Road to $1M ARR day 19/60: cut 80% of my pipeline with 1 email today.
Dec 4, 2025
Road to $1M ARR day 19/60: cut 80% of my pipeline with 1 email today.
focusing on less to grow faster. how?
Day 19 of the $1M ARR sprint.
Cut 80% of my pipeline today. Sent the breakup emails myself.
Sometimes the best growth strategy is knowing what deals to kill.

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Been thinking about deal velocity lately. Bigger fish take longer to land that’s just physics.
Series B companies move different than seed stage founders who decide on a Tuesday and wire money by Thursday.
Series B deal usually takes 45 60 days. Seed stage takes 7 14. But Series B pays $150-300K/year. Seed pays $30-60K.
So which do i chase during this 60 sprint?
Both. But differently.
Serie A/B is a new game for me. Not my usual ICP. But i’m learning that keeping momentum in longer cycles is its own skill.
You gotta orchestrate touchpoints without being annoying. Add value in every interaction. Create urgency without desperation.
Most agencies spam follow ups. Not doing that.
I am building a cadence system: share a client win here, drop a relevant case study there, send free taste of the service… you got the point
Each touch shows capability without asking for anything.
So i made a call. Looked at my CRM this morning and realized half these deals were noise. Wrong fit, wrong timing, wrong everything.
80% of the pipeline. Gone.
Sent personalized emails to each one:
“If you were considering us, we won’t be able to work together. This direction won’t create positive long term impact for either of us. I am very sorry. wishing you all the best.”
The deals i killed had patterns:
Wanted us to be their entire marketing department for $3K/month
Expected guarantees on outcomes we don’t control
Needed services we don’t excel at (event marketing)
Had “we’ve tried 5 agencies before” energy
Every minute spent on these is a minute not spent on the 20% that actually align with our model:
Companies that need sophisticated GTM infrastructure, have budget to invest properly, and understand that growth is a system not a campaign.
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Alvaro came to me with an offer idea that made me stop what i was doing. Because the offer is different from what we do.
Yet it’s just repackaging our existing blocks into something surgical.
Something specific. Something that solves one exact problem for one exact type of client.
That’s when you know you’ve built real infrastructure. When innovation becomes recombination of whatever you’ve been doing.
All those SOPs, processes, service components we’ve built over 18 months?
They’re lego blocks now. We can build whatever configuration the market needs without starting from scratch.
This is the compound effect of doing the unsexy work for months. Documentation. Systems. Templates.
Now we can move fast because the foundation is bulletproof.
The insight here is bigger than just this offer. We’ve been thinking about growth wrong.
We kept trying to expand horizontally new services, new capabilities.
But the real opportunity is vertical depth. Take what we’re world class at and create hyper specific applications for hyper specific moments.
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i’m calling it now: we’re adding at least $100K ARR by October 31st.
Not hope. Not optimism. Conviction based on pipeline math and close rates.
Built the plan. Executed the plan. Now watching the dominoes fall exactly where they should.
The wildest thing here for me is when you gamify business growth, when your dopamine hits come from daily execution instead of external validation, the whole game changes.
Work becomes play.
The scoreboard creates clarity. Every decision gets simpler: does this move us toward $1M or not? Every distraction becomes obvious.
Every opportunity gets filtered through one lens. This f******** challenge.
i wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tomorrow i’m hitting the studio. Recording 10 videos to drop over the coming weeks.
Also reassessing my content strategy for the rest of 2025. Tested enough hypotheses this month. Now i know what resonates.
Time to double down on what works and ignore everything else.
ARR: $622K → Target: $1M | Days remaining: 41
See you tomorrow 👊
O.
Subscribe to Othmane Khadri
accidentally built a million ARR GTM agency by refusing to spray & pray. now racing to $1M just to prove cold emails gurus wrong.
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