How to Take Your Business from $0 to $10M ARR

Only half of small businesses make it to see year 5.

Why? Lack of market demand, heavy competition, pricing issues – the list goes on and on.

While no one knows the exact recipe to startup success, Michael Seibel has a pretty good idea. 

Michael is the founder of Justin.tv (now Twitch) and Managing Director at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has launched over 4,000 companies you’re probably very familiar with, like Airbnb, Doordash, and Apollo.

Here’s his advice on how to build a successful multi-million dollar business.

6 go-to-market lessons from Michael Seibel

1. Assemble a team equipped to help you scale

Michael likens building any company to playing video games. You want to hire folks that love “playing the mage and casting spells”. 

Those are the people that will help you create new and innovative solutions. 

To compete with any existing solution in your space, look to hire people who love your industry and love your product; the people who go the extra mile because they are driven by genuine passion and interest.

Passion alone isn’t enough, though. You also need a team of risk-takers who are willing to put all their chips on the table, even when times are tough. 

“You’re competing against people who are all in, so if you’re not all in, you’re not going to win,” shares Michael.

It also helps to be friends with your founding team. Having a close-knit relationship enables you to be fully transparent during difficult conversations. 

When speaking about his experience founding Justin.tv Michael says, “We all had to take each other off of projects. And, that's a really tricky thing to do if you don't have a preexisting relationship.”

Find a group of people that are passionate about software and taking risks, and who you’re excited to work with, and you’ll be off to the races. 

2. Hire people who want to do the work

Another key lesson in building a team?

Don’t hire sales folks until you are comfortable selling. As the founder of your company, you are salesperson number one.  

Focus first on the fundamental steps of building a sales strategy—defining your value prop and target audience. 

Here are a few questions to help build your value proposition:

• What problems would a client need to have for x key feature to be useful?
• What are the consequences of the customer not addressing the problem?
• What are the potential needs that the customer might have in relation to the problem?

When it’s finally time to make a sales hire, you should look for someone who wants to do in-the-weeds selling. 

Founders often make the mistake of hiring sales executives who immediately want to build a team and create processes, but early stage startups just aren’t ready for that. Building repeatable and scalable processes will come later as the business matures. 

As Michael says, “Hire management at the end and hire line workers at the beginning.”

Finding the right fit for early hires also means you’re going to have to fire people. An unfortunate reality, but one you have to be prepared for to build a winning team.  

3. Prioritize customer satisfaction above the metrics 

You must care deeply about software, and the same goes for your customers. At its core, business is about service. You need to be laser-focused on adding value to your customers, rather than hitting a number in a spreadsheet. 

“When it goes wrong is when the founder is more interested in their KPIs than in helping the customer,” says Michael.

Founders that focus on the customer over internal metrics end up with success metrics that matter more.

The customer’s.

Alex Boyd, Founder of RevenueZen, devotes his time to seeing that his customer’s goals are met across the board. 

He sees theirs wins, as his.

Then, with dozens of specific customer success metrics that prove his company’s success, he publically shares these wins with new prospects through LinkedIn social posts.

These shares have become a huge source of referrals for his company, generating $4.5M in revenue.

His biggest tips for sharing customer wins?

• Use the biggest, baddest, most attention-grabbing numbers
• Include it with an image “going up and to the right”
• Leave some details out (it entices people to reach out to you for more information)

Successful customers keep the flywheel turning.

Read the full story on how Alex Boyd scaled a $4.5M business through social selling.

4. Don’t reinvent the (fly)wheel

When it comes to your go-to-market strategy, sometimes sticking to the status quo isn’t a bad thing. 

While it may sound counterintuitive at first, Michael shares, “There’s rarely innovation in GTM.”

Take Slack for example. When they started gaining popularity, people were amazed at their bottoms-up virtual go-to-market motion. While smart, this wasn’t a new idea. Yammer, a communication tool now owned by Microsoft, had run the same playbook a few years prior. 

People are used to buying in a certain way. Study what’s been done and use that to bring your product to market. 

Here’s a basic framework to get your go-to-market strategy off the ground.

1. Define your target market. Start by understanding your current customers, who your competitors are targeting, and who would benefit from your product.
2. Define your unique value proposition. Identify how your unique solution will help your target audience. 
3. Define your product positioning strategy. Take your value prop from the previous step to determine how you want your target market to think and feel about your product. 
4. Decide on your pricing strategy. Consider who is willing to pay for your product, what they’re willing to pay, and how you’ll create a competitive advantage with your pricing.
5. Define your distribution plan. How will you get your product to buyers? Make it easy for people to buy.

5. Do things that don’t scale

While your go-to-market strategy may not be unique, you can stand out by creating 1:1 experiences for your customers. 

Experiences that may not scale, but pay-off 10-fold. 

Michael gives an example of the early days of AirBnB when the founder used their cell phone as the customer support number and helped a woman, alone in a new city, check into a hotel when she couldn’t access her AirBnB stay. 

This level of service isn’t possible at a large company, but makes all the difference for a new player on the market.

If we’re talking about creating value-driven experiences in a process like cold email, consider the “Show Me You Know Me” strategy. 

“Show Me You Know Me” is the art of using personal details to craft intentional emails. It’s an outreach method that can’t be replicated for thousands of prospects, but it drives much higher response rates because of the level of personal attention and detail.

High-quality “Show Me You Know Me” emails are made up of 7 elements:

1. Subject line: This should be unique to the recipient. It likely won’t make sense to anyone else but the person receiving the email (and that’s the sign of a perfectly personalized subject line!). 
2. The first sentence: Start with an authentic intro, rather than niceties or your sales pitch. 
3. The transition: Make a logical tie from the first sentence to your sales pitch.
4. The challenge: What can you solve for your buyer? Focus on the person, not the company.
5. The value proposition: Consider your hook and buyer’s pain points.  
6. Hidden or forthcoming objection: Think about the most common objection you receive and get ahead of it. 
7. The close: Always include a call to action, but don’t include a calendar link in your first email.

All of this will come together to look something like this:

Startups have the unique ability to create especially memorable and personalized experiences—so lean into it.

Watch Samantha McKenna’s full course on cold email writing on Apollo Academy.

6. Go all in on one strategy

Remember when we said you need to be comfortable taking risks? 

Here’s another reason that matters. If you hedge your bets and try to execute three different GTM strategies at once, you’ll likely do them all poorly and learn nothing.

If you pick one strategy and go all in, you’ll learn something, even if it isn’t a success. 

“The core problem is fear. It’s not that people are unfocused, it’s that people are hedged,” shares Michael. 

And picking one strategy doesn’t mean you’re locked into it. As you learn and grow as a founder and a business, you should always be pivoting based on your learnings and how you're performing.

John Barrows, legendary trainer of over 100k sales reps, sees a future where successful GTM is completely experimental and responsive.

“Sales is far more a science than an art, so treat everything as an experiment,” John says, “What worked 6 months ago is just not working anymore. You have to be agile.”

Take your small business to the moon

Startup land is not for the faint of heart. As a founder, there will be challenging times, but these obstacles often push you to work even harder.

As Michael shares, “If I could bottle up what founders are capable of doing in the last six months of runway and allow them to tap into that any time, I think we would see a lot more successful companies.”

Focus on building a great team, helping your customers, and taking risks, and you’ll be on your way to building a successful business. 

🚀 For more advice on scaling your business and mastering the art of sales, check out our latest virtual event, Olympus.