Stan's 2024 Shareholder Letter
Doubling from $14.7M to $28.3M ARR, achieving PMF, and why 2025 will be our banner year.
Stan had a strong year.
We doubled this year, growing from $14.7M to $28.3M ARR — all while hitting 40% EBITDA margins.
But I think the more interesting story is how we’ve evolved as people, and as an organization.
This year was humbling.
After a strong start out of the gate, we hit a plateau that forced us to re-evaluate whether we had built an organization truly designed to ‘scale’.
We were forced to get hyperclear on what an organization deserving of $100M+ looks like, and the key ingredients we needed to get to the next level — unquestioned product market fit, a resonant marketing message, and a repeatable acquisition engine that scales into the $100M+ level.
As a result, we’ve come out the other end a completely different organization — one with clarity on who we are as people, what our strategy is, and how we need to evolve to get to the next stage of growth.
This letter will attempt to recount our year in full — our accomplishments, our lessons learned, and why 2025 will be our banner year.
Ingredient #1: Achieving Product Market Fit
It’s crazy to think that just four years ago, I was building the first version of Stan alone in my dorm room.
It wasn’t the prettiest — but it solved all the issues Creators like me were facing.
Forced to spend $100s a month, we were stuck patching together dozens of software subscriptions that were hard to use, and even harder to make money with.
It boggled my mind that a simple, all-in-one solution didn’t exist.
Four years later, it’s cool to get to say that Stan is now fundamentally the best product on the market.
The team has worked hard to get here — with the launch of our Community feature, I can now confidently say that there is no better deal out there.
There is nowhere else you can get all the tools you need to start your online business — your website, courses, community, digital products, calendar bookings & email marketing — with the 24/7 support and coaching we provide every single one of our Creators — all for the incredibly affordable price of just $29/mo.
Stan continues to be the simplest way to start an online business, and by far the most affordable.
More importantly though — now that we’ve established clear PMF — we can focus on our true North Star goal: making Stan so good and so helpful that we fundamentally lift the success curve of entrepreneurship.
Our goal this year is to continue building a product where anyone, anywhere can make a living working for themselves.
This means focusing on increasing our customers’ success rates (we’re already 2-3x our industry’s average) by figuring out how we can better educate, coach, and do work on our Creators’ behalf.
That way, we can continue to say “if you aren’t using Stan, you’re literally leaving money on table.”
Ingredient #2: Brand
One of our biggest unlocks this year was understanding “who we are” and what makes us unique in this world (our Values, our authentic personalities, and how we choose to express them).
This ultimately translates into “Brand”.
I used to struggle in understanding the value of Brand (at first, it’s quite intangible and “woo-woo”), but over the last year, I’ve realized just how powerful Brand is as a distribution medium.
For us — our Brand specifically means what we stand for.
We stand for inspiring and empowering anyone to pursue their dreams and make a living working for themselves.
We believe that despite all of the sh** going on in this world, you can still make it.
Everyday at Stan we see the stories of real, hardworking middle-class entrepreneurs take the leap and build a life for themselves.
Whether it be Janessa Lynae using the money she made from Stan to escape an abusive relationship and move across the country with her daughter, Selina Camarillo creating a 6-figure business out of her love for making sourdough, or Eddie Abbew making $1M in his 60s while teaching others how to stay in shape — we see the reward that comes if you can just persist through the muck and make that first $ for yourself.
It’s damn hard — but as Creators ourselves, we know how empowering this journey can be — not just financially, but also the sense of meaning, purpose, and self-agency it fills you with.
And having come from very little ourselves, we know just how much making an extra $500 or $2,000 a month can fundamentally change someone’s life for the better.
It’s why we throw everything we can into supporting and caring for our Creators — and why we share the ‘playbook’ of how to succeed as widely as possible.
That reputation (or “brand”) is now starting to precede us.
You see it manifest in how strongly our content performs:
And the comments and messages we get from our Creators:
We’re creating a movement here at Stan — and this year, you’ll start to see us inspire on an even bigger stage.
Ingredient #3: Evolving Our Organization (from Founder-Led to Repeatability-Driven)
Our last key learning actually came out of a period that was quite painful.
Early this year, we saw a huge surge in signups.
Unfortunately, much of this surge came from a wave of “Master Resell Rights” course sellers, a short-term trend where network marketers flooded into the market to sell a course on “How to Make Money Online”, which could then be resold at 100% profit.
This led to a massive, temporary spike in our signups that would soon drain out the other end.
The problem with this spike is that it disconnected us from our reality — our revenue scale had completely outpaced our GTM organization (or lack thereof).
We were so busy trying to keep up with the sheer deluge of demand (imagine adding 30,000 customers overnight!) that we didn’t have the bandwidth to dig deep and ask questions like: “have we really put in place an acquisition engine that will repeatably acquire tens of millions in revenue?”
The resulting plateau ended up being quite painful, but it forced us to do some needed soulsearching.
It helped us realize that the model we had used to get the company off the ground was no longer the same model we needed to get to the next stage.
We had essentially built a machine around leveraging “me” as our GTM channel: I had landed our biggest customers, thought up our biggest campaigns, and made all of the strategic decisions — a “founder-led” sales model.
This model works great to grow quickly to ~$10M ARR, but really breaks down at scale.
In order to move the needle at the scale we were now at, we needed to play a completely different game.
How We Think About “Scaling” Now
My eyes used to glaze over when anyone started talking about “org structure”, but I now see the value.
Your organization is essentially a ‘machine’ with some ‘total possible output’ — how you design that ‘machine’ affects its total output ceiling.
For us, our original model (founder-driven) had helped us shoot out of the gates quickly, but was now hitting its limit.
So we removed me as the bottleneck, and are now learning to build an organization that predictably and repeatably scales acquisition.
Over the last few months, we’ve restructured the organization to have multiple, single-threaded Owners who are empowered to drive their team towards metrics.
For example, over the last few months we’ve:
Hired our first Product Owners: before, product decisions were bottlenecked at the top; now, we’ll have multiple Owners driving more metrics than we previously could have handled
Started a real Marketing team: before, it was just me and Lo making content; now, we’re building our ‘Marvel Universe’ of Creators, 10x’ing our content output and juicing our organic ROI by 2-3x with the savvy use of paid channels
Doubled Down on our Support & Partnerships team: the best part of Stan has and always will be the human component we provide our Creators; we’re now making sure we have enough coverage to give everyone a phenomenal, white glove experience
The real change though is one of mindset.
Rather than approach every single problem with a mindset of “how do I solve this?”, we spend our time thinking about “who should we hire to solve this problem?”
“Who would take pride in owning this problem? And how can we support them in doing their best work possible?”
We’ve started to hire and promote incredible leaders at Stan to run their own organizations.
And already, we’re starting to see those results pay off.
In just November and December, we saw New Trial Signups re-accelerate (despite working from an overinflated base!).
Those are just the early results though — we’ll start to see the real compounding take off in 6-12 months.
And this here starts to hint at why I’m so excited about our future:
Stan started as just me in my dorm room.
It was just a single kid, hustling with a scrappy product and a dream.
But now, Stan has evolved into something much greater than me.
It’s an organization of some of the best people I’ve ever gotten to work with, all building a repeatable machine that’s ready to capture the massive market opportunity ahead.
Why 2025 Will Be Our “Banner Year”
Stan is clearly a growth-stage company:
We’ve built the best product in the market (compare our customers’ success rates vs. anyone else’s in the market)
We have clearly repeatable unit economics (5x+ LTV/CAC)
We have a clear sense of who we are (Brand) and how to message that (Marketing)
There is no one who understands our Customer better (we live, sleep, and bleed being a Creator-Entrepreneur)
The last key ingredient we needed to blow things out was learning how to scale an organization.
When you compound that with the fact that 90% of our market doesn’t even know we exist yet, you start to realize just how large the Stan opportunity might be.
Especially when you you realize how massive this market is becoming…
The Final Ingredient: TAM
“Eventually, everyone will be in the Creator Economy.” - Naval
It’s become extremely clear to me that the Creator Economy isn’t just the future of media, it’s the future of all Entrepreneurship.
The TAM is much larger than we first thought.
What started first as a few niche Creators posting about their passions has now evolved into every solopreneur — every lawyer, accountant, realtor, personal trainer, breathwork coach and literal breadbaker — realizing that ‘social media’ isn’t just ‘social media’ anymore.
It’s the new marketing channel.
It’s the new way to drive leads and stand out from the crowd.
This is no longer just a bunch of kids wanting to be YouTubers when they grow up — this is every business out there realizing that they need to be on social in an incredibly visible way.
You no longer need a physical location or someone’s permission to start your own thing.
All you need is your phone and a Stan Store.
People are modularizing into their own enterprises — and Stan will be there to support all of it.
Closing
Of course, there’s still so much we need to improve if we’re to live up to that potential.
We’ll need to double down on making our product even more valuable, figure out how to speak to 10x as many people, and maintain our Values at scale.
But no matter what, I couldn’t be more grateful for the journey.
This journey we call entrepreneurship is deeply humbling — it constantly pushes you to self-examine and evolve.
There are so many points where you don’t think you’re going to make it through.
Yet somehow, you do.
I think that’s what makes this mission so powerful for us.
Everyday we live what our Creators go through — the self-doubt, emotional turmoil, and constant need for reinvention.
But we also know just how transformative this journey can be — how it forces you to face your inner demons, builds financial independence, and kindles an immense sense of self-belief and purpose.
That’s an incredible human experience.
And you can bet we’re going to share that with as many people as possible.
—
Thank you for your support.
You’ve believed in us since Day 1, and we won’t let you down,
John (@jayhoovy)
P.S. - We’re Hiring!!!
For anyone interested in building the next great organization — what I hope to be a combination of Patagonia’s values, Goldman/DoorDash’s rigorous excellence, and the financial returns of early Google… please reach out.
Appreciate your intellectual honesty. I remember the Master Resell Rights Spike (the company who acquired my previous startup is in a similar space). Wild. See a lot Stan can do down the road for the soloprenuersin different verticals (not just influencers)
Can’t wait to see what’s to come!! Love the stories of real entrepreneurs building from their dreams and passions on Stan!