Road to $1M ARR day 47/60: what great leadership means to me?

Naval. Steve. Jensen

Day 47 of the $1M ARR sprint.

Follow ups sent. Calls booked. Proposals out.

Should get another 1-2 final decisions this week and 1-2 next week. The pipeline momentum feels different, prospects are moving faster, decisions coming cleaner.

But here’s what’s keeping me up who’s gonna quietly not renew in December?

That’s the unknown variable i haven’t mapped yet. All our current clients have been with us for 3+ months. Our commitment period is 3 months. Then month-to-month.

We’ve been winning new clients every month, but December always has its own logic.

Same for August, which i still managed to turn into the best month (out of Jan-July 2025). Let’s make the same happen for December.

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Had a team call this morning that hit different. Super efficient, no fluff. Shared the 2026 vision, what we need to build to validate the bigger direction for the company.

Everyone was hyped and aligned.

One thing i keep pushing myself on is becoming a genuinely great leader. For me that means three things:

1. Inspire your team to push themselves because you always do and show the way.

2. Be genuine, empathetic, yet know when to make the hard calls.

3. Create an environment where each person grows: professionally, financially, emotionally.

Naval said something that stuck with me: “Play long-term games with long-term people.” That’s exactly what we’re building at Earleads.

When you join an early stage company, you want ownership. You want to be part of something bigger than yourself and get exponential ROI.

Not just be a replaceable number in a g-sheet working from the 70th floor of some building.

Studies show 87% of employees at traditional companies feel like cogs in a machine. Zero ownership. Zero upside. Just billable hours and burnout.

We’re building the opposite. Every person who joins us early gets to shape what this becomes.

Patrick Collison grew Stripe to $95B by giving early employees massive ownership stakes.

Brian Chesky turned Airbnb employees into millionaires by treating them like founders, not resources.

That’s the playbook. Give high agency people real stakes in the game.

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So this morning we talked about the path to $10M.

$1M is inevitable now. The systems are there. The team knows the playbook. The market wants what we’re building.

$10M requires a different operating system entirely.

Most agencies die at $2-3M because they never evolve past founder-led sales. Or they scale headcount linearly with revenue and margins disappear.

Classic agency trap, you grow revenue 2x but need 2x the people, so profit stays flat.

We’re gonna do it differently. AI-powered delivery means we can 10x revenue with maybe 2x the team.

That’s the arbitrage opportunity we actually execute.

Traditional agency needs 50 people to hit $10M (assuming $200K revenue per head). We’ll do it with 15-20 max. Same output, 70% less overhead.

But that only works if those 15-20 people operate like owners, not employees. They need to think in systems, not tasks. Build processes, not just execute them.

Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA with direct reports from 50 different functions. No middle management layers.

Just high-trust, high-ownership operators. That’s $4.5 trillion of market cap managed with radical transparency and zero bureaucracy.

We’re stealing that model. Flat structure. Direct communication. Everyone owns their domain completely.

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Most founders think leadership is about being the smartest person in the room.

Real leadership is making everyone else in the room smarter. Creating conditions where A-players want to stay and B-players either level up or leave.

Steve Jobs had this thing where he’d push people past what they thought possible. Not through motivation posters or team building exercises.

Through relentless standards and genuine belief that excellence was non-negotiable.

That’s what this sprint is really about. Setting a standard so high that mediocrity becomes physically uncomfortable (for me first).

$1M ARR in 60 days sounded insane. But attempting it changed everyone’s mental model of what’s possible.

Suddenly that $50K deal that would’ve taken 3 months to close needs to happen in 2 weeks. That service we’ve been “thinking about launching” needs to ship tomorrow.

Constraints create clarity. Deadlines destroy excuses.

No surprises allowed in this sprint.

ARR: $892K → Target: $1M | Days remaining: 13

See you tomorroooww 👊

O.

ps: took 2h this afternoon to see the sunset from the summit. now back to the grind for a deepwork session.

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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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