It’s said that there are 4 main milestones on the path to a company becoming a unicorn: $1 million, $10 million, $100 million and $1 billion.
Each of those millions demands a different strategy and offers different challenges/obstacles. It’s hard to compare between the different stages (and it’s so dependent on industry/market) – but an argument can be made that the first milestone is the toughest.
After all: the first milestone is where 99% of companies fail to reach.
Here are a few strategies to reach that elusive 7-figure club.
1. Do things that don’t scale
In his famous essay, Ycombinator founder Paul Graham outlines the virtues of using growth strategies that don’t scale, early on. Nearly 7 years since being written, that advice still rings just as true.
2. Focus on the fundamentals
Growth-at-all-costs can be an issue even with bootstrapping companies. Focus on building a product people care about.
3. Don’t hire too quickly
There’s nothing more demoralizing than whiffing on a revenue milestone because you ran out of money. Only in tech startups is something so odd even possible, and it’s largely due to companies overinvesting early cash into hires they don’t need – but have to pay for later.
4. Talk to your users
You should intimately know the users that contribute to your first million in revenue. If you aren’t talking to new users every week, you’ll never understand the market well enough to dominate it.
5. Great artists steal
There’s nothing wrong with shamelessly undercutting your competitors or being inspired by their marketing campaigns in the early days. Just don’t make a habit of it.
6. Consider alternative revenue streams
Does your productized SaaS company get a lot of boutique consultation requests? Yes, Atlassian may not do custom consulting work, but you’re not Atlassian yet – revenue is revenue, you can worry about scale later.
