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Getting from $0m - $1m is impossible. Getting from $1m — $10m is improbable. Getting from $10m — $100m is inevitable. - From Impossible to Inevitable, Jason M. Lemkin and Aaron Ross 10 lessons learned in over 10 years helping startups get to $10M ARR and beyond: 1. Go small to go big. Find your best fit customers early, and ruthlessly defend your prioritization. 2. Hire behind demand. Your sales team is not there to create leads! They are there to harvest the demand you have and convert it to $$$. 3. Hiring someone with big company experience to figure out how to run sales/marketing/product/etc. for you will fail 90% of the time. Hire people who have been successful at your stage - ideally at multiple companies. 4. Your market will look very different at $10M than it did at $2M. Don’t worry too much about planning the whole journey - the plan will change 3 times (or more) along the way. 5. Invest in your post-sales process as early as possible. Your existing customers should become your greatest source of revenue and your most valuable lead channel. But this won’t happen if you mismanage onboarding and ghost until the renewal. 6. Don’t rely on your champions to sell for you. Think about how much work it took for you to figure out how to sell your solution....now think about the chances that someone you’ve spoken to for 74 total minutes will be able to sell it for you (very low). 7. Relevance is more important than relationships. Having industry connections might get you in the door, but if you don’t have a plan to deliver value quickly once you’re in it won’t matter. Having something people want is always the best door opener. 8. Document your process for everything, even if it isn’t perfect. You won’t know what to change if you don’t know what you’re regularly doing. 9. 70% of startups fail due to premature scaling. If you find something that works, don’t start doing more things. KEEP DOING THE THING THAT WORKS. It will take you farther than you think. 10. Be willing to change when it’s time. The things that got you to one level of growth will not get you to the next one. Stay unattached to the way things have been done so you can continue evolving. What’s been your biggest learning? Drop it in the comments!