He hit $1M ARR by sending 500,000 cold emails—then raised a $25M Series A in 6 days. | Mark Hughes, Co-Founder of Solidroad

00:41:19 · Pablo Srugo, Mark HughesPlay from here

[00:41:19] S1: you still did probably, what, thirty, forty, 50 meetings sort of thing? [00:41:21] S0: Yep. Yeah. And considering, like, follow on meetings and stuff like that, think it was, yeah, about 40 meetings. [00:41:25] S1: And just remind me, we talked about the the million ARR. Like, when when did you hit [00:41:29] S0: a million ARR? The night before demo day at YC, which was That would have been March 25. [00:41:36] S1: Okay. So that's the other thing. Like, you're because the series a bar is only getting higher. I think median series a is, like, 3 and a half million ARR. So that's the other thing. Probably by if you you hit a million a year before, you're probably doing, you know, in that mid, like, 7 figure range or so when you go out through the series a. Perfect, man. Well, listen. I think I think we'll stop it there, dude. Like, we we got we got a lot of meat. Nice. I think if you're a founder listening, there's a lot of things you could take from here and implement tomorrow. So thanks so much, Mark, for sharing your story and, like, walking us through, you know, the details, because the details are the things that everybody knows high level what you're supposed to do. And when it comes down to executing, it's really all about the details. So thank you for sharing that with us. [00:42:14] S0: No worries. Thank you very much for having me. And then, of course, if, like, there's any founders that are listening, you can reach me directly on LinkedIn. Always happy to help.

00:42:14 · Mark Hughes, Pablo SrugoPlay from here

[00:42:14] S0: No worries. Thank you very much for having me. And then, of course, if, like, there's any founders that are listening, you can reach me directly on LinkedIn. Always happy to help. [00:42:21] S1: You remember, like, the first person who told you about Bitcoin? The first person who told you about Uber? You want to be that person because being first is cool. So be a cool person and tell your founder friends. Send it to them on WhatsApp. Put it in a WhatsApp group. Put it on a Slack channel. Let people know about the show, let people know about this episode. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch and share it with your founder friends first. Remember what Ricky Bobby said, if you ain't first, you're last.