708: (Solo) What Nobody Tells You About Scaling Past $1M, $5M, and $10M

Nathan Chan (0:01)

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Welcome back, Foundr solo to solo episodes where I share all my lessons, all the things I'm learning from building Foundr these past 10 years. So every stage of business breaks you in a different way.

Nobody warns you which thing is about to break. So it always feels like you're the only one who can't figure it out and you're not. The game just changed and nobody told you after building Foundr for 12, 13 years, interviewing 700 Foundrs, the pattern always is the same. The Foundr who got you to one mil is not the same Foundr that gets you to 10 and I've done this journey all the way through from zero to multiple eight figures. So today I'm going to break down exactly what changes at each stage and what actually breaks. So these are the three revenue walls and why each one requires you to become a completely different person.

SPEAKER_2 (1:59)

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Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

Nathan Chan (2:13)

Let's start with the illustrious million dollar wall. This is really the Foundr bottleneck. So at a million dollars, you are the business. You're the salesperson, you're the market, you're the product person, customer support. Now, more than ever, with AI, you can build a million dollar a year business with pretty much yourself, maybe a couple of contractors, some AI agents. You could do it solo, you could do it with a co-founder or multiple co-founders. But it is definitely possible now more than ever. I built a million dollar econ brand with a couple of contractors and my partner at the time. So it's definitely possible. But you're wearing a lot of hats, right? And that's fine until it's not, because the thing that breaks is usually a time. Revenue plateaus not because the market's tapped out, but because there's only one of you and you physically cannot do more. Now, don't get me wrong, you can use AI agents, all these different things, contractors. The fix sounds simple, hire people, delegate, but this is where it gets emotionally brutal, right? Your whole identity is wrapped up in being the person who does everything. And this is the internal monologue that I used to go through. Nobody can do it as well as me. And that's probably true at first. And yes, you can use AI agents, you can systemize things, but there's still a lot of checking. And, you know, I know many people that are big in the AI space and they tell me, Nathan, it's incredible, but there's a lot of things that break. There's a lot of stuffing around with it. It takes a lot of time, right? And so whatever it is, right, sometimes it's not going to be as good as you just doing it every single time. And I learned this the hard way. Like we had our coffee table book, we raised about $200,000 through crowdfunding, incredible result. I priced it at $40 with $40 shipping when it should have been $60, right? The price of the book should have been $60, $20 shipping, same total, completely different psychology, left massive amounts of money on the table. We probably would have raised half a million, maybe even a million dollars, right? If we, if I had to stuff that up. But I was in the stage in my career where I was trying to control every decision myself, instead of having someone who understood this side of things take ownership. And that's the million dollar wall. You have to stop being the person who does everything, thinks about everything, owns everything, and start being the person who finds the right people because your job shifts from doing the work to finding the who. And you know what? Having a million dollar a year business with not that many team members, might be a great thing. You might just do that, right? But if you want to get to that next level, then let's talk about what needs to happen next, because you need to start to build a team. And then we have the 5 mil wall. This is the systems phase. So you've broken through, you've got a team, sub 5, 10, 15 people, revenue is growing. Everything feels held together with duct tape though. The stuff that worked in a million, the slack messages, the gut decisions, just ask Nathan, collapses at 5 million. So you need actual processes, hiring systems, financial reporting, meeting rhythms, strategic planning, OKRs, goals, KPIs, the boring stuff that nobody wants to build. And I know how corporate this sounds, but you need to get what I call the monkeys off your back. You need owners. And that's exactly why most founders resist it. Then that's exactly why they get stuck. And here's the second thing that breaks at 5 mil that's even harder.