This is a post by Jesse Pujji. Jessi a serial entrepreneur that lives in the US. He has:
- Bootstrapped to an 8-figure exist with his previous startup, Ampush
- Is currently building GatewayX, a venture studio that he plans to bootstrap to $1B+
- Executive Chairman & Founder of GrowthAssistant.com
- ex-McKinsey Consultant
Guest Author: Jesse Pujji
$12M ARR in 3 years. Profitable. 150+ customers. 400+ employees.
That’s what Adriane, I and an incredible team built at GrowthAssistant.
Here’s how we did it and what I learnt:
In early 2021, I started building my Venture Studio dream.
I had a simple test for starting a business: If there is a big mkt, a clear value prop, I find the right people and I have an “unfair advantage” I will start it.
At Mckinsey, Goldman, and then when I ran Ampush, we leveraged offshore teams for all the rote tasks. Formatting slides, pulling simple reports, etc. When I started investing in DTC brands, I found that many didn’t do that.
And the result? What Ampush got done in 3 weeks, they got done in 3 months. So a simple idea was born: Full-time, college-educated growth/mktg/sales-trained people to work directly on startups/DTC teams. We find, screen, train and place them with companies.
They do reporting, URL tagging, QA, video edit, creative formatting, SDR tasks, affiliate, influencer
And I found the perfect partner: Adriane was my middle school best friend who’d left corporate HR and was ready to be her own boss. So I pitched it to her and she was in. We had our first sale in <30 days.
And we started building out our ops: recruiting, marketing, sales, implementations etc. Today, three years later, Hubspot, DoorDash, True Classic, and 150 more incredible companies are clients. And we’re still growing at 60% year-over-year! I believe this can be a big business.
It is dead simple yet adds a TON of value for all the stakeholders. And it’s serving a real need in the market. Adriane is growing every day as a CEO and it’s so fun to partner with her.
The lessons?
Here are my top 3:
1/ Focus.
We had so much inbound in the early days and such a huge reach now, that we can serve any client in any market. But keeping the focus on marketing roles for startups, DTCs, agencies has helped us build an excellent offering in a narrow field. And it’s a meaningful differentiator.
2/ Painkiller > Vitamin
Growth teams are the most inundated at most startups. Endless list of ideas. Constant desire for growth. A ton of rote work to get there. People felt this pain and it was obvious from our huge waitlist plus 40% meeting to close rate.
3/ Founder unfair advantages
– I know Growth Marketing well, understand all the specific tasks and have offshored for a decade.
– I also have a massive network of founders and CMOs and even former ampush employees we could get in front of.
– Adriane had built large scale, high quality recruiting funnels for 10 years in finance. She had stood up tons of operations/systems.
– Bonus is we’ve known each other for 25 years so had tons of trust, candid feedback etc.
Check out the original tweet here.
