This weekend, Blaze crossed $5M in ARR, only 15 months after launch. By the end of the quarter, we will be at $10M in revenue, doubling our customer base in just three months.

What’s more impressive than our top-line growth is how we’re doing it: Blaze is powered by just 25 full-time employees, and we spend under $1M a month in net burn.

Achieving these impressive external benchmarks is the product of years of intentional, somewhat contrarian decisions about how we run the company. 

In this newsletter, I’m going to share our (top secret) playbook for team-led growth to help you produce top .01% results for your business. 

1/ High ROI planning

Extraordinary growth starts with first having a clear understanding of what drives it. Too many founders I talk to don’t fundamentally understand the levers that will grow their business—and if you want your small team to produce outsized growth, you need to know which to pull that will produce differential returns per hour of your team’s time.

Planning at Blaze starts with a high level forecast that me and our COO/Head of Growth co-own. Building the model ourselves helps us internalize what drives growth; I don’t recommend outsourcing it to an accountant or CFO. 

At least once per month, we update the forecast to reflect our recent performance, and run sensitivity analyses to understand which business inputs will most impact our future goals—which for Blaze are 1) ARR growth 2) LTV/CAC ratio and 3) net burn/cash balance. 

We then brainstorm strategies to efficiently move those key inputs. For example, if we want to lower our customer acquisition cost, we could invest in community and organic content on the marketing side, or better onboarding or free experiences on the product side. If we want raise our LTV, we could increase prices, or target bigger customers with higher willingness to pay, alongside building product features for teams or more advanced customers. 

Those strategies form the essence of our management plan for both the product and growth teams.

We assign each of the strategies to an individual owner, and ask them to come up with a bulleted plan which includes what they will do by week and a simple model/forecast that shows their expected results. For example, our community lead's model includes the number of events he'll run by week (key input), and the number of attendees (key output), and new customers (key outcomes)

These plans represent a handoff of responsibility from us leaders to the initiative owners. We often go a few rounds before approving them to align on expectations and approaches. After sign off, the initiative owners have the alignment and clarity they need to execute quickly and confidently on their own without more meetings or process.

Note what this is not: a lengthy, complicated OKR process. Unlike in OKRs, we tell each initiative owner what to focus on and what the quantitative goal—it’s not a collaborative brainstorm that breeds complexity and delays. Each owner has one overall outcome metric, not multiple competing goals. And the whole process takes <1 week and a 1-2 page bulleted plan, not a multi-tab spreadsheet that’s impossible to manage. 

2/ No performative overhead work

Once we have alignment as a team, it's go time. We've designed a daily operating process to create as much time for our team to execute and produce results as possible.

Each team member has one daily meeting (either an engineering standup, a design review, or a growth standup). Unlike most companies, we do not do not spend these meetings on lengthy verbal updates. The focus of each meeting is on proof of work and learnings. Every day, each person demos what they did yesterday. Show, not tell. If you have nothing to show, that's fine—but no one uses that time to tell us what tasks or tickets they completed.

Every standup includes a metrics review, for the overall team and then for each owner's area. On the growth side, we evaluate yesterday's performance against our forecast. There are two acceptable outcomes to these reviews: either we're on track (great), or if we're not, we have a brainstorm to discuss what we know or have learned to how to get back on track.

Other than these daily meetings, a weekly 1:1 with your manager, and our Friday All Hands, everyone is free to focus, sprint, and produce. You free to manage your own time as you see fit; we trust you to make the right decisions on your own, just as we expect you to ask for help if you need more context or support.

In other words, you don't get points at Blaze for the meetings you attend, or the comments you make in Slack, or the percent of your to do list you check off. You get rewarded for moving your metric or completing your plan when you say you will—or sharing learnings so that we do better next time.

3/ Hire the right people

A culture of high expectations, combined with high trust and ownership to produce results, is not for everyone. In fact, it can only be achieved with highly competent and driven people.

So we invest deeply in our recruiting process to hire people who will thrive in our environment. This starts with our job descriptions. We don't copy them from competitors; we think seriously about the 3-5 skills that make a candidate extraordinary for the role, and then source and vet people directly against them.

We don't care about where you went to school or where you worked; in fact, working at a big tech company is often a red flag for us because of our culture's aversion to BS work and focus on individually-produced results.

We care most about proof of work: you showing us what you've done and can do. We screen candidates by looking at evidence of their ability; for designers, it's their portfolio; for growth managers, it's whether their previous employers have big social media presences or great SEO; for engineers, it's their public Github repos.

In our process, the most important step is the exercise, which gives candidates exposure to the types of problems they'd directly work on every day and us some insight into how they'd solve them. While we still do interviews to make sure people are nice and will fit well with our team, we often know whether we'll make an offer just from the exercise.

Finally, we've designed our process to reflect our unique culture. We share our internal handbook with candidates early in the process. Our final interview asks candidates to reflect on our virtues, which were generated collaboratively by our team last year and reflect our belief about which behaviors will most help us win.

Our offer process includes a written, personalized letter about why we think they'll be an extraordinary addition to our team, along with transparent documentation about how we calculated their salary and a calculator slowing what their equity will be worth.

4/ Remote work is the ultimate startup hack

Most companies want to hire the very best people—but startups often can't because they are limited by their cash, age, and lack of results or reputation.

I remember trying to hire our first engineer after raising an initial $300k for Almanac within our first few months. We spoke to a pretty mediocre engineer who worked at Google who wanted $180k. I realized then a distributed team wasn't just a high-minded preference for us; it was a financial necessity if we wanted to hire good people at sustainable salaries for our young company.

Five years later, I believe our fully remote culture is one of the most important contributors to our success. Remote work opens up the talent market for us and allows us to hire truly exceptional people with more diverse backgrounds and experiences, often for a lower salary than what a worse person would cost in San Francisco.

Remote work also aligns with our high performance culture. Great documentation, efficient and engaging meetings, and a meaningful, satisfying work culture are both requirements if you want your distributed team to work productively across time zones—and the foundation of any exceptional culture, in person or not.

The truth is that remote work exacerbates the impact of culture and management: its makes bad teams worse, and great teams better. So, if you're an average manager who doesn't know how else to get your team to produce, perhaps it is the right decision to control their time by mandating them to an office. But because our culture is built on trust, respect, and ownership, remote work enables our team to make the most of their time as they see fit, produce amazing results, and enjoy their lives outside of work.

5/ Constant feedback and iteration

The culture I describe above did not come down to me from the heavens on day one. It's the result of years of iteration and evolution. We are constantly tweaking how we operate based on what's working, what's not, and what the team needs now—which we learn about through constant feedback at all levels.

Feedback is the lifeblood of our culture. We believe excellence is a function of iteration—the more times we try something, the better we get—but we only improve if we stop continually to observe, discuss, learn, and implement improvements.

We do this with our product work and growth activities on a daily basis. The internal company QAs every new feature ourselves—we don't have QA team—and the marketing team reviews every ad, design, and content we ship against its performance to talk about how we can do better.

But our culture of feedback also applies to our culture, starting at the top. Every 1:1 I have ends with the same question: "Do you have any feedback for me?", and I don't accept "no" as an answer. In our All Hands, we do a "Virtues Retro" where we call out people who lived our values that week, and also write out our learnings for where we could do better. And with our allergy to overhead work, we are as aggressive about cutting or stopping processes that have outlived their utility as adding new ones.

Our culture is not for every person or every business—and that's the point. It's designed specifically for our market, product, and team. And that's why it works.

Each and every person is critical to our success; you can feel it even when even one person is out on a (well deserved) vacation. Our culture forces us to prioritize, make tradeoffs, and live up to our commitments, because no one is going to save us except for us.

Over the next few years, our goal is to get to $100M in revenue with less than 100 people. And with the kind of focus, commitment, and extraordinary execution we've shown to date, I believe we'll get there.

Every week, I'll share an in-depth handbook on how we run a specific area of our business. Product, recruiting, performance management, marketing, and remote work - all drivers of how we have grown to $5M in revenue with just 25 people. Please send this referral link to anyone who needs to reset how they build, hire, or market, and let me know if there's a particular area you want to hear more about. Happy building!