The Launch of RVNU 🚀

Aug 18, 2024

It’s been a while since my last update, and I am thrilled to share some exciting news with you. On August 20th, we will officially launch our new brand, RVNU. I will re-direct all of my energies from Morris Consulting to RVNU. This marks a wonderful new chapter for me, and I want to give you an exclusive preview of what’s to come.

Firstly a quick note about the future of this blog. Zero To $20M will continue over on the RVNU blog, we’re still settling on a name, “Zero To RVNU” is winning so far! I’ve migrated your emails across so you shouldn’t need to resubscribe. However, if you would like to unsubscribe, you’ll have an opportunity to as soon as we deliver the first newsletter.

I haven’t decided exactly what to do with this blog, I’ll most likely use it for more personal and “off-the-wall” musing about the industry, tech and life in general, but let’s see. I’d like to talk more about how I got here and the lessons and mistakes both professional and personal. If that’s not your “cup of tea” as we say back home in the UK, please take the opportunity to unsubscribe today, and thank you for reading up until now.

Now onto what’s next…

The Journey So Far: Learnings and Milestones

Over the past 3.5 years, I’ve learned so much and achieved some fun milestones. Here are some of the key highlights:

Key Learnings:

Being a founder is f**king hard

Some days I wonder if I’m a revenue expert or a founder therapist. I’ve learned I have to be both. The job of a founder is excruciatingly complex.

I knew this already however in these last 3 years, I’ve become a true trusted advisor to many founders and CEOs, and I’m privileged to call many of them close friends. With that comes responsibility beyond what’s in our contract. Responsibility on a human level.

The founders I have worked with are true warriors, somehow they just find a way. But boy, oh boy they have to go through a serious amount of pain to get there. Being in their corner to help them make sense of their chaos as they suffer their way to progress has been a real privilege and I can’t wait to do even more of that.

There’s not much GTM guidance out there, that’s trustworthy

Founders routinely tell me horror stories of consultants and advisors they’ve hired who turned out to damage their business. They dream of a time when content and guidance they can trust is freely available for them to consume and apply to their fledgling businesses.

They dream of a time when they can validate someone’s GTM expertise impartially, and trust that spending thousands of dollars on a consultant or advisor is no longer a lottery.

Content that accurately guides the GTM journey of the early-stage build of start-ups is few and far between. At RVNU we have a responsibility to be one of the trusted players to help fill that void at scale, globally.

Most good early-stage VPs of Sales should be co-founders

Many founding teams lack revenue expertise but are stacked with engineering prowess. Once founders realize this, it’s often too late to make the first salesperson (often an experienced revenue leader) a co-founder, but not impossible, especially if no outside investment has been taken. If this ‘founding revenue leader’ is open to taking a founder’s salary, or close to it, my advice to every founder is to make that person a co-founder.

Briefly, here’s why: the startup is still hugely “risk on” and without the revenue leader the startup will likely fail, they’re that pivotal. Sure, you can take Jason Lemkin’s advice and move beyond the “carcass” of the first VP of Sales and hire another until one succeeds, but that kills time and capital, and it ravages cultures.

Look at it like this: If you don’t have product market fit, and you’re hiring a VP of Sales to find it, make them a co-founder and give them the equity they deserve.

Without RevOps, your revenue leader is flying blind

Not really a learning, but more of a rant. How do you expect a VP of Sales to build a GTM org without systematized data architected in the back end to give real-time diagnostics of how clean the fuel is running through their sales engine?

Most experienced CROs or VPs of Sales coming into a series A startup ($1,5M to $2M ARR), have a max of 18 months until their tacit knowledge begins to fall flat, and they run out of steam.

However, get them an outstanding revenue architect to help them read all aspects of GTM using data, and their effectiveness and shelf life can become infinite.

You can get venture growth without giving away your dream

Also not a new learning but with 3.5 years of concentrated signal, it’s something I’m more convinced about by the day. Founders routinely give up 20% equity in every major funding round. This is fine if your valuation (ergo: your revenue) is rocketing up to the right.

The thing is, it takes time, often lots of time for revenue to skyrocket. So it’s important to be patient and frugal for as long as possible. Profitability is about doing things smart, having hard conversations with yourself and your team, executing consistently and having people in your corner who have built in this way before.

In many ways, raising capital is often a signal that founders are not prepared to have hard conversations with themselves.

Founder’s routinely take funding way too early and realize only once it’s too late that they no longer own their dream. It’s hubris. This kills me, and at RVNU, we want to put a stop to this.

We have the back of every founder we work with, bar none.

Some of our milestones

Expanding Our Value Exchange

To take our mission further, I am delighted to introduce Laura Wheeler as co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of RVNU. Laura brings a wealth of experience from her roles in revenue operations and enablement at Tableau and Spekit, and her expertise will be invaluable as we expand our offerings.

Our Vision

We aim to tackle the shortage of GTM expertise and the dearth of reliable and actionable guidance for founders and revenue leaders of early-stage startups.

Our vision is to democratize access to teachings that you can trust will move the revenue needle in your startup.

Our frameworks will be made readily available, and a good chunk of them will be free to access. We’d also like to support experienced and proven successful revenue leaders to more effectively deliver fractional work at scale, through using our frameworks and methodologies.

Fig 1: The SaaS Startup Stages of Growth Framework, by RVNU

Our Roadmap

In order to achieve our mission we have to increase the surface area of our teachings, by consistently delivering precision guidance at scale.

Here are some of the ways we’ll be doing this:

GTM Debt Self-Assessment: We have created a free self-assessment to help you understand your start-up’s GTM maturity. It takes just 20 minutes and provides immediate bespoke insights.

Take the free RVNU GTM Debt self-assessment - click here

Ungated Content: We are making more of our frameworks and insights freely available through our website and newsletter. We will also engage through podcasts and keynotes more frequently than in the past.

Premium Content: You’ll be able to access our well-structured comprehensive knowledge base with an annual subscription, offering frameworks and videos as your guiding hand for every stage of your growth journey.

Bootcamp and Certification: Join our bootcamp later in 2024 for formal education on our framework, access to peers on a similar growth journey, with an option for certification to showcase your expertise and to formally work with RVNU clients either in a full-time capacity or as a contractor.

Bench: Certified revenue experts can join our bench to support bootcamps and engagements.

Get RVNU certified: Click here

RVNU Co-Pilots: Laura and I will continue to provide proactive hands-on guidance to select firms, if you need revenue support now, complete the GTM debt self-assessment and we’ll send you our calendar links

Book time to chat with us: Click here

How You Can Support the RVNU Mission:

Sign Up for the RVNU Newsletter: Be the first to receive our latest content. Sign up here.
Support Our Launch: We would love your help in spreading the word on LinkedIn on August 20th. If you are interested, send me a quick email (wm@rvnu.co), and I will share some post inspiration with you.
Meet Us at SaaStr: We will be at SaaStr in San Francisco this September 10-12th. Come and say hello! We would love to connect over coffee or drinks.

click here to find time with Wayne at SaaStr

click here to find time with Laura at SaaStr

Laura and I are pumped to launch RVNU. However, it’s not going to be about just the two of us, it's going to be a community of revenue architects, who have proven credentials and are qualified to give founders precise advice on how to grow revenue sustainably.

Thank you for your continued support and partnership.

Wayne

The best startups have minimal GTM debt
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Zero to 20 🚀

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