Why $10 Million Is the Hardest Number for Startups to Hit

A couple months ago I was sitting at a table in a casino restaurant, across from a good friend who agreed to meet me halfway between his home city and mine, out in the middle of nowhere. I had just learned that my current position would be phased out in the new year—startup, funding cuts, that old chestnut—and I wanted someone to complain to. 

He and I are completely different career animals. He has spent 25 years in what you’d call Big Business, rarely ever working for a company with less than $1 billion in AR. I’ve been a startup junkie my whole life. 

He was referring to the spike in readership I enjoyed over 2024 and how I, knowing my employment fate was sealed, began doing what I do and slinging some MVP magic to build a promising business model around the spike to catch the momentum. 

Becoming an entrepreneur, starting a business, growing a startup to a scaleup, and being the boss—this seems like the easiest and most fun thing in the world until you actually start doing it. Then it’s all work and rejection and also very scary.

Pick any number associated with your business—customers, website visits, conversions, revenue, profit, you name it. Think about where you are today. In fact, let’s look at revenue, and we’ll say it’s on track for $1 million this year.

Could you double it? To $2 million by the end of the year? Experience has taught me, sure. If things break your way and you’re smart, that’s totally achievable. Could you triple it? Well, that’s certainly possible if you hire up and take a lot of risks. How about quadruple? I mean, maybe?

That’s a visual trick. In fact, it’s actually all a visual trick. And even worse, the less revenue a business is generating today, the easier the trick looks to pull off. Especially when the starting number is zero. 

Going back to doubling revenue. One to two is easy. $1 million to $2 million is not. In fact, if you look at going from $1 million to $1.999 million, that looks a lot harder to reach than $2 million. 

The gap between $1 million in revenue and $10 million is where startups go to die. And only people who have actually navigated $1-million-plus companies will tell you this. Here’s where all those got-rich-quick stories fell apart.

Second, even getting to $1 million in revenue is not easy, not in a scalable sense anyway. One of my friends did a drop-ship thing a few years back and got to $2 million in revenue in his first year and made negative $10,000 profit doing it.

In fact, here’s some free feel-good advice. You know those articles you see everywhere that are like “His side hustle generates six figures a year with no initial investment and only four hours a week”? That’s all bullshit. That’s cake. You could do that in a week if you had a system in place and didn’t care about the long term. It’s usually not profitable. It’s definitely not scalable. The publisher running that story is selling clicks.

Now, that said, $1 million in revenue is indeed doable. I’ve done it a couple times over without much risk or sweat. You can do it with hustle and moxie and it’s a lot easier your second or third time around because experience and fundamentals.

Does investor money make it easier? Hell no. Now you’re on a treadmill that might get you to $10 million in revenue, but now it doesn’t stop there. And $100 million is nearly impossible, again, this is not valuation, this is not money raised. $100 million in repeatable, scalable revenue takes several years, hundreds of employees, loads of investment, and tons of risk and luck.