From Zero to $10M ARR: Takeaways from 250 customer demos in 8 weeks (TL:DR we've discovered a hidden epidemic among SMBs, and it's silently killing them...)

Welcome back to issue #9 of the Zero to $10M ARR newsletter. We've got some in the trenches reporting for you all today! We made massive strides regarding customer insights that are driving a huge pivot in the Helply GTM and overall business strategy. (I'll be telling you all about what those exact pivots are in the next 2 weeks, but they've got my mind doing backflips - this is why I love the new startup buzz...). So, without further ado. Here is what we have on the docket for today's newsletter: - Takeaways from 250 potential customer demos in 8 weeks (also check out [today’s LinkedIn post]() where we dive even deeper into the insights). - The seemingly terrifying picture for the future of AI by Leopold Aschenbrenner (OpenAI engineer) - The rise of the Tweet Sized Landing Page? ​ Alright! Let’s dive in! Takeaways from 250 potential customer demos in 8 weeks Helply is still weeks away from production, but I’ve done 250+ demos in 8 weeks with a potential pipeline of $400K. And, we've discovered hidden epidemic among SMBs, and it's silently killing them... It's as serious as it sounds... My top 7 takeaways: ​ 1. SMB knowledge bases are a disaster: Your knowledge base is critical to delivering exceptional customer service. However, managing and updating knowledge bases is an achilles heel for almost every SMB. This is literally an SMB epidemic, and it's silently killing people’s businesses. ​ 2. A great AI customer support agent needs to be trained on an immaculate knowledge base: With LLMs, it all comes back to data. If your dataset is trash, your agent will be trash and your customer support will continue to suffer, and so will your businesses growth. SMBs don’t even know where to start when it comes to their CX data. ​ 3. Most companies don’t understand how wildly inefficient their customer support is: This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of consequences. Their knowledge base sucks, so most of their inquiries reach their support teams, costing more money, blowing up support loads. This means more CX people required, more costs, more inefficiencies, more time, a pissed off customer and extreme losses of potential business + plummeting customer retention. The support team is then poorly informed which leads to bad customer support. This leads all leads to lost customers, churn, unmanageable support loads and ballooning costs. And most SMBs have no idea how this is all correlated. Vicious cycle. ​ 4. AI isn’t scary, it’s just becoming an eye roll: AI is quickly gaining “blockchain” levels of hype fatigue for consumers and… To read the read the rest of the takeaways, head on over to [today’s LinkedIn post]() where I break down takeaways #4 - #7. Would love to get everyone’s take on this in the comments, we really uncovered some fascinating insights. ​ Super intelligence / AGI by 2027…? That’s what this OpenAI engineer is saying. Well, maybe AI is a little scary... This paper by OpenAI engineer @Leopold Aschenbrenner is pretty terrifying. AGI is right around the corner, and everything is going to change. ​[(​ 7 frightening takeaways (good luck sleeping tonight): 1. National Security and AGI Race Excerpt: “The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.” 2. AGI and Global Power Dynamics Excerpt: “There’s already an eerie convergence of AGI timelines (~2027?) and Taiwan watchers’ Taiwan invasion timelines (China ready to invade Taiwan by 2027?)—a convergence that will surely only heighten as the world wakes up to AGI. (Imagine if in 1960, the vast majority of the world’s uranium deposits were somehow concentrated in Berlin!) It seems to me that there is a real chance that the AGI endgame plays out with the backdrop of world war. Then all bets are off.” 3. Security Risks at Nation’s Leading AI Labs Excerpt: “The nation’s leading AI labs treat security as an afterthought. Currently, they’re basically handing the key secrets for AGI to the CCP on a silver platter. Securing the AGI secrets and weights against the state-actor threat will be an immense effort, and we’re not on track. Today, we are treating them the way we would random SaaS software. At this rate, we’re basically just handing superintelligence to the CCP.” 4. Potential for AGI to Enable Mass Destruction Excerpt: “Perhaps dramatic advances in biology will yield extraordinary new bioweapons, ones that spread silently, swiftly, before killing with perfect lethality on command (and that can be made extraordinarily cheaply, affordable even for terrorist groups). Perhaps new kinds of nuclear weapons enable the size of nuclear arsenals to increase by orders of magnitude, with new delivery mechanisms that are undetectable. Perhaps mosquito-sized drones, each carrying a deadly poison, could be targeted to kill every member of an opposing nation. It’s hard to know what a century’s worth of technological progress would yield—but I am confident it would unfold appalling possibilities.” 5. Trillion-Dollar AI Clusters Excerpt: “The trillion-dollar, 100GW cluster alone would require ~20% of current US electricity generation in 6 years; together with large inference capacity, demand will be multiples higher. To most, this seems completely out of the question. Some are betting on Middle Eastern autocracies, who have been going around offering boundless power and giant clusters to get their rulers a seat at the AGI-table. But it’s totally possible to do this in the United States: we have abundant natural gas.” 6. Government Involvement in AGI Development Excerpt: “As the race to AGI intensifies, the national security state will get involved. The USG will wake from its slumber, and by 27/28 we’ll get some form of government AGI project. No startup can handle superintelligence. Somewhere in a SCIF, the endgame will be on. We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments—can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom.” 7. Industrial and Economic Explosion Excerpt: “Extremely accelerated technological progress, combined with the ability to automate all human labor, could dramatically accelerate economic growth (think: self-replicating robot factories quickly covering all of the Nevada desert). This would be a fundamental shift in the growth regime, more comparable to the historical step-change from very slow growth to a couple percent a year with the industrial revolution.” The rise of the Tweet Sized Landing Page? Picked this up from the great Greg Isenberg (check him out on [LinkedIn]() if you haven’t already). The idea is picking up traction and I’m not going to lie, I’m itching to try it out… The main ideas: - Try to keep it to 280 words or less (the version below comes in at about 108) - Inject personality (no corporate vibes allowed) - 1 big CTA button - Don’t sell a product, sell a transformation educational or community experience - Uses AIDA framework for ad copy - Attention: Grab them in a line. - Interest: Pique curiosity in the next. - Desire: Show them what they need. - Action: A compelling CTA to finish. ​ Example: ​ ​ Alright, that does it for issue #9 of the Zero to $10M ARR newsletter! See you next week! Alex CEO & Founder, [Groove](=) & [Helply]()​ P.S. I’ll also be posting on LinkedIn seven days a week, 365 days a year. I’d love to hear your feedback on the new newsletter in the comments of my latest post. I read and reply to every single one. ​ Don't want to hear from us? You can [unsubscribe here](.