GTM Sauce

Avenue · B2B · booking widget for trades

Hire a designer and two developers before any revenue, paid by your agency income

Gave confidence to sell to bigger companies; founder calls it a terrible idea on paper

Mixedfinancingteam-process

What they did

After the MVP proved feasibility, went all in: hired a lead designer, a head (back-end) developer and a front-end developer while at zero revenue. Paid for them with income from his 10-year-old marketing agency, which still had 70+ clients paying for website hosting and needed little attention, while transitioning out of the agency.

What happened

A polished product gave the confidence to sell into bigger companies; Tom says he doesn't recommend hiring before revenue
Stage
Pre-revenue, 2025
Effort
Three hires with zero revenue

In their words

This Simple Widget Makes $50K/Month

Play from 5:06

… things and seeing that anything I'd previously done had some success, I was like, "Why couldn't we do this? Like why not me? If we started, just give it a go." >> Yeah. You don't have technical background. So, how did you build this? What was sort of the timeline like? How long did it take you from idea to a working project that is now, you know, scaled to, you know, over $50,000 US per [music] month? >> February last year, I had a friend that

5:06

was a developer and he kind of helped like create like the MVP basically to see that it could be done. What we're kind of talking about like embedding it >> [music] >> naturally into a client's website. Once we kind of saw the layout begin to come to life, I kind of went all in at that stage. So, I hired like a lead designer that could actually make them look better. I hired like a head developer that could actually build out the back end and then we hired like a front end developer. Yet we had zero revenue. So, on paper, terrible idea. Don't recommend it at all. But [music] with that gave us the

5:38

confidence to sell into these bigger companies that we kind of needed to get on board to pay us to kind of make it possible. >> Yeah, for sure. You didn't have any customers. You didn't have any revenue, but you were able to hire all these people. How did you like afford that? >> run a marketing agency for 10 years, which still had like 70 plus clients paying like website hosting. So, I used my like very precious income that I did have to live to basically fund the start of this and try [music] and transition out of the agency into this full time. So, I was very very fortunate that the

6:08

past business was still like actively running without a whole lot of like attention required, but needed that income to kind of be able to hire staff to then get the product up and running. >> Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you grew this business from zero to over $50,000 a month in a relatively short time frame, like a year, year and a half. So, tell us a little bit about that growth. How did you get that initial traction? …

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Tags: pre-revenue-hiring, self-funded, agency-income