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Why We're Still Hustling Like It's Day One—Even at $30M ARR
Published May 20, 2025 · 12 views on YouTube
What has driven Howdy’s growth to $30 million ARR?
Howdy co-founder Jacqueline Samira says the biggest driver has been staying hyperfocused on being excellent at one thing for one company, rather than trying to be everything for everyone. That early discipline compounded over time: referrals grew, the team grew, and the same fundamentals that worked on day one kept working at scale.
Why does Howdy still do the same things it did in the early days?
Samira says what surprises her most, looking back from $30M ARR to Howdy’s earliest days in 2019, is how much of the original playbook is still in use. About half of Howdy’s sales still come from Jacqueline and co-founder Frank Licea personally prospecting, just as they did when the company had almost no customers. Her takeaway: whatever makes you successful early on will keep making you successful later, so it’s worth continuing rather than abandoning once you scale.
What was Howdy’s early strategy for winning customers?
Rather than trying to serve many companies with many offerings, Howdy focused on nailing the experience for a single company at a time. The goal was a service so good that a customer would rate it a 10 out of 10 — and one that could scale financially and operationally without losing money, so that delighting one customer could be repeated linearly for the next.
How does Howdy’s team support that original approach today?
Howdy now has an entire team helping duplicate the effort that Jacqueline and Frank started alone: continued referrals, an expanding sales pipeline, and ongoing prospecting and sales calls from the founders themselves. Samira’s advice to other founders: get it right for one customer first, and if you give it enough time, the results keep compounding.
Full video transcript
Howdy has been growing rapidly. What have been the biggest factors driving your expansion and how has this growth impacted your business and your clients?
Hi everyone. We’re so happy to be here. Darby, thank you again for having us and yeah, I’d love to tell you a little bit about it because I was reflecting on this journey recently. Howdy actually just passed the 30 million ARR mark. And I remember this number is very vivid in my memory because when we were just starting out and we had barely any customers and we were barely making any money, it was 2019. I happened to be in Colorado Springs and there was a US Treasury there, and they had a wall of $30 million in cash on the wall, and I stood in front of it and I was like, take a picture — if our company hits 30 million I’ll post this picture. And so that had happened on Monday, and I posted it on Monday. So this reflection of this journey is very recent.
And I will say that something that surprises me now, that I wouldn’t have thought of in 2019, is how much we’re still doing today what we did in the very early days. And I think what people who are building companies don’t realize is that so much of the sales — like 50% of the sales — are still coming because Frank and I are prospecting. So much of what we’re doing is still the stuff we had to do in the early days. So all of the things that you do in the early days of your company to make yourself successful is going to continue to make you successful. So if it works early on, it’s going to work later on as well.
And so this question about what’s the biggest factor for driving the expansion — one of the things we did really early on was to make sure that we were a really great product, or we’re actually a service, but to make sure we were a really great service for one company. Not to try and be like all things to all companies, or to sell many things to many people. What we really wanted to do was just make sure that we nailed the one thing for one company, and it was such an amazing experience that if we were to give them an NPS, of course they’d mark 10, because they were just blown out of the water. And then we needed to make sure that financially we could scale it, and that operationally it could be linear — because if it delights one person, and if it financially makes sense that we can scale it without losing money — in fact, we make money — and linearly we can expand to deliver the same amount, then as we’re growing we can create efficiencies. We can make things better. We can make more money. We can make more profit margin. We can squeeze things here and there. We can delight things in other ways.
But what we really wanted to do was just isolate it down to literally n of one, and just make sure that we were excellent for one. And then if you can do that, you can duplicate it. And so what is the biggest factor that’s now driving our expansion is that we have been hyperfocused on one thing and being great at one thing. And now we just have time on our side because we’re getting referrals from our customers. We’re getting our name out there. We’re still prospecting. Frank and I are still doing sales calls. We’re still meeting with different folks all the time, but now we have an entire team that’s helping and duplicating these efforts in a way that it’s not just us doing it — we have a massive team helping us with it. But get it right for one, and I promise you it will keep compounding, especially if you just have enough time behind you.