Starting a startup backwards

0 to 1 in 12 months (and US$2.7M raised)

We just announced that Marloo raised US$2.7 million led by Blackbird Ventures.

Here’s what the press release won’t tell you: Blackbird first invested in us 18 months ago when we had nothing. No product, no customers, no idea what we were building.

But we had something more valuable: a rigorous framework for finding the right problem to solve, and 12 months to execute it.

This is the story of how we started backwards - and why it worked.

The framework first, the money second

April 2024. I’d just left Lightyear to start a company. I didn’t know what that company would be, but I knew exactly how I was going to figure it out.

After years of company building and early-stage investing, I’d developed a strong conviction: too many founders work on the wrong thing for way too long. They rush to build because they need to raise money. They pitch the least bad idea they have instead of the best one they could find.

The abundance of venture capital may actually be a bug, not a feature. When capital was scarce, getting funded was a strong signal an idea was worth pursuing. Now, founders sacrifice years of valuable time without enough diligence upfront.

I wanted to do it differently.

The key insight: go slow to go fast. If you’re dedicating 10 years of your life to something, it needs to be the right thing

Shak and I wrote a five-page memo outlining our approach. The core thesis: company building is a series of true/false hypotheses. Venture capital should fund experiments to test novel hypotheses about how the world works - experiments that generate clear yes/no signals without requiring too much capital. Before committing 10 years of our lives, we needed to answer three questions with absolute certainty:

1. Is there a real, painful, high-frequency problem to solve? Not one we’ve convinced ourselves exists, but one that pulls us in.

2. Do we have unique insights that compound? Knowledge or perspective that gives us an unfair advantage.

3. Is this interesting enough to be our life’s work? Are we passionate enough to spend the next decade on this?

The critical part: each hypothesis had to answer true to unlock massive, uncapped upside in the next set of hypotheses. We needed to design the tightest possible experiments that would generate clear yes/no signals without burning through capital. If a hypothesis proved false, we’d move on. If it proved true, it would give us optionality to pursue something wildly valuable.

The process: 12 months to find a 0 or a 1. Either we’d validate something worth building and have a product in market with paying customers, or we’d have nothing - and we’d walk away knowing we hadn’t wasted years on the wrong thing.

When Samantha Wong from Blackbird called, we didn’t pitch her an idea. We pitched her the process.

Everything about a startup changes except the founders. So why wait for us to rush into pitching something just because we needed capital?

We also had practical constraints. We didn’t have the personal runway to go 12 months without salary. And we wanted to bring people in who were aligned and had equity incentives from day one.

We closed a small pre-seed round in April 2024 - enough to not be resource constrained, but not enough to get comfortable.

Twenty angels joined alongside Blackbird - incredible operators from the world’s most successful companies. We actually turned away more money than we took because capital wasn’t the constraint we were solving for.

The discovery process

For the first six months, we tested multiple ideas. We time-boxed ourselves - two to four weeks per concept. The forcing function was simple: could we convince people to let us into their offices for days at a time to understand their problems deeply?

If not, it probably wasn’t the right problem.

It felt awful. Not because we were burning cash, but because sitting in that messy, uncertain space is incredibly tough. You’re not building anything. You have nothing to show. You’re just searching, testing, walking away from ideas that don’t feel right. It requires a different kind of discipline.

By month two, we thought we had it. Vertical SaaS for roofing companies. On paper, it made perfect sense. Massive market, clear pain points, great business model.

But one question kept nagging: did I actually want to spend 10 years of my life working on roofing?

The answer was no.

Walking away from that idea was clarifying. The framework only works if you’re intellectually honest with yourself. You can’t optimise your way into caring about a problem.

Finding the thing

By August, a pattern emerged from our experiments. But it wasn’t a new problem - it was one we’d been thinking about for years.

Shak and I had spent eight years building retail investing platforms at Sharesies and Lightyear. We’d introduced millions of people to investing, held regulated roles, and built these businesses from scratch. The platforms we built now manage more than £5 billion in assets.

But we’d always been frustrated by one massive constraint: we could never give financial advice.

I’ve had tens of thousands of customer conversations. The question I was always asked: what should I invest in? By and large, people want to do the right thing. They want to build their wealth over time slowly, and they’re incredibly engaged. But we couldn’t help them in any meaningful way.

When markets crashed during the pandemic or Trump tariffs hit, we’d draft customer emails saying “don’t panic, markets go up and down.” But we couldn’t actually advise anyone. The result? Lots of people bought when markets went up and sold when they went down - the exact inverse of what they should do.

At Sharesies, Shak had even written a board paper exploring this. We looked at robo-advice, bringing human advisers onto the platform, even building our own wealth management business. We’d spent years pondering this space because we cared about it deeply.

Now, talking to financial advisers, we finally understood why the gap existed.

Advisers are drowning in admin work from outdated software. They got into the profession to help people, but spend their time fighting systems instead. The irony: demand for advice is so overwhelming - because it’s only accessible to wealthy people - that most advisers are referral-only, unable to serve everyone who needs help.

Meanwhile, people are making incredibly complex financial decisions alone - retirement, divorce settlements, inheritance, first home purchases, growing a family. These aren’t just investment questions, they’re life-changing moments where good advice is transformative.

Within a week of exploring this space, we got five firms to agree to let us go in-house.

That pull was unlike anything we’d felt with the other ideas we’d tested. Our background also gave us real credibility - we could open doors that others couldn’t. When you’ve built platforms managing billions in assets, advisers listen.

Go slow to go fast

From August 2024 to January 2025, we didn’t write a line of code for the actual product.

We went deep. Really deep.

We spent weeks across different wealth management firms interviewing every role: CEOs, managing directors, heads of compliance, advisers, power planners, support staff, call centres. We did side-by-sides: “Pull up every email from yesterday - what did you do with each one? What systems did you use?”

We went to industry conferences with working prototypes (in code, not Figma). We even exhibited. People thought the product existed. It didn’t.

We only started building the real thing when we were absolutely certain we were losing sales because we couldn’t onboard people.

By January, we had crystal clarity. We knew the pain we were solving. We knew our wedge (AI-powered note-taking) and where it was going (a system of action). We knew exactly how the product would develop over the next 24 months as we headed towards our vision.

That clarity is what allowed us to build insanely fast. We spent six months understanding the problem better than anyone else in the world. Our competitors rushed to build. We took the time to be certain.

Then we built. Fast.

The results

We launched in April 2025. Six months ago.

Since then:

• 50% month-on-month revenue growth for six months

• Paying customers across four countries

• Almost zero churn on monthly subscriptions with no lock-ins

• Team of eight people and growing

• Extreme product clarity and speed of shipping

• Insane ambition and aspiration to match

The product decisions and strategy we made because of the go-slow-to-go-fast approach are paying off. We designed the product to be global from day one - to be in as many big markets as possible, fully regionalised and localised, with an insane level of customisation across both firm and individual levels. We knew exactly where we were heading.

Advisers tell us they’re delaying retirement because of our product.

We’re winning because of our insight, our product strategy, and our approach. We’re building the most loved product in the market, and we’re on our way to having the best.

What starting backwards unlocked

This approach isn’t reckless. It’s disciplined.

Many founders skip the hard work of being absolutely certain about what they’re building. They convince themselves there’s a problem, rush to build something, and waste years discovering they were wrong.

The other trap: getting distracted by everyone else. It is tempting to obsess over competitors’ headline numbers, their capital raises, their press releases but then you lose focus on what actually matters.

All you should care about is the customer: their pain points, your unique insights, and whether they absolutely love your product. Everything else is noise.

We did the opposite. We raised money specifically to fund a rigorous discovery process. We gave ourselves permission to walk away from ideas that didn’t excite us. We stayed heads down on our own work. And we only started building when we had genuine conviction.

When we pitched Blackbird for our pre-seed round in May 2025, we got eight out of eight “hell yes” votes from their investment committee - extremely rare. Every slide was a customer story showing the pain and the immediate customer love we were driving. Not just in one country, but across multiple markets straight off the bat.

We weren’t raising capital. We were sharing evidence of a company that was already working.

The uncomfortable truth: those six months of burning cash with nothing to show were awful. You need investors who back the process, not just the pitch. You need the discipline to walk away from ideas. And you need the intellectual honesty to keep searching until you find something that pulls you in.

But if you can do it, starting backwards means you can go slow to go fast.

Eighteen months ago, we had a framework and nothing else. Today, we’re building the world’s most loved AI assistant for financial advisers, growing 50% month-on-month with a clear pathway to having the best product in the market.

The press release talks about the US$2.7 million. The real story is the rigorous process that made everything else possible - the willingness to be certain before committing, and the discipline to walk away until we found the right thing.

What’s next

I get asked all the time about the process we followed. I talk almost weekly with founders starting new companies, and the same questions keep coming up.

So I’m writing up the full framework: how we structured the discovery process, designed experiments, validated hypotheses, and made decisions. The actual playbook for founders who want to do the work and build a generational company.

The next post will cover the tactical approach - what to do in those first 6 months, how to know if you’re on the right track, and when to walk away versus when to commit.