$10M ARR is the FU MONEY of SaaS. At $10M ARR bootstrapped, you and your co-founder clear $1M+/year in salary and dividends easily. You can sell instantly for $30-40M. There are hundreds of EBITDA buyers at this level vs. a handful at $1B valuations. From here, you can do whatever you want. Hire a CEO and work 1 hour/week. Grind 100 hours if that's your thing. Raise $50M from a position of strength. Scale to $25M ARR with 25 people and pay yourself $10-15M/year. Most companies never get here because VCs show up early with decacorn dreams and money you don't need. That capital interferes with the one thing that makes you great: product-market fit. Bootstrapping to $10M ARR is easier and less risky than creating a VC-backed unicorn, with a far higher probability-weighted outcome. If you can find PMF and use customer money to get to $10M, you can do anything you want with your life.

Amos Bar-Joseph just cut his AI monthly invoice from $130K to $50K while ARR grew 25% MoM, and it made one thing clear... the AI model race to the bottom has begun. 👇 He said once they finish the move to open source, that Anthropic invoice will go to ZERO. Here's what's happening... For months their agent ran on Sonnet + Opus, and they treated $100K+ invoices like the cost of doing business. Then Minimax dropped. Then GLM. They ran the evals expecting a gap. There wasn't one. Not for the work that matters to their customers... scoring leads, reaching out to prospects, updating their CRM, summarizing calls. Same output, a fraction of the cost. So they rebuilt the entire stack open-source. That's how $130K became $50K. The frontier labs are in a race to the bottom. Token costs are collapsing toward zero. Soon everyone will have frontier intelligence for pennies. So when the model stops being the moat, the harness around it becomes the most valuable asset.. the context, the routing, the taste to know which task goes where. That's the bet Amos made the day they started Swan AI And it's working! Tomorrow Amos is going LIVE with me to show you exactly how they cut their AI bills by 60% and built an agentic harness for GTM (and why it's the most strategic piece in the GTM stack - not the model provider). Plus, he'll demo how he built the custom GTM tooling their using to grow 25% MoM. Like deal rooms and automated collateral generation with Lovable. Tomorrow at 11am ET. Join us here: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi…

Hey YC Founders - since I can’t turn back time and have you NOT do YC (I wish I could) … If you are rolling your own agentic cold outreach stack, check out MoltSets. Thank me later. $97/mo unlimited data + unlimited seats, 100% verified data, will revalidate every 3 days. Try it here: moltsets.com/ P.S. Tag a YC founder and I’ll send you a MoltSets hoodie.

“Mom, how did we get so rich? “Your father raised $100 million for his startup.” “So he got rich?” “No. I left him for the VC who made 2 and 20 on all the money he invested”

Here's my startup hiring philosophy: Hire people that would be great founders, but are too risk-averse to start their own thing. The key is giving them free rein to own their area of the business. Try to control them, and they leave. Freedom leads to great culture.

RB2B is a $10m ARR company with 1 FTE. I'd be OK if it never grew another dollar. Why? Because what makes it work are the constraints. We designed a stupid-simple PLG product that could be supported entirely by @fin_ai. The McDonald’s of site visitor ID. I know most founders don't agree with this approach... I can’t tell you the number of times - since BEFORE LAUNCH - people told us we needed to use AI to filter for ICP, find more contacts, draft messaging, and send emails and LinkedIn messages. And it’s what all of our competitors did (who are now all DEAD). While we kept the core product in its simplest possible form. In fact, it’s STILL HAPPENING. Last week on the way home from our all team offsite in Toronto my buddy @jesseogtm was yelling at me about how I needed to roll MoltSets into RB2B because it would solve our churn problem and double revenue. But here’s my question to founders: WHY DO WE NEED TO SOLVE OUR CHURN PROBLEM AND DOUBLE REVENUE? If you include our OEM $$$, RB2B is over $10m ARR. And it requires ALMOST NOTHING from us, while our core team goes on to build something we think has similar characteristics but is even MORE promising. Yes, we have a shared data team of 5 people who support four business units that total $32m ARR. Yes, Ebru does answer escalated tickets, and continues to improve Fin. Yes, Kayley handles OEM. But I am completely baffled that human nature makes it impossible for ANYBODY - even Jesse, a close homie and fellow bootstrapper - to accept that RB2B might just orbit at $10m ARR for the next 5-10 years, its product in its simplest possible form, supported by a SEARINGLY CLEAR value proposition, at a price so low that nobody can disrupt its market position. I listened to @dhh on @davidsenra's podcast on the way to the offsite. Of course I’m a sycophant, he and @jasonfried are my literal heroes. The first book I read when I decided I wanted to be a Founder was Rework. In the podcast, DHH made a point about how the HARDEST THING in 2026 as a software founder is to NOT BUILD EVERYTHING, because it’s so easy to build. He said there is something so beautiful about physical products where you finish it, bring it to market, and that’s what it is, on the shelf, forever… And since software isn’t that way, apps often become a bloated mess of noise. So I put it to you … What if RB2B’s revenue doesn’t grow anymore, EVER? What if the website and product are EXACT same 10 yrs from now? What if I launch a brand every 2-3 years that does the exact same thing? WHY DOESN’T ANYBODY ELSE THINK THAT WOULD BE AWESOME?!?!?! Because I do. And I’m going to keep doing it.

To be clear, I will not sign an NDA or redline ANYTHING whatsoever for our $79/mo PLG Web-ID product. Stop asking me over and over again to perform legal work so that your enterprise company can “run a test”. I know it’s impossible for you to believe that I don’t care about your business. But I don’t. RB2B is PLG, we serve the SMB, and we’re proud of it. And by the way - I think saying “no” to all things Enterprise is one of the things that makes RB2B so awesome. You can’t talk to someone even if you wanted to, and that’s BY DESIGN. We get away with it by having a product that is so simple and inexpensive that you don’t need to talk to people. If you need an NDA to use a $79/mo widget, were not the right fit. And thats okay. If you want to buy data, on the other hand … hit me up and our team GOT U!!! DM me. Our data is sick, particularly B2B2C.

Startup founder configuring his 50 AI agents, building his SOPs, and monitoring his vibe coded analytics dashboard with 300 different metrics. (He has 0 paying customers)

ARR vs. amount of VC money raised

FOUNDERS: If you don’t have confidence in yourself as an entrepreneur, it’s normal. I didn’t believe in myself AT ALL as a Founder until my SECOND startup took off. Why? Because the first startup felt like it was cheating. We scraped 250k paying customers from a community page of a unicorn pioneer of our space, cold called them all, got 5k to switch over, and from the day that list was completely burned I did not figure out a SINGLE OTHER WAY to acquire a customer for that product. It was devastating. I had no idea if I could create something that would work in the “Real world”, or how long this would last before it just straight up died. After YEARS of banging my head against the wall, I finally got traction with something COMPLETELY NEW. Well, not completely new. It was an website-ID feature in our original app that I thought was so unique it would get people to use the original app. Which it did not. BUT, when we spun it out as its own company, I made a VSL from digitalmarketer(.)com’s template, got someone on Upwork to make word art out of it, spent $1k on ads, and got $5k MRR back in a WEEK. (see the video I made 5 years ago below). 3 years later it was at $13m ARR and we only had 6 people. Somewhere between when I launched that and when we hit $13m I felt validated as a Founder, because I actually created something from scratch that thrived in the real world. That one is over $20m now (Retention.com), we did another one (RB2B.com) at near $10m, and now I’m highly confident that we can make MoltSets.com a VERY nice business. But that confidence wasn’t always there and took a LONG time to bulid. If you’re struggling with self doubt, there’s really only one thing you CAN do … Keep building.

FUCKING CLAUDE keeps telling MoltSets users that 20% of profiles are stale and don’t match the validated email address we’re providing. Why am I so pissed about this??? Because everybody knows that Apollo’s stale profile rate is 50-60%, but people are stuck in Apollo's UI, so Claude doesn’t have a chance to stick its nose into the workflow and spot check freshness. What pisses me off the most is when I ask “well how is it at your other data providers” and I get an “I don’t know … this is the first time I’ve done list building in Claude or over API”. FUCK YOU CLAUDE [and by the way, we will almost completely remedy this problem during our next data build … STAY TUNED] Try Moltsets here: moltsets.com Enrich your prospect lists with verified emails, mobile numbers, and LinkedIn data, right inside your AI stack from only $27/mo!

Hey X - I’ve lost control of my AI bot. No matter what I say, it keeps giving people insane deals I would never approve - like $27/mo grandfathered in with no daily cap for MoltSets.com!!! Can some AI expert please tell me how to stop this monster before it bankrupts me?!?!?

In March of 2021, two weeks before we were supposed to be wired $10m for selling my first bootstrapped startup, one of our engineers accidentally deleted the entire code base - and WE DIDN’T HAVE A BACKUP!!! Here’s the full story and how NOT to run your IT at a tiny startup: March 26, 2021 was a day like any other. I woke up, went for a run, made some coffee, and plugged in for the day. At around 10am, I got a text from Tate, our CTO. Tate: “Something really bad just happened.” This wasn’t immediately alarming. It's a startup. Things always go wrong. Me: What happened? Tate: Gustavo (name changed to protect the innocent) deleted the entire code base. Me: WHAT?!?!?! How did he do that? Tate: One of our four nodes crapped out, which has been happening all the time. I taught the guys to go into Amazon and 'reset' it. The problem is there is an option to 'stop' the node directly below the 'reset' option. He chose to 'stop' that one, and just then, by chance, a second node crapped out. He stopped that one two. When you stop two nodes on a 4 node distributed database, it’s all gone. Me: Well, that sucks, but I guess he didn’t mean to. We have a backup, right? Tate: No, because to save money, I wasn’t writing a brand new backup file every day because I didn’t want to store two 1TB files. Instead, I would update the old file with the new backup information. There is a two hour window every day where it was writing where if the code base was deleted we wouldn’t have a backup. I finally began to internalize the meaning of what I was hearing. My heart started to accelerate and my palms began to perspire. _____ TIMELINE: 10am: Find this out. 10:02am: Call co-founder, James, we panic. 10:15am: Call Amazon, they say there is nothing they can do. Ask for someone higher up, tell them millions of dollars are on the line. 10:30am: Speak to the higher up person at Amazon, they tell us there is nothing they can do. 10:32am: Tate attempts to reach out to the backup company. 11:00am: Acquirer reaches out and says “your website has been down for a couple hours. Do you know what’s going on?” 11:30am: Tate makes contact with the backup company. They tell him he is an idiot and pennywise and pound foolish for having any time exposed without a complete backup file. Say they can’t help. 11:45am: Tate explains that we are about to sell this for $10m - in literally two weeks - and is able to convince them to connect him with a very senior engineer who actually built the product to see if they can dig into the file somehow. But they had never done this before, so they had no idea. They gave it us a 20% shot they would be able to get the code base back. 12:00pm: I go to my friend Brad’s house - a VC - who says he has never heard anything like this ever in 30 years of tech, and that Tate had to be plotting something. I said he had 25% of the equity. No way. 12:30pm: Go to my friend Lou’s house who worked at Vista for 11 years, also never heard of anything like this, also assumes it must be some sort of malicious attack, maybe by the developers? 1pm: I realize talking to my friends isn’t helping. I grab my 6lb dog and start walking around Austin. I walked until 8pm. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink. I was calling up our bankers and telling them the transaction was off because we didn’t have a website to sell, and having to explain this absurdity to them. I had already internalized that I was personally going to get $4m in two weeks - and I basically had ZERO savings at the time. I was going to pay off my mortgage. I was going to buy a new truck, and buy a boat because I had just found a slip on Lake Austin. After taxes I was still going to bank $1.5m and put it in the equity market. What did I do? I thought the smartest strategy was to accept the most likely and worst case scenario, and if I got surprised, great. If not, I was already on my way to healing. I walked around Austin for 8 hours and told myself, over and over again: “It’s only money. You will make way more money in the future. It’s only money. You’ll make way more money in the future.” But it wasn’t just money. Internalizing that all of the work everybody who had ever worked on it had put in over the years - even though we never got it past $3m ARR - literally brought me to tears. By 6pm there had still been zero progress breaking into this backup file. I kept walking. At 10pm Austin time, Tate called. “We’re in. They aren’t sure how the process I was using actually works, so they don’t know what we will find, but we are in.” I was so exhausted from the crushing devastation I was actually able to pass out at around 11pm. I woke up at 4am Austin time, after having nightmares about backups and databases all night. I checked my email. There was one from Tate, from 15 minutes prior. “WE FOUND A BUNCH OF FOLDERS!!!” I called him right then, and he explained that they were able to dig up what looked like all of the folders that made up the code base. He didn’t have anything to compare it to, so he didn’t know the completeness of it, nor did he know if there were actually any files in them, but they started with the folders that started with “A’s” and it appeared as though most of the critical files were in it. After spending eight hours preparing myself for total loss, I felt a rush of relief that I had never felt before or since. Slowly, over the next 8 hours, I got update after update that they were into more folders with more files, and by noon, they had recovered 97% of the code base. It would take two days for the website to be up and running again, but the only problem would be that some reports would be off from the day before. Jesus.

Every time I feel bad about my business - which is often - I get dinner with a VC backed Founder in the $20-30m ARR range who has raised over $50m. I share my complaints, then they share theirs👇 - They are unprofitable - They’re either stuck or not growing fast enough for their investors - Their investors send them all the Clay and AI financing news weekly - They have 5x the team size I do (and execs) - They are on planes at least 1x/week (I hardly travel) - They are being forced to add product complexity - They face intense new-entrant competition despite superior product - They are under an incredible amount of stress and don’t see a way out After they are done… it always kicks off the same dialogue: CEO: “But you’re making money, right?” Me: “Yea, we will probably do $12-14m profit this year." CEO: “That sounds like the absolute dream.” To which I always get reminded that... Yes, it actually is! But when you’re in the middle of it all, it’s so easy to lose sight of. Startups are hard. Some things get easier, but in my 12 years of experience, it almost always feels like shit. But if you can last long enough as a bootstrapper: 1. You will end up being enormously profitable (mini exits every year) 2. You will have total freedom to design the life you want for yourself Raising money is exciting and validating, but most of the time you end up stuck with no way out. The reality? $10m ARR is the FU Money of SaaS. In 2026, it takes fewer FTE’s than ever before. At RB2B we’re about to cross $9.6m ARR growing with a team of 3. 99% of VC backed founders would kill for that business. If you can bootstrap, bootstrap.

this is advice I give founders, maybe it helps you: 1/ The only way to experience rapid growth from a cold start is through a disruptive product AND disruptive marketing 2/ Investment capital will NOT help you solve either of the problems of #1 - in most cases it will work against you 3/ Hold off on taking funds from anybody as long as humanly possible. If you absolutely have to raise, do it from people who would give you money if you opened a restaurant 4/ If you can’t raise money from people who would give you money if you opened a restaurant, you aren’t ready yet. Start a simpler business first (consulting, fractional), get some wins 5/ Building a lean, inbound machine that will get you to $10m ARR without many hires, then building a proper company once you are super profitable, you win no matter what 6/ Only hire when it hurts, but let people go the second it seems like someone isn’t the right fit. “I’ve never regretted letting someone go - only not letting them go soon enough” 7/ Start working with an executive coach at $5m ARR to help you learn how to communicate and manage people. You suck at it, have horrible habits, and it will take years to change them 8/ If you are stuck at 1%’s growth at $1m ARR, raising money will not fix that problem. You will likely need to pivot to something totally new and different to grow 9/ If you can hold out on investment long enough, the freedom you will have as a bootstrapper will give you the life you wanted when you started on this path in the first place. VC will not Just my two cents. Hope it helps.

FOUNDERS: Your team can’t use AI to write cold emails that book demos because your team doesn’t know how to write cold emails that book demos.

What does the CEO of a $32m ARR business (RB2B + Retention + MoltSets) ACTUALLY do all week? I’m not sure what other CEO’s do, but here’s how I take on the work week … MONDAY - INTERNAL MEETING DAY: - I start and end early - all internal meetings - 1-on-1’s with Ceci, Robb, Diana, Keleigh - Executive and RB2B/MoltSets L10 (we run on EOS) - Other misc things - occasional legal/partnership calls - Afternoon - I hike the ski mountain during the summer, ski during the winter TUES - CONTENT DAY: - Claude Did WHAT?!? Weekly Workshop - Meeting w/ Alec to discuss content strategy - Record a YT video - written/produced by Samu - Schedule other podcast appearances - MAYBE write a post or two, but usually not WED - FRI - WHATEVER DAYS - Zoom calls/other work - I go to 1 YPO forum meeting/mo 7mo/yr - I have a one-on-one w/ my exec coach bi-weekly - We do a quarterly exec offsite that requires travel - We do 2 all-team offsites per year that require travel - What are oom calls/other work? - Posts I didn’t get to on Tuesday - Calls w/ data team to try to figure something out w/ MoltSets - Calls w/ Robb to try to figure something out w/ RB2B or MoltSets - Calls w/ Diana about our data business - Calls w/ smart people about content/virality - Calls w/ industry people trying to figure it out - Calls w/ whatever crazy experiment I’m doing (most fail) - Now that we are in Aspen, I love meeting people for hikes/ski TAKEAWAY Most CEO’s would look at this calendar and say it’s a joke. (Think about how much more I could be “doing”!!!) How much FASTER would we be GROWING if I were GRINDING 80 hour weeks… To that, I say: Just because my calendar is spacious does not mean that I am not working. It just means I’m not STRESSED about working. In fact, I look at this calendar and find it to be DEEPLY energizing. Like I could do this for DECADES. And guess what… If I can? Our business will be an epic, colossal success. And in the meantime… I’ll just keep building.

2019: I want a $25m ARR biz w/ >35 FTE. Retention.com today: $23m ARR, 27 FTE. 2024: $10m ARR w/ 3 FTEs is the dream. RB2B.com Today: $9.5m ARR, 3 FTE’s Today: I want a $1B ARR 1 man startup. MoltSets.com in 2028: …to be continued...

Founders always ask me what keeps me going now that I have exceeded my initial $25m ARR / lean team goal. "You could hire a CEO to run this thing and sit on the beach all day and pay yourself millions of dollars in dividends." In the same breath, they ask if I’m going to sell. A) Nobody would buy any of these businesses I have (despite the fact that they print cash and keep growing), B) I love the game and my life so much more than when we started back in 2019 (and the company this spun out of back in 2014). Our team has become incredible over the years, and they now allow me to focus on what I want to do (and what I’m good at) and they deal with everything else. I am not on sales calls, I deal with zero people issues, I never have anything in my calendar on Fridays, my wife let us move to Aspen for god sakes. I am genuinely as excited as I’ve ever been about MoltSets, even though I have no idea if it’s going to work or not. Hearing someone say something that triggers an idea, talking to a bunch of smart people about whether or not the idea is stupid, then trying to will it into existence is one of the most interesting challenges I can think of. Not to mention I think with RB2B we created one of the most interesting businesses that has ever existed. We are about to assign one person (in Europe) to handle escalation, enterprise, and OEM deals, my CTO is going to give it 1 day of dev per quarter, and that will be it. And we’ll hit $10m ARR by September - WITH ONE PERSON RUNNING IT. I acknowledge that the combination of my founder brand and keeping the product so simple that it’s sub-VC scale led to the enormous good fortune of our competitors dropping out of the market … but think about how insane RB2B actually is. One person. $10m ARR. Freaking nuts. 2026 is truly an amazing time. It’s about to get even more amazing. How anybody could be negative about anything related to the state of the world or economic progress when something like RB2B is possible is completely beyond me. We are about to see a flourishing of humanity and entrepreneurship beyond what any of us can even comprehend. You just need to stay in the game long enough to catch your version of lightning in a bottle. It’s inside of you. Keep building.

FOUNDERS: WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MORON SIGNS UP FOR THIS?!? VC was already a horrible deal for the Founder. If this is how the game has changed, I am even further emboldened that the bootstrapped path is the best path for MOST people in this game. Unless what you do is highly capital-intensive, you should avoid this “changed game” like it’s the plague. The VC game was already bad: a 90% chance you'd kiss a decade of your life goodbye and walk away with nothing but an education. This new game is meaningfully worse in terms of probability-weighted financial success for YOU, the Founder. I post here because I want people to realize that what I do is an option. I didn't know it was possible until I found a podcast episode in 2017 with Ross Andrew Paquette from Maropost, who dropped enough info for me to back into the fact that he had a $30m ARR biz dropping $20m to the bottom line, and he owned all the equity. I had two epiphanies that day: 1/ that seemed like a better life for the founder than any other SaaS I had heard of, and 2/ it seemed much more attainable than hundreds of millions of ARR. So I became obsessed with Ross, tried to figure out how he did it, copied what made sense for my business, and fast forward 10 years and we're not quite there ($32m ARR, $15m run-rate profit), but we're close, and I'm more optimistic than ever about growing our profitability. People always ask me what mistake I see young Founders make the most. It’s raising money, and it’s in two different situations. Situation 1: they're at $1m ARR, growing 2-3% per month, and think money will speed that up. It won’t. ZERO percent chance. The only thing that speeds up a startup at that stage is more disruptive product + more disruptive marketing. Neither has anything to do with money. Yet they raise from people who think or say they are VCs, and enter the world of pain of the treadmill of capital without growth. Situation 2: getting to $10m ARR quickly and raising, thinking your TAM is bigger than it is. I made this mistake, but thank GOD we were so profitable that I didn’t actually raise, I just grew my team from 13 to 60 in 60 days, burned through the TAM in 9mo, hit a wall at 100mph, and for the second time in my career fired everybody I hired in that delusional frenzy. When you take money at that point, you don’t have that option. You are forced to try to widen the TAM, you build a bunch of shit no one wants, and you enter the world of pain of the treadmill of capital without growth. I want to be your Ross Paquette. This game isn’t easy. VC or not, you have to create disruptive products with disruptive marketing to win. That’s the only way you’ll grow. So, WHY NOT do it without selling your soul to a game you only have a 10% chance of winning? I PROMISE grinding your profitability higher from $15m 12 years into the game is amazing, and you have a WAY higher chance of getting there than going $0-$100m in 9mo. Fuck Lovable. Stay small. And keep building.