A founder was denied equity at a startup, so he rebuilt the product independently and hit $20-30K monthly revenue. Jake Setterlun coaches him on scaling with a sales team, structuring compensation around revenue share, and committing to one model instead of jumping between ideas.
In this video today, we're going to be pulling back the curtain and I'm going to be showing you a raw one-to-one conversation that I had with one of our members inside of our community of over 4,000 agency owners, online experts, coaches, consultants, SaaS owners that are currently scaling their businesses and their offers to $100K months. This is a one-to-one conversation. I have these every single week with members inside of the community, and I want to show you a little snippet of what these look like. Enjoy.
I've been building this business kind of like from, from the start of it, like set up the systems, everything from like end to end. But the catch is that I don't run this business. I'm not a decision maker, but I've like been with them from the top up. And now I'm kind of like in the strategic crossroad of where I'm kind of like negotiating between either negotiating equity in this business because all, like, they all turn their heads to me whenever there is, like, whenever we need to make a decision. Like, I'm the one who's, like, coming with all the inputs of this business. I know the market. Um, I built this before in Sweden. I've just, like, kind of, like, where I'm at is before I started working with this current business, I just had a very tough period in my life where I just kind of like lost everything. So now it's just like building everything up again. But like, I know, or like, I feel like I'm doing something right in this Swedish market where I'm doing things.
For sure.
Whether, you know, negotiating equity in the business that I'm doing now, or it's building my own thing, but in like a little bit different niche, or taking a senior like growth role. Elsewhere.
For sure. I would put the— put your master proposal together and give it to them and say, hey, I want to scale this. I, you know, I'll make, you know, I want X percent of revenue over what we're doing because I want to be benefited from the growth. If they don't take it, I would start looking elsewhere. I am serious. We— I would be open to having a conversation, um, about you coming in and working here. Um, and, and not to hold that in front of you, but yeah, like, that's, that's how much— like, I don't understand why they don't value all of that stuff that you've been doing. That, to me, that's crazy. Um, especially if you're, you're doing sales and you're like you're doing so much of that. Just doesn't make sense to me.
Yeah.
So yeah, like, give it your shot, put the proposal together and legitimately, like, kind of just put your foot down that, like, if I don't get this or we can't work something out, you know, it might be time to step away. Of course, I wouldn't quit without having you know something else to go to and everything like that. How are you?
Hi, I'm good. Yeah.
Did you get your equity?
Say again?
Did you get your equity?
It's a funny update. I was like, any possible chance you remember my face from like six months ago? Okay. So I did not get my equity. However, when I brought it up to essentially the guy that I was going to negotiate to, he came to me and was like, why don't you and your, my now co-founder, do this by yourself? And I think I brought this up to you like last time. I was like, yeah, we don't have, I don't know. I don't know. At least, at least now when we're thinking back about it, we don't know. So we bought out like a non-compete thingy that was in my co-founder's contract. We launched the business from scratch, remade the product, remade everything, launched everything. We didn't even have like LLC in the beginning. Now we do. And now we're at like $20,000, $30,000 in revenue. And we're like—
Hell yeah.
Okay. Because like we had, we had like all the organic content. I think I told you. So we just launched organic and then obviously paid ads. And now we're scaling up ads on multiple channels. And really, actually, honestly, the kind of like our biggest constraint right now is, um, uh, hiring sales. 'Cause I've been doing the sales up until this point. We just got setters and, uh, that's where we're at now.
That's awesome. Sweet. Awesome. No, I love it. I love it.
Um, that's sweet.
That's sweet.
A few months later.
Yeah. A few months later. No, I love that. And just popping back in here like, yeah, you know, we did it.
You know, I thought I wanted to come with an update.
I appreciate it. No, I appreciate it. Um, it just takes a lot of time figuring it out, what works. But I do think the biggest thing is people jump ship very quickly. Like, you need to pick something, lock it in, write it on a piece of paper, and figure it out. Because you can make money a thousand different ways. Um, the ones that succeed are the ones that They stick to it. Like, you know, Melina, of what she does, she figured it out. She stuck to it. Last time I talked to her, she was working a job and then, you know, she quit and she started the business. They're doing $30K a month. You know, Joseph had been doing that for 6 years. I think the people that I've talked to that have been doing this for a long time and still have not made progress, it's because they're trying different business models.
