Hoff: Auvik took over three years from founding to land first customer
Alex Hoff · He took 3 years to make his 1st sale—then grew 1000x to $10M ARR 3 years later. | Alex Hoff, Foun... · PMF Show · Aug 5, 2024 · at 30:01
Alex Hoff is the co-founder of network management platform Auvik. He is outlining the company's early timeline and multi-year product development phase before securing initial revenue.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Late 2011, we found, we founded the company, got going. 2013, we raised capital, so we now have a strong thesis of what we're gonna go execute on. We didn't get our first customer until early 2015, so a long time.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Hoff
Hoff: A $100M enterprise customer distracts businesses and dictates product roadmaps
“Having a customer that spends a hundred million dollars with you. I may be rounding up a little bit in the story, but it kind of sucks. It's great. It's great for the business, but it's actually really distracting in the sense that they control your roadmap, v…”
Hoff: Small businesses have no business managing their own IT infrastructure
“What we realized is SMB had no business doing their own IT. They were cheap. They were hiring people. They were undervaluing the concepts of IT, the risk associated with IT, like, and just doing a bad job.”
Hoff: Left the office at 5 PM every day while building Auvik
“So there was like not a day that I didn't leave the office at five PM. This is when we still worked in an office. I was home every day, no matter what, unless I was on the road for a trade show.”
Hoff: Public companies struggle to fund zero-to-one J-curve investments
“It's hard to make a substantial J curve and affect your rule of 40 when you're public. It's just a different beast.”