This founder was about to shut down his business and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What other businesses can scale like this?

I heard that Jasper scaled to $45m ARR in 12 months...with a team of 8.

For context, they are one of the fastest-growing companies ever. Grew from $0 to $45m ARR in 12 months (then raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation).

As a fellow founder, their story is really inspiring to me (curious about what others think):

In December 2020, Dave Rogenmoser and his co-founders were on the brink of shutting down their business. They'd spent 3+ years building a conversion optimization software called Proof...and it was flatlining.

A few weeks prior they had to make the painful decision to let go of half their team. Competition and churn had completely eroded growth. Things were painful.

8 years of work left them with a string of startups that never quite made it:

• 2 failed software businesses (couldn't make money)
• A SMB marketing agency (maxed out at $25k/mo)
• An online course company (hard to get big)

The Pivot: In January 2021, they had an idea to use Chat GPT-3, the generative AI model released 6 months earlier, to write high-converting Facebook ads. Within 30 days, they launched the business.

With the skeleton crew remaining from the last startup, they scaled the business to $45m ARR and 70,000+ customers without hiring a single new person. Soon after, they raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation.

Dave Rogenmoser, CEO at Jasper, had some great one-liners in a few podcasts I listened to on the business. Here are some of his learnings:

• Right Skill, Wrong Vehicle: He spent 8 years building marketing businesses which gave this team the knowledge and confidence to spend $1m/mo on sales and marketing to scale the business to $45m ARR in year 1.
• Launch Fast & Iterate Quickly: The team agreed that if the business didn't work in 30 days, they'd shut it down. Dave says, "If you have been working on a problem for more than 18 months and haven't found Product market fit (PMF), odds are you won't...Make the hard pivot."
• Ride A Big Wave: Generative AI technology is a new technology that is changing the way we work. But it's not just text. It's images, voice, etc. Identify new customer segments (e.g., Municipalities, Banks, Lawyers, etc.), learn their problems, and apply this novel technology to solve them.

What other businesses have you seen scale like this? I've never seen a SaaS business grow that fast.

I meet interesting founders 2x per week and share the learnings here.