Who this is for?
B2B software & AI startup founders who want to reach $1M ARR as fast as possible but need a straightforward method, protocol and advisory, to do so.
From my 12+ years of experience in the startup ecosystem as an operator, a founder and an investor, I’m now 100% convinced that entrepreneurs fail not because they can’t build products or identify markets but because of two reasons:
Regarding point 1, most founding teams lack the knowledge and skills to develop a clear path to the $1M ARR mark. They have some knowledge about sales and marketing, sometimes they were sales and marketing operators at larger companies, startups, or scale-ups. But the $0 to $1M of revenue stage is very specific. It requires way more than classical sales and marketing techniques because the rules of the game are different at this stage.
I’ve seen that most founding teams operate their startup without following a scientific approach to customer discovery, marketing and sales. As a result, they first struggle to find a clear, undisputable product-market fit and then reach the $1M in revenue milestone. That’s why most projects fail or at the very best plato! And that’s why founders are over-stressed during that phase. Because they don’t have a clear path. And this path exists!
If you are building a software company, their is a path for you to reach $1M in revenue in less than 12 months, using a scientific and systematic approach to customer discovery, marketing, and sales.
The goal of this document is to tell you why and how B2B software & AI startups led by great founding teams can all reach $1M in revenue within 12 months.
Why do I claim that “ALL” startups with a great founding team can do it?
A lot of entrepreneurs I have been working with think that the startup-building game is a game of having a good idea and executing it. That’s the case for 1% of startups. For 99% of them, the game consists of having a lot of ideas and testing them as fast as possible in a very time-bounded timeframe. This is the only way to get the best chances to find something that people want desperately (i.e find product-market-fit). What’s missing from most teams is the correct method to find, test, and execute those ideas. With the correct method and a systematic approach, founders get:
the opportunity to find a problem and an angle worth working on
way more iteration cycles because they know how to do it, what to look for, and what success looks like before scaling.
Why do I set the bar to “$1M in revenue”?
For software startups funded by VCs, this is often the point at which they are in a great position to raise a Series A (provided that they can show a reasonable revenue growth rate).
For all software startups, it’s the milestone at which we can reasonably admit that they have proven financially successful and continue to grow. If the economics make sense, nothing can happen to you if you reach $1M in revenue. You can continue to grow and be profitable, you can raise money to accelerate or you can sell the business.
Why do I assume that you should aim at less than 12 months?
For startups that are VC-funded, that’s often when you want/need to start to raise your next round and show great metrics.
For all startups, including the VC-funded ones, it takes a lot of energy to find an idea and reach product-market-fit. After 12 months, the energy level of the team starts to decrease, and problems start to arise due to fatigue and frustration, including the most famous co-founders’ issues. Growth and revenue solve all those issues and are key to keeping a good mood and energy, even when fatigue arises.
First, to find product-market fit, or to grow beyond $100/200k ARR, founders need to excel at three things: customer discovery, positioning and marketing.
Entrepreneurs are not putting enough effort and structure in the way they try to find and validate a problem that a very specific niche has. Hence, the market does not respond well despite all the efforts and investments that are made. They never reach the point where they can consistently and predictably generate new leads and often rely on luck (sending hundreds of messages to get one prospect in the pipeline…). I see entrepreneurs focusing first on the product and after on the customer and the messaging. That’s probably the biggest mistake possible because the chances of failing are really high in that configuration.
Founding teams must go heavy on research and use specific methods to identify who is their customer and how to connect with them. That is the only way to generate (early) traction without relying on luck.
Second, founding teams need to get excellent at Sales & lead generation and do it themselves until they have a strong playbook that will enable them to recruit and scale.
Founding teams are usually doing sales in an artistic way, more than a scientific one. They were never trained to be excellent at sales, to leave no room for uncertainty along the whole sales cycle. Because of poor lead generation, discovery, proving value, or closing, founders leave a lot of deals and money on the table. Consequently, it takes them too long to reach the famous $1M in revenue magic number, with a very uncertain and stressful journey. It generates frustration, leaves a lot of room for new competitors, and often, it causes the death of the company sooner than the founders think.
Instead, founding teams need to make it a priority to become excellent at sales and marketing for the $0 to $1M stage, to shorten the route to the $1M of revenue and build a rock-solid sales playbook they will use to recruit the early team.
Option 1: Learn it by yourself
Except if you’ve done it before as a founder (not only as a sales or marketing operator), it will take you a lot of time, way more than 12 months. With a lot of uncertainty and stress. As we’ve discussed above, that’s too much of a risk to plan for potential success in more than 12 months from now. You will struggle to identify your niche, the messaging that resonates, how to consistently generate leads and sales to generate massive growth with predictability, and so on.
Option 2: Join an incubator/accelerator
This option can work, but not everyone can join Y Combinator. Even if you join YC, it’s often in weeks or months from now. What will you do in meanwhile? And will cost you 5%+ of your company.
With any other incubator/accelerator, you’ll surely get access to a network, but you won’t know who exactly will train you on the activities we discussed before that are the only ones responsible for the success of your company (the network is not…).
Option 3: Hire someone in house
Many founders try to hire marketing and sales before having a strong playbook that the first hires can replicate. That’s a costly mistake! First, there are just a few people out there combining all the skills from niche definition to closing that will solve your product-market-fit and early sales challenges. Second, those people won’t probably join your company as regular employees. They are either founders themselves or are very well paid somewhere with a way lower risk than joining an early-stage startup. Third, even if you find them and convince them to join, it will probably take you 5+ months to do so. Again, what will you do until then? Fourth, finding a product market fit takes a lot of work. It requires the founders’ incentives to put in the effort. Can you give that kind of equity/money incentive to an employee?
Option 4: Work with me
Then, there is me: I structure the approach of finding product-market fit and growing sales to $1M revenue through a well-defined protocol. I have done it as an insider with Algolia, Terality, poolside, and as an outsider at 50+ companies (see testimonials on www.guillaumeduvaux.com)
If you work with me, you can get to the results much faster and much quicker than if you were to do it alone. With way lower stress and uncertainty. For example:
Not only I’ll share with you a protocol to follow, I’ll make sure you are on the right path to your targets by performing reality checks regularly. Companies die because founders tell themselves stories that are not the right ones. I would have loved to have someone help me see reality as it was when I was a founder. I want to be that person for the founders I help.
I will be the person you can rely on to share ideas, thoughts, feedback, worries and hopes! And from what founders have been telling me for 3 years, it’s a great help and avoids weeks & months lost thinking alone and too much.
A little bit about who I am. I’ve spent the past 12 years of my professional life building revenue engines, selling software in startups and helping early stage founders!
First, at Algolia, I joined as employee #11 globally, #2 in the business team, and was the top performer salesperson for 5 years in a row. I closed $8M of ARR and helped the company scale from $1M to $60M of ARR, working with sales, product, marketing, and hiring.
Then I joined Datadog for 6 months, which enabled me to learn extensively about the best enterprise sales methodology.
I left Datadog to create my startup, Terality. We’ve raised close to $2M and scaled the team to 8 people, with hundreds of users of our data processing engine for data scientists.
Since Terality, I have been helping 20+ founders get excellent at sales and marketing, find product-market-fit, and scale their startups up to $1M+ of ARR.
Within that journey, I was the founding Head of sales and GTM at poolside.ai, a company founded by the ex-CTO of GitHub, to kick-start and build the GTM motion and help with the $500M Series B we raised in July 2024.
My 1:1 intensive coaching program consists in a mix of synchronous and asynchronous work, were I will create and share clear action plans to find the path and achieve $1M in revenue as fast as possible:
Our ultimate goal is to build, set up, and optimize the revenue playbook of your startup, reach $1M in ARR.