Slash, @slashapp, just crossed $150M in annualized revenue profitably. We went from $2M -> $150M in 24 months making us the fastest-growing business banking* platform of all time. 700 word post on 4 guiding principles that got us here. This cost us >$10M dollars to learn... (Bookmark this) I'll cover: • Picking the right market (where 99% of founders go wrong) • Why revenue is the ONLY business metric that matters • Why market saturation is fake • What every founder does day to day that they shouldn't 1. Attack “small” markets: Startup founders - myself included - gravitate towards working on companies that have huge upside. Here's the problem: it’s difficult to find aggressive product-market fit / build a differentiated product if you don’t sell ONE offer to ONE person. I'll repeat: one offer, to one person Examples: • PayPal didn't start by trying to own 70% of online payments they started with payment processing just for eBay merchants. • Uber started as black cars for rich SF people. Ask yourself, what am I selling and to who? If you're selling more than one thing to more than one person, in the beginning, you're not niche enough. Slash started by building a better credit card for SNEAKER RESELLERS. Ridiculously niche. And that tiny wedge alone got us to $5M ARR in 11 months. Once you dominate the niche, you earn the right (and the cash) to expand outward. We STILL go after “small” verticals because our competitors are too arrogant to do it. We walk in and own them. 2. Revenue is the only metric that matters. Everything else is cope. If your revenue isn't growing, nothing else matters. Revenue gives you two things: A) Money to redeploy. (Obvious.) B) Momentum. A team that’s winning wants to work harder. A team that’s losing checks out. To become a unicorn, you have to outwork everyone else. To outwork everyone else, you need morale. To get morale, you need wins. To get wins, you need revenue. Everything ladders back to one thing: Sell more, sooner. Drive sales and demand → everything else falls into place. 3. “Market saturation” is fake. When starting Slash, everyone told us we'd never be successful because Ramp, Brex, and Mercury were already worth > $10bn. The reality is that fintech is only 5% penetrated. 95% of business deposits and corporate card spend still runs through the legacy banks. Many markets are similar to B2B fintech. They can “feel” settled because there is a sexy startup that everyone’s heard about, but dinosaurs have all the rev share. There's always a way to find your wedge. 4. 99% of founders do the wrong thing at the wrong time When you start your role as the founder is to do EVERYTHING. And you should outsource nothing. Example: If you run an ecom business you should write film and edit EVERY single script. If you're a CTO you should write every line of code. Biggest 🚩in an early stage founder is someone who says they need to "outsource to an expert". No. You ARE the expert or you become one. Founders who outsource early are lazy. When you grow this needs to change rapidly. >10M ARR you need to SHIFT fast. Your role as the founder should be to bring in people competent enough to deliver on all of your initiatives. There is simply too much to do and it won’t be possible for you to brute force your way out of every problem. We're winning because 65% of our team is on the spectrum. We have savant engineers who this year alone have, shipped treasury, Stablecoin Payments, check deposits, SWIFT, Global USD, accounting automations, a completely new interface, and more. We have a world-class GTM and ops team. Because of it, we blow our competitors out of the water when it comes to revenue / employee, payment volume / employee, and other efficiency metrics. -------- If you have read this far, thank you. I got told countless times Slash would never be anything. We want Slash to be the first trillion dollar fintech company in the world. At our current growth rate we'll hit 1 billion dollars in revenue run rate in 18 months and 100 billion in 7 years. We’re giving it our all to accelerate our growth rate and hit these metrics even faster.
