Introduction

Welcome to the Zero to $10M ARR Podcast. Today, we're sitting down with the founder and CEO of Kit, Nathan Barry.

Nathan’s journey to building a multimillion-dollar SaaS business started with freelance web design, selling iPhone apps, and authoring books on design. In 2014, he committed to focusing full-time on Kit—then earning just $1,000 a month—and grew it to over $42M in annual recurring revenue with $4M in annual profit. And he did this in less than 10 years.

Outside of work, Nathan is a video blogger, an angel investor, a traveler, and he even bought a ghost town in 2018.

In today’s episode, we’ll unpack Nathan’s path from side project to multimillion-dollar business, and We’ll dive into the strategies and decisions he used to go from zero to $10M ARR and beyond.

Nathan, welcome to the show!

Questions

1. You experienced hockey stick growth from $60K ARR to $1M ARR in just 9 months. What specific changes or strategies during that period drove such explosive growth, and how did you sustain it?
2. You scaled from $1M to $6M ARR in just one year. How did you achieve that, and what were the key factors that contributed to such rapid growth?
3. The following year, you grew from $6M to $10M ARR. What were the main drivers behind that next stage of growth, and how did your approach evolve to support it?
4. You’ve spoken about niching down into email marketing for bloggers early on. How did focusing on that niche accelerate your initial growth, and how did you expand beyond it as Kit scaled?
5. What role did direct marketing, content marketing, and affiliates play at each stage of your growth, and how did your approach to these strategies evolve as revenue milestones increased?
6. Looking back at your journey from 0 to $10M ARR, what was the single most pivotal decision you made that changed the trajectory of Kit’s growth, and what can other SaaS founders learn from it?
7. If you were us (Helply), what growth lever would you pull right now?

Outro

That wraps up today’s episode of the Zero to $10M ARR Podcast. A big thank you to Nathan Barry, founder and CEO of Kit, for sharing his journey and the strategies that helped him scale from a $1,000-a-month side project to over $42M in annual recurring revenue.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with other founders looking to scale their businesses. You can learn more about Nathan and his work at nathanbarry.com.

Nathan, thanks again for joining us. And to everyone listening—keep building, keep scaling, and we’ll see you next time!