We just surpassed $10M ARR

I initially had another post planned for today, but I decided to change direction last minute.

On Friday we surpassed $10M ARR (annual recurring revenue). I was working on a presentation and needed to pull a number from Stripe, refreshed the page, and the dashboard showed $10M ARR almost exactly on the dot. (For those of you who don’t refresh Stripe as frequently as I do, the numbers are only updated daily, so it was a bit of a coincidence for it to land exactly where it did.)

It took me a moment to realize before taking a screenshot and dropping it in Slack, followed by a quick victory lap on socials.

Usually, I’d barely acknowledge these arbitrary milestones, and just throw myself right back into what I was doing. But I had to hop in the shower before my friends arrived, which was sort of a forcing function to think on it and let it sink in. And I’m glad I did.

I had this unexpected rush of emotion and memories. I ran out of the shower to my desk and just started writing. It’s for sure a little rough, but it’s raw. And I’m glad I tried to capture it.

Here’s what I wrote 👇

At the end of each quarter I spend a few hours putting together a presentation for the team. The purpose is twofold: recap the prior quarter and align the team for the quarter ahead.

I was reviewing last quarter’s presentation when I came across the Highlights slide that shouts out a few of the top recent accomplishments. Right at the top sat “Surpassed $7.5M ARR.”

Naturally I was curious to what number I’d throw on top of this quarter’s slide so I refreshed Stripe to see what we were working with. The page refreshed displaying $10M ARR more or less exactly on the dot.

I’ll admit that I really struggle with being able to enjoy the moment and appreciate the journey in real-time.

I have such a vividly clear vision for what this business can become will become, that in its current form, it always feels like it’s not enough. Because relatively speaking, what beehiiv is today should be a lot worse than what it will be in the future.

From a product perspective, my DMs are filled with “holy shit beehiiv is such an incredible platform” and my genuine reaction is always “you haven’t seen anything yet, we’re just getting started.”

It’s because I know the roadmap and what’s to come. I can see around the corner where outsiders can’t, and I know what’s in store is going to be multiples better than what it is today.

And from a revenue perspective, yes these milestones are cool, but I didn’t start the company to grow to $10M ARR. I know we can build this into a multi-billion dollar business, so when you put it into perspective, $10M feels so insignificant.

It’s a blessing and a curse because yes I sound like a total miserable fuck, but the lack of complacency has me so locked in to relentlessly push this thing forward.

But this time feels a little different.

Maybe it’s because the sun finally came out for the first time in weeks, amidst the “June gloom” of West LA. Or maybe because it’s a Friday afternoon and I already have plans with some friends to see Fred Again tonight at the LA Coliseum.

When I was reflecting in the shower just now, my mind immediately went to this visceral memory from December 2021. Coincidentally, it occurred the last time I went to a concert at the Coliseum (shoutout Kanye and Drake).

We had just launched beehiiv a month prior, and I couldn’t contain my excitement. My cofounders and I had just spent the past 10+ months balancing our full-time jobs while working late nights and weekends moonlighting beehiiv on the side.

And here we were just a month after launch, with real people actually using it and paying us. Of course, that was always the plan, but it was all so new and surreal.

We were stuck in traffic to get downtown and I couldn’t shut up about how amped I was. I was talking about the user adoption and feedback, the roadmap, how big this thing was going to be. As a bystander in this conversation, you would have thought we were about to IPO.

A mutual friend in making some conversation goes “dude that’s awesome, how much revenue do you think you’ll make this month?”

I replied — “I don’t know, maybe $2,000.” To which he goes, “Oh, cool.”

And for whatever reason I can never remove that memory from my head. It’s not even that I was embarrassed, but it was at that exact moment where I realized the discrepancy between what I felt and believed in, and reality.

To me it meant everything — we had real revenue, this thing had legs. It wasn’t even remotely a good product yet and people were paying for it.

To anyone else it meant nothing — a business doing $2,000 in revenue per month couldn’t sound less impressive, no matter how you dress it up.

I was absolutely delusional. You sort of have to be as a founder. Just months prior I was trying to convince investors to write a small check into our seed round. I was saying things like…

At the time you couldn’t even send an email on beehiiv, we hadn’t built that yet. No wonder over 40 investors passed and told me to kick rocks.

Fast forward to today and we’re paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to publishers, and working with advertisers like Netflix, Hubspot, Betterment, Monday.com, Betterhelp, and dozens of others.

I’ll be honest — this isn’t my best-organized or finest piece of writing. I have a running list of topics I want to write about, and I usually spend a good amount of time mentally preparing and thinking through each piece before writing it. I’m rambling a bit and this is straight off the cuff.

But now that I’ve gotten that off my chest (i.e. this isn’t my greatest post, get over it) — I’m going to drop one more story that comes to mind.

Back in 2022, we were really in the dog days. I’m talking like, maybe 12 employees, I’m spending hours each night answering support tickets until midnight, I wakeup every morning to another fire that entirely derails my day — the whole nine yards of startup life. The days where one hour you think you might actually IPO at some point in the future, and the next hour you don’t know if the company is even going to exist in a week.

I got introduced to someone and agreed to hop on a call with him. I can’t even remember who it was or the purpose of the call. Nothing ever came of it (like most calls), but there was one thing that I remember so vividly.

At the time we had just surpassed $30K MRR. We were bullshitting around on the call and I mentioned that, and he responded, “Oh wow, congrats man — that’s the hardest part. Zero to $30K is infinitely harder than $30K to $300K.”

At the time I could barely believe we were doing $30K in MRR, and here this guy just told me that $300K was right around the corner. It was realistic, and in fact, according to him, would be easier than what we had already accomplished.

Truthfully my mind couldn’t comprehend the thought of refreshing Stripe to see $300K MRR. What a fucking dream come true that would be.

I’m not going to say that guy changed the trajectory of the business or even led us to doing a single thing differently than we already were. But I also can’t understate how that totally trivial piece of encouragement made me feel. I remember the exact feeling to this day.

“To this day” being the day we just surpassed $10M ARR. Just 2.5 years after launching a business no one believed we could build.

I’m going to dance my ass off tonight and enjoy this one.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/10m-arr

Good view, great lighting, excellent couch. Would invite all the homies over to spectate and watch me write emails.

Reply with your own AI generated office and I’ll feature it in an upcoming issue.

Turn on, tune in, drop out. Click on any of the tracks below to get in a groove — each selected from the full Big Desk Energy playlist.

Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

• Quinn is one of beehiiv’s earliest adopters and his newsletter about science and activism is fantastic (Subscribe to Important, Not Important)

• Why the Surgeon General is calling for a warning label on social media platforms (NY Times)

• Alex Lieberman’s new company, Storyarb, is hosting an online event on digital content… and I’m speaking (RSVP to CommaCon)

• The creators of South Park explain what makes a good story (Twitter)

Share this newsletter with your friends, colleagues, and cute girls.

1 REFERRAL = 25% OFF EVERYTHING IN THE STORE

Your referral count: 0 

Or share your personal link with others: https://mail.bigdeskenergy.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

Enjoyed this newsletter? Forward it to a friend and have them signup here.

Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽