How We Grew from $1M to $5M

What got you here won't get you there—or will it?

Hey folks ??, I'm Kenneth Burke. #BurkeBits is where I share stories, data, and frameworks to help you become a better marketer. Subscribe for free to level-up.

I’ve already shared how we made our first $1m at Text Request, but the 3 main things we did were:

• Cold calling our ideal personas
• Outbound email to the same
• Inbound marketing through blogging and SEO

You can see how we made each of those work here.

They say “what got you here won’t get you there,” but, through trial and error we learned that’s not exactly true.

In order to get from $1m to $5m in annual recurring revenue (ARR), we had to keep doing what got us to $1m and also add on a lot of other things. I’ll share with you 5 things that worked and 3 that didn’t.

Keep in mind that I’m telling this story through a marketing and business development lens. Throughout all of this, we were also making significant improvements to our features and customer experience.

5 Ways We Grew From $1M to $5M

1. PR—yes, it actually affected revenue.

After we hit $1M, we thought it was time to tell our story. Only 4% of startups hit $1M, and we were both bootstrapped (not funded) and building outside of Silicon Valley (in Chattanooga, TN), so we felt special.

We partnered with Heed PR (whose co-founder David Martin just published a book on PR for Startups and Growing Businesses that I highly recommend), and started trying to get our story told.

I’ll skip a lot of details here and say that what worked for driving revenue was:

• Building a paper trail of press wins and interviews that helped us solidify deals when prospects went to do their due diligence, and
• Getting coverage in niche industry outlets that our target customers paid attention to

The relative golden goose was being interviewed in an article for ACHR News (heating and air) that directly led to 83+ new paying accounts. We did this again and again, and it helped.

2. Google search ads.

Attribution tracking has been the bane of my marketing existence, but we eventually had clear evidence that when we increased spending on search ads, demos and sales would rise significantly 2-6 weeks later. When we decreased spending, we saw the same happen in reverse.

We had good organic rankings, but this is how we outranked competitors enough to win enough deals to keep fueling the fire of growth.

3. Earning online reviews on key platforms.

We had a terrible problem for awhile where we were creating a ton of qualified sales opportunities and closing very few of them. The #1 closed > lost reason was “chose competitor.”

I can’t remember how we figured out this was the case, but we realized that, even though we were winning in search results to create these sales opportunities, we were losing deals to competitors who had significantly more positive reviews than us on platforms like G2 and Capterra.

It took some tinkering, but we eventually started sending review requests to every user, and it began paying off.

We didn’t create significantly more opportunities this way, but we began winning deals at a much higher rate.

View tactics #4 and #5 that helped us grow to $5m, and 3 things that didn't work, on burkebits.com.