6 Go-to-Market Lessons from Arbol’s Journey to $171M in Revenue
Most startup advice focuses on quick wins and rapid growth. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Arbol founder Sid Jha shared a contrarian perspective – sometimes, the path to explosive growth starts with months of foundational work for minimal revenue. Here are six key go-to-market lessons from Arbol’s journey.
- Build the Factory Before the Product
Drawing inspiration from Henry Ford, Sid approached market entry with unusual patience: “He really spent the time building pieces for producing a much greater number of cars later on… he spent a lot of time building the factories, building all the pieces in place, putting every single component in place while producing no cars. But once he was ready, he could produce multiple cars in a day.”
This philosophy shaped Arbol’s early strategy of building infrastructure before chasing revenue – a decision that enabled their later scaling from $3,000 to $171 million in just three years.
- Navigate Regulation Through Small Tests
In regulated industries, Sid advocates for starting small to learn the landscape: “You can’t just up and start selling insurance. So you have to first find out, how do I kind of even get the first transactions going? What do I need to do in terms of licensing and the correct regulatory stuff?… And you don’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting all the licenses before you even know what the market is.”
- Run Multiple Cohesive Experiments
Rather than betting everything on a single approach, Sid recommends a multi-thread strategy: “You try 20 things, 30 things – all try to be cohesive. You’re not trying to just do 20 random projects. They should be cohesive. They should be among the same kind of theme. But you have to put a lot of threads out there… because 19 out of 20 of them will likely not get anywhere.”
- Focus on Customer Outcomes Over Technology
Despite building on blockchain and AI, Arbol takes a customer-first approach to messaging. As Sid explains, “The buyer does not care… For us, it’s more important to make sure the customer pays premium and then gets what he or she expects for that premium. That when there’s a climate event, they get paid. They really don’t care how it happens.”
- Be Patient With Early Revenue
Sid recalls their first transaction: “I remember it taking almost six months to arrange the first transaction, which was a grand total of $3,000 in gross revenue. And it was good to get the first thing done, but it also was deflating that this was this much work for $3,000 of gross revenue.”
This patience paid off – by focusing on learning and process improvement rather than immediate revenue, they built a foundation for rapid scaling.
- Build Networks in New Industries
When transitioning from Wall Street to insurtech, Sid faced the challenge of building new networks: “Once you’re 15 years into a career in one industry, you know a lot of people, you have a network you can fall back on if something doesn’t work out… to leave that behind and to then start something new in a new industry like insurance… really a whole new set of people, a whole new set of ways you do things. Whole new set of processes that you have to learn on the fly.”
The Power of Patient Platform Building
These lessons challenge the conventional startup wisdom of “move fast and break things.” Instead, Arbol’s success suggests that in regulated industries, patient platform building and methodical market entry can create the foundation for explosive growth.
By focusing on building infrastructure, running cohesive experiments, and prioritizing customer outcomes over technology hype, Arbol created what Sid describes as “a whole new asset class at a scale that has not been done before.”
For founders entering regulated markets or building platform businesses, this patient approach to market entry – while potentially deflating in the short term – might be the key to unlocking massive scale in the long run.
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