Here's how I added $10m revenue over the last 18 months, HiFello CEO

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My name is Stephen London. I am the co-founder of Fellow, and I am super, super excited to share how we went from zero to 10 million in ARR in 18 months. We can actually change that title in two weeks to zero to 15 million in 24 months, hopefully.

So, first of all, who is Fellow? We are a marketing engagement platform, AI-powered. We're building more and more AI capabilities every day. So that's a huge emphasis for us. We started in residential real estate, and our heroes are real estate agents. However, we're going to expand over the next couple of years, both products and capabilities in real estate, and then also to other verticals. So, how did we do it? First of all, a shit-ton of hard work and pain and ups and downs and a lot of luck. But here's our revenue growth.

This is personally my favorite chart that we have.

We went from zero, we launched in October '22, and then we're about to cross 15 million, hopefully, within the next two weeks. As I mentioned, we'll be at 20 million by the end of the year. So, wild, I mean, it's crazy to see a chart that encompasses so much pain in one place, and it looks so pretty and easy to understand, but it definitely is not. So, what is the story, and what are the lessons and hacks that I can share with you guys, and hopefully you can take a couple nuggets away from today and maybe apply them to your business. So, a quick show of hands before we start. Who is in the kind of zero-to-one

stage of their company? Who's in one to 10? Okay, and who is in 10-plus? All right, so, most in one to 10, perfect. I think, generally, in terms of these three stages, which is pre-revenue, kind of zero-to-one, and then product-market fit at some point in the one-to-10s, and I call it dots, ants, and rockets. So, I always think about it like, dots are connecting the dots. These are the framework of your idea. It actually applies throughout the life cycle of your business, but these are the things you need to nail upfront. So, first comes team. If you don't get this right, it's like a bad

marriage, your life is terrible, you've got conflicts. And so, I think the key there is upfront, you really have to know yourself and be honest, because I think if you're not honest, it's very hard and you're a little delusional. And all of us in the room are entrepreneurs, we think we are smarter and can solve more problems than everybody else, and if you say no, you're lying, because you probably do. So, the more that you know yourself, I think it's easier to understand where you need to supplement and where your co-founders can help out. One other thing, the guy on the right, Ryan, is one of my childhood best friends, and for a long time, I was always, we were talking to VCs, always embarrassed and would hide that and all this stuff. And what I've realized is that's actually

one of the strongest assets we have as a company, is that both from a culture standpoint and from a resolving conflict standpoint, you have somebody that you understand how to work with. And once you figure that out, I think we've hit our stride. It took us a couple of years to really hit our stride as founders, but... You start to let go and you can start working with your team more and more, understanding who's doing what. I think that's that's critical. If somebody can do something 80% as good as you can, they should probably be doing it as you scale. So, quick idea point here. Great ideas always sound crazy, so don't worry about sharing

them. Oftentimes, as entrepreneurs, we have this idea, we want to launch this product, and then we don't share it and, you know, we don't want somebody to take the idea. The best ideas, when you say to somebody, here's a little trick, they will go right over their head, or they'll think it's so crazy or weird that it doesn't resonate. That's how you know you may be on to a good idea. So, stay fluid with the idea. We launched, actually, not in software. We raised a seed round in 2021 off of the eye-buying concept. So, it's asset-based, and we pivoted because we had the software in October of '22, and it's just taken off ever since then. So, we raised about $3 million seed round.

So, while the idea isn't important, I think the story is everything, and I'm going to get more into the personal brand and the how important brand is these days. But, a quick question on the story, as you're going out to the market and telling it. To me, you know, this is one of the most important things you can nail. Who's going to be the face? I'm fairly confident, to grow very fast in this day and age, depending unless it's a highly technical aspect, you need somebody to be the face. So, first, you have to figure out who's going to be the face, what is that origin story, and then who is your hero? So, our hero are real estate agents. We build everything so we can decentralize real estate for them. That has been something that's been at the threat of everything we've done.

So, next phase, now you're in the zero to one. You have your idea, you have your team, and you have your story. You are now ants, and everybody laughs when they say ants. What I mean by ants is, you know, a long time ago, I read a book, I think it was called Emergence. But it was about how the organization of ant colonies. And I always took away that it's fascinating to me that you have these tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of creatures that just go out in the world trying to find food. When one finds something, you relay the signal, and everybody pivots towards that idea. And I think as you're, you know, trying to find that market fit, the more experiments you run, the more you can kind of test that, the faster, the better. So how do you do that? One, you need power users all the way down.

So one of our advantages are Ryan, he's a real estate agent. He has a team. He is a power user. Everything we build, he tests with his team. Our CPO and CTO, who are the two other guys in that picture, co-founders are obsessed. They're, you know, I think I work hard. You think you work hard. These guys are psychopaths. They just are obsessed with the product and just keep working all day long. And the third hack, we had actually investors as users. So after the seed round, we pivoted ideas and had to raise a million dollars in safe kind of funding. And we made a conscious choice to not, you know, work with VCs, not work with other entities

and raise from users of the product. So top real estate teams. And that's been immensely helpful, both from a feedback loop, probably a little less from feedback, more from just the social proof of it.

Here is a quick, you know, something I'm personally really proud of.

We, as you start being ants, you're running as many experiments as you can. We created a very flat organization. I think I would recommend that for anybody that's certainly sub 10. As many people that can be empowered to do as many tests as possible wins. We spent, so in 2023, we went from 400,000 in ARR to 7 million in ARR. And we spent $80,000 on marketing, which is wild. And I'll talk a little bit about how we did that, but I think an important lesson from that is spending money on marketing does not make good marketing. You have to spend money on marketing when you have product market fit and you know what you're doing from a marketing perspective.

Otherwise, you are spinning your wheels.

So here are some experiments we ran. We gave away the product for free. We did free onboarding. We hired people without an exercise, which is a terrible idea. We ruined our email domain. We hired demand gen agencies. Didn't work out. But some random fun things that worked. We threw a free party. So we kind of convinced this other larger organization, hey, I want access to real estate agents. And we said, okay, great. Why don't you throw the party? We'll pretend like we're hosting it and then you guys and your team can attend. So we threw this party for 200 people. Worked out great at a conference. We ran a 30-day challenge. So we gave away the software for free for a year to whoever won this 30-day challenge. It engaged our entire community.

Text message post. People text, oh, man, this software is awesome. Everywhere. So the social proof of that. Get on as many podcasts and webinars as possible. It is one of the most, you know, easiest hacks, both from it helps you practice telling that story, but also it's just free. You can repurpose that. I think Nathan talked about it, talked about it. And then building a community. That is the engine that can take you to a billion dollars in ARR, but you have to start building that early on. So this, this slide, you know, the Madonna song, we live in a material world. I think if you're going to take away one or two things, this is one of the slides I

would encourage you to take away. How many people get forwarded something on Instagram or see a YouTube short or listen to something on a podcast and three weeks later you remember it? You don't remember where you heard it from or where you saw it from. And these little cultural pieces of information, you know, which is a meme, not the funny frog joke of what a meme is, but a meme in terms of sharing cultural information. This gets into our heads and we forget where we hear things. So as a hack of, from a marketing standpoint, if you can provide enough social proof in enough places, it's gonna start implanting in people's heads.

And, you know, we have an expression, "Hit 'em from every angle." You "hit 'em from every angle," meaning podcasts, social media, all that stuff. And ultimately, you know, my favorite line I hear at conferences all the time now from us is, "I see you guys all over the place." "How have I heard about this?" Or, "I heard somebody say it was great. I can't remember who said that." And that is because we are blasting the airwaves with social proof. And it's all honest people saying positive things about us. We're not making any tricks. But it's the just constant getting into the subconscious minds of your users that is incredibly powerful.

All right, so now you have product-market fit. You're in the, let's call it, 1 to 10, 3, whatever that range is. For us, it was 3. I remember saying to our co-founders at 3, if we, and I remember I was at dinner when it happened, "If we hit 3, we can hit 100." Like, I'm very confident. But we just have to get to 3 first. And we hit 3, and then it is now a different game. And you have to kind of stop at some point, you'll know when that point is, and say, "Okay, I got something here. Now, how do I grow this as fast as humanly possible?" So, one exercise I'd love you guys to do when you get home, or on the plane, or for wherever. I think it's, it sounds very simplistic.

It'll take you 5 minutes, but it will change your business if you do it right. Take a piece of paper and a pen and sit down, and, not with your mind, because you're gonna say, "Well, I can't do that. And I don't have salespeople." Dream something big for next year, or next month, whatever you want to do. Dream something so big that it makes you uncomfortable. If it's not big enough and it's not making you uncomfortable, you are not a dream big. So if you say, "I want to grow 50% next year. I want to raise a Series A at this valuation." Double it. Make it so uncomfortable that you, in your mind, is just constantly saying, "We can't do that, we can't do that, we can't do that." Once you have that big goal, I think this is the important part.

You have to dissociate from reality. You're gonna say, "I can't do this. We have no AAs. Well, we don't have a marketing budget. Well, we don't have this or that." This is where the genius happens. Pretend you're just playing a game. Okay, it's not me, it's somebody else. How would I do that? You know, we can make affiliate percentage 50%. We can give people $0 salary and 70% commission. It doesn't matter what it is, what the variables are, but I think the important thing is you have to separate yourself from the day-to-day reality of your business and pick something huge. And you will be shocked, if you do this right, how powerful this exercise is.

Last couple things. Culture, another thing we learned from rocket ships standpoint. Your internal culture reflects your external culture. And it's not some words on a slide. So we used to, we had five, 10 employees. We used to write these exact core values down and have people read it every meeting, and it's just bullshit. It's only bullshit because your real core values are what you are every day. It's a radiation of kind of the team. And to determine them, it's very simple. You just have to think through which employees didn't make it and why, and which employees made it and why.

And those are your core values. So as you think about, you know, this person didn't make it because they weren't gritty enough, or they got pissed when I asked them hard questions, or at 4:30 they checked out every day and that just made me so angry. Those are your core values as a company. And that reflects and radiates outwards into your external culture, which is so important. And this goes back to the community, I would say, overspend on your community. If you want to get to build a massive company, you need a community. We have Facebook groups, I'll talk about that in a second. But we, every conference we go to, we get testimonials. We have the top right there. One of our clients, we couldn't attend.

We had them accept the awards for us. We gave, you know, this is again going back to the growth hacks. Put on conferences to promote our ICPs as heroes. That's the listing challenge on the bottom right. We made a wrestling belt, which was really fun. So the culture of, you know, this vibrancy, especially if you're in dying or slow growth industries that haven't adapted and changed in a long time. You bring some life to that industry. I think it's going to be so well received and that can be your culture. Last slide, I heard a couple of people talking about this yesterday.

I think, again, there's only one way to hypergrowth, and that is leverage. So leverage can mean a lot of different things. Leverage content for marketing. Affiliates has been a huge angle for us. People love us. We want to reward them for sharing that. Shared knowledge for CS. So we have, bottom right is our Facebook leadership. We actually have two Facebook groups, one leadership and one for single agents. I think we have 2,000 in the leadership group now. We have had a community that really talks a lot about what we do, shares knowledge. We have a fellow academy, which we just launched a couple of months ago, where we're

doing masterclasses and tips and webinars. And so the goal there is just, how do we leverage everything that a different user figures out or asks a question and just mass broadcast that. Last two, quick plug for Founder Path. Early on, we actually did a quick deal with them and was super easy. I remember Nathan called me on a Friday and I was like, who is this? He just kind of went on and said, I want to make sure you're a real person. So debt is good if you have ROI behind it, and it's not great if you don't have ROI behind it. And last thing that's been a huge hack for us is leveraging the world for talent. So

We are a COVID baby as a company. We had never had an office before. We've never, my co-founders and I rarely see each other in person. And we have people working in five different countries. We have people all over the United States. If somebody's $120,000 in New York and they're $80,000 in Idaho, Idaho it is. So I think the ability to leverage the world at this point is a really undertapped resource for a lot of people. And I think, you know, you have to, you have to work hard and get lucky with some of the hires, but I'll say a lot of people that we've hired from different countries are harder

working and more appreciative of the job than the people in the US. And that has been, you know, we have this kind of global company at this point, which is kind of fun. So let me pause there. Hopefully that was encapsulated some of the stuff we learned over the last now 24 months. And I put a QR code with my LinkedIn. I love helping. We received a ton of help over the last few years. You have any questions, you want to connect, anything, I'm there if you want to reach out. So appreciate your time. Thank you very much, and I'll hang out after if anybody wants to chat.