Growth envy: How Cursor got to $100M with 20 people

Growth envy. We've all been there. Another company just blows up in what feels like seconds.

Immediately you wonder, how could we achieve the same? Well, first step is understanding, and in this episode we break down the conditions that enabled Cursor to grow incredibly fast.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:20) - Cursor and 0-100
• (05:09) - The Power of Top Funnel
• (11:56) - The Future of Code Writing
• (12:10) - Teleportation and Sales
• (12:49) - Understanding the Funnel
• (13:05) - The Simplicity of PLG
• (14:45) - Developer Tools and Market Size
• (19:02) - Freemium Models in Enterprise Sales
• (23:09) - Challenges of Rapid Growth
• (27:05) - Retention and Competition

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

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Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

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[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Hohlbein. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we're talking about growth envy and break down how teams like Cursa have gone from zero to a hundred million in literally no time at all with just 20 people.
[00:00:17] Enjoy
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[00:00:49] Mikkel: oh, now it feels so quiet and sad. It's like, I heard apparently someone arranged a screaming party in Berlin yesterday where folks could come and basically scream out their
[00:01:01] Toni: it's called, it's called, the election.
[00:01:03] Mikkel: No, exactly. It was, it was part of the election, but people could come and scream out their emotions, but apparently everyone there were just sitting quietly on their chair, watching the news in a half empty room.
[00:01:11] I was like, wow, that captures the mood of this election. Oh man.
[00:01:17] Toni: No, I think you just saw Germany.
[00:01:19] Mikkel: Hmm.
[00:01:20] Toni: Germany's at peak emotion,
[00:01:22] basically sitting there.
[00:01:23] Mikkel: apparently there was a, this was a bit hilarious. There was a bus in Berlin. Did you hear about this? There was a bus. They had a screen, a
[00:01:30] Toni: me more about the
[00:01:31] Mikkel: That basically read F off AFD. And then it made these air raid sirens and it became so loud. That the police could actually not communicate with each other. So they just had to go and then smash the speakers. Oh man, this is so German. We're going to lose the entire German audience just because we're dabbling a bit into politics
[00:01:51] now.
[00:01:51] Toni: no, no, no. I think that, I think they're all pro what we're discussing here right now. So it's, it's all good.
[00:01:57] Mikkel: Well, the thing is also, we are not really. Expressing what is good and bad or anything in this area. We're just stating matter of fact right now. That's what we're doing.
[00:02:06] Toni: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:02:07] Mikkel: So let's leave it at that. Let's leave the realm of politics aside and enter a much more interesting realm, our whole go to market software, scale up environment.
[00:02:17] What's actually what's on our mind at the moment.
[00:02:20] Toni: So we, as many others of, you know, probably the audience have heard about some. Crazy growth stories. So there's kind of this new thing going around of like, Hey, Cursa went to a hundred million with what 10 employees
[00:02:36] lovable, lovable that, you know, to what 20 million with like five people and
[00:02:41] ball to like 500 million with what.
[00:02:43] It's like, I
[00:02:45] mean, the list goes on. Right. And, and while all of us are looking at this, like, Oh, you know, geez.
[00:02:52] Mikkel: You know, 500 people organization or something.
[00:02:57] Toni: hope that was me, you know, why is this me? Why is it? Why is it these other people? We wanted to kind of peel the onion a little bit and discuss why is it that those teams took off like they
[00:03:11] did?
[00:03:11] And not not do like a deep dive into product
[00:03:14] and things that we don't know.
[00:03:15] But basically kind of take a, take a objective lens to it and kind of try and understand why, why they were able to take off like
[00:03:21] that. But also buffer this a little bit with, okay, they did take off, but. You know, because I think there's like a second chapter to all of these growth stories that, that obviously don't get the prominence on LinkedIn
[00:03:36] when we get there.
[00:03:36] Right. And we've seen the first couple of folks already in this, in this space, like we might just mentioned like a copy AI, like a writer. com, a couple of those folks, extremely noisy in the beginning, not so noisy anymore recently. So, you know, we can just guess what's going
[00:03:52] Mikkel: I think it's also important to cover this subject because I at least remember being in those conversations when you look with this. We have this envious look at this other startup that's just rapidly growing and you go like, Oh, they're doing, wait, they're doing freemium. We should do freemium.
[00:04:06] That's how, that's how you get to a hundred million with, you know, 50, 20 people so we can fire everyone and just do freemium. And you kind of ignore that. There's a bunch of other things that are actually happening because it's not the first time a company with few people have scaled incredibly fast to a high AR number.
[00:04:23] Like we discussed, we're not going to get into those cases, but Instagram, we've talked about previously WhatsApp, another one, right? And we just want to break down what are some of the ingredients. That basically led them to get here. And I think it just is relevant to know also, because then you can start looking at what ingredients do you have to play with and is there some kind of path dependency or I don't know, physical limit for how much you can grow.
[00:04:47] So we want it to at least, let's say demystify, peel the onion, break down, analyze, run through just a couple of examples here to figure out what the heck is going on.
[00:04:56] Toni: and help everyone overcome their envy,
[00:04:58] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly. That's, That's,
[00:05:00] Toni: so that's really what it is. So let's, let's start with the first ingredient here in this, in this dish, in this soup of, of amazing, incredible hyper growth.
[00:05:09] I think the first one is they got a lot of top funnel.
[00:05:15] Like an amazing top funnel, right? So let's kind of go through the list a little bit.
[00:05:20] So, from I don't necessarily know the, the, the cursor story. I think that a lot of word of mouth that kind of helped them. The cursor is like a a developer tool,
[00:05:29] basically kind of helps them write code faster with AI, right? You know, guess what people loved it. But for example, lovable, so lovable is more of a developer tool for non developers, you can kind of put in your. Hey, I want to have this app built and then it builds this app for you, right? It's like, it's magical, but basically they could have talked about how they had like, I think two or three launches and the third launch suddenly took off and they basically kind of put something on LinkedIn on Twitter. So X. And and suddenly they're crazy engagement and then engagement kept going and going on and going. Right. We had the example with with cursor where what a seven year old on
[00:06:05] YouTube was basically showing people how she's coding. And everyone was like, wait, what?
[00:06:11] Mikkel: it's so amazing She creates like a web I think it's a web page and there's like and then we wanted to say Harry Potter and there's like Boop now you can see it says Harry Potter now. I don't want it to say Harry Potter anymore I wanted to say Bilbo Baggins and it's like boop now look now Hilarious to watch
[00:06:27] Toni: And I think bolt very much similar, similar
[00:06:30] kind of product in this space, kind of a developer tool.
[00:06:33] Right. And then we have someone like, and we just adding this to the list. We had him on the show at M Robinson's RB to be. Also kind of, they, they basically had a very, or he basically kind of build a, you know, audience on LinkedIn and it grew extremely well.
[00:06:46] He figured this thing out. He went to a hundred thousand followers really quickly. And basically being able to create this amazing top funnel.
[00:06:54] Organically or, or, or, you know, planned, I would say Adam Robinson was way more structured around this.
[00:07:00] Like, Hey, this is what I'm going to do now. I think the lovable and the cursor guy kind of stumbled into this a little bit more, I think kind of there, maybe we're a bit lucky with some of those punches. But basically you need to have, you need to have the surface. Otherwise you, you cannot attract enough people
[00:07:17] coming through. And this is just, by the way, the first ingredient here, right? And I think and I think what, what helped them to get to this point was some kind of a magical feeling that people had around
[00:07:31] this something that was really emotionally enticing for them to like it, to share, to, to kind of tell other people about this stuff.
[00:07:40] I think we heard a similar story from Tenthesia in their early
[00:07:43] years. When they were basically kind of having those avatars and it was super shareable, right? Basically being able to create something that is extremely successful online in the top funnel, like easy to share, easy to like, but also connected all the way down to the actual product experience, right?
[00:08:00] Kind of, and, and these companies have been, you know, for, for some reason, been able to achieve that.
[00:08:06] Mikkel: So really when you say top of funnel, you're not talking about, Oh, they have a big email list and they send out an email. And then it's like, no, no, that's actually not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is they got a lot of awareness.
[00:08:18] Toni: Yeah.
[00:08:19] Mikkel: And I think there's a couple of, if we break this down a little bit further, there's a couple of reasons that happen.
[00:08:24] If you think a bit about Instagram back in the day basically that app could exist because there was an app store that was taking off. I the iPhone was taking off and. Mobile connectivity was improving, like the speed of, of the internet. Not, not on wifi, but on mobile networks was increasing. And you also had a digital camera in the phones, right?
[00:08:43] That got better to a point where now you could have a network where you shared images, like a social media network and social media was kind of trending. Because of Facebook and because of X and in came Instagram and kind of leaned into these trends that were already taking place. And basically I think the catalyst being the, the speed of, of, of mobile connectivity.
[00:09:02] Right. So I think that's, that's pretty important. Same to degree with, with cursor. I think there's a new technology. Hello AI that can actually help you do it. And I think there was just something incredibly. Amazing when you watch basically an AI, write a bunch of code on your behalf. You don't need to know what is, I mean, it helps by the way, don't get me wrong.
[00:09:25] Right. There are stories now, folks who build stuff with cursor who aren't technical people and they're running into a bunch of issues. Right. But it's still, it, this is something that makes an average developer, a 10x developer all of a sudden, right. And this is just amazing to see. And I think it's the same with.
[00:09:41] Maybe the allure also Synthesia had with their video avatars. Right. And obviously they had virality built into their components. So I think it was something like for every one video that got created on freemium. They attracted one and a half new users, boom, you have a viral loop right there, right?
[00:09:57] Because those users would create video. So I think I think there is something around the, the trends and also to be Frank, some kind of a wow effect when you think about it, lovable is the same, right? Me being a non technical person, realizing that I can go in and tell it to build a. I don't know, personalized calendar app for me and my family, because we have, I don't know, a special calendar need, you know, that's pretty amazing to think about that you can go and do this stuff.
[00:10:22] So
[00:10:22] Toni: And I think in reverse, right? Sure, you can always go about and trying to. Synthetically construct that like from whatever you're selling. Right. But I think it's, it's clear that for some products that are out there, this is just a lot harder to
[00:10:39] achieve. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm sorry for a new CRM or like a,
[00:10:44] like an accounting software or, you know, whatever it might be, it's a lot harder to create those.
[00:10:53] You know, those wow moments, frankly, right. And to create, you know, tap into this emotional reaction that happens, you know, instantly when someone is seeing this thinking like in their head is like, you know, an explosion goes on. I think we saw some something similar and kind of, we're forgetting this almost because it's, for me, it's part of the establishment already, but chat GPT. I mean, open AI's product, basically, do you guys remember this back, back in,
[00:11:20] you know, January 23 or something like this. And you know, LinkedIn was filled with shitty screenshots of chat GPT and kind of what it was doing
[00:11:29] and how it was writing this stuff and people were just like, Oh my God, everyone will lose their jobs.
[00:11:35] Right. And, and those kinds of situations you know, on, you know, on the top funnel, that's what I'm kind of referring to. Those were the ones driving you know, driving this massive
[00:11:45] attention. And then also the revenues coming out of this, right?
[00:11:48] Mikkel: I think it's also the reason it has that appeal, especially in the top funnel is. Here's the thing we've assumed, we'll just continue as is forever.
[00:11:56] It can never be improved. And then all of a sudden it's like, wait, what? I don't need to understand how to write code. It just explained to me again, it writes the code for me.
[00:12:04] What do you, what do you mean it writes the code for me is, you know, that's kind of insane when you think about it all together, right?
[00:12:10] It's like teleportation. You and I can sit here on this show and say, it's never ever going to happen because it's just. Something you see in the movies. And then one day when someone, yeah, someone does, you know, introduces teleportation, you know, number one, obviously old school outbound door to door sales is just going to be crazy.
[00:12:28] You're going to have a sales rep enter your room out of the blue.
[00:12:32] Toni: Transportation led growth. I can see it.
[00:12:36] Mikkel: but also it's like, how crazy would that be? That product, I could see LinkedIn once again, go like, Oh my God. What is going on, folks? So it's, I think there's that component too. Let's move on to another
[00:12:50]
[00:12:50] Toni: The, the next thing is so, and Hey, are we going down the funnel? Yeah, we're going down the funnel. Yeah. That's kind of the kind of structure we're taking,
[00:12:57] but the first thing is obviously the attention. And then the next thing is, and this is a little bit of like the PLG playbook.
[00:13:05] Actually, it needs to be easy to understand.
[00:13:08] Easy to explain to people, easy to extract value from this thing. Right. And when you go through the list, like they have all of those check marks all over the place. Right. Again, easy to understand. I'm not a developer. I don't know how this thing works, but if I see a seven year old write code, then I'm like, okay, I understand this.
[00:13:30] I understand the appeal.
[00:13:32] Mikkel: Now I can hire young people to develop.
[00:13:35] Toni: Yeah, no, but it's also like, Oh, this would probably be good for all my developer
[00:13:39] friends that I have. Right. And you know, again, I'm not even the target audience
[00:13:43] and I could, I could do word of mouth for them, like a medias
[00:13:46] is no problem whatsoever. Right. And, and kind of getting it immediately.
[00:13:51] I think that's a, that's a major thing. When you think about some of the established products and, you know, some of the people that are trying to differentiate,
[00:13:58] it's like, Oh, you know. For example, what is it, Etio and Fork or Folk or something like this, kind of the new CRMs.
[00:14:06] It's like, yeah, okay, I kind of get it's new CRMs, but like, do it. I mean, I've, I've spent like half an hour on this. Do you really get why this is so extremely much better and different? I'm sorry, I still don't. I'm an expert in this thing. I'm sorry, right? And, and, you know, if, if you can get to this moment of. Oh, wow. This is completely different. Totally get it.
[00:14:27] I totally understand how this is driving value in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes. That's, that's kind of part of the equation. Yeah.
[00:14:36] Mikkel: air about the abstraction layer of a problem, right? So think about think about Calendly here, the ability to book a meeting easily.
[00:14:45] That's a very, like you, can you take it one level further down to be even more specific? Probably not. Actually, it's, it's already pretty far down to the practicalities.
[00:14:55] CRM is pretty high up. Like what, what is the problem here? It's solving, what does it, I mean, conceptually, I understand there's something with accounts and opportunities, but like, why do I, why do we need it versus a, Oh, here's cursor. It, it helps you write code. It's like, okay, yeah, I guess developers need that.
[00:15:12] You know, so it is on a concept it's. It's extremely specific and actually also in this case, very narrow, who it's for. Cursor is not for non developers. Let's be clear. It's not for you and me, by the way. I don't even know how to install the thing. Right. But if you're a developer, it's like brilliant solution, brilliant solution.
[00:15:30] So
[00:15:30] Toni: No, and I think, I think you're right. I think the tangibility of this makes it so much more interesting,
[00:15:37] actually. Kind of, when you think about, I don't know. HubSpot or cause, you know, I don't know why they're going back to the CRM stuff, but it's like grow better.
[00:15:44] It's like, okay, yeah. no, I
[00:15:46] understand. Totally. I totally get it. Totally. I understand. Totally see the value. But what specifically does it do for me actually kind of
[00:15:54] why
[00:15:54] is,
[00:15:54] Mikkel: for the muscles, grow the muscles better.
[00:15:57] Toni: and there, there, you know, there's so many products out there that basically kind of have this problem,
[00:16:02] however, and this is also what I want to say. I don't think you would be selling HubSpot more and faster and quicker by saying you can create accounts and you can add contacts to those accounts and you can run
[00:16:15] deals to your pipeline.
[00:16:16] You can close wind deals. You can create invoices from it. Like that wouldn't help them either.
[00:16:22] Right? So I think some product categories, they have to, you know, in order to summarize all the things you can do, you have to stand a little bit higher up. Basically, because otherwise, otherwise it would become extremely boring.
[00:16:35] Kind
[00:16:35] of the, the, the, the reason for the, you know, have sport being so enticing is you can do all of these things in the same spot, right. And, you know, then trying to list out all the pieces it can do. It's, it's not going to make the, the, the total actually better. Right. So, and I think people need to understand that in some cases, depending on what you sell, it will be extremely difficult for you to kind of reach this one thing that you do so well,
[00:17:02] that, that, you know, everyone immediately understands.
[00:17:04] Mikkel: No, it's also an unfair comparison. Like HubSpot is a suite that sells different products to different teams, and so it is just, it is difficult. Right. And it's different, but I think
[00:17:13] Toni: I think there's to cut you off. Yeah. You know, there are some people that that have built a suite, but are still only, you know, really advertising one feature, for example, Stripe,
[00:17:27] Stripe is doing a lot of things. Stripe is not just doing the one thing that we all know them for, like processing payments, they're doing all kinds of other things.
[00:17:36] And I wouldn't even know what they are. But at the end of the day, when you go to the website, it's about this, this, this one feature,
[00:17:42] this basically the payment processing, that's what all of this is about. Right. And that, you know, because it's still the flagship, you know, use case basically for
[00:17:50] them. They keep promoting that obviously, and then kind of create their, their anchor points and their, their, their, their, their churn resilience, basically around some of the other products.
[00:17:59] Mikkel: no, great. I'll just cut you out and post and then resume my talk track. And
[00:18:03] then, then we'll figure it out. No, because the other thing I was going to say, actually, there's another component here, which is, you also have to realize that the amount of people who write code is inherently. Big, it's a massive market.
[00:18:16] It's a huge, it's a huge problem and not problem, but it's a problem. A lot of folks actually have the ability to scale their, their their production, right? So the size is you know, as of the market is, is huge comparatively to a bunch of others and the frequency of use, which, you know, it's, it's funny how rarely it's being talked about.
[00:18:34] When you talk about TAM and size of a, of a market, how frequently does this segment have a need for cursor? If you're a developer, most of your day, maybe also weekends, if you have pet projects you're developing at night this is something that will be used in, you know, so much at the end of the day.
[00:18:54] And, and you have to realize that that ingredient if you don't have it from inception, it's going to be pretty difficult probably to grow as fast.
[00:19:02] Toni: And I also think kind of, we've, we've, you know, jumped over this little bit, we call it freemium or PLG, but basically kind of the ability to not have artificial barriers of entry of like a salesperson to talk to, like,
[00:19:14] or a credit card needs to pull out kind of, you can just jump in, try this thing out, totally get it.
[00:19:18] And then adopt it into your life. And then yes, pull out the credit card,
[00:19:22] kind of basically having that friction removed.
[00:19:25] For those super simple use case. And again, not everything can be PLG, but if you have something that's totally easy to get, totally easy to understand the value then this lends itself to being kind of a, a freemium model or trial model or whatever you want to do, but basically without a salesperson in the loop.
[00:19:42] Mikkel: so I've heard a few folks say, well, freemium doesn't really work for enterprise sales, and I'm not sure that's entirely true. I'm not the expert here, but just looking at some of the other cases such as Asana and cursor here, by the way, I think probably it works because what happens is they start out, start out at freemium, the speed and simplicity of purchasing.
[00:20:02] Extremely fast and extremely simple. Like you don't need to involve legal or finance that you, they're just a bunch of engineers that just swipe their personal credit card and get this thing. And you know, their boss loves them because all of a sudden they're way more productive. What happened to Greg?
[00:20:16] Now his output is three X. We should promote that guy. Right. And it's so I think that's one dimension and the other is the, the time to value is like. I, I imagine setup is pretty simple. We're talking a minute here tops. And then once you have it, I think it's like one prompt and then you're like. Okay, yeah, I think it just removed an hour and a half for me now, like
[00:20:38] Toni: So, so I'm not, I'm not entirely sure. The, so the cursor stuff is really difficult for us to comment on because we are not,
[00:20:44] you know, we're not developers, right? Because you, you, at the end of the day, you could go into. Chat GPT and ask that and then get like the code back, right? You, You, could, you
[00:20:55] could copy some of that back and forth.
[00:20:56] I think there are a couple of other reasons why this is so magical, which we don't understand, but developers do, and they think it's magical. So, and kind of that, that'd be it. But I think the, the other point that you mentioned is, is another really important one, which is. Ease of integration, ease of onboarding, ease of setup, kind of getting to this point really quickly without needing to, I don't know you know, change processes in the organization or, you know, go through some security stuff
[00:21:25] or do, you know, go through legal or. Have, have other integration needs that need to happen first. Kind of, if, if you don't have that stuff if it's just not there, you just need to download and plug it in. Maybe it takes more than a minute, but maybe five,
[00:21:39] like that is, that is what's kind of, you know, driving this further down into the adoption, right, kind of not having any of this friction to deal with. I think that is extremely magical. And again, that is not true for most or. Many, many different other SaaS
[00:21:57] products or products in general. It's just not
[00:21:59] Mikkel: I was just thinking like, Oh, if you're in mid market right now, just imagine that the take the fastest deal you possibly can a customer submits an inbound thing and they go like, I want to buy it now. If it's 10, 000 MR, I don't care. I need it now. How quickly can you deliver? How much time we're talking?
[00:22:19] You still need to pass it to an AE who needs to still do negotiation and probably run Medic or Spiced or meh, maybe best case we're talking two weeks. Versus Cursor, like they swiped the credit card themselves, this thing could take 10 minutes probably. This is like radically different. So even though the unit cost.
[00:22:40] Is way lower and you can laugh at their 20 bucks per user thing. And you're, you know, cashing in 5k uh, MR deals all the time. They could outrun you like crazy. There's their sales velocity is going to be through the roof comparatively. And I think that is a key component of what they have figured out.
[00:23:03] Like, and I think it's, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that for a bunch of these teams.
[00:23:09] A lot of the traditional ways, I should say, almost of running a SaaS company or software business where you have a sales motion and need to jump through so many hoops, it's just not there. It's a system that just runs way more efficiently.
[00:23:23] Toni: And the, and the thing is, right. So when, when we say it's a system that runs more, way more efficiently, it's like to a degree you're telling people like, Hey, you can, you can create that super efficient setup yourself. My point is actually, our point is actually, you know, despite everyone being super envious. You probably can't, and it's not
[00:23:43] it's not big, it's not because you're stupid or these other guys are so smart. It's just the physics of what they have built basically lend itself to you know, this equation where all the check marks turn green and then just a hundred million spits
[00:23:58] out basically. Right. And again, right. They, they have this excitement effect on the top funnel that, you know, drives word of mouth
[00:24:05] probably because it was a great product, but it's also like mind blowing. Right. They have a really easy value prop. That's easy to understand. They have an easy way to get started. And you know, you don't even need to take out your credit card.
[00:24:16] You can do this later. And that still works for them, right? They're still making a bunch of money on each of those users.
[00:24:22] Right. And just to be super clear, there is only. This has nothing to do with, you know, quote unquote AI companies.
[00:24:29] Like this is a very specific subset of those AI companies that basically kind of got to this. Mind blowing, you know, trifecta here and then was able to scale like crazy.
[00:24:40] Mikkel: Yeah. So sorry to break it to you. If you only. Growing 40 percent year over year north of 10 million AR. I'm so sorry for you. I mean, the compound will be pretty sweet, but you're not going to move as fast as all these other teams we're talking about in this episode. So,
[00:24:55] Toni: also all these other teams, we're talking about five teams or something
[00:24:58] Mikkel: no,
[00:24:58] Toni: It's Like come on.
[00:25:00] Mikkel: Like I think a lot of folks. You know, they will look at those teams and go like, dang, how do they do it? And maybe it's not even those teams. Maybe it's others in the industry that are not growing as crazy, but still growing fast and you fail to realize that there's a bunch of things around the context they're operating in.
[00:25:17] That's just different.
[00:25:18] Toni: What you do have is, you know, those kinds of people that you just mentioned amongst other names, they're also called venture capitalists. Right? And they're basically kind of looking at this like, Oh, cool. That's the new blueprint. You know, that's the new expectation. So I heard, where's it Harry stabbing?
[00:25:33] It's like triple, triple, double, double. That was yesterday. Like that is old news. Now it's you know, quintuple quadruple triple double. Basically, right.
[00:25:43] Mikkel: And it happens
[00:25:45] in six
[00:25:45] Toni: four X, three X, two X. Right. That's how you get down four years to a hundred million.
[00:25:50] Mikkel: No, and it's not years, it's quarters, by the
[00:25:51] Toni: yeah, exactly. And it's like, I think to a degree, this is also critical.
[00:25:57] It's super distorted reality for like founders. It
[00:26:00] was like, okay, wait a minute. I. I didn't, you know, quintuple am I, am I now a loser? Can I still go on fundraise? It's like, you know, am I still worth anything? It's like, you know, come on. I mean, there, there are not so many teams out there and we're going to get to, there's a little bit of a flip side here that should help all of us envious people rest a little bit, you know, bad at night. But but Mikkel, sorry, I was not cutting you off, but you want to say
[00:26:25] Mikkel: No, I was just gonna say, at least as a closing comment for me, it's You have to look at this list we ran through now. And you just have to reflect over what can you realistically control in this process, right? You, you do have path dependency as does cursor. There will be physical limits to how fast you can grow.
[00:26:46] If you want to change those, you need to fundamentally, you know, redefine the business altogether, which is probably not going to be your job. Let's be honest. It's going to be this year on the board if need be. And who wants to roll the dice if they're growing at a 30, 40, 50 percent clip every year.
[00:26:59] So, so I think you just need to look at what is within your realm of control. And yeah,
[00:27:04] Toni: So.
[00:27:05] And I think then there's kind of a flip side to this whole thing, which obviously no one talks about because, you know, it's less sexy on LinkedIn.
[00:27:13] Mikkel: But we're doing it on this show.
[00:27:15] Toni: Yeah,
[00:27:16] because, you know, I mean, we started this out with talking about German politics, you
[00:27:20] know, I think kind of whatever next topic is going to increase the sexiness level for sure. But so my point is so, you know, one example, 11 acts been out there, you know, clearly, clearly people have now figured out that they have immense churn,
[00:27:36] like crazy churn. I heard something like 60 percent net retention,
[00:27:39] something like that. Something like that. Right. We have all heard kind of that Adam Robinson from RB2B has like 15 percent monthly churn or something
[00:27:49] like this, right? Basically now capping out at, I think 4 million, not growing anymore. You went to 4 million really fast, but then, you know, capping out afterwards. We, hearing less and less about companies like copy AI, they've been really dominating and raising and doing all of these things. And it's kind of, you know, it's kind of getting quiet.
[00:28:06] So why is that? I don't know. I think someone was looking at their web traffic and it's tapering off and actually kind of going down. So, you know, maybe this is kind of a hint, right? So what I'm trying to say is what is easily gained is kind Also
[00:28:22] easily lost, you know, and really, we talked about the mode and all of these other things.
[00:28:27] And what, you know, in this equation of, wow, this is amazing. I totally understand the value. It's easy to onboard. You, you really need to also realize that. What's easy to onboard is sometimes also easy to off board
[00:28:42] like it's, it's, you know, it's, it's very straightforward, right? The and, and the competitors are popping up all over the place, doing a decent job,
[00:28:51] you know, if, if there's no reason for you, if, if the company isn't providing any way of stickiness. Then why wouldn't you just jump over to the, you know, next cheapest player here, potentially. Right. And, and what would be a mode? Well, a mode would be something where it's easy to integrate, but really difficult to pull out. Another thing could be like, Hey, you just built a habit around this thing, or you kind of distributed in the organization that much that. It's like suddenly this is creating stickiness, but really in this equation. And this has been unsolved in the market. Largely, I think is not only showing that you can get to a hundred million, but also showing that you can, you know, retain those 100 million and add another hundred million
[00:29:34] next six months or whatever it's going to take.
[00:29:36] Right. And kind of that part of the equation, no one really talks about it. And and, and no one publishes on LinkedIn. Right. And we have seen a lot of those AI companies. Like reach peak hype eventually, but then it's just simply struggled to maintain their, their customer base.
[00:29:52] Right. And I think that not that this is like a, you know, a silver lining for anyone here. But that part, you know, for companies that are maybe harder to understand, harder to sell, take longer, longer to onboard, longer to integrate. It also means it's you're probably deeper in the, into the organization than those other comparative tools here. And therefore it's a harder to kind of rip out and replace.
[00:30:19] Right.
[00:30:20] And I think that balance I think people completely forget about
[00:30:23] that
[00:30:23] Mikkel: yeah, I agree and speaking of sticky if you've been with us for plus time 200 episodes Of course, you have left a review and you know, you're probably already subscribed. I would be surprised if not,
[00:30:36] Toni: while they haven't, please do. Right. I'm not last time I checked it's free, I think also. So
[00:30:41] Mikkel: Yeah, Yeah, I'm pretty sure like so this should be we should be growing pretty fast
[00:30:45] Toni: Wonderful.
[00:30:46] Mikkel, thanks a bunch. Everyone else. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching and have a good one. Bye bye.