[SaaS Club] First $1M ARR Without Customer Validation

Hey Reader

I hope you're doing well.

Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club:

🎧 Podcast

The First $1M ARR Without Customer Validation

In 2020, Hung decided to build an end-to-end data platform that would replace the various tools needed to build a decent data infrastructure.

But he didn't interview customers to validate his idea. Instead, he got to work on his product and spent a full year building it.

When he finally launched the product, he realized it was missing a lot of features customers needed. So he spent another two months on it.

It sounds like the stories we often hear (or experience ourselves) i.e. we think we know the problem, so we just go and build a solution.

In most cases that approach fails.

For Hung, it worked out and he hit his first $1M ARR within a year.

We unpack why he was able to do that without doing all the customer validation we talk about. And what if anything he'd do differently.

To date, his company (Y42) has raised $34 million in funding and has several hundred customers and a team of 150 people based in Berlin.

I hope you enjoy it.

Listen to the full podcast episode

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📗 Book of the Week

This week's book recommendation is from Hung:

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Why did Hung recommend this?

"He talks a lot about human bias and it's a super valuable lesson that everybody should understand about human nature. For example, if you want to build a billion dollar company, you need to change human perception in the first place. And like software is all about humans too. It shows human nature with its biases. And within that, there's also a lot of opportunity and potential to build something great."

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Remofirst just raised $14.1 million to make it easy and affordable for companies to hire top talent from anywhere in the world, regardless of where their legal entities are.

Remofirst is an all-in-one platform that allows you to hire employees in 150+ countries without worrying about legal entities, compliance, international payroll, taxes, labor laws, and more.

Pricing starts at $199/mo.

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🌐 Around the Web

YouTube

We're now posting full-length video interviews on YouTube.

So if you want to watch the interview with Hung, check it out there:

😍 Let's Get Social
Want to get more social? Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Have a great week!

- Omer

P.S. I've just launched a new coaching program (Accelerate 2.0). If you're interested in joining the first cohort you can learn more here.

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