I was reminded that this time last year I wrote a post about hitting USD $2 mil ARR. It seemed to be well received, and it’s nice to look up, step back, and see where you’ve come.

I posted on socials about hitting $3 mil earlier this year. In that post, I discussed how things continue to be hard, mostly due to market expectations. We continue to grow steadily as a company, and though not as headline worthy as startups often crave to be, we’re still having fun and get to focus on why we started and what matters to us - a kick ass product we’re proud of.

I thought I would write more about what things we’ve learned since last year’s post, as well as core events that happened.

Timeline

As a recap:

• 6 months $0 → $1
• 2.5 years: $1 → $1m ARR
• 1 year: $1m ARR → $2m ARR
• 1 year: $2m ARR → $3m ARR
• 6 months: $3m ARR → $3.5m ARR

We’re adding ~$83k ARR each month. Something we’re always trying to accelerate.

Last post we got to mid 2025…

September 2025: Dorian joins

• Initially hired to take on customer success, and quickly leaned into sales, expansion, account ownership of top-tier customers and pushing our revenue.

November 2025 - Prairie Dev Con

Oliver and Derrick attended Prairie Dev Con in Winnipeg. Their trip didn’t get off to a great start, as they arrived at midnight only to find out their hotel reservation wasn’t in fact reserved.

Hotel issues aside, they had a fantastic time meeting the local community, talking about IcePanel, handing out t-shirts, and our Yeti cooler giveaway. We’ll certainly be back as a team at some point in the future, maybe to see the polar bears.

December 2025: New dev joins - doesn’t work out.

Reliant on AI to do their job with limited deep technical knowledge, causing a lot of issues with the team’s progress. Sadly, it doesn’t work out.

Lesson learned: AI makes it easy to fake you know things, but hard to execute and build real things (in our experience/world). The downstream effects were rapidly piling up, which for a lean team, added a debt we were never going to be able to repay. Deep and real technical understanding are required from any hire. We now ban agentic building during the work trial.

January 2026 - Collaboration with Luca starts

We started sponsoring Luca’s Dear Architects podcast series to help share architectural insights and lessons from industry experts. Working with Luca as a content creator and influencer is incredibly fun and valuable in top of funnel marketing with ~200k total views on Youtube + more on other podcast platforms & social.

February 2026 - we hit $3mil ARR

• Upsales, expansion and new customers are being kept engaged during our sales process, which is now more efficient.

Confoo conference - great audience for us.

• We leaned hard on unique merch that people loved. Custom t-shirts for the location, custom bear stress balls and a Pokémon-style trading card game for a prize.
• Trading cards caused a black market of dealing and scalpers collecting our limited edition Brian trading cards.
• Expanded deals and strengthened relationships with a chill in-person event for architects (beers helped).

March 2026 - Axel, Nikko and Thom join.

3 incredibly valuable hires, all of whom (yes, whom) have outperformed what we expected when hiring them.

• Someone to manage technical customer support, bug fixing and expand test coverage.
• Someone to manage day-to-day operations so small things don’t pile up.
• Someone to manage complex technical problems and push the product forward.

May 2026 - CANSEC conference

Trying to stand out whilst standing next to tanks and military hardware proved difficult. Likely the wrong audience for us (we can’t count the number of times people thought we were doing something related to panels of ice..), but great learning that not all conferences are worthwhile. Being more targeted makes sense.

June 2026 - DDD in Belgium

We attend DDD Europe which is a hyper targeted at architects and architecture practices, mostly around Domain Driven Design (shocker, given the name). It was a lot of fun and we had some awesome conversations. We do learn that when flying that far, a buffer to get over jet lag might be a good idea …

July 2026 - Team retreat in Whistler.

The team get together for our annual week of activities in the mountains and we all get covered in dust.

Hint - if you’re looking to bring your team closer together, I’d recommend playing paintball and getting someone to break a leg. It’s funny what a crisis does to the team dynamic…

What did we learn this last year?

Market shift.

This is likely not a surprise to anyone building software… but it’s clear that this year, more than before, the market has shifted to automating everything.

Before it felt like a gimmick, but now it’s the expectation that you support automation/agentic workflows.

The hardest part for us as builders is that this is despite the data showing limited ROI (or just ROI uncertainties).

Hiring.

Hire people > don’t just fill a role.

Good people figure out what’s needed and where to add value.

e.g. First customer success hire ended up becoming our lead designer. The second customer success hire ended up pushing sales and expansions, increasing our revenue dramatically (whilst owning customer success too).

Collect people

Hiring is a long and painful journey, but as a lean team, finding the right person through those pains is worth it to me. We have a high bar of expectation, which paired with hiring in person in Vancouver and unable to match VC funded companies who are happy to throw unholy amounts of money at people, make it a lot harder… That said, outsourcing our hiring hasn’t helped find the person we want any faster - it’s just hard.

“Collecting” people before a role is ready for them has turned out to help us greatly in the long run. (4 of the team knew us before we hired them). I’ve spoken to many people who I believe are great candidates - just not exactly what we’re looking for right now.

To point out the elephant in the room - yes, we’re all men. This is not by design, we just sadly get far fewer non-male applicants (we’re hiring btw…).

Natural end

Things and people that work well at a specific stage and time of your journey, might not work at other stages.

This is a hard pill to swallow, but as a business and team, you need everyone invested in the journey of where you’re heading. Anything holding the company back is bad for everyone trying to push forward.

AI has ruined applications but also made it better.

I do all our hiring myself, from headhunting to application reviews and all first interviews.

Over 75% of our applicants used AI for the application. This is easy to sniff out - it reads as boring, soulless and vanilla as you can get. Even if AI added flavour in your application, the first time we meet will likely feel like I’m talking to a completely different person - you’ll likely not get the job either way and have just wasted both of our time.

This is however amazing for those who put real effort into an application they’re actually excited about. I used to hate the AI applications as it felt a waste of time reviewing plagiarized work (let’s call it what it is…), but they benchmark what mediocre looks like, so the exceptional people float to the top. We also ask engineers to bring in work their proud of. Again, things built completely with agents (to the point people have outright told us they’ve never looked at the code… given this is for a senior engineering position…) might look cool on the surface, but when you dig deeper, they crumble and there’s rarely value beneath.

Product

Building the right thing

Building a product that provides value continuously, is genuinely hard.

“What got us here, won’t get us there” feels more relevant than ever right now - we’re always learning, which is fun!

Dig deeper than the surface level always - We’ve learned that customers have these wild ideas that seem crazy to us … but there’s usually a reason deeper that explains why. Don’t take what they say at face value, but meet them there to dig deeper

We’re still figuring out our growth engine.

Scale what works

Conferences

We started going to a couple to see if this works, so now we’re scaling up to attend more (within reason). Meeting people in person, seeing their instant response and jamming on ideas with people new to the tool has been an awesome experience. BUT - it has to be the right type of conference. We attended CANSEC this year, and it’s hard to standout as a tool for software architects when you’re stood next to an actual tank… We plan to continuing attending targeted and highly relevant conferences.

Training

Services continues to be a huge value add for our higher tier customers, and we now have 2 trainers who help us scale our training programme to more teams across the globe, especially in timezones that mean we don’t need to do 5am calls anymore.

Comparison

It’s 6 years since Victor and I started IcePanel, which is the longest job I’ve ever had, and completely flown by…

Comparing to other founders used to make me feel inadequate. We didn’t raise tens of millions, hyper scale a team, spend tens of millions on marketing, shout from the rooftops about how we’re “killing it”, demand the team works 80 hours a week etc.

But none of that was why we started - so why should it matter now?

We started because we wanted to learn how to build a product people cared about for a problem we saw in our own day jobs.

In this time we have:

• Learned how to talk to customers and understand their problems. (the original reason we started)
• Moved country and had 12 offices.
• Made our first dollar
• Got into YC - realized the VC path wasn’t for us
• Hired an awesome, lean and autonomous team.
• Grown to 900 customers and $3.5mil ARR.
• Have fun building.

All that matters to us is what our customers think, what our employees think and what our mum’s think. That’s all the validation we need.

Where now?

We continue focusing on building the coolest tool for software architecture design so teams can focus on what matters most - their customers. We’re all playing a new game with the current market, which brings a whole new set of challenges.

I don’t tend to like posting about how we’re making money whilst having fun building because it feels like cheating. It also feels “icky” to me, as it comes across as boasting, which is not a very British thing to do… I feel incredibly lucky to be able to build a really cool thing for our really cool customers. These posts are more for me to share and highlight the alternate path that a lot of people starting to build a product or company don’t hear about, because it’s not sexy or headline worthy. Bootstrapping your own company and making sure your customers are happy and that you make more than you spend, is just good math in my head. The path you get to control is the one that’s more “you” as a founder and gives you enjoyment as well as being financially beneficial.

Thank you to all our supportive customers, old and new. We’re here because of you and are all incredibly grateful for your support and feedback.

Of course the same issues from my last post apply:

• The arguments and wrong turns.
• The continued sacrifices.
• The features nobody cares about.
• The “I can solve all your problems” messages in my inbox every hour.
• Pricing and contract negotiations lost from something out of our control.
• Big companies taking advantage of a smaller companies.
• and so on…

I’m proud of all the work we do as a team and love that we have fun solving problems every day. It’s still hard - but I’m starting to think that is why it’s fun.

If you want to build something cool, own what you build and have fun doing it - let’s chat.