From $0 to $10M ARR in Six Months: The Growth Playbook of Hunter Hammonds, Co-Founder & CEO of Assembly Ventures
Jan 10, 2024
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Hunter Hammonds, Co-Founder & CEO of Assembly Ventures, shares his growth playbook of going from $0 to $10M ARR in six months. Topics include building long-term relationships with creators, focusing on quality over mere publicity, and structuring teams and operations effectively. The podcast also touches on scaling businesses successfully, partnering with large content creators, and the three pillars of team operation.
Assembly Ventures focuses on finding the right product-audience fit and ensuring strict quality control to protect creators' brands.
The teams at Assembly Ventures operate in specialized pods, providing self-sufficiency and incentives for growth.
Deep dives
The Birth of Assembly Ventures
Hunter Hammonds took a six-month sabbatical after wrapping up his successful agency Everest. During this time, he received a text from an old friend, Sahil Bloom, with an idea that aligned perfectly with Hunter's own. This idea eventually became Assembly Ventures, a creator-led B2B brand builder. Assembly Ventures partners with creators who have large audiences to launch products that cater to their audience's interests. They focus on finding the right product-audience fit and ensuring strict quality control to protect the creators' brands. Despite starting five businesses in five months, Assembly Ventures maintains high standards through its team structure, including specialized pods and shared services. They prioritize execution, constantly iterate on processes, and ensure customer satisfaction is their main focus.
Distribution and the Flywheel
Assembly Ventures leverages creators' distribution channels to kickstart their businesses. However, they don't rely solely on the creators' promotion. Instead, they focus on organic customer-driven acquisition and turning customers into advocates. Their flywheel consists of strategy, execution, and amplification, running the same playbook across their businesses. While each company operates independently, they benefit from the overall brand reputation and playbook. The teams are structured in pods, which are self-sufficient and incentivized to level up. The shared services team supports all the companies, and tremendous growth has come from internal referrals. Despite managing multiple businesses, Hunter maintains his sanity by staying away from customer service and having a strong management team and scorecard system.
Process and Approach
Assembly Ventures operates with contradictory approaches when it comes to process. They implement column aggression, aggressively collecting information and executing relentlessly. They also have a wartime mindset, where day-to-day calls and constant evaluation drive process improvements. While slow at the assembly level, individual companies iterate and adapt rapidly. Quality service and customer satisfaction are emphasized, leading to strong organic customer-driven acquisition. They strategically choose creators to partner with based on product-audience fit, and they continuously refine their distribution strategy.
Building Networks and Partnerships
Hunter emphasizes finding your 'why' and building a strong network to naturally attract partnerships with creators. He advises entrepreneurs to focus on giving value and being helpful without expecting anything in return. By operating from a place of genuine value and building relationships, opportunities for collaboration will emerge. Additionally, building a network of trusted connections increases the likelihood of finding the right creator partners.
E66: How did Assembly Ventures, from nothing but dreams and passion, pull in a crazy $10 million in less than six months? Call it nuts. Call it ambitious. Call it a crazy result. But it happened, my friend, it happened.
Today, host Yong-Soo (@YongSooChung) sits down and spills the beans with Hunter Hammonds (@_hunterhammonds), the CEO and Co-Founder of Assembly Ventures. Hunter shares his business flywheel—Strategy, Execution, and Amplification. Hunter also talks about focusing on quality over mere publicity, building long-term relationships with creators, and overall operation and HoldCo structuring strategies.
On today’s episode, you’ll learn:
- The 3 Pillars for Teams Operation - How to Scale Businesses Successfully - The 3 Flywheel Components of a Business - How to Partner Up with Large Content Creators
Don't miss out on this one!
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*** EXCERPTS:
Effective Strategy Approach:"So I think there's a lot of trust in what we're doing right now because of the approach we've taken and the people that we chose to partner with first vs. doing something that's more of the celebrity-driven kind of vast-market creator approach." — Hunter Hammonds (15:58)
Building a Strong Brand: "So instead of us launching a new brand and that detracting from the quality, every time we launch a new brand, we're pulling that playbook into that new space, that new service, using the learnings from this new service, or how we perform this particularly new niche creative thing and using that to inform the rest of the operations." — Hunter Hammonds (17:47)
*** First Class Founders is a show for indie hackers, bootstrapped founders, CEOs, solopreneurs, content creators, startup entrepreneurs, and SaaS startups covering topics like build in public, audience growth, product marketing, scaling up, side hustles, holding company, etc.
Past guests include Arvid Kahl, Tyler Denk, Noah Kagan, Clint Murphy, Jay Abraham, Andrew Gazdecki, Matt McGarry, Nick Huber, Khe Hy, and more.