As a founder, the delta between “your product today” versus “what you envision your product will be in ~5 years” is painful to acknowledge. Refusing to acknowledge it, however, means you’re selling a product that doesn’t exist yet. While pitching a glorious future is necessary to raise funds, it is inefficient when trying to sell.
The client decides to wire you money (or not) based on what your product looks like today. The investor decides to wire you money (or not) based on what your product will look like tomorrow. Using the same approach to get clients and investors to wire you money is, therefore, a defective strategy.
I’ve made that mistake. The RO’s vision is to build “The Financial Times for the global startup scene”. In other words, mandatory reading for any professional in the global startup scene (founder, investor, policymaker, corporate, ecosystem builder).
The problem is that the RO today isn’t “The Financial Times for the global startup scene”. This doesn’t mean our product is bad. It just means it doesn’t look like the FT yet.
A more intelligent framing may be: what type of ICP would find value in the RO’s product, in its current state? If we find such an ICP, we could use revenue from that ICP to:
Get the RO to profitability (the RO’s profitability cements its editorial independence, which increases its editorial quality, which boosts its commercial value, which further cements its profitability).
Invest back into the RO’s editorial product (ie: hiring writers) to gradually transform the RO into the “FT of the global startup scene” it purports to be.
Lucky for us, we have found that ICP: universities.
We have now sold RO subscriptions to two elite US universities (ie: the university library buys a subscription for students). We have other, advanced conversations with universities in the UK, India, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan…
It’s not an ICP I expected when I started the RO. But it turns out that the RO’s product (in its current state) solves a real pain for university libraries around the world.
For universities in the “West”, we’re valuable for students from emerging markets, who want to launch a startup/VC back home and need information on how startups/VC work in their home countries. Little such resources exist for them today. RO fills that gap.
For universities in “emerging markets”, we’re valuable for (I think) the majority of students interested in tech/VC. They are tired of learning entrepreneurship from an Apple Inc case study from 1998. Steve Jobs is great: if you’re trying to launch an insurance tech startup in India in 2026, the insights to be gleaned are limited. Reading an RO deep-dive on an insure tech startup in Mexico might provide more practical value.
It also helps that university library deals are annual, paid upfront, and are larger than when we sell 2 RO seats to a VC fund. If we serve our university clients well, they are also unlikely to churn year-over-year. Especially since we are on the cheaper end of the other publications they pay for.
That’s why, for the next ~24 months, we’ve decided to focus 100% of our sales efforts on university clients.
The math checks out:
500 universities paying €4,000/year (honest estimate) for an RO subscription = €2M ARR.
We can reach that by end of 2028. That checks out to ~17 new university clients per month. Ambitious, but fundamentally doable.
€2M ARR = ~ €160,000/month budget if we want to break-even. Let’s drop it to €130,000/month to account for a “monthly savings” buffer.
€130,000/month budget = let’s say €90,000/month on salaries.
€90,000/month on salaries = 18 people full-time, considering €5,000/month salary (fully-loaded cost).
According to its website, the FT employs 700 journalists. So we won’t be there yet.
But the RO’s product with 18 people full-time will be a different product than it currently is (2 people full-time). Our objective, then, will be to keep serving our university clients and find a new ICP that will gain value from the RO’s 2028 version. That ICP will help us fund the RO product to its improved 2032 version. Rinse and repeat until we get to FT-grade.
Every founder and every company has its own way of doing things. Ours isn’t the brash, chaotic, move-fast-and-break-things-and-erode-democracy playbook. We’re the reclusive, cerebral, methodical type, analyzing our Granola sales transcripts with feverish intensity.
The RO team sends each other well-crafted, thought-out, long emails, not pithy missives on Slack (we don’t have Slack nor do I plan on getting it. Email has a a certain inertia and formality that forces you to write better).
Patiently, gingerly sequencing our growth, ICP by ICP, fits our company culture. There’s product-market fit, there’s founder-market fit, I also think there’s strategy-culture fit. An ADHD-like growth strategy may work for others (I don’t judge it - it clearly works for others) but it simply doesn’t fit my personality and therefore the personality of people I recruit (who I tend to share many personality traits with).
Zero to One is still the best startup book I’ve read. Even though I despise the author’s political views (and don’t understand why we give people who are brilliant in one field front-loaded credibility in other fields where they have no credentials), Peter Thiel makes the point that young founders underestimate the power of conscientious, long-term planning. I agree.
I’m also aware that as a “high conscientious founder”, I ought to leave some room for chaos. As Cedric Chin from Commoncog (your favorite business mentor’s business mentor) puts it in this fantastic essay:
“High chaos founders excel at network effect startups, because a strong network effect hides the weaknesses of chaos. In other businesses, their natural chaos becomes a liability during scaling. So they have to learn conscientiousness as they grow; growth tends to demand structure and process.
High conscientious founders do better with companies like B2B SaaS startups, where their methodical approach works brilliantly. But then they struggle if they’ve tapped out their original market and need to launch new products or expand into other markets — because, surprise, surprise, uncertainty isn’t their strong suit.
[…]
It turns out that some amount of chaos is necessary to build a good business — it’s the only way you can generate enough information to figure out what you can use for your strategy. If you don’t take enough chaotic actions, cut random deals, or start random new products, you won’t unearth the Lego blocks that you can combine into new, coherent parts of your business.”
I haven’t felt this level of strategic clarity in a while. Universities are an ICP that we solve a problem for, that are willing to pay, that are ethically rewarding to serve, and that represent a large global market. I’m excited to go all in on serving them for the coming years. While leaving some (tightly-contained) room for serendipity and new opportunities (I’m trying to live up to your words, Cedric).
I hope this email finds you in good health. Wishing you a great month of September.
Tim