Founder-Led Sales to $1M ARR With Just 10 Customers

He needed a big retailer's data to build the product. No big retailer gives data to a company with no product. Felix Hoffmann solved it sideways: 7Learnings sold a paid consulting project, kept the right to use the data, and built its predictive pricing product on top of it. Ten customers later it was at $1M ARR, and he had closed every one himself. Felix explains why a demand forecasting product cannot start with a small customer, how he structured the first pilot as an A/B test so a retailer could hand over half its prices without betting the business, and what happened when the first run came back far too expensive. Plus: how a pricing optimization company prices itself, and why he refuses success-based fees even though he can prove the uplift. 7Learnings is a Berlin company whose software forecasts demand for each product at each price, then sets the price that hits a retailer's goal. It is now at multiple seven figures in ARR with around 40 customers. Felix spent six years as a pricing consultant at Kearney and two years running price optimization at Zalando before founding it. This episode is brought to you by: 🤖 Hobbes → Don't book a demo. Take one. 🔑 Key Lessons 🎯 Solve the data cold start by selling something else first: 7Learnings could not train a forecasting model without a large retailer's sales history, so it sold a paid consulting project and kept the right to use that dataset. 🤝 Shrink a scary ask into a reversible test: Retailers would not hand pricing to an algorithm outright, so 7Learnings ran an A/B test on half the assortment while the retailer's own team priced the rest. 📉 Pick an early customer who can survive a failure: The first live pricing run was badly wrong on high-priced products. It survived because the buyer had a big enough problem, no alternative, and understood they were working with a startup. 💰 Price high enough to lose some deals: His test is blunt. If nobody is walking away because you are too expensive, you are too cheap, especially for a complex product carrying real delivery cost. 🚀 Founder-led sales lasts longer than founders expect: Felix closed all ten customers behind the first $1M ARR himself, and stayed closely involved through the next forty, because handing off enterprise sales is genuinely hard. ⚡ Pick the technology after the problem, not before: Felix argues founders are all digging in the same technical space, and that decisions needing determinism, low cost and explainability should not be handed to an LLM. Chapters Where the idea came from: Kearney, then Zalando The hardest part was finding co-founders The consulting project that funded the product Finding the first paying customer Structuring the first deal as an A/B test The first upload was a disaster How a pricing company prices itself Ten customers to $1M ARR The price matching objection Why LLMs don't belong in the pricing decision Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/494 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email