The 4-Step Framework Can Help You Go from £0 to £1 Million ARR Within a Year

This isn’t your typical blog packed with jargon and frameworks that sound like they were brainstormed during an all-hands at a big tech giant. No, this is real, gritty advice from the trenches—advice that comes from taking a gamification platform from £0 to £1M ARR in only one year as a 0 to 1 product manager. We’re diving into the art of building something from scratch: establishing processes, defining culture, and securing tech partnerships. Note: for SEO purposes I will be redacting my startup’s name to simply “my start up” so that this article does not rank for my startups company name, but I am sure you can guess which one I am talking about 😉. What Is a 0 to 1 Product Manager? The 0 to 1 product journey in product management is like losing your AirPods, finding your old wired earbuds from 2012, and spending the next 35 minutes of your commute trying to untangle them. Simply put, zero to one product management is stressful. It’s about making connections that are obvious in hindsight but blood-boilingly frustrating to identify in the moment. In startup terms, this usually means launching a minimum viable product (MVP), iterating on feedback, scaling for growth, then trashing it all and starting over until you get some traction. But too many people think being a 0 to 1 product manager is just about building the product. It’s not. It’s about laying the foundation for the team, culture, and processes that will sustain it. But why 0 to 1 specifically? Not only is $1 million ARR (or £1 million ARR for me since I’m British now) a powerful milestone for a startup and product manager’s career, but the phrase was also popularized by former CEO and co-founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel in his book, Zero to One where he coined the original concept of taking a product from nothing into its first user-ready iteration. The Big Tech vs. Startup Revelation When I transitioned from an product manager MBA internship at Activision Blizzard, working on the Candy Crush Saga (a £1.2 billion ARR mobile game), to heading product at my startup, I—naively—thought I would have all the tools I needed for growth. I knew all the prioritization frameworks, had Google/Uber/Meta case interviews memorized, and could build an executive powerpoint presentation with my eyes closed. All the most useless things when it comes to startup product management. I quickly learned that product management at a startup is a completely different beast. At Activision Blizzard, every process and resource you could dream of was already in place. When a new feature launched, it plugged into a well-oiled machine of engineers, game designers, QA teams, and marketing workflows. At my startup? There was no machine. Heck, there wasn’t even a lever. I had to build it all—by hand. What Sets a 0 to 1 Product Manager Apart If you’re stepping into a 0 to 1 role, here’s what you need to know: 1. Extreme Ownership Yes, I regularly wake up at 4:30am to run in the London rain. Yes, I am borderline insane when it comes to organizing Jira tickets, backlogs, roadmaps, and Confluence docs. So yes, I am going to use a Jocko Willink quote in a product management blog. The single most important mindset for a 0 to 1 product manager is ownership (OWNERSHIP). You don’t just own the product—you own the culture, processes, partnerships, and ways of working for the entire team. For me, this meant teaching team members who had no formal product training the “why,” “how,” and “when” of product decisions. Action Item: Define and document every process. If you’re not documenting it, you’re leaving it up to interpretation, and chaos will reign. 2. Automate or Die Trying Startups don’t have the manpower for manual, repetitive tasks. Believe it—one of my most impactful contributions was automating our bug reporting workflow. Before automation, reporting a bug meant ping-ponging between Slack and Jira while manually tracking every update. Here’s what I implemented: Customer flags a bug → Slack workflow auto-creates a Jira ticket. Jira ticket auto-assigns to a dev with capacity. When resolved, Slack notifies the team and the customer. This process saved thousands of hours (1,926 hours between my customer success manager,my solutions consultant, and I in 2023 to be exact) and reduced total reported bugs from 321 to 121 in a year—all while increasing app usage by 97%. Action Item: Identify repetitive tasks and automate them. Tools like Slack workflows, Zapier, Jira integrations, and of course, ChatGPT, are your best friends. (take them out for a pint afterwards, they deserve it). 3. Feedback Loops Are Your Secret Weapon In a team of 12, conducting full-scale UX research wasn’t an option. Instead, I turned my startup’s app into a feedback loop machine. Non-intrusive product tours, onboarding flows, and in-app nudges collected user insights in real time. This approach allowed us to iterate quickly and sustainably. Our tech stack for this is Chameleon.io (thanks Pulkit!) for product tours and in-app feedback loops, HotJar for heatmaps and recordings, and Zapier for automating UX interview bookings. Action Item: Embed AUTOMATED UX feedback loops directly into your product. Your users are your best (and cheapest) source of insights. Ready for that clickbaity number 4 I promised? I’m actually kinda proud of this one. 4. Drink From Revenue Fountains Breaking into the B2B SaaS market as a 0 to 1 product is like trying to charge into the Death Star with a podracer and no force abilities. You have no brand recognition, no credibility, and no one’s lining up to talk to you. The enterprise sales process is its own maze of red tape—RFPs, legal reviews, preferred vendor lists, misaligned leadership, procurement skepticism, and endless back-and-forth. It’s exhausting, slow, and often feels impossible to navigate as a tiny, scrappy startup. That’s why I created the concept of “drinking from revenue fountains.” Instead of hacking through the tangled vines of enterprise sales on your own, this strategy lets you tap into established sales pipelines by partnering with technology providers that already serve your target customers. The Power of Peripheral Partnerships The key is to identify technology partners that provide complementary or peripheral services to yours. These partners already have relationships with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and are trusted vendors on their preferred lists. By partnering with them, you gain access to their established credibility and sales pipeline, accelerating your path into enterprise accounts. Here’s an example: At my startup, a gamification platform targeting enterprise retailers, we identified loyalty platforms and CRMs as our ideal tech partners. These platforms store voucher and customer data on the back-end but lack a front-end mechanism to collect that data in engaging ways. Enter my startup. Through our partnership: Loyalty platforms and CRMs can now pitch us as the solution for retailers to gamify shopper experiences, boosting engagement and data collection. Retailers win by driving more customer interactions with their campaigns and collecting more valuable data for their loyalty programs. my startup wins by fast-tracking our way into enterprise sales cycles. Everybody wins. How to Find Your Revenue Fountains This concept isn’t limited to gamification or enterprise retail. Any B2B SaaS product can use this approach to break into its market. Here’s how to apply it: Define Your ICP: Identify your ideal customers and the vendors they already trust. Look at their preferred vendor lists and tools they’re using. Identify Peripheral Gaps: Analyze these vendors and tools to find gaps or enhancements your product can provide. For example: Does a vendor lack a front-end interface? Are they missing an integration to collect or analyze specific data? Can your product complement their services and make them more valuable to their customers? Pitch to the Vendor: Show how your product enhances their offering. Position yourself as a win-win for the vendor and the customer. Vendors are often more approachable and easier to sell to than directly selling to end customers. Collaborate to Sell: Once the partnership is established, leverage the vendor’s sales team to pitch your product as part of their solution. This gives you a fast-track introduction into enterprise sales processes without having to start from scratch. The Fast Track to £1M ARR Drinking from revenue fountains can dramatically accelerate your revenue growth. Instead of burning months on cold outreach, you align yourself with trusted partners who already have a seat at the table. This strategy helped my startup unlock key enterprise accounts, grow usage for our tech partners, and, ultimately, smash through the £1M ARR milestone. If you’re a 0 to 1 product manager, don’t try to blaze every trail yourself. Find the fountains already flowing with revenue, align your product to enhance their streams, and watch the growth flow in. The Challenges of 0 to 1 Let’s not sugarcoat this: 0 to 1 product management is hard. Here are some of the biggest challenges and how I tackled them. Building Processes from Scratch When you’re starting from zero, prioritization frameworks like RICE or MoSCoW won’t help unless you first establish foundational processes. At my startup, this meant creating a simple centralized Google Sheets dashboard that everyone—from engineers to the CEO—could follow. Here, everyone could reference the roadmap, high level OKRs and goals, and it was delivered in a simple enough medium for it to be easily adopted. Action Item: Seriously, when in 0-to-1 more, don’t dive into every fancy PM tool. No one will know how to use Miro, your developers will not know how to implement Mixpanel properly—nor will they care, and no one will want to spend an hour trying to figure out why Linear is better than Jira (it is, but we don’t have time for that). Minimize your team’s learning curves—Google Sheets, Jira, and SQL queries are your 0-1 friends. Simple. Easy. Everyone, from your 22-year-old intern to your 55-year-old founder, is familiar with them.* Navigating Limited Resources When resources are scarce, every decision is a tradeoff. Should you dedicate precious dev hours to a feature proven to reduce YoY churn by 6% or break your design system’s rules by updating the app’s font to Montserrat to make the founder happy? The key is ruthless prioritization and transparency with stakeholders. In a previous article, I wrote about how I break down “effort” into four categories (dev, QA, UX, and business) to ensure every task was evaluated fairly. I even made a Google Sheets template to help you prioritize. Hint: Go steal it. The Payoff: £1M ARR in One Year Looking back, the biggest wins at my startup came from laying down foundations: Taking extreme ownership to establish product process and culture. Automating workflows to save time and reduce errors. Turning the app into a feedback engine to improve user satisfaction. Drinking from revenue fountains. These efforts didn’t just improve the product—they transformed the team’s ability to execute. By the end of 2023, we did it—we hit £1M ARR in less than 1 year. How to Thrive as a 0 to 1 Product Manager Here are my final takeaways for anyone stepping into this role: Embrace the Chaos Every day will feel like a new fire to put out. Learn to love it—or at least accept it. Chaos is part of the journey. Lead with Curiosity You don’t have to have all the answers. Ask questions, experiment, and learn from your team and users. Build for Scalability Every process you create should scale. Even if you’re a team of 12 today, plan for the team of 50 you might become. Focus on Outcomes In startups, effort means nothing if it doesn’t translate into results. Keep your eyes on the prize: user satisfaction, revenue growth, and team morale. Bottom Line Being a 0 to 1 product manager isn’t about frameworks or checklists—it’s about creating something from nothing and owning every step of the journey. Whether you’re automating bug reports or teaching your team the fundamentals of product management, remember: the impact you have at 0 to 1 will ripple far beyond the product itself. So, roll up your sleeves, embrace the mess, and make it happen. Because at the end of the day, being a 0 to 1 product manager is: Less about the product and more about systems and processes. Less about knowing what to do and more about figuring it out as you go. K Bye! This isn’t your typical blog packed with jargon and frameworks that sound like they were brainstormed during an all-hands at a big tech giant. No, this is real, gritty advice from the trenches—advice that comes from taking a gamification platform from £0 to £1M ARR in only one year as a 0 to 1 product manager. We’re diving into the art of building something from scratch: establishing processes, defining culture, and securing tech partnerships. Note: for SEO purposes I will be redacting my startup’s name to simply “my start up” so that this article does not rank for my startups company name, but I am sure you can guess which one I am talking about 😉. Note: Note: Note: for SEO purposes I will be redacting my startup’s name to simply “my start up” so that this article does not rank for my startups company name, but I am sure you can guess which one I am talking about 😉. for SEO purposes I will be redacting my startup’s name to simply “my start up” so that this article does not rank for my startups company name, but I am sure you can guess which one I am talking about What Is a 0 to 1 Product Manager? What Is a 0 to 1 Product Manager? The 0 to 1 product journey in product management is like losing your AirPods, finding your old wired earbuds from 2012, and spending the next 35 minutes of your commute trying to untangle them. 0 to 1 product product management Simply put, zero to one product management is stressful . product management is stressful stressful It’s about making connections that are obvious in hindsight but blood-boilingly frustrating to identify in the moment. In startup terms, this usually means launching a minimum viable product (MVP), iterating on feedback , scaling for growth , then trashing it all and starting over until you get some traction. minimum viable product iterating on feedback scaling for growth But too many people think being a 0 to 1 product manager is just about building the product. It’s not . It’s not It’s about laying the foundation for the team, culture, and processes that will sustain it. But why 0 to 1 specifically? Not only is $1 million ARR (or £1 million ARR for me since I’m British now) a powerful milestone for a startup and product manager’s career, but the phrase was also popularized by former CEO and co-founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel in his book, Zero to One where he coined the original concept of taking a product from nothing into its first user-ready iteration. Peter Thiel Zero to One Zero to One The Big Tech vs. Startup Revelation The Big Tech vs. Startup Revelation When I transitioned from an product manager MBA internship at Activision Blizzard, working on the Candy Crush Saga (a £1.2 billion ARR mobile game ), to heading product at my startup, I—naively—thought I would have all the tools I needed for growth. £1.2 billion ARR mobile game I knew all the prioritization frameworks, had Google/Uber/Meta case interviews memorized, and could build an executive powerpoint presentation with my eyes closed. All the most useless things when it comes to startup product management. All the most useless things when it comes to startup product management. I quickly learned that product management at a startup is a completely different beast. At Activision Blizzard, every process and resource you could dream of was already in place. When a new feature launched, it plugged into a well-oiled machine of engineers, game designers, QA teams, and marketing workflows. At my startup? There was no machine. Heck, there wasn’t even a lever. I had to build it all—by hand. What Sets a 0 to 1 Product Manager Apart What Sets a 0 to 1 Product Manager Apart If you’re stepping into a 0 to 1 role, here’s what you need to know: 1. Extreme Ownership 1. Extreme Ownership Yes, I regularly wake up at 4:30am to run in the London rain. Yes, I am borderline insane when it comes to organizing Jira tickets, backlogs, roadmaps, and Confluence docs. So yes , I am going to use a Jocko Willink quote in a product management blog. So yes So yes The single most important mindset for a 0 to 1 product manager is ownership ( OWNERSHIP ). The single most important mindset for a 0 to 1 product manager is ownership OWNERSHIP OWNERSHIP OWNERSHIP You don’t just own the product—you own the culture, processes, partnerships, and ways of working for the entire team. For me, this meant teaching team members who had no formal product training the “why,” “how,” and “when” of product decisions. Action Item : Define and document every process. If you’re not documenting it, you’re leaving it up to interpretation, and chaos will reign. Action Item Action Item 2. Automate or Die Trying 2. Automate or Die Trying Startups don’t have the manpower for manual, repetitive tasks. Believe it—one of my most impactful contributions was automating our bug reporting workflow. Before automation, reporting a bug meant ping-ponging between Slack and Jira while manually tracking every update. Here’s what I implemented: Customer flags a bug → Slack workflow auto-creates a Jira ticket. Jira ticket auto-assigns to a dev with capacity. When resolved, Slack notifies the team and the customer. Customer flags a bug → Slack workflow auto-creates a Jira ticket. Jira ticket auto-assigns to a dev with capacity. When resolved, Slack notifies the team and the customer. This process saved thousands of hours ( 1,926 hours between my customer success manager,my solutions consultant, and I in 2023 to be exact ) and reduced total reported bugs from 321 to 121 in a year—all while increasing app usage by 97%. thousands of hours 1,926 hours between my customer success manager,my solutions consultant, and I in 2023 to be exact Action Item : Identify repetitive tasks and automate them. Tools like Slack workflows , Zapier , Jira integrations , and of course, ChatGPT, are your best friends. (take them out for a pint afterwards, they deserve it). Action Item Action Item Slack workflows Zapier Jira integrations 3. Feedback Loops Are Your Secret Weapon 3. Feedback Loops Are Your Secret Weapon In a team of 12, conducting full-scale UX research wasn’t an option. Instead, I turned my startup’s app into a feedback loop machine. feedback loop Non-intrusive product tours, onboarding flows, and in-app nudges collected user insights in real time. in-app nudges This approach allowed us to iterate quickly and sustainably. Our tech stack for this is Chameleon.io (thanks Pulkit !) for product tours and in-app feedback loops, HotJar for heatmaps and recordings, and Zapier for automating UX interview bookings. Chameleon.io Pulkit HotJar Zapier Action Item : Embed AUTOMATED UX feedback loops directly into your product. Your users are your best (and cheapest) source of insights. Action Item Action Item Ready for that clickbaity number 4 I promised? Ready for that clickbaity number 4 I promised? I’m actually kinda proud of this one. I’m actually kinda proud of this one. 4. Drink From Revenue Fountains 4. Drink From Revenue Fountains Breaking into the B2B SaaS market as a 0 to 1 product is like trying to charge into the Death Star with a podracer and no force abilities. B2B SaaS You have no brand recognition, no credibility, and no one’s lining up to talk to you. The enterprise sales process is its own maze of red tape—RFPs, legal reviews, preferred vendor lists, misaligned leadership, procurement skepticism, and endless back-and-forth. It’s exhausting, slow, and often feels impossible to navigate as a tiny, scrappy startup. enterprise sales process That’s why I created the concept of “ drinking from revenue fountains .” drinking from revenue fountains Instead of hacking through the tangled vines of enterprise sales on your own, this strategy lets you tap into established sales pipelines by partnering with technology providers that already serve your target customers. tap into established sales pipelines The Power of Peripheral Partnerships The Power of Peripheral Partnerships The key is to identify technology partners that provide complementary or peripheral services to yours. technology partners These partners already have relationships with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and are trusted vendors on their preferred lists . Ideal Customer Profile trusted vendors on their preferred lists By partnering with them, you gain access to their established credibility and sales pipeline, accelerating your path into enterprise accounts. Here’s an example: At my startup, a gamification platform targeting enterprise retailers, we identified loyalty platforms and CRMs as our ideal tech partners. These platforms store voucher and customer data on the back-end but lack a front-end mechanism to collect that data in engaging ways. Enter my startup. Through our partnership: Loyalty platforms and CRMs can now pitch us as the solution for retailers to gamify shopper experiences, boosting engagement and data collection. Retailers win by driving more customer interactions with their campaigns and collecting more valuable data for their loyalty programs. my startup wins by fast-tracking our way into enterprise sales cycles. Loyalty platforms and CRMs can now pitch us as the solution for retailers to gamify shopper experiences, boosting engagement and data collection. Loyalty platforms and CRMs Retailers win by driving more customer interactions with their campaigns and collecting more valuable data for their loyalty programs. Retailers my startup wins by fast-tracking our way into enterprise sales cycles. my startup Everybody wins. How to Find Your Revenue Fountains How to Find Your Revenue Fountains This concept isn’t limited to gamification or enterprise retail. Any B2B SaaS product can use this approach to break into its market. Here’s how to apply it: Define Your ICP: Identify your ideal customers and the vendors they already trust. Look at their preferred vendor lists and tools they’re using. Identify Peripheral Gaps: Analyze these vendors and tools to find gaps or enhancements your product can provide. For example: Does a vendor lack a front-end interface? Are they missing an integration to collect or analyze specific data? Can your product complement their services and make them more valuable to their customers? Pitch to the Vendor: Show how your product enhances their offering. Position yourself as a win-win for the vendor and the customer. Vendors are often more approachable and easier to sell to than directly selling to end customers. Collaborate to Sell: Once the partnership is established, leverage the vendor’s sales team to pitch your product as part of their solution. This gives you a fast-track introduction into enterprise sales processes without having to start from scratch. Define Your ICP: Identify your ideal customers and the vendors they already trust. Look at their preferred vendor lists and tools they’re using. Define Your ICP : Identify your ideal customers and the vendors they already trust. Look at their preferred vendor lists and tools they’re using. Define Your ICP Identify Peripheral Gaps: Analyze these vendors and tools to find gaps or enhancements your product can provide. For example: Does a vendor lack a front-end interface? Are they missing an integration to collect or analyze specific data? Can your product complement their services and make them more valuable to their customers? Identify Peripheral Gaps : Analyze these vendors and tools to find gaps or enhancements your product can provide. For example: Identify Peripheral Gaps Does a vendor lack a front-end interface? Are they missing an integration to collect or analyze specific data? Can your product complement their services and make them more valuable to their customers? Does a vendor lack a front-end interface? Are they missing an integration to collect or analyze specific data? Can your product complement their services and make them more valuable to their customers? Pitch to the Vendor: Show how your product enhances their offering. Position yourself as a win-win for the vendor and the customer. Vendors are often more approachable and easier to sell to than directly selling to end customers. Pitch to the Vendor : Show how your product enhances their offering. Position yourself as a win-win for the vendor and the customer. Vendors are often more approachable and easier to sell to than directly selling to end customers. Pitch to the Vendor Collaborate to Sell: Once the partnership is established, leverage the vendor’s sales team to pitch your product as part of their solution. This gives you a fast-track introduction into enterprise sales processes without having to start from scratch. Collaborate to Sell : Once the partnership is established, leverage the vendor’s sales team to pitch your product as part of their solution. This gives you a fast-track introduction into enterprise sales processes without having to start from scratch. Collaborate to Sell The Fast Track to £1M ARR The Fast Track to £1M ARR Drinking from revenue fountains can dramatically accelerate your revenue growth. Instead of burning months on cold outreach, you align yourself with trusted partners who already have a seat at the table. This strategy helped my startup unlock key enterprise accounts, grow usage for our tech partners, and, ultimately, smash through the £1M ARR milestone. If you’re a 0 to 1 product manager, don’t try to blaze every trail yourself. Find the fountains already flowing with revenue, align your product to enhance their streams, and watch the growth flow in. The Challenges of 0 to 1 The Challenges of 0 to 1 Let’s not sugarcoat this: 0 to 1 product management is hard. Here are some of the biggest challenges and how I tackled them. Building Processes from Scratch Building Processes from Scratch When you’re starting from zero, prioritization frameworks like RICE or MoSCoW won’t help unless you first establish foundational processes. RICE At my startup, this meant creating a simple centralized Google Sheets dashboard that everyone—from engineers to the CEO—could follow. Here, everyone could reference the roadmap, high level OKR s and goals, and it was delivered in a simple enough medium for it to be easily adopted. OKR Action Item : Seriously, when in 0-to-1 more, don’t dive into every fancy PM tool. No one will know how to use Miro, your developers will not know how to implement Mixpanel properly—nor will they care, and no one will want to spend an hour trying to figure out why Linear is better than Jira (it is, but we don’t have time for that). Minimize your team’s learning curves—Google Sheets, Jira, and SQL queries are your 0-1 friends. Simple. Easy. Everyone, from your 22-year-old intern to your 55-year-old founder, is familiar with them.* Action Item Action Item Navigating Limited Resources Navigating Limited Resources When resources are scarce, every decision is a tradeoff. Should you dedicate precious dev hours to a feature proven to reduce YoY churn by 6% or break your design system’s rules by updating the app’s font to Montserrat to make the founder happy? The key is ruthless prioritization and transparency with stakeholders. In a previous article, I wrote about how I break down “effort” into four categories (dev, QA, UX, and business) to ensure every task was evaluated fairly. I even made a Google Sheets template to help you prioritize. Hint : Go steal it. Hint Go steal it. The Payoff: £1M ARR in One Year The Payoff: £1M ARR in One Year Looking back, the biggest wins at my startup came from laying down foundations: Taking extreme ownership to establish product process and culture. Automating workflows to save time and reduce errors. Turning the app into a feedback engine to improve user satisfaction. Drinking from revenue fountains. Taking extreme ownership to establish product process and culture. Automating workflows to save time and reduce errors. Turning the app into a feedback engine to improve user satisfaction. Drinking from revenue fountains . Drinking from revenue fountains These efforts didn’t just improve the product—they transformed the team’s ability to execute . execute execute By the end of 2023, we did it—we hit £1M ARR in less than 1 year. £1M ARR How to Thrive as a 0 to 1 Product Manager How to Thrive as a 0 to 1 Product Manager Here are my final takeaways for anyone stepping into this role: Embrace the Chaos Embrace the Chaos Every day will feel like a new fire to put out. Learn to love it—or at least accept it. Chaos is part of the journey. Lead with Curiosity Lead with Curiosity You don’t have to have all the answers. Ask questions, experiment, and learn from your team and users. Build for Scalability Build for Scalability Every process you create should scale. Even if you’re a team of 12 today, plan for the team of 50 you might become. Focus on Outcomes Focus on Outcomes In startups, effort means nothing if it doesn’t translate into results. Keep your eyes on the prize: user satisfaction, revenue growth, and team morale. Bottom Line Bottom Line Being a 0 to 1 product manager isn’t about frameworks or checklists—it’s about creating something from nothing and owning every step of the journey. 0 to 1 product manager Whether you’re automating bug reports or teaching your team the fundamentals of product management, remember: the impact you have at 0 to 1 will ripple far beyond the product itself. So, roll up your sleeves, embrace the mess, and make it happen. Because at the end of the day, being a 0 to 1 product manager is: Less about the product and more about systems and processes. Less about knowing what to do and more about figuring it out as you go. Less about the product and more about systems and processes. Less about knowing what to do and more about figuring it out as you go. K Bye!