🇦🇺 Alex is Building

Day 320 of growing SuperX to $100k MRR Progress: $22k MRR 🟩🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ (22%) I left Cyprus 🇨🇾:

I'm 33. I built a startup to $10,000,000 ARR in 2 years. If I had to start over from scratch… Here's exactly how I'd rebuild a 7-figure company in under 12 months:

Here’s my backstory on how we took Stan Store to $30m ARR: When my co-founder and I started Stan, it was just the immigrant grind for years with lots of frugality and sheer hustle. There was even a time when we returned an IKEA table after using it in an Airbnb for some time, asking ourselves: "Are we building something that looks like a startup? Or something that actually helps people make a living?" And that question drove everything that followed. Early on in our journey to $30M ARR, we made a decision most advisors disagreed with. - No transaction fees to use Stan - Flat subscription, no upsells - $29/month price. People told us we were leaving millions on the table by not charging a transaction fee. Like every single one of our competitors did. And guess what? They were right. We left the money there on purpose. Because we realized that the moment you take a cut, you’re no longer on the Creator’s side. You’re just the middleman. We wanted Creators to win more because they used Stan. Not win less because we skimmed the top. Trust compounds faster than revenue. That turned out to be true. As growth picked up, so did the pressure. “Hire faster”, “Build a big team”, “Spend to show momentum.” We ignored all of this. Instead, we asked one question over and over: "What breaks if we don’t hire?" Most of the time, the answer wasn’t “people” … but systems. So we instead, we automated and simplified as much as we could. Deleting features. Building self-serve tools. Then, and only then, we hired people. Today, Stan serves 80,000+ Creators: They make $200M+ per year using the platform. Three years into building, we celebrated: ~$30M ARR. ~30 people. ~7 engineers. And a relentless focus on: – trust – speed – product – and not doing work that doesn’t need to exist So when I see posts that talk about Stan as the “fastest-growing startup I’ve seen”… I get it. But the real story that needs to be told is not the one about speed. It’s the one about restraint. We said no more than we said yes and we didn’t optimize for looking successful. What we optimized for was being helpful and creating fundamental value for our customers. We like to say that we didn't build Stan alone. The Creators built it with us. One at a time. Over the years. And that, out of any ARR, MRR or GMV… That’s the only leaderboard that actually matters.

New house 🔓 Im going to use GPT to design my office. Wish me luck.

FaZe Banks says everything is “cooked” and most people aren’t ready for what’s coming “You open up Twitter now and everything’s cooked politics is cooked crypto’s dead dating’s fried everyone’s an incel everyone’s a virgin it’s all fucked and AI is coming for your jobs your wives your kids” “You need three things money attention or at minimum the understanding of attention and how that shit all works and the third thing is AI literacy these three things we believe are gonna hold value and likely increase in their value over the next five to 10 years” “Shit could get dark if you’re a paralegal in your last semester of law school and you owe $400,000 in college debt and Claude does your job better than you and ChatGPT does your job better than you you are fucked my brother”