Journey to $2 mil ARR
I thought I’d write a reflective look back at IcePanel’s journey since it’s different to the sudden successes the headlines showcase. I’m a bit late in writing this since we hit this milestone at the beginning of the year (now at $2.4 mil), but here we are.
Our journey, like most founders, is not an overnight sensation. Those stories are the exception of the exception. There’s an incredible amount of luck involved in any success, but the ones you read about are often selling this fairy tale story you can do it too… there’s a LOT of hidden pain you’re not hearing about. Most founders (that I know at least) grow a company through painful lessons, time and choosing not to die. Through my journey, I’ve learned about the power of compounding (something I wish I learned at school), which can apply to your effort as well as finances.
We still have a long road ahead of us, with thousands more mistakes to make, but here’s how IcePanel started and reached $2 mil ARR.
🛣️ Journey
Prologue
Victor and I (Jacob) met at Bournemouth University in 2014, where we both studied on the Games course. Victor focused on programming, and I focused on the design side. It was the mountain biking club that we both went on to run together for a few years, that brought us closer together. Neither of us had an interest in making games once we’d seen how the sausage was made… Victor went into working within the crypto world as a developer, and I went on to become a UX designer within a large corporate environment in the payments space.
The real start: June 2020
Victor asked me to work on a side project he’d been working on to visualize Kubernetes that had some interest from some subreddits. We were both looking for something more than our day-to-day jobs and wanted to experience a rapid iterative product process. We took a step back from the solution of “visualizing Kubernetes” and focused on learning about problems architects, developers, and product people face. It turns out we both saw critical problems in communication in our full-time employment, experiencing the pain of miscommunication of technical things firsthand. We knew there must be a better way…
Given that we love simplifying complex things, we decided to focus on the problem of communicating technology, which is still becoming increasingly complex year over year, and decided to build a visual tool to explain how software systems work.
We also decided we would keep the name IcePanel from Victor’s previous project as it had a unique feel over the technical names you often hear in the dev tool space.
October 2020
Victor and I moved to North Wales together to be in the mountains (the only reason to move to Snowdonia…) and work part-time on our side project (IcePanel) in person. We spend most of our evenings and weekends prototyping and getting feedback to iterate on the design.
This is where we learned about YCombinator and consumed all their videos on YouTube. We resonated with the “Make something people want” statement. We also read a bunch of startup books, including The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, which turned out to be the most pivotal book in our early journey. If you’re interested in making products people want, and you’ve not read it, PLEASE read it - you’ll save yourself tonnes of wasted time.
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March 2021
IcePanel V1 launched, and although people said it looked nice, no one wanted it and said there are many other tools that solve this issue better. Simon Brown (creator of the C4 model) pushes us towards modelling and the C4 model. It made total sense; it was lightweight and a niche in the industry we could focus on with little direct tooling support.
April 2021
We move to Scotland (again, for the mountains). Here, we work full-time on IcePanel, using our personal savings as funding, while enjoying the highlands. We attend YC’s startup school and learn a lot from the process and other founders we meet there.
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August 2021
IcePanel has its first paying customer 5 months after the first launch and a lot of iteration. This moment was a huge relief and felt like magic. Someone wanted to give us money for a thing we built!! 😱 Not only this, but they’re from a Fortune 500 company, still a paying customer and meet with me regularly 🫶
September 2021
We move to Canada to explore the outdoors and continue working on IcePanel that just started making money - we continue living off our savings from previous jobs, and spend way too much on snowboards, craft beer and this Canadian delicacy called poutine?! Moving to Canada was always a dream for us, and so we moved as soon as borders reopened post-COVID restrictions.
We quickly realise that British Columbia is where we want to call home, and we quickly have a crucial decision to make. We either make IcePanel big enough to keep us here (Customers, revenue, employees etc.), OR we work for another Canadian company. Neither of us wanted to work for someone else … so we really only had one choice to stay - Make IcePanel a legit company.
As first-time founders who hadn’t grown up consuming Tech Crunch or in the Bay Area, neither of us knew that “fundraising” was the typical way companies start to reduce risk once they get traction. Instead, we decided to work on building a product that people loved to drive revenue.
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January 2022
IcePanel is officially incorporated in Canada. We knew Canada (specifically the West coast) is where we want to be, so decide to continue to grow in beautiful BC.
This is where we apply for YCombinator S22 batch and even get an interview, an intense 10 min barrage of growth related questions. We don’t get accepted this batch, because we “don’t know enough about growth”. YC were right - Victor and I were snowboarding almost every day in Whistler (70+ days on the mountain that season), which apparently is not a key trait of most successful startups…
This is when we start learning what “growth” meant and started to figure out how to get more paying customers to prove we could do it. IcePanel was making ~$8k monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at this point.
September 2022
We apply for YC again after doubling revenue to ~$16k MRR, and are accepted into the W23 programme. This was a “pinch me” moment for both of the founders, as they had no expectation they’d get in. Neither of the founders had the background you often hear of for a YC founder. Neither had FANG or Ivey league school backgrounds, so getting accepted was a huge shock. They discussed whether this was a path they wanted to take, but having that orange badge of honour was only held by a few in the world, so even if things didn’t work out, they had that. We had breakfast to discuss it and decided “let’s do this” and accept joining for an experience of a lifetime.
January 2023
Victor and I join YCombinator in the W23 batch, and work the hardest we ever have, doubling our revenue again in 4 months from ~$25k to $50k MRR (this was after YC moved the sign to avoid pictures of the motor homes outside their office). We spend the whole batch sitting at a dining table in an Airbnb with two very nosey cats, eat a ton of food and avoid most social events to focus on growth - as tempting as all the drink events are in the Bay (We are British after all… 🍻).
May 2023
We decided to go back to Canada and continue building. As we approach YC’s demo day, we decided not to raise further capital, despite being one of the higher revenue companies in the W23 batch, saying no to over 100 outbound investor emails post demo day…
The core decision here was about control. Taking further capital didn’t make sense for how we wanted to build the company and opt for a bootstrap (seedstrapped?!) approach instead.
To any founder who’s thinking about this right now, be honest with yourself - are you and your idea venture scale ready? I don’t doubt we could have gone down that path, perhaps even growing faster, maybe one day I’ll experience that. It just didn’t feel right at the time and already showed signs of friction between the two of us. At the end of the day - we’re building IcePanel for our customers, not investors.
January 2024
Tim and David join the team and we hit $1 mil (USD) ARR!
Building the initial team is a crazy and incredibly fulfilling experience. Convincing people to join your crazy mission and vision for an uncertain future with no guarantee of succeeding, is quite a challenge, but both David and Tim were crazy enough to be all in. I couldn’t have asked for better first hires. 🫶
April 2024
We hire our first intern - Gyunay joins us for summer and enjoys our annual retreat to Whistler, where we did far too many activities. ATV, white water rafting, high ropes, hiking, axe throwing, spa, meals all over 3 days… (Victor loves a jam-packed adventure).
January 2025
Derrick joins the team and soon after the team hit $2 mil (USD) ARR and get a new office and run first IcePanel event.
Hitting these milestones is a huge achievement, and we often just keep going on as normal. “Great - onto the next one!”. We really should learn to reflect more and celebrate.
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April/May 2025
Oliver joins the team as the first design hire, and IcePanel attends our first conferences in London and Vancouver.
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Where now?
We’re now halfway through 2025 and still growing steadily, and it’s easy to just keep moving without looking back at the mountain we’ve climbed to get here. To all our customers, thank you for believing in us. We wouldn’t be here without you. To all the incredible people I’ve met along the way - you’ve all helped in your own way.
This is the first time I’ve spent time writing our journey down, and I’ve mostly focused on what worked… I completely missed everything that didn’t work (a lot hasn’t worked):
- The arguments we’ve had.
- The wrong turns we made.
- The endless sacrifices.
- The features nobody cares about.
- The “advice” from “experts” that made us so angry, that we did the opposite out of determination to make it work.
- Pricing and contract negotiations that end up not being won because of something completely out of our control.
- Big companies taking advantage of a smaller company because they outbudget us 10,000 to 1.
- and the list goes on…
I feel lucky to be able to do this. I wouldn’t change it for the world, despite how much of a ball-ache it’s been.
Interested in joining us?
We’re building for the long term. If you love to build products and care about your craft - you’ll fit in here (We’re hiring).
Pics of the team
