Scale or Die

When Brian Moran was growing up, his father gave him a piece of advice that stuck with him: learn to sell. After playing collegiate baseball, studying marketing, and running two online businesses, Brian launched SamCart, an e-commerce shopping cart software that helps small businesses get their online stores up and running. SamCart made quite the splash — and proved Brian truly knew how to sell —  when it turned into a $1 million dollar business overnight.

As a software startup, you can be focused on a lot of things: customers, revenue, churn, or even competitors. The focus you decide on helps dictate both the culture and direction of your business. At Proof, we recently made a paradigm shift — going from an MRR-obsessed mindset to a customer-focused one. Dave chimes in on his rationale for this change, and the initiatives he’s taking to build this focus into all parts of our business.

On Founder Fridays, Dave weighs in with what's going through his mind as he grows Proof. This week we'll cover core values in-depth. Dave talks about why core values are important (even at an early stage), how Proof settled on our 7 values, and why you shouldn't copy the values of other companies.

Nathan Barry isn't the typical startup founder. His company is based outside of a major tech hub (he lives in Boise, Idaho), he's bootstrapped his business to ~$1.3 MM in MRR, and he's as transparent as they come (putting all his financials up online for the world to see).

In four short years, Teachable has grown to over $1 million of monthly revenue and last year, they helped their creators sell close to $190 million in courses. And one of the most unique aspects of Ankur's story is that he's scaled his business by following the counter-intuitive philosophy of "do things that don't scale." Find out why it works for Teachable and how you can apply this lesson to your own business.

Drift is a company that we've been intrigued by for a long time. In this episode, David Cancel (also known as the uncle, D.C., or the GOAT) gives us his learnings from his 20+ year career as a serial SaaS entrepreneur. He's had five companies acquired (BuyerZone, Compete, Lookery, Ghostery, Performable), he served as Chief Product Officer at Hubspot, and now he's building Drift into one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses of all-time.

In the tech world, if you don’t scale, your business will die. Join our host, Dave Rogenmoser, co-founder of Proof, as he uncovers proven strategies from the growth experts behind some of the world’s fastest growing startups.