Alex got the co-founder of a public company to join him and raised $6M out of the gate—but it took him 3 years to make his first sale.

But after he shifted from selling to SMBs to selling to MSPs (Managed Service Providers i.e., outsourced IT), things took off:

April 2015 - $1K MRR
August 2015 - $10K MRR
June 2016 - $100K MRR
Nov 2018 - $1M MRR ($12M ARR)

And growth never stopped—soon, he'll cross $100M ARR.

Alex and his co-founder did many things differently. They came up with an idea by starting with markets, not customer problems. They raised a lot of money upfront and built a sophisticated product instead of an MVP. And they deliberated cultural values before making their first hire.

Clearly—it worked.

Why you should listen

Learn why you should define culture before making your first hire.
How to find market trends and customer problems top-down instead of bottoms-up.
Why keeping your product unchanged but targeting a different market can have a massive impact and lead to product-market fit.
Why you should be willing to be bold and not hedge.
Why you should only focus on one thing at a time.
How to use constraints to do more things faster.

Keywords

Auvik, software company, networking, SMBs, mid-market, decoupling, control plane, hardware, software solution, automate, configuration, user research, product design, team, company values, SaaS, IT management, product-market fit, pivot, managed service provider, MSP, boldness, discipline, advice

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:47) The Origin of Auvik
(00:07:20) Finding a co-founder
(00:12:35) It's People Who Build Companies
(00:14:10) Finding the Concept for Auvik
(00:20:07) Buikding the Product
(00:30:30) First Customer Experiences
(00:34:40) Feedback Loops
(00:39:08) Getting to a Million
(00:41:33) Finding Product Market Fit
(00:42:54) One Piece of Advice

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

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