Fast Early Revenue Is No Proof a Startup Is Ready to Scale, Tech Leaders Warn

Artificial intelligence has sped up how quickly startups can grow, and some now reach high annual recurring revenue (ARR) figures only to collapse a few months afterward. At this year's TechCrunch Disrupt, three figures from the industry offered founders advice on how to lay a solid foundation during the critical first 90 days.

The panel featured Luke Arno, who leads go-to-market at Lovable; Ben Broca of the AI platform Polsia; and Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures. Polsia uses AI agents to build and run businesses with almost no human staff, and Broca says he is the company's only employee.

Broca said product-market fit is among the hardest things to find at the moment, particularly because competitors can copy so many products with ease. Arno responded that the go-to-market approaches that last are the ones a company can repeat reliably.

"The most critical thing for founders or earlier-stage companies to do is develop learning density or pattern recognition for where your customers are," Arno said. "Don't rush to build out a top-down go-to-market motion if you're not there yet."

For that reason, Arno said, founders in the first 90 days after launching a commercial product that is ready to sell should not take quick early revenue as evidence that the company is ready to scale. A startup should only hire a sales team and push for growth once it can win new customers by repeating tactics that have already worked. If each sale demands a different approach, he said, the company has not truly reached product-market fit.

He gave an example. "If I bring on 10 new customers in 10 different ways to solve 10 different problems, sure, I brought revenue in, but I don't have a way to go scale a go-to-market," Arno said. "If I bring three customers in with a similar motion to solve a similar problem, now I have high confidence that I can go scale."

Lovable, the AI app-building startup, has set many of the early benchmarks for rapid growth, and founders across the industry now feel pressure to match it. Its investors value the company at more than $13 billion, it says its ARR has passed $600 million, and it has raised more than $700 million to date. "The expectations for overall execution speed are absolutely tremendous," Tunguz said.

Still, Tunguz said growth on Lovable's scale remains the exception, even though founders should continue to move quickly. He said the pressure is real because far more money moves through the startup ecosystem at every stage than when he began investing in 2008. A seed deal brought in by one of his partners, he said, could now just as easily be a $5 million raise, a $50 million raise or a $500 million raise.

According to the panel, the companies that come out ahead concentrate on understanding their customers well enough to know what will keep them once the hype fades. "Community building is very important and being close to customers is very important," Broca said. Founders can send emails and hold events, he said, and he personally likes to speak with many of his customers: "The general rule is always to be talking to customers."