Spendflo’s Path to $1M ARR: Referrals, Cold Outbound, and Negotiating on a Wedding Night

Spendflo’s Path to $1M ARR: Referrals, Cold Outbound, and Negotiating on a Wedding Night

Your first million in revenue will come from tactics that don’t scale—and that’s okay.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendflo, a SaaS spend management platform that’s raised $15.4 million, shared the scrappy, unscalable early GTM motion that got them to their first million. No sophisticated playbook. No refined go-to-market machine. Just referrals, cold outbound, and a willingness to negotiate contracts on your wedding night.

Two Months from Idea to First Customer

December 2020. Siddharth’s ex-CFO sent him a LinkedIn message about a contract she couldn’t find. That message turned into an offer to help. That help turned into proof of concepts. And those POCs turned into paying customers at breakneck speed.

“We signed our first customer in like in the first two months of the business. Very lucky, I remember,” Siddharth shares.

But here’s the thing about that first customer. It wasn’t lucky. It was the result of deep founder-problem fit. When his ex-CFO reached out desperate for help, he didn’t need twelve months of customer discovery. He already understood the problem because he’d been living it.

The Wedding Night Negotiation

How committed do you need to be in those early days? “And I got married in February 2021, and I was negotiating our first contract on my first night,” Siddharth recalls.

His wedding night. Not the week after the honeymoon. The actual first night of his marriage.

That’s what it takes in the earliest days when you don’t have a team, don’t have processes, and customers need help right now. The founders who succeed are the ones willing to do whatever it takes, whenever customers need it—even if that means working on what should be the least work-appropriate night of your life.

The Referral Engine That Got Them Started

For the first million in revenue, Spendflo relied heavily on referrals. When you solve a painful problem well, customers tell other people who have the same pain. CFOs talk to other CFOs.

Referrals work early because they come with built-in context and trust. When a peer says “this solved our SaaS procurement nightmare,” that carries more weight than any marketing campaign. The referred customer already understands the problem and believes a solution exists.

But referrals alone don’t scale. They’re unpredictable and hard to accelerate. That’s why Spendflo combined them with cold outbound.

Cold Outbound: The Channel That Eventually Failed

“For the first million of revenue, it was broadly referrals and a lot of cold outbound,” Siddharth explains. Cold outbound gave them control over pipeline generation while referrals provided high-quality leads.

But here’s what most founders don’t talk about: just because a channel works early doesn’t mean it scales. Spendflo eventually invested fourteen months trying to build sophisticated cold outbound. They hired the team, implemented systems, and gave it a genuine shot. It never delivered at scale. They shut it down.

The lesson isn’t that cold outbound doesn’t work. It’s that early tactics often don’t scale, and that’s fine. In the first million, you’re optimizing for survival and learning, not efficiency. Cold outbound gave Spendflo pipeline control while they figured out their repeatable motion.

What Changes After the First Million

Getting to your first million requires different tactics than getting to ten million. After hitting that milestone, Spendflo’s co-founder Rajiv and head of marketing Divas joined from Freshworks with event marketing expertise.

“As were coming out of COVID in 2022, people wanted to be in person,” Siddharth recalls. “They were craving some in person time to be social in late 2022 and early 2023 onwards.”

That’s when they built their sophisticated event marketing engine. But in the earliest days, it was just showing up to events and hosting dinners where nobody came. “The first version of this is me and Rajiv, like showing up to events and then hosting dinners ourselves with nobody showing up,” Siddharth recalls. “And now we have waitlist for our events.”

The scrappy early tactics—referrals, cold outbound, showing up everywhere—created the runway to figure out the scalable playbook.

Why You Should Embrace Unscalable Tactics

Most founders delay launching because they’re trying to build the perfect, scalable GTM motion from day one. They want attribution models and repeatable processes before they talk to their first customer.

That’s backwards.

Your first million comes from doing things that absolutely won’t work at scale. Negotiating contracts on your wedding night. Personally handling every conversation. Running outbound yourself before you know if it works. Hosting dinners where nobody shows up.

These tactics teach you things planning can’t reveal. You learn who actually has the pain. You learn what messaging resonates. You learn what customers value enough to pay for. The sophisticated playbook emerges from these scrappy experiences, not from strategic planning.

The Permission to Be Scrappy

If you’re in those early days, here’s your permission: do things that don’t scale. Work nights and weekends. Take calls at weird times. Show up to events where nobody knows you.

The goal isn’t to build a machine. It’s to learn fast, land customers, and survive long enough to figure out what actually works. Spendflo’s path to their first million wasn’t elegant. It was referrals from people who loved the solution, cold outbound to fill gaps, and a founder willing to work on his wedding night.

That scrappiness didn’t make them unprofessional. It made them successful. The million-dollar question isn’t whether your tactics will scale. It’s whether they’ll get you to the point where scaling matters.