Transcription
My business just hit $3 million in annual recurring revenue and got valued at $85 million just 5 months after we launched it. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact playbook that I use to find a great idea, get our first customers, and build a product people are desperate to use.
Right now, AI has made it easier than ever to launch a business and generate revenue. And that's why I'm going to take you through my code framework to spot and validate opportunities so you can build something of your own. And let me be clear, this is the fourth time I've built a business past 8 figures across four different industries and four completely different products. Everything I'm about to show you is repeatable. And these are the seven steps that I used to launchable and how you can do the same thing.
In September, I got on a plane and I flew to San Francisco and I worked with dozens of engineers and I had Zoom calls with hundreds and I sat down with two engineers specifically which was Arya and Sam. They had deep technical expertise. They were obsessive about product and were as convinced as I was that AI search was going to be one of the most important spaces built in the next 5 years.
You really need to first understand the three main skills a founding team requires in order to build something that can scale. So number one would be UX and design. So someone who understands the product. And right now it's very easy to vibe code a basic product. But all this does is lead to a lot of products that look identical. So this person's role therefore is to be the innovative driver and for them to take ownership of the whole product experience and the value that the customer gets and yes they can use cloud code or they can use lovable or whatever but they have to really make a product and design experience that delivers value to that customer.
So number two is deep engineering experience and this person takes the final ownership over the actual build and the architecture and is responsible for making the product real. The third skill you need truly is sales and marketing. And this person is the frontman for the business. They're the owner of distribution, the story, and they become the growth engine for the company. So within that, you're going to have to have some overlap. Of course, you will work on the same things, but this gives you each a space to own yourselves. And between the three of us at SearchBull, all of those bases were covered. Ari and Sam on the technical and product side, and me focused on leading the business, having the vision and focusing on the distribution.
And the real advantage comes when everyone shares the same mindset, a strong interest in technology, a bias towards speed, and then the ability to use AI to increase your output. And this isn't a new model. It's how some of the biggest tech companies ever have been built. If you look at Zuckerberg and Facebook, he started it with his college roommates. And even when you look at companies like Apple, you had Steve Jobs and you had Steve Wnjak and then later they brought in Mike to lead the commercial side of the business. So neither of those companies and many of the companies that you see growing don't start with a single founder. They start with a shared vision in a small team of people who want to build a great company. And if you want to build a fast growing company, you will need to do the same thing.
So, you don't need to be extreme as I was here. You don't need to fly to San Francisco. Your founding team could genuinely be in your network or even your colleagues. But once you've got your founding team in place, this next phase will decide if your idea is going to be a big enough idea to reach $100 million.
So, the first job of your founding team is to validate the idea that you've come up with. So between you and your co-founders, you've probably got the right skill set to build almost anything. So don't get tied down to one vision if there's no proof that it's actually going to work. So there are two parts to this validating the idea process. The first is assessing whether the idea is possible and the second is working out if people even want it. So over the years I've developed a framework called code which specifically is built to validate business ideas and help founders to choose the ones that they should commit their time to.
So the first part of code is consumer trends. So I want you to study where consumer behavior, where technology and demand are shifting right now. And the aim is to spot what I call a rising tide. The core reason for starting searchable is that we notice that when people are searching for a product or service, they are no longer googling it. They are going to chatbt and trying to find a business or a service that can help them with their problem. And so for us that was a huge consumer change, a massive change in how people search for products, services, and businesses. You need to read every industry report, forum threads, and LinkedIn comment sections. And what you're looking for is a large number of people who are experiencing the same problems at the same time. And when you find that, you move on to the second step, which is opportunity.
So finding a rising tide isn't the hardest part. The trick is to locate a specific opportunity within that trend. So you're looking for overlap where the trend is heading and a problem that hasn't been addressed yet. So for us the answer became clear very quickly. We knew people were moving towards chat GBT for their answers. So we knew that what we had to do was create a specific tool that made customer acquisition for businesses possible within chat GBT and AI.
So once you know there's an opportunity, figure out if there's demand, which is the third step of code. The way I did this was I spent 6 hours a day for a month reading everything I could find about AI search. Every forum thread, every LinkedIn post, every comment section, every subreddit where founders and marketers were talking about it. And by the end of that, I didn't need a survey to prove the demand was there. It was so obvious. Wherever I looked, people were asking the same questions constantly and no one had a clear answer. So, what you're looking for is a conversation that's already happening. If a large community of target customers already complain about a problem, then that is active demand. And when active demand exists, you just need to insert your product into the conversation that's already happening. And that makes building a business so much easier.
One of the biggest mistakes that founders make is they say, "There are no competitors for my product." Whereas in reality, what I want to see is a business where there are lots of previous businesses solving the same problem, but doing it with traditional methods. So for example, SEO tools exist and bill hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And so building an AEO tool has validation that there is already budget in that space.
The final question that most founders overlook, but this will determine the scale you can grow your business to is economic sizing. And this is a very simple equation. It's total potential customers times by total customer spend, which gives you total addressable market. You want to avoid small markets as you will need to completely dominate in those spaces to make good money. Instead, I want you to focus on big markets where you only need to capture a few% to build a big business.
So, here's how the maths worked for my last startup that was in the care home space. First, I Googled how many care homes there were in the UK and the US, and Google says 58,000. Next, I Googled how much does an individual care home pay per month in software costs? And I learned they roughly pay $2 to $5,000. So, let's call it $3,000 a month to be conservative or $36,000 a year. So, I then plug it into my economic sizing formula. 58,000 care homes time $36,000 a year equals a multi-billion dollar opportunity.
So now that we've been through each step of code, Arya, Sam and I were very confident that we had an idea that people needed and they wanted and it was big enough. And as soon as we knew there was demand for the idea, we started building. And the thing that most founders will get completely backwards is building a product in silence for months without driving awareness or testing their idea. And they'll wonder why the demand is so low when they finally launch the product. So instead, I want you to build an audience before you build the product. It's exactly what we did at Searchable and is the single best approach for proving you have an idea that people actually want.
So the way you're going to want to do this is with a weight list. A weight list costs almost nothing to set up, but it gives you real people with real intent putting their hand up and giving you their contact details, which is so valuable for later down the line when you launch. But launching this is going to be the first test of whether the code assessment for your business is actually accurate. So truthfully, if you can't get 200 people onto a weight list, you're going to really struggle to sell anyone later on.
So while Arya and Sam and I were heads down working on the searchable product, I was doing something that to be fair from the outside didn't look like I was building a product. Every day from about October onwards, I started putting out content about AI search, teaching people about it and explaining how their business could win in AI search. Importantly, I wasn't trying to sell our tool. I wasn't selling hard to the audience. I just shared genuinely valuable educational content that people found useful for their businesses at the time. And at the bottom of every piece of content, we put one single line. Sign up to be the first to know when our business launches.
So, what happens next is a thing I want you to really understand because it explains why the weight list is so powerful for a business launch. You see, if you're trying to sell to people organically on social media, a good result, like a good outcome for you, would be 2 to 5% of people signing up to the product. But the reality is that is a terrible conversion rate. If you offer a weight list with no financial commitment, the barrier to entry is their name and their email address, which in 2026 people are happily able to give you. And so the percentage of people who sign up is dramatically higher. It's 50, 60, sometimes 70% of people. So by the time you come around to actually launching your product, you could have thousands of people who have put their hand up and said they want access to your tool when it launches.
So, you're probably thinking this only works if you have a large following. But it is simply not true. The principle works at any size. Whether you've got 100 followers or 100,000 followers, the mechanism is identical. You create useful organic content to educate your ideal customer profile on the problem that your product actually solves for them. You give them a reason to follow you and then you capture their intent before you ask them to spend any money.
But this whole section will be a waste of time and effort if you don't perfect the next and most important step. So in the early days, it's very easy to get carried away and build your entire product. But if you do that, you honestly can spend 6 months building features that nobody has asked for and nobody will use. So instead, you need to do this. You want to build one feature for one ideal client that solves one specific problem. That's your MVP, your minimal viable product. Not a whole product or a platform, just one thing that provides value to your customer.
I learned this lesson the hard way and was actually saved by one of my investors, Tom Blonfield, who's the founder of Monzo. We were months into building Lotty and he came to us. We asked him for investment and he said he wouldn't invest in the current business, but if we could launch our MVP of our care home marketplace in 2 weeks, he would give us £100,000. And so we went home that night and thought to ourselves, we're going to have to strip this down to the most basic version to get this thing live and secure this investment. But it was the best lesson that we ever learned because we focused on the one specific part of the product that we knew customers were interested in and we just built that. And every day after that, do you know what happened? Our customers told us what they wanted us to build next with feedback every single day.
So now if we jump back to searchboard, the business I'm building today, Ari and Sam and I, we were in London in November and we asked ourselves the same question. The same question Tom had asked me years before. What is the one thing that we can build right now that proves this idea works? And the answer was prompt tracking. A tool that would scan the major AI platforms, ChatgBT, Gemini, Perplexity, and show businesses exactly where and how often they were being mentioned in the AI answers.
So once you're in this position, I want you to be really honest with what you and your founders can get live right now. Not in two months, not in 3 months, but right now. Make it deliberately, almost aggressively simple. The goal of the MVP isn't to like impress hundreds of people, but it's to give customers something to try and to get them to tell you what you should build next. And if they use what you've built and they start asking for more, that is the perfect signal. And you can use that feedback now to create the rest of your product roadmap.
So now you're at a point where you can effectively launch your business. But this next step will define its success and you can't rush this. So mid December Sam and Ari and I were sitting there and for the first time we opened Searchable up to a larger selection of people from our weight list and we gave them an early access deal which was a lifetime discount of 50%. So, at this point, it's not so much about the money. It's about getting early product champions into the product, using it every day, and giving you feedback every single day on what they would improve.
So, every single day throughout December, we were collecting feedback. We were asking what was working, what was confusing, what was broken, what was missing, what we could build more of. And what you're trying to do here is build a feedback flywheel. So the faster that the product actually improves, the more confident your early users become that this is something that they would pay for and that they should tell their friends about this and the more confident you become in your own product.
To make that flywheel spin even faster, we then launched a Slack community and this became a place where everyone who was using Searchable could talk to each other to share what they were seeing, to ask questions, to post feedback and learn from the product and learn from us about this new space. So on top of this, I was spending honestly 10 hours a day on calls with our current users to understand what they wanted and what wasn't working. And then Sam and Ara would work throughout the night on fixing the issues and building new parts of the product. So at this stage, Searchable is improving rapidly. The feedback loop is in full effect and our job now is to reach new customers to actually scale the amount of people using the product.
So, I've seen so many technical founders obsessively focus on the product itself and almost bolt-on marketing afterwards when it's time to launch, but that puts so much unnecessary pressure on the launch week. And a content machine mitigates that risk and is made up of three fundamental layers that work together.
So, the first layer is one that founders either underestimate or avoid entirely. But, it's something I've seen incredible benefit from over the past four years, which is founder content. Posting consistently on platforms like LinkedIn builds trust. It attracts your ideal customer and it builds an interested audience. And the reason this works so well is that people are far more willing to engage with someone's perspective rather than a brand. So a founder talking honestly about the problem they're solving, the mistakes they've made, and what they've learned. That is something that people are willing to engage with. That's what people share, what people will screenshot, and what people come back to. And the best part, by the time they find your product, they already know who you are. They already trust your thinking. and the sale is already halfway done.
So for searchable, our ideal customers are founders, marketing managers and agencies. So every piece of content that I put out is built around problems that they are trying to solve, how they grow their brand, how to think about AI search, how to reach customers who are completely changing their behavior. And that means that every post, every video, every cheat sheet is designed to reach this audience and position searchable as the perfect solution. The best part is that any organic content that you put out that performs well and drives people to your product, you can then boost later on with paid adverts. So, you're testing whether your paid ad strategy works before you're even running ads.
So, the second layer is GTM. You need to get emotion going where you're reaching out to people from your weight list and you're introducing your business to them. You're giving them a chance to book a free 30inut consultation and a product demo with them. And these warm prospects who come to you through lead magnets and content, they'll be the lowest friction clients because you've already delivered them some value and they've already committed a certain level of trust to you. And once that's in motion, you can layer in cold outreach. And this has to be highly personalized, value first, and aimed at prospects who are perfect for your business. So instead of leading with, hey, would you like a demo? You should offer to diagnose something for them. So try this. I've been looking at your business and I think there are three clear opportunities around the problem that you solve. I've dropped this into a document, but I'm happy to jump on a call and talk you through what I'm seeing. That starts a conversation. It adds value and it gets them on the call.
So, the final layer is AEO or answer engine optimization. This is about making sure your brand appears in AIdriven search not just in Google but chatgbt, perplexity, Gemini and other platforms where your customers are now looking for answers. So the shift happening right now is the entire reason that we launch searchable. People are using AI to make purchasing decisions to choose which tool to use which agency to hire and which product actually solves their problem. And the brands that are showing up in these answers are building a compounding distribution advantage that is going to get harder and harder to close the longer that you wait.
So, we've just talked about building an MVP, collecting feedback, and then how to drive traffic to your business. However, as a startup, the most important thing is that you make the most of any traffic and interest that you get and you turn that into interested customers. And that is why it's so important early on to create highquality lead magnets. The mechanisms are really straightforward. You create something genuinely valuable, a tool, a report, a framework, a piece of data your audience can't access anywhere else. And you put a small exchange in front of it, usually an email address or a phone number. And that exchange is the moment that you own the relationship. Every piece of communication that you send afterwards goes straight to them. It doesn't just get posted to social media.
For Searchable, we spent a week building what became our most important acquisition tool, the free AI visibility report. Anyone could enter their company name, and Searchable would scan their website, identify their competitors, and generate a report showing exactly how they were appearing or not appearing across the major AI platforms compared to their competitors. And that's how we engineered this value exchange. Our report was free to generate, but to read the full results of the report, you needed to create a searchable account. And that was it. But it was only one step with no credit card, no commitment, just an account. But what we received in return was nearly 50% of those free users converted to paid users. All because we gave them an incredibly valuable piece of information and an incredibly valuable tool upfront for free. We've actually just released the latest version of Searchable's visibility report. And if you want to see how your company ranks on ChatGBT and other LLMs for free, the link is at the top of the description in the video.
So now we're on to the launch. So in January, we opened the doors to searchable publicly. And thanks to the work that we put in on all the different stages we talked about, we reached a million dollars of ARR in 60 days, which let us immediately hire more people into our product and engineering team and build out our broader marketing team. I believe if anyone follows this playbook, finds a niche within an incredible natural growth market and develops a product that people are very interested in, they will get similar inbound from investors. So the key tip is build in an exciting space, share your success, force early traction and investors will be interested.
But let me end with a few ways that we are still driving this growth because scaling customer acquisition beyond social is challenging and complicated. But there are two focus areas that we're working on right now. Inbound inquiries which we're generating through adverts, through organic social media content, through press and also ranking in Google traditional search and appearing in AI search as well. We also launched the AI search accelerator which is a 5-week live training program for businesses who are looking to drive their presence in chat GBT and attracted hundreds of customers that we've now trained hands-on which is both great for awareness but also for stickiness within the product. The second is outbound which is the process of locating the contact details for your target ICP and sending them messages to check your tool out to book a demo and to see how your business works. We use a combination of Apollo and LinkedIn to find the data and then we use clay to enrich it to give us the contact details and then we send really highquality personalized outbound about their business and how searchable could help them.
And that brings us to today, the beginning of June. We have been live now for 5 months and have managed to scale our business to beyond $3 million of annual recurring revenue. We have a team of 18 people and we are now working on the next iteration of our product and scaling up our business. The next version of searchable is an autonomous AI agent that will actually help you and your business to strategize and execute the work required to build your business and appear in AI search. It's been a hell of a ride and we're obviously not stopping now.
So, I hope you continue watching the journey and if you've made it this far, you're more committed than 99% of people. So, I want to thank you and if there is anything you want me to cover from building a business to marketing, just comment below and I'll make sure that I cover that in the next one.