Learning to soothe my teething baby helped me close $526,380 in ARR

Wait... what?

How does soothing my daughter through a rough set of teething pain close $526,380 in revenue for my company?

I get it, the correlation doesn't make much sense.

It's sort of like me saying the increase in ice cream sales equates to an increase in murders....

oh wait... that's actually real.

Crazy right?

Anyway.

Back to my odd correlation.

Last week I closed over half a million dollars in ARR for my company all while assisting my wonderful wife in the calming, soothing and de-paining of my baby.

So how did this happen?

Well, it starts way back in June.

June 1, 2020

On June 1 we went public with AURA, our population health intelligence platform.

We'd spent the last 3 months soft launching to an initial cohort that was close to us.

We squashed all the bugs, answered the requests and finished building out a product that we were super pumped to bring to market.

That same day I had 5 demo requests come in via the website.

All 5 had been referred by one of our initial clients.

After holding the demos, 2 weren't a good fit, 1 was self admittedly kicking tires, and 1 will close here in the next month.

But there was one demo that stood out.

It was the company that closed last week.

I'll be honest this was a tough one.

They weren't super open, definitely held their cards close to their chest, and their wasn't push back on pricing (we're not cheap).

Their main focus was aggregating their data and building out benchmarks to track which providers were providing the best care, and which weren't.

Both things we do and do very well.

I left that call feeling ok, but again, not the most open company, so they went in "Demo Held" on HubSpot and I started the nurture process.

June 12, 2020

Just a normal day in the Arick household.

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and hold up, what's that?

Oaklynn just bit mommy?

Bit?

For the past 6 months she's only gummed.

That must mean, yep, you guessed it, Oaklynn Marie has her first tooth.

Look at those bad boys popping through!!

Little did we know, that same excitement would turn into the first of many sleepless nights, fussy days and an uncomfortable baby.

We pulled out all the stops in order to make our baby happy.

We couldn't figure anything out though.

Onto the next Google search.

June 24, 2020

The follow up meeting was on Wednesday the 24th of June.

The CEO had some follow up questions, and was thanking me for keeping him in the loop via email.

We answered all his questions, but they still continued to keep their cards close to their chest.

Something was off.

We were all clicking as people, but I wasn't confident they were going to be onboarding AURA anytime soon.

He loved the platform, but there was an emptiness to his compliments.

I wasn't checking all the boxes.

We ended that meeting with a few homework assignments on each side and for me to figure out what the heck they really wanted.

July 4, 2020

Spending time with family, Oaklynn is still struggling with her teeth.

She's not having an awesome first 4th of July.

This time we notice that Oaklynn is chewing on mommy's shirt a lot.

Heck, worth a shot, let's try to letter her chew on a shirt.

She LOVED it!

Did we do it?

Did we figure it out?

Maybe?

Well... nope.

Not quite.

She enjoyed the shirt, but only for a bit, then she got fussy again.

The shirt didn't check all the boxes.

Back to square one.

July 6, 2020

I send over an update of features.

Something I was doing weekly to stay top of mind.

I also had finished my side of the homework so I sent that over.

No response.

July 8, 2020

Another fussy night.

The shirt was working pretty dang well, but it was brief relief, nothing lasting.

She really enjoyed her frozen teethers, but again, they weren't doing exactly what we needed.

Back to the drawing board...

...or were we...

The following exchange happened in our kitchen while I was holding a frustrated baby:

Christina: Ned, wet one of those cloths and toss it in the freezer.

Ned: Why?

Christina: Oaklynn enjoys the frozen stuff, but it's too hard, and she loves the t-shirt but it's not cold enough. Just do it.

Ned: Ok (I don't question my wife more than once)

Fast forward 30 minutes.

Oaklynn Marie LOVES the frozen cloth.

She chews it, sucks on it and her pain is all but gone for hours at a time.

Anytime she gets fussy, all we do is pop a frozen cloth out of the freezer and she's in heaven.

Dueces to teething pain.

Teething: 0

Daddy and Mommy : 1

July 8, 2020

I'm brushing my teeth about to hit the sack and my brain explodes with an idea.

I was running back the last meeting between the CEO and myself and BOOM, it came to me.

He needed there to be a connection between the data, the benchmarking and the physician.

Right now, the data and benchmarking are all connected, but he kept talking all about how important the physician was in the equation.

How did I miss that?!?!

I dropped my toothbrush and called our head of product (luckily developers don't sleep).

I asked him if he could write up a connection on the back end that when someone went negative on a benchmark, someone at the org would be pinged.

He said it'd be easy and he built it in a few days.

July 10, 2020

Dang those cloths are good, Oaklynn is fairly pain free!!

The notification is built and I send over the update to the CEO.

Understand that this build out was a swing for the fences.

He never said anything about this being make or break.

Remember that when I had this "epiphany" I was sleep deprived and about to hop in bed.

I just took our head of product away from other projects for 48 hours to do this.

It could FOR SURE backfire.

I test the connection, it works.

I shoot the CEO the info and the addition.

His reply is with his homework and a response of "send me your calendar link"

July 13, 2020

Oaklynn had a great weekend. Crazy how well these frozen cloths work!

I also had a 10am meeting with the CEO and his team.

This was exactly what they needed.

They talked about how it would take a ton of work without the notification and if this notification was live, they would sign.

I brought in our head of product and he gave them a timeline that they agreed to and told us to send over the paperwork.

In a matter of 10 minutes we went from unsure to drafting our contract.

July 17, 2020

Paperwork signed.

July 20, 2020

I've learned a lot over the last two months.

I've learned a ton about myself, about parenting, about my daughter and about business.

What I've learned the most is this:

Sometimes your prospects will be like 7 month old teething babies.

They won't tell you exactly what's wrong, they'll just present symptoms of the pain.

You have to dig deep, test and trial some remedies.

Some may work, some may not.

The key though is to never stop trying.

Before trying this final fix, I'd brought up 10 other things we had, and they all were enticing, but nothing that changed the game for him.

The remedy that seems like it works (the other 10 I tried), may just be a band aid on a bullet wound and will lose you the deal.

The persistence in trying to get my daughter to feel better, lead to one of the largest deals for me to close in my career.

Who woulda thunk that freezing a wash cloth would have turned into a necessary addition to our software that puts us over $1M ARR?

Not me.

The moral?

Parenting, Business and Life are all trial and error. Keep trying and failing until you win.

Until Next Time