How I went from $0 to $1M in 12 months

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
How long did it take for you to get to one million in revenue?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Took us about a year to get our first million.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
If I copied step by step what you did, could I do the same?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:09)
I think most people could replicate the same strategy that we used. On a roadless trail.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
Tyler, what's up, man? How are you?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
What up, how's it going?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Did you see the YouTuber, I think his name is Lab Coats, who copied, he figured out the Coke formula from scratch after two years of testing. Did you see this?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:35)
No, no.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:36)
Okay, so the Coke formula, the flavor for Coca-Cola is top secret. There's like, I don't know, a handful of people in the world who have ever known it at Coke, they never patent it because if you patent it, you publish it and then other people can clone it. And so this YouTuber, after two years of scientific testing, flavor testing, made a chemically identical formula for Coke. So he literally got it exactly right. And people are worried for this guy. They're like, dude, you need security. Coke does not take this lightly, but it's a pretty remarkable thing. And I feel like what you're giving us right now is the sauce, just like that. It's like brick by brick way that you can build, get those first hundred users, then those first thousand users, then that first ten thousand of revenue and get to the first million of revenue, and then now you're at 30 million of revenue. And I'm kind of wondering if we can kind of remix what you did. How long did it take for you to get to one million in revenue?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:38)
Took us about a year to get our first million.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:40)
Okay. So it took you a year to get to a million in revenue. By year two, where were you at?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:45)
About five million in revenue, so five X in year two.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:48)
And now where are you?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:50)
We just did about 30 million in revenue last year, which was our fourth year in business.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:56)
Yeah, your growth is bananas. And you're one of the investor updates that I like to open up. But what I thought would be cool, and we were talking, we were like, what would be fun to talk about here? Really, I think it's about growth. I have this book that's on my bookshelf called Steel Like an Artist. And this book is basically about how most of what we think is original, is a remix or a straight up copy of something that came before it. And I feel like your story is kind of like that. You were at Morning Brew and you helped make Morning Brew the fastest growing newsletter. And it got to $75 million in revenue and it exited and all this good stuff. And then you took kind of like the learnings from that, you remixed it into a product so that anybody could grow their product. And I'm kind of wondering if we can kind of remix what you did and see if we can extract the basic principles so that anybody who's out there trying to get to that first million in revenue can copy what you did. So I want you to walk me through what did you do to grow and not like the high level, like build a great product, but like the real shit, the specific stuff that actually worked.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:04)
Yeah, let's get into it.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:05)
What was the first thing that worked? You're ground zero. You have no customers, no revenue. How did you get going?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:11)
Yeah, I actually think you already hit on it a bit of like, I think about founder market fit a lot and the morning brew story of actually, and you've talked about this before, of taking something you did at a company or something you've learned previously, become an expert in a low risk way as an employee, and then apply those learnings to start a new business. I think in the founders that I've backed and seen become extremely successful, there's typically a through line between them doing that previously and then launching again. Quick story that I've never actually told before is while I was at Morning Brew, crypto between 2017 and 2020 was the biggest thing ever. I didn't even own any Bitcoin.
I had no business starting a crypto business, but I was like a founder. I wanted to get into crypto. So I found this open source library of a 3D model of a cold storage wallet. I found someone in China who could make them, bought a thousand of them, shipped them to New York, and then on day two, started just trying to sell cold storage crypto wallets.