2 Mindset Shifts That Fueled 24x Startup Growth in One Year

Scaling a startup at an exponential rate isn’t just about strategy or tactics – it also requires evolving your mindset as a founder. In 2024, Unify grew revenue 24x year-over-year (from nearly zero to mid-seven figures of ARR). That kind of growth forced me to rethink how I lead and where I focus my time. Here, I’ll share two of the most important mental shifts that helped drive our company’s breakout year. We simply wouldn’t have found product-market fit as quickly without these perspectives.

1. Treat every problem as a people problem.

In the early days, I used to think in terms of product features, sales targets, and growth hacks. But I’ve come to realize that behind almost every major challenge is a people question. Do we have the right people working on this? Is the team set up to succeed? Are we communicating and making decisions effectively? Talent and teamwork are the ultimate force multipliers.

At my previous company (Ramp), I was a member of a hypergrowth team with incredibly high-caliber people. That experience ingrained in me the importance of A+ talent. But shifting from an employee to a founder/CEO role, the lesson became even more pronounced: now it’s my job to attract, empower, and retain those people.

I made it a priority to hire for trajectory and potential (what we call “slope over intercept”). In a startup’s early days, you want team members who will grow rapidly alongside the company, not just folks who were effective in a very structured, stable environment. High-slope people embrace the chaos and learn fast – they get better every month, which is exactly what a 0→$1M ARR journey demands.

This mindset also means spending an extraordinary amount of time on recruiting and team-building. Today, I devote a big chunk of my week to sourcing talent, interviewing, and networking to find future team members. It’s arguably the most leveraged use of my time. Even after hiring, I remind myself that if something is going wrong in the business, it’s likely a team or alignment issue at the root. Fix the people part, and the business outcome usually follows.

2. Build the category (don’t just build the product).

The second shift was realizing that we couldn’t just build a great product – we also had to shape how the market thinks about it. Unify operates in a space that didn’t really exist before: an AI-driven platform for automated outbound sales. It’s not like we were a new CRM or another email automation tool entering an established category. We’re creating a category, which is exciting and fun – but also challenging.

Early on, I underestimated how much product marketing and education would be required. At my last company, the market category (corporate spend management) was already well-defined for prospects. With Unify, we had to explain what we were even offering and why it’s not just “another sales tool.” This meant crafting a strong narrative and constantly refining our messaging to find what resonated.

I found myself iterating on our pitch every month. We’d incorporate new customer feedback, adjust to trends (for example, the whole “AI SDR” hype cycle came and went in 2024), and continually clarify the problems we solve. I also realized I needed help – which is why one of our first non-technical hires was a product marketer. We needed someone laser-focused on defining our ICP, honing our value prop, and enabling the sales team with the right collateral.

The takeaway here: if you’re bringing something novel to market, you can’t rely on customers to already get it. You have to become an evangelist and educator. That means investing in content, talks, case studies – whatever it takes to give shape to the problem and your solution. It also means being ready to adjust your positioning as you learn more. We now see messaging and category creation as core parts of the job, not afterthoughts.

Final Thoughts: My time working at a $13B startup (Ramp) taught me a lot about building a company, but stepping into the founder role demanded that I unlearn and relearn some of those lessons. “It’s all about the people” went from a cliché to a daily operating principle. And “build it and they will come” flipped to “we need to educate the market so they come.” If you’re aiming for outlier growth, take a hard look at your default assumptions – the biggest unlocks often come from changing how you think. Embrace the idea that your past playbook might not directly apply, and be willing to adopt a new one.