RVNU #021: Why We Created RVNU
The Missing Link in Founder Growth
Why We Created RVNU: The Missing Link in Founder Growth
[PHASE: Introduction]
[FOCUS: Origin Story & Mission]
[FOR: Founders of B2B SaaS Companies]
[TOPIC: GTM Debt Problem Identification]
The Challenge
We've witnessed it hundreds of times: brilliant technical founders who've built remarkable products struggling to transform their innovations into sustainable businesses. Despite exceptional engineering talent and genuine product value, these founders hit invisible growth ceilings that no amount of technical optimization seems to break through.
This is the fundamental paradox of technical founder journeys—the very skills that enable the creation of groundbreaking products rarely translate to commercial success. What begins as a small gap in go-to-market knowledge compounds into what we call "GTM debt"—a growing deficit of commercial capabilities that silently undermines growth potential.
The consequences of this GTM debt are stark: diminished runways (time to execute), frustrated investors, team misalignment, and ultimately, existential threats to otherwise promising companies. Most painfully, we've seen technically superior products fail while inferior solutions thrive solely because their creators navigated the commercial landscape more effectively.
But here's the misconception: technical excellence alone will drive commercial success. It won't.
Problem Exploration
The Technical-Commercial Divide
Technical founders face a unique challenge: they've typically spent years mastering engineering disciplines that operate on entirely different principles from go-to-market execution. The skills that make someone an exceptional CTO rarely prepare them for commercial leadership.
Consider the contrast:
Engineering values elegance and efficiency; sales often requires comfortable ambiguity
Product development thrives on logical progression; customer acquisition rarely follows a linear path
Technical roadmaps can be planned with relative certainty; commercial outcomes remain perpetually uncertain, especially in early-stage startups.
This divide isn't merely academic—it manifests in very real problems. One technical founder we worked with had built an objectively superior security solution, yet watched in frustration as a competitor with inferior technology captured 80% market share through more effective positioning and sales execution.
I’m proud to say I’ve often been the guy on the opposite side of this equation, selling an inferior product in a more machine-like GTM org. Obviously having the superior product AND GTM motions is the holy grail we search for an invest in today at RVNU.
I see these challenges most often immediately after the founder has objectively secured product market fit, but is trying to abstract themselves from the sales process. I often refer to this as the “efficient growth chasm”. It’s when the founder is trying to create repeatability in GTM and hire their first non-founder seller.
Ask yourself: Does your team spend 10x more time discussing product features than go-to-market strategy? Do commercial decisions lack the same rigorous framework as your technical decisions?
The "Figure It Out As You Go" Fallacy
Startup culture has perpetuated a dangerous myth: that commercial strategy can be effectively improvised. "Talk to customers and iterate" has become the default advice, suggesting that go-to-market execution is somehow less systematic than product development.
The reality is far different. While every company's path is unique, the patterns of successful commercialization are remarkably consistent. Yet most technical founders end up rediscovering these patterns through painful trial and error—often at the cost of millions in wasted capital and years of lost momentum.
We watched one AI startup spend 18 months cycling through three different pricing models, each requiring substantial sales retraining and customer reeducation. The third model—which finally worked—was a standard approach for their category. The cost of this "figure it out as you go" approach? $2.7 million in additional burn and a critical delay in their Series A readiness.
The combined burn of runway (capital) and time is often enough to kill a startup!
The Expert Access Problem
When technical founders recognize their GTM challenges, they typically face a troubling dilemma: rely on generic advice that doesn't account for their specific context, or pay enormous sums for top-tier commercial expertise they can't yet afford. (or listen to their VC, which with respect, is when you know they are in really deep doo doo!)
Traditional options fall into predictable categories, each with serious limitations:
Startup incubators/accelerators: Generalized advice, rarely delivered by operators with pattern recognition across dozens of similar cases, and often hyper focused on what we define as the ‘idea market fit’ phase of growth (pre/seed).
Books and courses: Static knowledge lacking contextual application to specific business models
Fractional executives: The high-quality folk are prohibitively expensive for early-stage companies. (the cookie-cutter folk just accelerate your path to bankruptcy)
Traditional consultants: Enterprise-focused with business models unsuited to startup budgets
The result? A fundamental mismatch between the expertise technical founders need and what they can realistically access, particularly outside traditional tech hubs.
Common Misconceptions
"We'll hire commercial talent to drive revenue"
Many founding teams misunderstand the primary value of early sales conversations. They view these interactions primarily as revenue-generating activities rather than what they truly are: the most valuable product development signal available.
This misconception leads to premature hiring of revenue leaders who need and want revenue targets—when the real objective should be gathering structured market feedback to refine the product. We frequently see founders hire VPs of Sales or CROs too early, only to set them up for failure with unrealistic expectations in an environment where the product is still evolving.
The reality is that founders should lead early commercial conversations themselves. This critical phase requires someone with the authority to absorb market signals and rapidly adjust product direction—not someone incentivized to hit arbitrary revenue targets with an imperfect product. The founder's unique perspective and decision-making authority make them irreplaceable in these early customer interactions, ideally with guidance from someone who has navigated this specific growth stage before.
"We can learn everything through trial and error"
Trial and error is undeniably valuable, especially for companies with novel or unique technology where direct market proxies don't exist. High-cadence experimentation can reveal insights that no framework could predict in advance. The issue isn't experimentation itself—it's unstructured experimentation without a system for capturing and interpreting the results.
We've observed the most successful founders combine rapid market testing with thoughtful frameworks for what they're learning. They run frequent experiments, but each interaction has clear learning objectives and a system for interpreting the signals received. This balanced approach respects the uniqueness of your offering while still leveraging established patterns where they apply.
For truly innovative technology, there's no substitute for direct market contact and iteration. However, even groundbreaking innovation benefits from structured approaches to customer discovery, pricing psychology, and value articulation. The goal isn't to eliminate trial and error, but to make each trial more informative and each error more instructive.
Business Impact
Runway Waste
GTM debt extracts a heavy cost in both capital and time—resources that early-stage companies can ill afford to waste. We've documented this impact across dozens of companies:
A developer tools startup spent $500,000 testing go-to-market approaches that experienced operators could have immediately identified as misaligned with their category
An enterprise AI company extended their sales cycles by 7 months due to mispositioned messaging that emphasized technical capabilities over business outcomes
A promising SaaS platform burned through 40% of their Series A funds before discovering fundamental flaws in their ICP definition and targeting approach - lots of top of funnel, a bloated mid pipe, and not much coming out the bottom. A classic bout of “Startup Constipation”
These aren't isolated incidents—they represent systematic patterns we've observed across the SaaS startup founder landscape.
Growth Plateaus
Perhaps the most insidious impact of GTM debt is the artificial growth ceiling it creates. We've repeatedly seen companies hit revenue plateaus that their founding teams misdiagnose as product issues, market limitations, or competition problems.
In my career I was the hired gun to arrest these plateaus, and now at RVNU we arrest these plateaus at scale, but in reality we try and get to the startups before the plateau happens and whilst they have enough runway to stay alive and ultimately thrive.
In reality, these plateaus typically indicate a mismatch between the company's current commercial capabilities and what's required to reach the next growth phase. The symptoms are consistent:
Growth stalls at specific revenue thresholds ($1M, $3M, $10M ARR)
Customer acquisition becomes increasingly expensive
Sales processes that worked for early adopters fail with mainstream buyers
Initial traction gives way to unpredictable, lumpy growth
Without addressing the underlying GTM debt, companies find themselves trapped—unable to break through to sustainable growth despite continuing to enhance their products.
Origin Story Elements
Our Background
RVNU began with a simple observation: the patterns of commercial success and failure we'd seen across 100+ B2B SaaS companies weren't random. After decades collectively spent in the trenches—as founders, operators, and advisors—we recognized that technical founders were repeatedly encountering the same commercial challenges, often at predictable points in their growth journeys.
This pattern recognition came from an unusual breadth of experience:
Working with companies across funding stages from pre-seed to IPO
Supporting transitions from founder-led sales to scaled commercial organizations
Guiding transformations from product-led growth to enterprise sales motions
Helping companies navigate critical pricing and packaging decisions
This vantage point revealed something crucial: the difference between companies that achieved escape velocity and those that stalled often had less to do with their technical capabilities and more to do with how effectively they navigated key commercial inflection points.
The Insight Moment
The catalyst for RVNU came from my direct experiences leading companies where GTM execution made the critical difference between success and failure—often despite product advantages or disadvantages.
At Maxymiser, I led revenue growth against much larger competitors with superior resources but inferior GTM execution. Despite not having the strongest product in the market, focused commercial strategy led to a $180M exit to Oracle. The pattern repeated at Guidebook, where outstanding product competed against well-funded rivals—yet targeted GTM strategy and execution consistently outperformed competitors with deeper pockets. Guidebook continues to thrive today, while most competitors have disappeared.
At Wonderschool, strategic pivots were driven not just by market opportunity but by the viability of executable GTM strategies given the complex demands on the company. These pivots proved essential to the company's ability to navigate challenging market conditions.
These experiences crystallized our thinking: the gap between technical excellence and commercial success wasn't just a founder experience issue; it was a systematic, addressable problem hiding in plain sight. More importantly, we realized this problem disproportionately affected founders outside traditional venture ecosystems, who lacked access to the commercial pattern recognition that Silicon Valley founders often take for granted.
Early Validation
Our hypothesis was validated through three complementary sources: our direct operating experience, our consulting work with diverse B2B SaaS companies, and insights gathered from $20M Roadmap completion discussions with founders.
Working with companies across vastly different sectors—from Codepath, Upciti, Upfront and Brightwheel in Ed/GovTech to Contractor Commerce in Construction SaaS, Zendesk in DevOps, Innovasea in Aquaculture SaaS, Portainer.io in DevOps, Tailscale in Cybersecurity —we observed a remarkable consistency. Despite their different markets, these companies all benefited from applying our GTM operating system to align and execute focused, rapid revenue growth.
Our experience spans the US, Europe, and Asia, and we frequently work with startups looking to make successful entrances into the US market from other geographies, and vice versa. This global perspective has shown us that while market entry strategies may differ by region, the fundamental patterns of GTM success remain consistent.
These experiences confirmed our core insight: there are identifiable patterns in early-stage GTM growth that most founders are either unaware of or ignoring. The problem wasn't a lack of information (there's plenty of generic sales and marketing advice available), but rather a lack of contextual pattern recognition specific to business model, stage, and category.
Mission and Vision
Democratizing Commercial Expertise
Our mission crystallized around a simple idea: what if we could make Silicon Valley-quality commercial expertise accessible to technical founders everywhere? What if we could compress the learning curves that typically take years and millions in capital into a structured, accessible system?
This isn't just about knowledge transfer—it's about dismantling the geographic and network barriers that have historically kept world-class commercial expertise locked within small circles of connected founders.
Systematic Approach to Founder Growth
Through our work with 100+ companies, we've mapped the technical founder's commercial journey across 16 distinct stages—from initial problem validation to scaled go-to-market operations. This mapping revealed that success isn't random; it follows identifiable patterns with clear inflection points.
Most importantly, we discovered that founders who understand these patterns and prepare for key inflection points significantly outperform those navigating without this map—regardless of their prior commercial experience.
Accessible Expertise Model
Traditional models for delivering commercial expertise (consulting, coaching, fractional leadership) are fundamentally misaligned with the needs of early-stage technical founders. They're either too expensive, too generalized, or too focused on execution rather than capability building.
We've reimagined how expertise should be delivered:
Structured around common founder challenges rather than abstract business functions
Focused on building founder capabilities rather than dependency relationships
Priced for accessibility at every growth stage
Designed for practical implementation without requiring expertise to interpret
Founder Journey Mapping
The technical founder's growth journey follows a predictable trajectory, though it rarely feels that way when you're in the middle of it. We've mapped this journey across four critical phases, each containing key inflection points that determine growth potential:
Idea-to-Market Fit: Validating that your technical solution addresses a meaningful, monetizable problem
Product-to-Market Fit: Proving your solution delivers and captures value in repeatable ways
Go-to-Market Fit: Creating scalable, non-founder-dependent commercial operations
Scale: Building the systems and team to drive consistent, predictable growth
At each phase, technical founders face specific challenges that require distinct commercial capabilities. Understanding these inflection points in advance doesn't just help avoid pitfalls—it transforms them from crisis moments into planned transitions.
Team Introduction
RVNU brings together complementary perspectives on the founder journey:
Founder backgrounds in sales, customer success, marketing, operations, and executive functions spanning engineering, product, and capital raising
Experience across the full spectrum of company stages, from bootstrap to IPO
Track record of building and scaling commercial operations across multiple categories and industries
Pattern recognition from working with 100+ founders across different business models and sectors
This diverse experience gives us unusual visibility into the patterns that determine commercial success—not just in theory, but in practical application across a wide range of contexts. We've lived through these challenges as operators, executives, and advisors, giving us a multi-dimensional view of what works, what doesn't, and why.
Common Questions
How is RVNU different from traditional startup advice?
Most startup advice falls into two categories: general best practices disconnected from context, or individualized coaching without systematic frameworks. RVNU is built around a structured mapping of the founder journey, organized by specific challenges at each growth stage.
Do you work directly with companies?
While our primary focus is making expertise accessible through our content and frameworks, we do work directly with a limited number of companies that match our ideal customer profile. This hands-on work continually refines our understanding of current challenges and ensures our approach remains grounded in real-world application.
Is this just for early-stage companies?
Our approach is valuable for technical founders across stages, though the specific challenges vary. Pre-seed and seed companies benefit from avoiding common pitfalls, while Series A and B companies typically need help scaling beyond founder-led commercial operations or addressing GTM debt that has accumulated over time.
Coming Next
In the weeks ahead, we'll be exploring each phase of the founder journey, diving deep into specific challenges and inflection points. Our content will be intensely practical and structured—no platitudes, no hype, just actionable insights based on patterns we've observed across hundreds of B2B SaaS companies.
Think of our newsletter as an unofficial entrepreneurship MBA focused specifically on early-stage SaaS. Each article will tackle a specific challenge founders face, with concrete examples, diagnostic questions, and practical considerations. We'll cover topics including:
Problem validation approaches that actually predict commercial viability
Market sizing methodologies that matter to investors (beyond theoretical TAM)
Solution development frameworks to prevent building products nobody wants
Design partner selection to get meaningful feedback, not just encouragement
Product adoption strategies to convert signups into engaged users
Value quantification techniques to articulate ROI in customer-relevant terms
Pricing strategies that capture appropriate value without limiting growth
Sales playbook development to move beyond founder-led selling
Team structure approaches for different growth stages and business models
Customer success systems to drive retention and expansion
Metrics frameworks that predict growth before it happens (or doesn't)
For anyone interested in truly learning what it takes to turn software into a profitable business, this is the newsletter for you. No hyperbole, no generic advice—just structured, honest guidance based on what actually works.
We'll begin with the foundations of idea-to-market fit, exploring why most early validation approaches fail to predict actual commercial viability. From there, we'll move through the critical stages of product validation, pricing strategy, commercial operations, and scaling for sustainable growth.
Engagement Opportunities
Ready to turn these insights into action? We offer multiple ways to engage with RVNU's expertise:
Newsletter Subscription (Free): Weekly insights exploring common founder challenges, delivered directly to your inbox. Perfect for staying informed about key GTM considerations at each growth stage. Subscribe Now
Newsletter Subscription (Paid): Unlock higher-frequency content, deeper strategic insights, bonus frameworks, and exclusive guest content from industry experts. Ideal for founders who want comprehensive guidance without the full framework access. Upgrade Your Subscription
The $20M Roadmap (FREE in May)
Your personalized assessment and growth plan that identifies where you stand across the 16 critical stages of B2B SaaS growth, pinpoints your most pressing GTM debt, and provides a prioritized action plan. Get your $20M Roadmap now.
RVNU Vault: Treat your founder journey like an MBA in SaaS commercialization. Access our complete library of frameworks, participate in regular office hours, and join exclusive events with other technical founders. The Vault is designed for founders who want to implement proven methodologies with expert guidance. Join the Vault waitlist.
Co-Pilot Program: For founders who want direct operational support, our Co-Pilot program puts our team inside your business to drive GTM execution and results. We work hands-on with your team to implement the right strategies for your specific context and growth stage. Learn About Co-Pilot
Our approach is designed to meet founders where they are—whether you're looking for insights to implement yourself, structured frameworks with implementation guidance, or direct operational support from our team.
Our mission is to help founders break through commercial barriers and build sustainable growth engines.
Together, we got this folks 👊🏼
Onwards,
Wayne, RVNU founder.
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