The Zero to $10M ARR Newsletter

⚡ TLDR

• We launched a new company, website, podcast, and premium community (using a Notion doc and a 10-question survey)
• 700+ founders have applied
• 205 founders are committed
• $199/month × 205 founders = $40,795 MRR
• Our goal is 300 by September
• This issue breaks down our exact launch flow and lessons learned

🎤 What We Did

We launched a new company: zeroto10m.com

It’s where we document the build-in-public journey of scaling Helply, InstantDocs, and (because it's meta) Zero to $10M, to $10M ARR.

It includes:

• ​The Academy - a premium, invite-only community for SaaS founders that want to scale from zero to $10M ARR
• ​The Podcast - where we interview today's most successful and creative founders on their path to $10M ARR
• ​The Newsletter - where we share weekly playbooks, GTM systems, experiments, templates, and growth breakdowns (what you're reading right now)

What makes the Academy special is that I'll be sharing every playbook, every strategy, every tactic we use in real-time.

No outdated information. No generic course.

Join and you're a part of the team, with keys to the inner workings of everything we're doing.

We've already gotten Groove to $5m ARR, fully bootstrapped, with 5 employees. Now we've got a new goal of launching and scaling our holding company, OptimizeCX (which holds Helply, InstantDocs, Groove, and Zero to $10M).

Our goals in the next five years:

• $0 to $10M ARR for Helply and InstantDocs
• $5M to $10M ARR for Groove
• $0 to $3M ARR for Zero to $10M

And Zero to $10M ARR Academy members will get insider access to every playbook we run to get there.

🎯 Results

We put out the idea of a the Zero to $10M ARR Academy in April (to test the idea). Here's what happened next:

• 200+ founders applied in the first week
• 500+ applied by the end of the month
• 700+ have applied in total YTD
• 205 founding members are committed at $199/month (billing starts in September), with projected MRR of $40,795
• We're following up with the remaining applicants now

We're planning to cap founding members at 300 for our official program "start" in September.

If we hit our goals, here's what our numbers will look like:

MRR target at launch: $199 × 300 = $59,700/month

This is a potential $1M ARR business born directly out of what I've been doing for the last decade: building in public and teaching everything I know.

🧠 Why We Did It

The Zero to $10M ARR Academy started because founders kept asking if I’d coach them. Not just one or two; dozens of DMs.

At first, I ignored it. My focus was on revamping and improving Groove, and launching two new companies: Helply and InstantDocs. Enough to drive most founders insane...

But then I got thinking:

1. We document everything as part of our process anyway...
2. We're already building and running GTM playbooks to grow these companies to $10M ARR...
3. And we're sharing the 'build-in-public' on LinkedIn...

So why not?

My peers said I was crazy for launching ANOTHER "side business" on top of Helply, InstantDocs, and the Groove revamp.

But here's the thing:

#1. Screw what people think. If you're on the ground floor, see a pattern, and spot an opportunity, don't be afraid to go after it.

It wasn't just one or two people who reached out to me. It was hundreds over the years (and dozens in the last 12 months alone).

That's signal, not noise.

#2. No one's opinion really matters but your own. Everyone has an opinion, but the only thing that matters is what you're willing to bet your time and energy on.

The founders asking me for help meant it. And I could feel and see that need.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this wasn't something I should build, it was something I needed to build:

• A complete, A-to-Z program that helps SaaS companies scale
• Private Slack community
• Exact playbooks we're running for Helply, InstantDocs, Groove, and Zero to $10M
• Live strategy sessions
• Direct access to me, Tom Morkes (head of Growth, OptimizeCX), and our tools and vendor list

So we pulled the trigger, and that's why we're here now.

📈 Growth Breakdown

The Notion "Quick Launch" Playbook: how we validated our new offer with 700 applicants, quickly

When it came to starting the Zero to $10m Academy, we didn't start by building a product.

We didn't even design a website.

We wrote a Notion doc about what we wanted this Academy + community to be, we published the notion doc as a webpage, we connected a 10-question Typeform survey to the page. Then we hit publish.

Next, we shared it through:

• Our email list (one dedicated email send + we've plugged it at the top of our newsletter in our 'blue CTA highlight' area - see above)
• LinkedIn (I wrote two posts about it; here and here)

• DMs and email replies when people asked for advice, feedback, or coaching

I also shared the notion landing page with people who engaged with my posts on LinkedIn, as well as with people who fit our ICP and who were engaging with other SaaS thought leaders on the platform (using a combination of Trigify and HeyReach to automate this process).

For the most part, it was a very simple and very manual process.

🔎 Templates and Tools

Tools we're using:

• ​Kit for email (variable pricing; its free to use if you don't need advanced visual automations and sequences)
• ​Trigify to track social signals on LinkedIn ($99/mo)
• ​HeyReach to automate our LinkedIn messaging ($49/mo)
• ​Notion for the landing page ($10 per member / mo)
• ​Typeform for the application form ($29/mo, or you could use google forms for free)
• ​Clay for our database and that connects all our other apps ($134/mo)

Templates and examples:

• ​The Notion landing page we launched with​
• ​The survey we used to qualify founders​
• ​The email we sent to applicants to drive commitments​

📉 Mistakes We Made

• Didn’t have Stripe or onboarding flows ready
• No tracking in place to measure conversion or engagement initially (we built this after we launched)
• Had to clean everything up mid-flight while founders were already committing (some waited several weeks for us to get back to them 🤦)

💡 Summary (Major Takeaways)

Would we do it again? Yes.

Would we do it the same way? No.

Next time, Stripe checkout + onboarding sequences comes first.

🗓️ What’s Next

• Launching the Zero to $10M Podcast (first guest is the founder and CEO of one of the world’s most profitable bootstrapped companies)
• Opening the private Slack group in July
• Academy officially launches September (first 300 founding members get early access, no charge until September)
• Launching v2 of Helply and InstantDocs in July
• Launching a CX focused holding company
• Sharing it all as we go

​Apply here...​

📢 For You

What’s the best zero-dev validation tactic you’ve used to launch something?

Reply and share. We’ll feature the best ones in the next issue.

Until next time,

Keep building.

Alex Turnbull

Founder and CEO

OptimizeCX, the holding company behind:

Groove, Helply, InstantDocs and Zero to 10M ARR