Immad Akhund
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Grit · The Difference Between 1% Improvements and 10x Growth | Immad Akhund
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Why Do Companies Keep Chasing 1% Improvements Instead of 10x Bets?
Immad Akhund says a company at scale keeps taking the 1% improvement because it pays now, while a new product usually does not. Getting 1% better at Mercury for business brings in millions and millions of dollars, and a small go-to-market change is enough to get there. A new product that starts at zero and has to reach even a million dollars in revenue takes much more work, and each bet is low probability. Stay on the 1% work and the company settles at a local maximum. The new thing is what can become the next 10x.
Mercury Personal, launched in February, met that resistance. Mercury is a business-to-business company, the teams were already overburdened, and the case against hiring for a per
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Why Should Founders Enjoy the Day-to-day of Building?
Immad Akhund says a founder has to enjoy the journey, because the work lasts too long to run on the highs. His third startup went through four full pivots, each one a start from zero, so the fourth company has felt closer to a seventh or eighth major idea. Across about 20 years of building, what holds is liking the ordinary day: writing code, doing product work, talking to customers, and thinking up the next thing. He was still writing some of the code when the previous company was acquired, and in another life he would have been a software engineer.
Celebrating the wins, or letting every setback drag the day down, works against that. Enjoying the ordinary work is what supplies the energy a
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When Should a Startup Hire Its First Recruiter?
Immad Akhund says a startup should have an internal recruiter once it is looking to hire more than three people a month. People generally wait too long for a recruiter. He hired the first one at about 20 people, after raising 20 million dollars, and counts the timing as right. Quality, speed, and almost every element of hiring improved a ton after that first recruiter.
For most other roles, waiting too long is the better default. Do the job yourself first, even when you do not understand it well, so you learn what the role really needs. A founder will not know whether a hire is doing a good job unless the founder has at least failed at the work. Hiring a bunch of roles you only think you wa
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How Much Revenue Does a Series a Need Now?
Immad Akhund says a reasonable Series A now takes the same 3x yearly growth and probably $3 million a year in revenue, unless the startup is on brand, on thesis, and hot.
A Series A used to get done with $1 million in revenue if the company was growing 3x a year. He treats that as the rough benchmark, and most of the time it was doable. The $1 million mark is no longer good enough. A company on brand, on thesis, and hot can have zero revenue and still get a Series A done. For a company outside that hot set, the growth rate stays at 3x, and the revenue he is seeing is probably $3 million a year before a reasonable Series A comes together. Raises still get finished, but they are much harder t
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What Is a Good Sales Payback Period?
Immad Akhund says a sales hire at a startup with product market fit should pay back their salary in about one year. Keeping a sales team on a one-year target is the spending math he trusts. Ten million spent on sales should bring ten million more in revenue, and fifty million spent on sales should bring fifty million in ARR. He would be shocked if a company running that equation could not raise a future round.
In frothy markets, teams go far too heavy on sales and marketing, and payback stretches to three years or five years. No one will fund a three-to-five-year payback on that spend. A company with zero salespeople should not hire fifty at once. The next hires are two people, then five, w
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Do Founders Have to Be Unrealistically Optimistic?
Immad Akhund says founders have to be unrealistically optimistic. An idea that starts as nothing in the founder's head has to travel all the way to a billion dollars in revenue, and the mindset required is extreme.
Less than 0.1% of startups achieve a billion dollars in revenue. A hundred million in revenue used to count as the cool target. The promised land is now a billion. The founder still has to believe the path is possible: write some code, sell the product, hire the people, and reach a billion dollars in revenue.
Belief has to come first. The founder then has to project that belief to investors, to customers, and to employees. A pitch is relatively unconvincing when the person does
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Why Does Mercury Keep Launching Products Beyond Banking?
Immad Akhund feels some companies get interesting at scale, where you can do more, while other companies converge, and in his view most companies tend to do one thing and then improve that for the rest of their life. Banking is different: a Mercury account holds all of a business's money, it is the first thing a founder sets up, and it is a universal product because every single business needs a bank account.
Mercury Books launched three weeks ago. A founder already signs up for a bank account before an accounting system, and the bank account already has most of the data, so he calls Mercury Books an easy, natural expansion. Mercury Personal, the personal product, just launched as well. Ban
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Why Should Founders Stay Emotionally Steady?
Immad Akhund says founders should stay emotionally steady, because responses that run too positive or too negative make long-term grit hard. A founder who spikes up when good things happen, or spikes all the way down to giving up when something bad happens, will find life hard to manage. He is unsure whether a steady response can be trained.
His wife is doing a startup right now. After many sales, a founder should not enjoy the win, because something bad is going to happen. Startups are a rollercoaster, especially when the work is hard. Sometimes a founder feels great and, the next hour, feels really shitty. Staying emotionally volatile makes long-term grit really hard. Bad outcomes show up
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Why Does Immad Akhund Like Being Challenged?
Immad Akhund finds adversity fun and wants to be challenged. A normal week where nothing tricky is happening and everything is up and to the right feels boring. He wants to do hard things. People who play sports want to do things that might make them lose, even though they do not want to lose.
He plays tennis quite a bit, and always winning would not actually be a game. He often thinks of startups as a game, so he wants hard things there too. Every time Mercury solves something hard, the company has created value to some extent, assuming it was the right difficult thing. Mercury is going through a bank charter process that his previous software companies did not have to deal with. He treats
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How Does a Founder Maximize Grit?
Immad Akhund says a founder maximizes grit only when personal life and business life stay in sync. Burning out means you will not be the highest-grit person. Grit is how long you can last through adverse situations.
The people in the conversations are not running a company in a way that leads to more grit. Personality, personal life, and business life have to sit in sync if the aim is to maximize grit. When you get hit, a customer can say no, or you cannot raise money. Someone already super burned out does not have the perseverance to go through it. How long you can last through adverse situations is the frame of grit.