He took 3 years to make his 1st sale—then grew 1000x to $10M ARR 3 years later. | Alex Hoff, Founder of Auvik

Alex got the co-founder of a public company to join him and raised $6M out of the gate—but it took him 3 years to make his first sale. 

But after he shifted from selling to SMBs to selling to MSPs (Managed Service Providers i.e., outsourced IT), things took off:

April 2015 - $1K MRR
August 2015 - $10K MRR
June 2016 - $100K MRR
Nov 2018 - $1M MRR ($12M ARR)

And growth never stopped—soon, he'll cross $100M ARR.

Alex and his co-founder did many things differently. They came up with an idea by starting with markets, not customer problems. They raised a lot of money upfront and built a sophisticated product instead of an MVP. And they deliberated cultural values before making their first hire.

Clearly—it worked.

Why you should listen

• Learn why you should define culture before making your first hire.
• How to find market trends and customer problems top-down instead of bottoms-up.
• Why keeping your product unchanged but targeting a different market can have a massive impact and lead to product-market fit. 
• Why you should be willing to be bold and not hedge.
• Why you should only focus on one thing at a time.
• How to use constraints to do more things faster.

Keywords

Auvik, software company, networking, SMBs, mid-market, decoupling, control plane, hardware, software solution, automate, configuration, user research, product design, team, company values, SaaS, IT management, product-market fit, pivot, managed service provider, MSP, boldness, discipline, advice

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:47) The Origin of Auvik
(00:07:20) Finding a co-founder
(00:12:35)  It's People Who Build Companies
(00:14:10)  Finding the Concept for Auvik
(00:20:07)  Buikding the Product
(00:30:30)  First Customer Experiences
(00:34:40)  Feedback Loops
(00:39:08)  Getting to a Million
(00:41:33)  Finding Product Market Fit
(00:42:54) One Piece of Advice

Send me a message to let me know what you think!