Your First Million in Revenue Won't Come from Ads
It'll Come from Hustle
In the modern entrepreneurial landscape, there's a pervasive myth that scaling a business is primarily about mastering digital marketing and running sophisticated ad campaigns.
While advertising certainly plays a role in business growth, the reality for most successful startups is quite different: the first million dollars in revenue rarely comes from ads.
Instead, it's born from hustle - the gritty, persistent, and often unsexy work of personally connecting with customers, refining your offer, and creating value before automation takes centre stage.
The Allure of Advertising
The appeal of advertising is understandable.
It promises scale, automation, and a seemingly predictable path to growth.
Launch a campaign, optimise your funnel, and watch the customers roll in.
This narrative is reinforced by countless success stories of companies that appear to have grown effortlessly through clever marketing.
What's often missing from these stories, however, is the foundation that made those ad campaigns effective in the first place.
Before Airbnb was spending millions on marketing, its founders were personally photographing listings and meeting hosts.
Before Dropbox was running sophisticated acquisition campaigns, its team was hustling for its first users on Hacker News and through personal networks.
Source : The Hollywood Reporter
The Pre-Scale Reality
For early-stage businesses, advertising often yields disappointing results.
There are several reasons for this:
Unproven product-market fit: Without clear evidence that your solution genuinely addresses a customer need, ads simply accelerate failure.
Undefined ideal customer profile: Early businesses rarely have the deep customer knowledge required to target ads effectively.
Underdeveloped value proposition: Your messaging likely hasn't been refined through hundreds of real customer conversations.
Insufficient feedback loops: Without direct customer interaction, you miss critical insights for product improvement.
Limited capital efficiency: Ad costs have increased dramatically across platforms, making them an expensive way to acquire customers before you've optimised your unit economics.
Stripe, now a payments giant valued over $50 billion, didn't rely on advertising to reach its first million in revenue.
Instead, co-founders Patrick and John Collison personally recruited early users by engaging directly with developers at tech meetups and through one-on-one outreach.
They spent countless hours implementing their API for early customers and gathering feedback to improve their product.
The Alternative Path: Hustle
So what does "hustle" actually mean in practical terms?
It's not about working 100-hour weeks or sacrificing your health.
Rather, it's about direct engagement with potential customers and solving their problems in high-touch, non-scalable ways:
Direct Customer Acquisition
The founders of Wistia, a video software company that bootstrapped to over $20 million in annual revenue, spent their early days personally reaching out to potential customers.
Co-founder Chris Savage recalls emailing hundreds of companies individually, offering to help solve their video hosting problems.
This approach not only landed their first paying customers but provided invaluable product feedback.
Manual Value Creation
Before Zapier automated workflows between apps for millions of users, co-founders Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig, and Mike Knoop would manually set up integrations for early customers.
This "concierge MVP" approach allowed them to understand user needs deeply before building automated solutions.
GitHub, before becoming the developer platform Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion, started as a side project by founder Tom Preston-Werner to solve his own development challenges.
Early growth came entirely through word-of-mouth within the developer community, with Preston-Werner and co-founders personally engaging with users on forums and at events.
Relationship Building
Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt into a community that would eventually be acquired by AngelList for approximately $20 million.
Rather than focusing on ads, Hoover personally curated products, connected with makers, and built relationships with influencers in the tech community.
This community-focused approach created a flywheel effect that advertising dollars couldn't have replicated.
Why Hustle Works When Ads Don't
The hustle-first approach offers several advantages that advertising simply cannot match for early-stage businesses:
Learning Velocity
Direct customer interaction provides unparalleled insight into what's working and what isn't.
Intercom co-founder Des Traynor has spoken extensively about how the company's early growth was driven by the founding team personally onboarding and supporting customers.
This approach led to rapid product iterations that eventually created a solution compelling enough to market at scale.
Trust Building
In an age of increasing skepticism toward advertising, personal relationships create trust that ads cannot.
Notion grew primarily through word of mouth and community engagement rather than advertising.
The company's personal touch in supporting users and engaging with the community built advocates who spread the word far more effectively than ads could have.
Cost Efficiency
Buffer, the social media management platform, reached its first million in revenue without significant ad spend.
Instead, founder Joel Gascoigne focused on content marketing, personal outreach, and exceptional customer service - approaches that required time but minimal financial investment.
Market Positioning Refinement
Twilio didn't define its market position through focus groups or advertising tests.
CEO Jeff Lawson engaged directly with developers, learning their pain points and refining how the company positioned its communication APIs.
This resulted in messaging that resonated deeply when the company eventually scaled its marketing efforts.
The Transition Point
There is, of course, a time when advertising becomes not just viable but essential for continued growth.
The inflection point typically arrives when:
Your product has proven its value to a significant number of customers
You understand your customer acquisition costs and lifetime value
You have refined your messaging through hundreds of customer conversations
Your business model has demonstrated predictable unit economics
Shopify, the e-commerce platform now serving millions of merchants, focused initially on building a product that merchants loved and spread through word of mouth.
Only after achieving strong product-market fit and understanding their customers deeply did they scale up marketing efforts to reach their current market position.
Implications for Founders
The "hustle first, ads later" insight has several important implications for founders:
Budget Allocation
In the early stages, customer acquisition budget might be better spent on attending industry events, taking potential customers to coffee, or hiring customer success personnel rather than on digital ads.
Hiring Priorities
Before bringing on a marketing team focused on scaling acquisition, consider prioritising roles that enhance your ability to deliver value and gather feedback - product, engineering, and customer success.
Metrics Focus
Rather than obsessing over CPAs (Cost Per Acquisition) and ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) early on, focus on metrics that indicate value delivery and customer satisfaction: Net Promoter Score, retention rates, and qualitative feedback.
Conclusion
The path to your first million in revenue isn't likely to be paved with clever ad campaigns.
Instead, it will be built through personal connections, direct value creation, and the kind of deep customer understanding that only comes from getting your hands dirty.
This isn't to say that advertising doesn't have a place in your growth strategy - it absolutely does.
But that place is likely after you've already established product-market fit and understand your customers deeply through direct engagement.
The companies that ultimately succeed at scale are often those that delayed gratification, embraced the unsexy work of direct customer interaction, and built a foundation strong enough to support effective advertising when the time was right.
The hustle-first approach isn't just about bootstrap efficiency - it's about building a business with genuine value at its core.
And that, more than any marketing tactic, is what creates sustainable success.
Source : Empire City Wire.
References
Collison, P. (2023). "The Early Days of Stripe." Y Combinator's Startup School Lecture Series.
Savage, C. (2019). "How We Bootstrapped Wistia to $10M in ARR." SaaStr Annual Conference.
Foster, W. (2021). "From Side Project to 8-Figure Business." Mixergy Interview. Retrieved from https://mixergy.com/interviews/zapier-with-wade-foster/
Preston-Werner, T. (2018). "Building GitHub." How I Built This with Guy Raz, NPR.
Hoover, R. (2020). "Building Product Hunt." The Twenty Minute VC Podcast.
Traynor, D. (2022). "Customer Development at Intercom." Inside Intercom Podcast.
Gascoigne, J. (2019). "Buffer's Path to $20M ARR." SaaStock Conference.
Lawson, J. (2021). "Ask Your Developer." HarperCollins Publishers.
Lütke, T. (2020). "The Shopify Story." Masters of Scale Podcast with Reid Hoffman.
Why did I write this post ? I am fascinated by startups and embrace the whole process that a founder embarks upon post their initial epiphany or eureka moment, i.e. idea 💡 when they discover a problem they feel obsessed to solve for the world. However, I personally have to confess, as a recovering Founder, Co-Founder and supporting multiple Founders, Co-Founders, Leadership teams of startups across the world 🌍 have noticed, depending on interestingly the individuals age or experience or both, an amazing variety of lens and perspectives on how best to address the item discussed above 👶. I have witnessed all too often the reluctance by some founders or co-founders to get their “hands dirty” and embrace the hustle that is discussed above in this article. Considering this person or set of people are the reason the business exists is beyond me. More on my thoughts on how to do address this later.
If you liked this post then please subscribe and follow me here as I also will continue to import episodes of my podcast, The G&T Sessions into the future. You can also follow me on X here https://www.x.com/andrewjturner and if you would like to subscribe directly to my podcast here https://www.linktr.ee/thegtsessions
Ciao for now