Our team is absolutely crushing it right now. We went from $5 million to $6 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in 2.5 weeks, and are on track to 3x ARR from December 2024 to March 2025. At this pace, we could be making $50 or even $100 million in ARR by the end of the year.

Every day, investors ask me, "What's your killer secret? What's the one thing that's really driving growth?"

The unexpected answer is that it's not one thing. We're seeing strength across the board in our channels: paid, influencers, affiliate, organic social—even this little newsletter. :)

But, if you were to press me on one thing, it all comes down to speed: our ability to execute very well at a pace faster than anyone expects.

Speed is the ultimate startup growth hack. You know a team is running when you see it, but aggressive pacing is incredibly hard to cultivate, reinforce, and accelerate over time.

Here's my playbook on how you can make speed your secret weapon too.

What fast looks like

The average speed at Blaze is a sprint.

Generally, it takes us 1-2 weeks to design a feature, and 2-3 weeks to build, QA, and release it—that's less than one month from concept to customers on average. We recently pivoted half of our roadmap—5 engineers' and two designers' work—in one week to focus on our mobile experience. Most companies' cycle time from an idea to feature launch is 4-6 months or longer.

On the growth side, our cycle time between an idea and actual market feedback is less than 1 week. For example, earlier this month, we went from deciding we wanted to invest in marketing partnerships to signing our first deal in less than two weeks. We've done the same with launching new ad channels like TikTok and LinkedIn, scaling up customer programs like webinars and reviews, and jumpstarting organic social channels, PR, and stunts.

The speed of our overall projects is bolstered by our daily rhythms at work. Everyone on the team demos their progress every day to their peers. Engineers show visual feature updates in our daily standups, or we have their pod QA features live. The marketing team looks at metrics by channel daily, and we make adjustments to spend and strategies in real time. Our culture is show, don't tell.

However, our sprints are part of an overall marathon, and so rest is an important part of our routine. We all take nights and weekends off, and we actively work to mitigate burnout across the team. Slack is quiet outside of working hours, and we enforce vacations for folks who haven't taken one in a while.

But when we're on, our team moves like their future of the company depends on it—because it does. 

Why we are fast

There are three truisms in startupland—almost like laws of gravity for founders—that reinforce why speed should be your top priority:

1/ Startups are a race.

Honestly, if you don't feel like your startup is running against time, I don't think you're going to make it.

At a startup, you're forced to sprint as fast as you can towards towards growth: if you raise venture capital, success means going from $0 to $100 million in revenue in just 10 years. Even if you bootstrap or raise other forms of capital, you need to crack product/market fit, figure out distribution, and grow to breakeven profitability before your resources run out.

So in that way, the experience feels more like you're running away from death: you must achieve those goals before you run out of money, and more critically, momentum.

At an early stage, your team's motivation is the real currency you're using up, before external signals like customer feedback or revenue can fuel velocity. No startup "dies mid-keystroke:" it's almost never the case that a team is furiously coding just as the power goes off due to an empty bank account. Most startups die in silence, as people get tired, lose inspiration, and move on to fresh and exciting things.

So every startup is running against a declining cash balance and a rapidly evaporating sense of momentum. You better move before it runs out.

2/ Iteration is a function of excellence.

Obviously, the faster you build something people want, and figure out growth, the less worried you'll have to be about dying. But both of those fundamentals require repetition to succeed: running into the wall more times than you think until you find a way through.

And one you're scaling, high growth requires sustained excellence in every dimension: from design to product quality to marketing execution to hiring and management.

And so we believe at Blaze that iteration is a function of excellence; the more times you attempt something, the more chances you have to learn.

And because we all have the same 24 hours in a day, the faster you can iterate in a given period of time, the better you'll get—against your competition, and your former selves.

3/ Compounding is everything.

The most important concept most people don't understand is that progress isn't linear. Even if you get better at the same rate each week, that rate multiplies against a bigger base each cycle, leading to exponential returns over time.

So, small changes in either improvement or speed in the short-term can lead to massive changes in the long-run. And because it's much easier to move a little faster consistently than to be extraordinary every time, increasing your speed by 5-10% can be the difference of literally millions of dollars.

Let me give you an actual example of how much compounding matters to us at Blaze.

Right now, we have a big project to improve our mobile experience, which we think will improve overall net revenue. For illustration's sake, if our improvements increase monthly revenue growth from 20% to 30% starting this month—a 50% relative improvement—we'll end the year with 141% more revenue compared to the baseline.

But here's the kicker: if it takes us until May instead of March to ship those improvements, we'll have ~40% lower revenue by the end of the year than if we had moved faster. Moving slower by two months would cost us $26 million in lost potential revenue. Staggering.

Two months sounds like a big delay, but small holdups or slower pacing can easily add up to it. For example, if our designers take two more days to get something done, we'd need to hand it off next week instead of this week to engineers—one week lost. If engineers take three days longer on a two week feature, we lose another week before we can QA it—another week lost. Multiply this across multiple features, and you can see how and why every single day matters.

Why people are slow

A quick detour to answer an important question you might be asking: if speed is so important, why do so many startups still move at a glacial pace?

1/ Average is comfortable.

We know from basic physics that things like to be in a state of rest. All animals will find the most efficient way to get a job done to conserve energy to survive.

And going fast is uncomfortable: physically, intellectually, emotionally. Going fast takes effort and focus and stamina. Going fast hurts.

Being average, on the other hand, is very comfortable. But being average as a startup is a death trap. You must fight, struggle, push against the dying light with speed and might.

2/ The companies people work at go slow.

Most companies people join are very, very slow.

They go slow because they have to: change takes a long time to manage over a lot of people, programs, and processes. They go slow because they must: there's often legal or reputational risks to rocking the boat. But most importantly, they go slow because they can. They have deep product/market fit and entrenched market share, and speed isn't necessary to avoid disruption or death.

These factors are just as prevalent at big tech cos like Google and Facebook as old industrials like GE and Ford. And even if people know that "slow is bad" when they worked there, they bring their infected professional DNA into your startup.

3/ People don't know how fast they can go

The simplest reasons are often the most true—and in my experience, most people have never pushed themselves to go as fast as possible. They go as fast as they know how, or as fast as they think they're expected to.

But most people can do so much more with the right combination of management and motivation. Here's how.

How to become fast

Your startup's speed will be the sum of a thousand small improvements that your team tests, improves, and deepens into over time. Here's five tactics that were most consequential for us:

1/ Set continually ambitious goals.

I believe teams that overpromise and underdeliver internally consequently underpromise and overdeliver externally to their customers, investors, and community.

This starts by setting goals that feel right on the edge of unrealistic. The idea of "shoot for the moon, land on the stars" actually works: setting an ambitious goal for timing often leads to faster results than starting at a speed that feels naturally comfortable.

For us, "ambitious" looks like expecting each marketing team member to grow their channel 7% per week, every week. On the product side, it means asking engineers to develop shippable milestones within two weeks for each and every feature.

The important caveat here is that your goals must not be red lines—they are merely a starting point for negotiations on timing and pacing, subject to customer feedback and performance data you get along the way. If the work goes off track, you have to be ready to flex on timing if to maintain quality and the team's trust.

2/ Give people time to go fast.

It's easy for people to waste time on work that doesn't matter, thus slowing their pace. So make it easy for people to focus and develop momentum.

The easiest way to do this is to clear people's calendars, especially if you're the one calling many meetings. Cancel extraneous brainstorms and update "syncs". Question if you need weekly 1:1s. Ensure standups and all hands are time well spent, as those are particularly expensive get togethers.

3/ Reward results, not performative progress.

Once you set ambitious goals on timing and give people room to run, you must reinforce the importance of speed through how you recognize excellence.

In standups, don't accept verbal updates; ask people to show their progress and recommit to their deadlines. Don't allow for performative work, like completing overhead tasks or answering emails or spending hours in Slack, substitute for real progress on the metrics you've agreed to. Communicate, through positive and constructive feedback, that the only thing that matters are real points on the board on the timeline they've committed to.

4/ Ship, ship, ship.

The best way to enforce speed is to encourage the team to get ideas to market as quickly as possible. The point of speed, after all, is to get feedback—either from users on product features or the market on growth tactics. The faster the team gets external data, the faster they can learn and move up the curve.

Beyond setting a culture which rewards shipping, you can also help the team release faster by breaking big projects down into smaller milestones, creating ways to get feedback outside big public releases, and making time for a lot of internal QA testing.

5/ Balance speed with rest.

One final but critical note: I have found that A players thrive on being pushed incrementally—they want to see how far they can go, how much more they can do, how much better they can be. They appreciate the coaching, which is based on a belief in their potential.

But pushing to go faster has its limits. People can only do so much, and even the most capable people need breaks, forgiveness, grace, and encouragement. Startups are sprints within a marathon, and your job is to make sure your great team can make it all the way to the billion dollar finish line. So keep the long view in your perspective.

Enough reading for now. Get moving already! See you out there.