Richard White

Trying to get from $0 to $1M ARR? Find your PMF. Obsess over identifying a problem that a big enough market urgently needs solving. Talk to your customers about their most painful problems and validate your assumptions. Not all feedback will be valuable. Focus on insights from your early adopters—they become your ICP and shape your product. Stay true to your core customer profile. Chasing revenue or artificially widening the PMF dilutes your product's effectiveness. Your product can only meet so many needs. Tailor every feature to your ICP. Your first version is your Minimum Sellable Product (MSP). Make the MSP easy to use and beneficial. With customers using your product, continually collect feedback to improve: 1 - Offering 2 - Marketing messages 3 - Sales calls 4 - Pricing structure 5 - Demo flow If you reach $1M ARR, congratulations! Your product has real demand. Next, it’s time to think about scaling to $10M ARR. More on that soon.

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A playbook for managing the biggest risks in early-stage health tech adapted from Wesley Fogel article on Peerr 🚀 👥 People Risk: Engage users, decision-makers, and clinicians early with prototypes and iterative feedback. 🏥 Clinical Risk: Ensure safety through external evaluations and compliance with standards like DTAC and DCB0129. 🔒 Security Risk: Prioritise data security and compliance with HIPAA, ISO27001, and other standards. 🛠️ Technical Risk: Avoid technical debt and optimse your tech stack with an experienced CTO. 🏛️ Governance Risk: Build a diverse advisory team to guide ethical, legal, and regulatory strategies. 🌐 International Risk: Weigh the benefits of early overseas exploration against potential resource strains. 💰 Financial Risk: Focus on vision, team, and go-to-market strategies at different funding stages. 📈 Commercial Risk: Maintain ongoing customer engagement and seek formal partnerships through accelerators. https://lnkd.in/e8BPBnEv

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Product-market fit isn’t a silver bullet for success. Long-term startup success requires optimism - and even obsession. Once you’ve ensured your product has a viable market and a customer base willing to pay for or use your solution, your job is to keep your momentum going. This is where optimism comes in. As a leader, your positive attitude is the heartbeat of your startup. Letting it fade means risking the very life of your company. Stay wildly optimistic, regardless of the challenges. And challenges will come. When optimism fails, obsession is what keeps a company’s momentum going. Become fanatically focused on solving your customer’s problem. Know your customers deeply and refine your solution with speed and precision. This obsessive focus will fuel your growth. Your optimism and obsession drive action, and action generates momentum. This momentum is essential for transitioning from PMF to high-growth. Everyone knows that an object in motion stays in motion. But when it comes to startup success, obsession can be a helpful outside force to add to the mix.

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This is an interesting article from SaaStr sharing data from ICONIQ Capital about revenue per employee. “These are useful yardsticks for folks scaling: At less than $25m ARR, actually SaaS start-ups aren’t any more efficient than in 2017-2019, at $130,000 per employee / FTE. Although that’s still more efficient than the Boom Times. At $25m-$100m ARR, SaaS scale-ups are about 25% more efficient than they used to be, at $172,000 in revenue per employee / FTE. Time to get real at $25m ARR, apparently 😉 And at $100m+ ARR, they are 20% more efficient then they used to be, at $249,000 in revenue per employee. On the path to the $300k+ we see in public SaaS leaders.” At Worksmith in October, our annualized revenue per employee was $238K. https://lnkd.in/gqkkpjEW

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Three lessons from building and launching a P2P payments app without doing the proper customer validation first (despite knowing better): 1) Building something you need is a great starting point - but not enough to validate an idea. As someone drawn to building solutions, I’m an early tech adopter. This led me to overestimate consumers’ willingness to onboard, especially with a P2P payments app that requires KYC/KYB compliance and relies on a network effect to be useful. 2) Manual solutions are often best to start with It’s good business to be in business - transitioning from ideating to operating as early as possible is the BEST way to learn effectively. While the move fast and break things mindset has attracted well-deserved skepticism, getting stuck in a multi-year build trap distracted me from critical real-world validation. 3) Consumer appetite shifts quickly In my case, the proliferation of free and instant P2P payment options like Zelle added additional pricing pressure that I couldn’t compete with. This disincentivized the consumer event/payment collection market, turning my bottom-up go-to-market strategy upside down. Pitch (https://www.pitch.fun) is currently on the back burner as I’ve begun building custom solutions in various industries to sharpen my skills, solve specific problems, gain a hands-on understanding of operations, pain points, and workflows, and build a network of experts to lean on as I keep my eyes peeled for high-impact opportunities.

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Next week, I’m hosting 15ish B2B seed stage founders to talk about what’s working and not working in GTM. Some of the things I’m hearing from other founders who are at that sub-20 customer stage have to do with growing beyond their network. Everyone seems to be able to find a couple customers or early design partners but how do you move beyond with limited resources? One of the founders I spoke to who is in AI, is leveraging the brand of AI to get conversations through cold outreach. A broad message of “We do AI for X generating Y results" where X is your niche audience is getting conversations started. These types of insights and the detail that goes with them are the things we’ll be discussing next week. Join us. https://lu.ma/x3k6v4dn

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🎙️ Exciting insights from SaaS Academy's CEO Johnny Page on the Expertise Economy podcast! Johnny breaks down their two-step approach to helping SaaS founders: 1️⃣ The Discovery Call: Uncovering the founder's "why" and long-term vision 2️⃣ The Strategic Game Plan Session: Creating a 90-day action plan to achieve 12-month goals 🔑 Key focus: Identifying and solving business constraints Want to dive deeper on the secrets of building a successful SaaS business? Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/dju-Be2u #SaaS #BusinessStrategy #SaasAcademy #ExpertiseEconomy #Podcast

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📈 Curious about the startup scene in Massachusetts? Explore our detailed funding list featuring startup names, HQ locations, and investor info. Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs alike! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dAp3xj-Q #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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On this episode of Building Jam w/ Retool + ex-Stripe eng leader Tamar Ben-Shachar: 1. How to get out of fire-fighting mode and back to proactive engineering 2. Slowing down short term to add observability to move faster long term 3. The importance of aligning on what does "Done" mean on your team 4. Why the best dev teams are good at saying no 5. What are the best engineering interview questions to ask Hope you enjoy the episode! YT link below

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In an increasingly crowded field of telemedicine startups, building a platform that not only attracts users, but also retains them is key. For this week’s episode of the Building One podcast, I recently sat down with Alexandria Stried, the Chief Product Officer of Cerebral, a telehealth business specializing in mental health - from therapy to medication management. One of my favorite takeaways from this episode is about how Alex and her team learned the importance of early activation -- the moment in which newly onboarded users realize the value of your product. In Cerebral’s case, they found that people who went to three therapy sessions in their first month were more likely to retain. Once they figured that out, they focused their growth team on getting their onboarding journey right. This is a lesson that really applies across many industries & products, but few product leaders actually know what it is for them. Alex goes into detail on all this and more in the full episode, including (1) the value of getting direct feedback from your users, especially ones who churned, and (2) why investing in a better product for Cerebral’s service providers was potentially even more important for customer satisfaction than anything else. Check out the full episode for all the great learnings. Click here to listen and follow: 🎧 Apple: https://lnkd.in/etbU8_76  🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eCrAQMCB

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Chat with Miles Clements about building Linear For me companies are like design problems: you have context, constraints & goals unique to you. Then you look for a solution that has a good fit to your unique problems. The company problem also evolve over times the solution Directly applying what others have done doesn’t work that well, yet there is lot emphasis on playbooks, pattern matching and playing copying what other companies are doing in industry. https://lnkd.in/ghxjJwYU

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As a former value investor, power law ideas feel weird and counter-intuitive But real Spot Ship numbers: We burned substantially more cash getting to $10k ARR Than it took for us to get from $10k ARR to $100k ARR And are on track to burn only a small fraction of that on the journey $100k ARR to $1m ARR [N.B. We have never pivoted and if anything, leanness is gradually trending slightly down from A-grade ridiculously lean towards an end state target of the uncomfortably lean side of sustainable] That is really weird. I still struggle to get my head around it. However, the late and great Munger did always say that the first $100k is the hardest....Maybe some value investors did understand power laws instinctively! #shipsandshipping #maritime #powerlaw #vc #seriesa #founder

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Imagine you’re meeting a VC today and pitching your company. Now, also imagine the VC goes home tonight and tells his or her spouse about the meeting with you. How do you think the VC would (or should) describe your product to the spouse? Remember, this is for someone who doesn’t have any context, and probably doesn’t have time to listen the whole story. If you can think of a story version that's plain and simple -- how you want the VC to describe your product to the spouse -- perhaps that version should be your pitch in the first place?

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Bootstrapped Founders I work with are figuring out how to drive profitability. VC-backed Founders I work with? They're trying to figure out how to skip a round. If you're a SaaS Founder working to build a differentiated GTM Machine so you can control your own destiny, then grab a complimentary copy of my 5-Point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. Follow the link in the comments below 👇

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Sorry, founders: You need to fire your CCO once you decide you wanna sell to the enterprise. Most start-ups and scale-ups begin their journey selling to SMBs— It’s a great place to start, refine your product, and build early momentum. But eventually, many companies set their sights on going “upmarket” and selling to enterprise clients. And that’s where things change—big time. Enterprise sales is a different beast altogether: now you’re facing large organizations with complex structures and processes. Suddenly, compliance, security standards and strict purchasing processes become the norm. You’re now working with procurement teams, legal departments, and executive committees that can stretch sales cycles to months… if not years. And here’s the catch: the CCO who is a rockstar at selling to SMBs is often not equipped for enterprise sales. It requires an entirely different set of skills, from relationship-building with senior stakeholders to understanding and navigating long, complex sales processes. I’ve been there. I was the CEO of a company with 250 employees and over 400 customers. And guess what? We had enterprise clients. I can tell you firsthand that shifting to enterprise sales required me to rethink and restructure our team—and yes, that meant parting ways with talented leaders who weren’t the right fit for this stage of our growth. The bottom line? Moving to the enterprise market means building a team with the right expertise—It’s not just about having a great product; it’s about having the right team to support and deliver that product to the most demanding clients. Enterprise sales aren’t just bigger sales. It’s a new game with new rules. Have you made the transition to enterprise sales? What changes did you find necessary for your team? #leadership

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It had been far too long since I last caught up with Andrew Lau, CEO & Co-Founder of Jellyfish, to get the latest on the company. We also discuss the results from their State of Engineering Management Report. In this video, we chat about: * Details about Jellyfish * Customer examples & use cases * Finding from their State of Engineering Management Report * The culture at Jellyfish * Why Jellyfish should be on your radar for your career

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A lot of companies are still dealing with the fallout from the 2019 growth at all costs. Many overhired without really knowing how to use all those people, and now we’re seeing layoffs as they try to fix that. Lot's of good people on the market. Now, with copilots of all sorts boosting productivity I think companies need to be smarter about hiring and focusing on real value. Building smaller teams of more senior and motivated people.

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There's a big difference in quality when founders build products for themselves versus for others. I'm not talking about, "I built this at FAANG and now I'm selling it to the market." In that case, you're still building for someone else. You don't use the product yourself. What I mean is: "I'm building something I use every day to do my own work." Think about products like Slack, Zoom, or Redis. Magic happens when founders are the biggest users of their own products

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Agencies: The Double-Edged Sword of Tech Development ⚔️ Ever felt trapped by your own tech team? You're not alone. The reality with agencies is stark: 1. They’re either incompetent, wasting your time and money. 2. Or they’re excellent but they enslave you with golden handcuffs, locking away your tech assets from your own control. Investors see it too. They push for a tech co-founder to keep critical tech in-house. But, what do you do when your tech co-founder isn't up to the task of building a tech department? Enter CTO-Doctor 🌟. We’re reshaping agency roles: - We build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). - We establish your tech department seamlessly within your company. - By launch, you have a running product and an independent tech team. No more dependency. No more golden handcuffs. Just transparent, efficient, and integrated tech solutions. Founders, prioritize this. Your future self will thank you. Ready to break free? Let's talk. #Startups #Entrepreneurship #Founders #VentureCapital #FutureOfWork --------------------- 👋 I’m Kateryna. ✨Former Silicon Valley Tech Co-Founder ✨Now, your Fractional CTO and Advisor for Startups 🔔 Follow for more insights on tech, startups, and leadership!

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