Going from $0 to $2M ARR in 2 years | Hacker News Reader

Going from $0 to $2M ARR in 2 years

laskie.co

168 pointsgatsby44 comments

I don't mind paying for expert advice,but I need to confirm if the person is expert or not. your website have no data/proof showing expertise related track records. I suggest you to add case studies(if any) and more free insightful content which will support your claims.if you are new find clients you may already know, and later publish your findings.

for real example, I have really fair understanding of tech, grocery store management, accounts and in-corporation regulations(for india),a good knowledge about construction materials, adhesives and civil work. I want to start as an advisor for tech startups and a civil construction & adhesive consultation. I have good track of cases where my advice saved 10s thousands from my advice, I can easily start here with some good testimonials from famous clients. on other side, for tech startups I must start from scratch.

But an ARR of 2 million is an order of magnitude more than the thousands you charged for saving your client 10s. This is about building a value driver instead of preventing a cost driver.

that advice needed one site visit with 5 minute of inspections. and those thousands usd[10k usd=7.2Lac INR,more than average software developers pay per year in India] in Indian labour will cost 10 times if it was in USA. Every dollar saved is an asset in balance-sheet.

Nice too peek behind the curtain and see some of the effort and thought going into the ‘cold emails’. As a recipient of several thousand in my work email over the years, as an IT contact, I often wonder who’s writing them, and if I was on a list or directly targeted. Although I can offer my anecdote as a lead about the two I have responded to- 1) sent on New Year’s Day offering basketball tickets to a suite for a meet and greet, and 2) a $50 Amazon gift card for doing a 5 minute survey.

Finally got around to reading this. Great guide, thank you for sharing.

It’s possible to read your entire web site and still have no clue what your company does.

Brilliant.

The article is just an excuse to sell their services. But agreed it's pretty vague.

Also, the tone/bitchiness of the comments for the article are truly the worst I've ever read on HN in a long while. Raise the tone or just take it somewhere else.

Pot, kettle.

Written by AI?

Where is the $2m story? Not even a mention of the company?

Author here, our company also went through YC in 2015.

Email me with any questions: chris at laskie.co

Let’s talk pop up on https://laskie.co/ takes in an empty input.

surprised you never gave an example of a frigid ice cold polar bear kind of cold email.

could you drop one in the comments here?

Sure. I'll help as my company does cold email as a service.

Greeting SNIP Relevance CTA

Hey Bold,

Saw your HN question about an example of an "ice cold polar bear kind of email."

I write emails like this all day for companies like Boldslogan. Would be happy to walk your through it in 10 or 12 minutes.

Zoom on Tuesday or Wed?

Nice! You got me to check out your website :)

FWIW this sort of email triggers my immediate shutdown reactions in several ways: use of "Hey" greeting from some unknown non-friend, general (albeit here not total) avoidance of first-person pronouns[1], phony-baloney specificity in time and duration for an initial meeting.

[1] "Saw your email," "Would love to hear more"--no, avoiding "I" does not make the writer appear stronger.

It doesn't work all the time, but it works well enough.

Well done, and thanks for sharing your insight. Small gripe, I found this line in your article's opening remarks a unnecessary - "If that doesn't ring a bell, then please ignore this and go about your life a few million poorer."

A bit of feedback on your landing page: Something about "hyperlocal incentivization" caught my eye and I was thoroughly confused. Then read the whole paragraph and actually laughed out loud.

The next thing I did was actually look at the products, because you'd got me in a good mood.

Brilliant piece of copy.

> If that doesn't ring a bell, then please ignore this and go about your life a few million poorer.

This line is distasteful and detracts from the rest of what you wrote.

seems like dry humor :)

What is the joke?

If one has to explain a joke then either they're bad at it, it's a bad joke or they have the wrong audience....I'll leave the conclusion as to which is it to the readers :)

The article is about making money (even from the title)..the commented upon line is insinuating that if you think the article isn't for you (ie you just randomly stumbled upon it), then you obviously are not interested in making money...sarcasm :)

His language is really sloppy and amateur throughout. He also has this bad line, “Everything about a startup is sales”.

No it’s not, unless you’re selling snake oil.

Sounds like you're not interested in making money.

I’m interested in adding value and helping make progress in the world, money is secondary, but I have plenty of money.

it's really easy to not care about money when you already have it.

Oh for sure, I grew up poor and am now on the other side. But that’s not what the author is talking about. He’s condescending to people that are making $250k/year for ”leaving millions” on the table. At $250k/year you don’t have to care about money a whole lot, and you can make that being a developer.

You missed the sarcasm, GP was agreeing with you by means of a joke.

It's ok, no one forced you to read it I hope.

Sounds like hyper aggressive salespeople being parodied in a movie. But then again I know some people talk like that in real life.

The article is actually useful, despite the annoying introduction line of `a few million poorer`. People could stop reading the article for whatever reasons.

Just one typo I believe, at the end of https://laskie.co/playbooks/bootstrapping-b2b-sales/cold-ema..., should be `same for emails` instead of `same for calls`.

Nicely laid out! I was struggling with buyers persona, your guide helped me create the perfect personal for my buyers!

Nicely done. We're more of a boutique shop building custom machine learning products for large enterprise in the mid six-figure range, slowly moving into abstracting many of what we learned into our internal ML platform[0].

Many good points about picking sectors and roles. We built for many sectors and roles, but repeat business is important as we end up developing a relation with our clients and they come to us with many other problems.

I tweeted about what worked for us[1] and been musing on turning that and other tweets and replies in here into posts. Again, congrats. This feels nice.

- [0]: https://iko.ai

- [1]: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...

“Everything about a startup is sales”

Haha, nope.

Sounds like you've never done it.

Never done what? I’ve never worked in sales if that is what you mean. Not sure how that’s relevant.

Oh, sorry. I meant ran a startup. You're right, it's not relevant.

So you’re saying the only thing that matters at a startup is sales?

Certainly not. I'm just saying that sales is probably a bigger factor than you think. I'm going to assume that you're an engineer. Tech alone doesn't make a business successful. More so than not it makes a business fail. I agree that the statement "Everything about a startup is sales" is exaggerated. Although, I will say that good sales outweighs good tech the majority of the time. It baffles me that people don't recognize that.

I’m an executive at a fortune 100 company. The article/post was sloppily written.

Fortune 100 is not a startup. It’s a giant wheel where 95% of the workforce is pretending they are doing something, including executives.

I was replying to his condescending assumption, “ I'm going to assume that you're an engineer”

Sales is important, it’s not the only thing.

BTW, most startups are miny cults where employees are suckered into taking a pay cut to “change the world with disruptive blah blah blah”, and as you can see from the author of this post, the founders are just trying to line their pockets.

Yes, startups are definitely like that. I was lucky to not work in those kinds of startups.

What happened all the time is that I would look at competition and be surprised by their success. Their product would be extremely bad compared to ours.

I would be surprised by the amount of missing features (that they still listed in their product sheets). They would close million dollar deals promising features that they barely or never delivered.

But checking out their team, they would all be very experienced salesmen.

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