I love this piece, Kyle. A MUCH healthier narrative and data backed reality of building startups. Featuring all the unicorn p0rn creates unrealistic expectations and makes founders feel bad about themselves...like seeing influencers on Instagram 😂. Still don't know how you keep churning out such thoughtful, long pieces. But grateful that you do.
"What I found: almost half of software startups do eventually make it to $1 million ARR after they’ve started monetizing – if they’re willing to stick around 10 years."
The actual numbers are worse.
Sticking around for 10 years is not an act of willingness. It's an achievement in survivorship.
If that's a qualifier to the data pool, we already look at the survivors.
However, I would celebrate companies that didn't manage to get to $1M ARR *and* they survived 10 years. With high certainty, these would be profitable companies.
Something that such behemoths as OpenAI can only dream of, as of now.
Great post - thanks. One clarification please - the data does not seem to be in line with the ChartMogul SaaS Growth Report. For example in your post 49.4% would reach $1M ARR (within 10 years) whereas in the ChartMogul report it's 68%. Can you calarify?
It's a similar methodology, but this report is refreshed (2025 vs. 2023) and includes more cohorts of companies in the dataset, and in particular a lot more companies that have been around at least 10 years.
I love this piece, Kyle. A MUCH healthier narrative and data backed reality of building startups. Featuring all the unicorn p0rn creates unrealistic expectations and makes founders feel bad about themselves...like seeing influencers on Instagram 😂. Still don't know how you keep churning out such thoughtful, long pieces. But grateful that you do.
1,000%
Being a full-time solopreneur now definitely makes it easier to churn out content!!
"What I found: almost half of software startups do eventually make it to $1 million ARR after they’ve started monetizing – if they’re willing to stick around 10 years."
The actual numbers are worse.
Sticking around for 10 years is not an act of willingness. It's an achievement in survivorship.
If that's a qualifier to the data pool, we already look at the survivors.
However, I would celebrate companies that didn't manage to get to $1M ARR *and* they survived 10 years. With high certainty, these would be profitable companies.
Something that such behemoths as OpenAI can only dream of, as of now.
Great post - thanks. One clarification please - the data does not seem to be in line with the ChartMogul SaaS Growth Report. For example in your post 49.4% would reach $1M ARR (within 10 years) whereas in the ChartMogul report it's 68%. Can you calarify?
It's a similar methodology, but this report is refreshed (2025 vs. 2023) and includes more cohorts of companies in the dataset, and in particular a lot more companies that have been around at least 10 years.