as a company we had never had an office before we've never

my co-founders and I rarely see each other in person um and we have people working in five different countries uh we have people all over the United States if somebody's $120,000 in New York and they're $80,000 in Idaho Idaho it is um so I think the ability uh to leverage the world at this point is a really under tapped uh resource for a lot of people and I think you know you have to you have to work hard and and

Get Lucky with some of the The Hires but I'll say a lot of people that we've hired from uh different countries are harder working and more appreciative of the job than the people in the US and that has been you know we have this kind of global company at this point which is kind of fun um so let me pause there hopefully that was encapsulated some of the the stuff we learned over the last uh now 24 months

and um I put a QR code with my LinkedIn I love helping we received a ton of help over the last uh few years you have any questions you want to connect anything I'm there uh if you want to reach out so appreciate your time thank you very much and um I'll hang out after if anybody wants to chat