10k MRR Funding Mismatch

A story about the early struggles of Teachable, when growth wasn't working despite following typical startup advice.

"12 months after raising $1 million in venture funding and having a team of 10 people, we were at only $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Things were not working as well as they should have and we were pretty concerned at the time.

It's not that we were completely flat - we were growing, it was just very, very slow. When you zoom in on the first year, it looks up and to the right, but at the end of the day we were at only $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue after a year. We didn't know what we were doing wrong.

We read all the blog posts, did all the startup things, we were doing everything - it was just not working at the scale we wanted it to. We could basically afford one engineer - that's our CTO Noah. We had 10 people, but the math wasn't adding up.

We were working really hard - far harder then than we frankly work now. We were hustling but it wasn't working. We tried following the startup advice of 'do things that don't scale' - I was personally uploading content for people, we reached out to Y Combinator and hosted their startup class on our website. I went to Ryan Holiday, took his book, and we ourselves converted it to a course to try and make the business work. We were doing all these things that weren't scaling, we even started growth hacking, which is really stupid - I'm really happy that word died."