The $1M ARR Growth Playbook

Fall 2013

I was 24 years old and had just moved to New York City.

I knew I wanted to start a startup, but none of my ideas until that point were going anywhere.

To pass the time, I started teaching online courses on Udemy with my buddy Conrad.

We scaled this to a couple of thousand dollars a month in revenue, but since Udemy took 50% of our sales and cross-sold other courses to our students, we found it hard to grow beyond that.

So one weekend, I built a simple website to sell those courses on our own branded website and domain. We sent it out to his email list, and a few days later had made thousands of dollars in revenue — of which we could keep every last dollar!

This was more promising than any of the other startup ideas I had been working on.

I started to offer this tool to other course creators… and a handful said they’d love to try it out!

Six months of tinkering later, we formally incorporated the company in May 2014 and we were off to the races.

—

May 2014

We formally started charging our creators a subscription fee in May.

While we started seeing traction almost immediately, our monthly recurring revenue grew a lot slower than we hoped.

In fact, a full year after incorporating the business and raising our seed round — and eighteen months after starting to work on the idea, we were only a little over $10K in MRR:

At the time, we had a team of 5+ people working together for a year… and we could barely pay a single engineers salary from our MRR.

But over the next few months, we implemented a whole new growth playbook that blew our numbers out of the water.

The six months after that we grew our MRR 7 times to hit more than $1M in ARR by November 2015:

This article breaks down exactly what we changed in the summer of 2015 to jumpstart our growth to $1M in ARR… and eventually, many tens of millions of dollars.

Table of Contents

• Sell the Transformation

• Double Your Conversion Rate

• Finding Our Channel of Competitive Advantage

  • Storytelling

  • Affiliate Program

  • Equity Deals

  • Online Conferences

• Intentionality