Todd Jackson: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay. So essentially, 60% ish of companies don't make it past L2. And I love the way you're framing it of just, "If we can just get a few more companies further, that makes a massive dent both in the world and the lives of founders and people that want to use products." Another question I wanted to talk about briefly is just again, the timelines of each of these levels. Just in your rough experience, how long do each of these levels roughly take so people can get a sense of like, "Oh, it's taken a lot longer. Maybe there's a problem"? So again, this whole thing probably takes four to six years, and so let's just pick five years as the number to get to level four. I think the way this works, ideally, is you probably take 12 to 18 months to do level one, because that is the most important level, honestly, in my mind because that's where you're really choosing the right persona and the right problem to focus on. And I think just that choice is one of the most important choices that founders make. And the interesting thing, my partner, Josh Kopelman, talks about this all the time, is that founders spend 99% of their time building because that's what they've done. And they spend 1% of their time picking, in picking the market, picking the problem, picking the customer. And in reality, it's that pick that determines the constraints and the boundaries of where you're going to be working for the next, hopefully, 10 years of your life. So there's a real imbalance there. And I actually think that that pick is the most important thing. So I would actually like to spend, let's say, somewhere 12 to 18 months in level one, just really figuring that out and figuring out my four Ps. And then, hopefully, I move very quickly. It takes me a while to get to my first five satisfied customers, but they love it. And then I go quickly through L2, maybe that takes about a year. This is like the Looker path, the happy path. And then L3 is long just because we're going all the way from five million in revenue up to 25, and that might take a year or two, probably two years even in a good case. And then getting from 25 to 100 million is hard, obviously very hard. And then that probably takes a couple years. And then you're figuring out all of these things. You're growing your team and your company's got a lot more moving parts and functions, and there's a demand generation side of the house and sales and there's engineering and the whole thing just gets more complicated with a lot more people. But I think that if you set the foundation really nicely at level one and level two that hopefully the whole thing... The boulder is rolling down the hill and it's carrying you forward and you don't just feel like you're pushing this rock uphill for five years. That's not a fun place to be. There's a lot of founders in that place and I know a few, so this is really interesting. So you're roughly saying that maybe spend a year, year and a half on level one, which is you're just grinding, cold emailing, reaching out, selling customers, and maybe getting to five customers in the first year and a half. That's at the extreme, but that's a good outcome. And then maybe another year trying to get to... What was it? 25 customers.…

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