353: Growing From $1 Mm To $10 Mm

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what it takes to grow your company from one million to ten million in revenue.

Hitting the million dollar revenue mark is a great achievement and something to congratulate yourself on. However, once you do, the new challenge now becomes growing your revenue to newer heights and this can be quite a challenge.

Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on surpassing the one million revenue mark and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic.

00:35 Why this topic was chosen.

01:50 How long it takes you to get to the ten million milestone.

02:31 Why the growth rate is really what’s important when you're trying to scale to $10 million.

02:43 What happens when you try to scale pass one million.

03:15 Things that break as you try to scale.

03:47 What it takes to get you to one million.

04:08 The big difference between leadership and management.

05:25 Why your goal should be to hit ten million with 3 or 4 years.

06:50 How to find team members that can scale to ten million when you’re still growing.

3 Key Points:

There’s a big difference between leadership and management

As you try to go from one to ten, everything breaks.

What got you to one doesn’t get you to ten.

[0:00:01]

Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:05]

Steli: And in today's episode of the Startup Chat, we're going to talk a little bit about what it takes to grow from one million in revenue to 10 million in revenue, right? So, we have a prior episode of the Startup Chat, where we talk about how to get to your first million in revenue. And, we talked a little bit on that episode about this concept that today, it seems easier and faster for many companies to get to that one million mark than ever before. Especially if we focus it on kind of the software space. And then particularly on the SAS space, getting to kind of a one million run rate, or a R rate, is easier than ever before, and many, many companies are breaking that milestone, they're breaking it faster and faster. So, you know, what we thought would be cool is to take that next morsel and say, alright, so once a company surpasses the one million mark, the next kind of stepping stones and milestones that usually are on the five million market and surpassing the ten. And that's also the areas where there's like resistant lines, right, where companies have to, have usually a tough time breaking through, or where some company just like, getting stuck and they're many years in the four or five million mark. Or many years close to the ten but can't quite go through. So, I thought it'd be cool to just talk a little bit about our observations, our own experiences, what it takes for somebody to take a business that's running around the one million mark and pushing it beyond the ten.

[0:01:36]

Hiten: Yeah, let's do some math, so if you're doubling every year at one million, it will take you about three and a half years, roughly speaking, it will take you three to get to eight. If you're tripling every year, it'll take you, what was it? Almost, just two to get to nine.

[0:01:54]

Steli: Right.

[0:01:55]

Hiten: And so, you know, I think my first piece of advice on anybody that's like trying to go from one to ten, is what's your growth rate? How fast can you get the business to grow, because it's really about how fast can you get to ten? And the reason is, like, one to ten is, I mean, zero to one is obviously very difficult. One to ten is not necessarily much easier, it's just different. And, the growth rate is really what's important in terms of how fast are you growing every month, every year in your revenue, in order to go from one to ten? And,