0 to 1.7mil ARR in 3 years

A few years ago I was working in my full-time digital marketing job. It was the career I worked my ass off to get to, but something just felt empty and unfulfilling about it.

So I started getting serious about becoming a tech founder. As a marketer though, especially pre vibe-coding, I was clueless on what I was going to actually do, what sort of business I was going to start, what product I was going to sell. Even if I knew what I was going to do, how was I going to create it? I was not a developer. Being a marketer, I could definitely help with distribution though.

I googled 'how to find a business partner for a tech start-up'. Something appeared called 'Y-combinator'. They had something on their site where you could list a profile and match with others looking for a cofounder. It was sort of like tinder for tech cofounders.

So I created my profile with skills, experience, a profile pic and started swiping...and matching. I spoke with several people on the platform, through chat and then zoom calls. Most stopped after a simple chat, there wasnt a fit because of the product, skills, or what each side was looking for from the other.

One person I met on the platform who was living in another city in Australia was a guy called Travis. He had created an online learning system already and had some decent success with starting his own businesses and building his own products. He had struggled to grow due to marketing though. We met online, got along, started working together in my free time, unpaid of course because there was no revenue at that time and we just kept going.

The first 10 months was honestly pretty rough - no revenue, barely any sign ups, lots of thoughts about giving up because of lack of traction, potential investors giving us weird looks like we had gone absolutely nuts. Travis' original idea was use AI to automatically make courses, a process he knew well as a very manual time consuming and expensive process. My reaction was "that's a sh*t idea". Sounds stupid in hindsight, but this was pre-ChatGPT when I had tried a bunch of AI marketing tools that all sucked.

So we started building a simple easy to use Canva of course creation platform. The response was crickets. Even as an experienced digital marketing manager, I couldn't get it to work. There was just way too much existing competition and the product was so behind already existing solutions that had been doing exactly the same thing for ages.

9 months later...ChatGPT is released. We see the potential, we pivot back to Travis' original "sh*t idea". Boom. The floodgates open. Thousands of sign ups roll in every day. It was like we were stuck, the hose had a kink in it, and then suddenly we figured out how to unkink it and the water started bursting out to the point that the hose was now thrashing around and we didn't know what to do with it.

Thousands of sign ups were on our waitlist. Let's build this product and let's do it fast... We quickly launched our MVP and one of the coolest things that can ever happen in a start-up happened - someone bought our product. That first sale is an incredible moment gave me the confidence to quit full-time work and go all in.

I had a small amount of savings that could help me pay for a few things for the business and let me work on Coursebox for a few months so I did. We grew almost every month, mostly through organic SEO, targeting high value keywords like AI course creator.

After about a year of working hard on making the product better and growing with organic marketing, we wanted more. So we went into an accelerator program which taught us a lot. Travis moved to my city Perth where we worked together in person for a few months. It was a great opportunity to get to know each other better, see where our strengths lie and get pushed by some incredible mentors to grow faster. This gave us a small amount of funding to make our first couple hires.

A few months later we got a small investment from a local VC. Again we got to hire more team members to fuel a better product and more marketing.

It certainly feels more like a real business now with real staff to pay and more responsibility. It's not for everyone, we could have just stayed as 2 founders and paid ourselves a pretty hefty salary.

For me a chill lifestyle business didn't align with what I felt at the beginning of why the hell I wanted to start a business in the first place though. I wanted that spark, and a lot of that was a feeling that I was changing the world, building an exceptional product. To do that, I knew and I still know that innovating, pushing and growing more is what's required and that means a lifestyle business just isn't an option here.

We're now past 1.7 mil ARR which I feel really proud of and the team we've built. There's been struggles and challenges at each part of the journey, now more than ever, but as you grow your role as a founder completely changes. I'm operating a business, a team of 11 employees, managing a product with an active customer base of over 1,600 customers globally. It brings a different flavour compared to launching a product for the first time from your bedroom and hoping it sticks.

The important thing is that you never loose that spark. I'm excited for what's next as we build and market the world's leading agentic AI course creator and LMS. Changing the world is an epic journey that makes all the effort so worth it.

Pivoting from a marketing job to being a founder was one of the best life decisions I'll ever make.