Building a business to seven figures isn't about following a "standard" playbook—it’s about knowing which rules to break. In a recent Road to $1M session, Jeremy Malecha (Biocanic) and Fergus McKenzie-Wilson (60X) broke down the pivots that moved them from first revenue to their first million.
Here are the most insightful (and unconventional) lessons from their journey:
1. Sell the "Paper Cuts," Not the "Vision"
Jeremy found product-market fit when he stopped selling "better health outcomes" and started solving "Death by five-minute paper cuts". His practitioners were drowning in fragmented data—managing 200-page lab reports and context-switching across multiple monitors.
- The Result: By naming this specific friction, Biocanic cut practitioner onboarding time by 60%.
2. The "Sell First, Build Later" Playbook
While most founders follow a "Raise → Build → Sell" cycle, Fergus flipped it. He went straight to Fortune 500 companies and sold them on the "fear of being left behind" before the platform was fully developed.
- The Insight: You can’t know what the "perfect" product is until an organization pays a large sum of money to solve a real problem inside their four walls.
3. More Clients Can Actually Slow You Down
Scaling revenue often means leaving clients behind. Fergus argues that "bad fit" clients create mental context-switching that kills company velocity.
- The Strategy: Push your prices higher than you are comfortable with to identify who actually needs your core value versus who is just window shopping.
4. Technical Debt is a Long-Term Tax
Jeremy’s biggest regret was using Stripe to manage subscriptions instead of just processing payments. This early "convenience" decision created a massive switching cost that still impacts their operations today.
5. Unconventional Hiring
The "Unicorn Mafia" Scouting: Fergus doesn't just post job ads; he built a community of 900 developers in London called Unicorn Mafia. He uses this group as a specialized recruitment engine to find "Golden Balance" engineers.
The 5-Year Power User: Fergus targets engineers who are 5–6 years post-graduation. They are senior enough to understand the entire stack—from cloud architecture to DevOps—but young enough to be AI-native.
The 60X Multiplier: These engineers use their deep architectural knowledge to give AI systems extremely concise instructions, effectively 60x-ing their productivity without sacrificing user satisfaction or code quality.
The "Clean Slate" Strategy: Jeremy took the opposite path at Biocanic. He stopped hiring senior engineers and now recruits brand-new college grads.
Training for Velocity: By hiring new grads, Jeremy can train them in Biocanic’s specific architecture and design philosophy from day one. While it takes longer to get them to production, the result is a team perfectly suited to the specific speed the company needs.
6. The Persistence of "Interesting"
Closing enterprise deals requires extreme persistence. One team member followed up 37 times to secure a single workshop. The key is to be persistent without being annoying—staying "interesting and friendly" throughout the process.
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