Scaling a Startup to $1 Million ARR: Insights from Three-Time Founder Varun Jain
I had the pleasure of interviewing Varun Jain. He is a three-time founder, who has scaled his current startup, Default, to $1 million ARR.
What motivated you to launch your startup?
Learning excites me, especially across domains, doing a startup fulfills that
As to specifically this startup, tech hiring is a notorious and well-known problem all over the world. The pandemic has opened up the possibility of solving this problem via remote workers. In helping startups leverage talent from the developing world I feel we are helping hasten innovation on one side and on the other helping these developers get access to opportunities that they previously did not have access to.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
Working with the team I am working with, and getting to choose who/how I spend my working time with is an opportunity that I am quite grateful for. Enabling this very same thing for our clients and for talent is what we aim to do, help folks find companies they can feel a sense of belongingness to.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
We are bootstrapped so definitely optimizing for cash has been a never-ending challenge. I had no experience with marketing or sales prior to starting this, so that was also a steep learning curve at times. Now it is more about figuring out the strategic pieces that will help us go from 1 to 10
What are your future plans for your startup?
We are currently focussing more on our US growth and operations plans. We have additionally started an initiative for go lang, whereby we are upskilling backend engineers on go lang. We think go lang is going to see major adoption across various projects. It is acting as a great alternative to Java and Python.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
Talk to your users, people in the industry, and your competition. Understand the landscape of the land you are walking. Also, people always want to talk about their work, they just need to be given the right platform. Second, focus on selling/growth at least as much as building. You can do a lot even when the product is being built. Last, you don’t need to have the right answer for everything but you need to be able to find the person who does. Being resourceful is your primary skill as an entrepreneur.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/varun-j/
twitter.com/tooldrool
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
