The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter

You took a $50K pay cut for startup equity. The VCs are counting on that. Here’s what they know that you don’t...

Last year, a friend called excited:

• Head of Product role
• $2M ARR startup
• $120K salary
• “Generous equity package”

I asked one question: “What’s the preference stack?”

Silence.

Here’s what that 1% actually means:

• Investors put in $10M
• They get paid back 2x first
• Then they get their pro-rata
• Then you get… what’s left

The real math:

$20M exit = $0 for you

$30M exit = $0 for you

$40M exit = maybe lunch money

But it gets worse:

Your 1% isn’t even 1%:

• Series A cuts it to 0.5%
• Series B drops it to 0.25%
• Series C? Keep dividing
• Down rounds? Start crying

The cruel truth: 95% of startup employees never see a dollar from equity. But 100% took pay cuts to get it.

Before you take that “dream offer”...

Red flags to watch for:

• “Industry standard vesting”
• “Standard preferences”
• “Standard dilution protection”
• “Standard liquidation rights”

Translation: Standard = You lose

Questions that save you:

1. “What’s the current preference stack?”
2. “Show me dilution scenarios”
3. “What’s the exit waterfall?”
4. “How many shares outstanding?”

Because here’s what VCs know: Hope is expensive. Math is free.

Choose math.

Alex Turnbull

Founder and CEO

Groove and Helply

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P.S. I believe that if you can get 10 paying customers, you can get 100. And if you can get 100, you can get 1,000. So if you're just getting started, here's how I would get my first 10 paying customers in 6 months:

• Pick an urgent pain in a high-paying niche
• Define your ICP (ideal customer profile)
• Build your TAM (total addressable market)
• Talk to 100 buyers to clarify the pain (your initial ideas may be wrong)
• Vaporware your solution (Figma, wireframe)
• Recruit 25 VIPs for early access in exchange for providing feedback (the first 25 will come from the most engaged / motivated from your initial 100 calls)
• Hire an AI-first dev (search where big tech isn’t looking)
• Build your product in public (get to v1 quickly, polish it up later)
• Convert 10 of your 25 VIPs into full-pay customers before launch (no discounts, no verbal commitments; real cash in exchange for solving a burning pain)

This is the exact process I'm going through with Helply and InstantDocs right now. We have over 100 VIPs inside both products, and we're still over a month away from launch.

I'll be revealing my exact exact process, scripts, and GTM playbooks inside the new Zero to $10M ARR Academy. If you want access, click here to join.

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