How being arrested for cyber crimes led to a $100k MRR business. Steven Goh shares his growth journey

Steven Goh of Proxycurl recently hit $100k MRR, but his entrepreneurial journey started in an unusual place: Jail.

Since then, he has built a number of successful companies, and some failed ones too. Here's what he learned along the way. 👇

Computer crimes and entrepreneurship

James: Why did you become an entrepreneur?

Steven: I was arrested for computer crimes when I was 17. I was in the lock-up cell and I was crying because I thought I was going to prison.

I remember my mother saying that if I got a criminal record, I'd never get a good job. And I thought, "That's fine."

James: How so?

Steven: I was making $20k/mo as a 17-year-old from illicit botnet activities. If I could do that at 17, then I could build my own business.

That’s what I did. My circumstances made me an entrepreneur.

James: So that's when you became an entrepreneur?

Steven: I became an entrepreneur right out of school. The best time to fail was in University because any project was just a side-project, and you can’t fail side-projects if they are just for fun.

At worst, it was fun. At best, it makes you money.

I never considered working for anyone before because I do not think I have the temperament to be an employee. At my internship, I was very frustrated with the company taking losses; even if they were gaining market share.

James: Why were you so frustrated?

Steven: I guess I was never really a VC-startup kinda guy, where you burn money for growth.

I believe you can make good money and achieve startup-level growth at the same time.

For the last 14 months, we have achieved 11% month-on-month revenue growth, which is way better than most VC-funded startups. And we are able to achieve this while being profitable.

James: You've had a few products since university, right?

Steven: Yes, Gom VPN hit about 1.5M in registered users and still makes me about $1500/mo in residual income. Revenue from Gom VPN funded my early employees for Proxycurl, and led me to build the company into what it is.

Picturebook Chrome Extension got 2M users. I didn't make any money from it, but I used it to market my other products.

We onboarded thousands of websites to Kloudsec, a product like Cloudflare, but we couldn’t afford the bandwidth. It was a classic VC product where we burned money to get users, but I did not have it in me to raise funding; nor was I able to convert the free users into revenue.

And NuMoney was a Bitcoin Shop for the regular people. We made very good money with this. The trouble came when we raised a seed round and the cryptocurrency winter came. I had a mini-exit when I sold my stake in the company.

There were other products, but I consider them failures.

Most people shouldn't try to be entrepreneurs

James: Seems like 17-year-old you was right. Are you particularly suited to entrepreneurship or is this something anyone can learn?

Steven: Most people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs and they shouldn’t try.

James: Why?

Steven: It's about grit. I was in the special forces (Naval Divers) during conscription in the Singapore Navy. The biggest takeaway from my two years there was that my mind is capable of much more than I imagine it to be; and that I NEVER give up.

James: What would you say is your core expertise?

Steven: I happen to be a software engineer but my core expertise is in product management/design. Historically, I have always been able to build products that are a leap ahead in terms of UX.

I still lead product management at Proxycurl and answer to most, if not all, customer support tickets because it’s the only way for me to understand the pain/bugs that my customers are experiencing.

James: And you handle sales too, right?

Steven: We do not have a sales team. I am the only person getting on sales calls with customers. And for the most part, I do not get on calls unless it is an inbound Enterprise contract.

James: How do you where so many hats?

Steven: There is no "how". I came from a poor family and I just had to do it. Google and learn. And given that I know a little of everything, I knew how to hire people who were better than me.

James: Yeah, a lot of founders say that wearing all the hats in the beginning taught them enough to know how to hire.

Steven: Before I hired someone for marketing, I made sure that I did enough marketing myself to bring our SEO to rank on the front page for various important keywords.

James: Any advice on how to wear all of these hats?

Steven: I have no advice, but the “just do it” thing really stands out. Not just am I able to design and code. I also had to learn how to sell, how to pitch, how to manage people, how to perform marketing, etc. Not knowing something is not an excuse to not do something.

Turn weaknesses into strengths

James: Tell me more about how you handle sales

Steven: I read somewhere to embrace your biggest weakness in your product; it might help you stand out in the pool of competitors.

Now if you look at our competitors, their CTAs on their websites are to get on a demo/sales call with their sales team. Their pricing is also often obfuscated. That’s the Enterprisey way of doing things and I completely understand why they do that. But it is not our core competency so we decided to go completely in the other direction.

We do not want to get on sales calls unless you have already spent a large sum of money on our product. Our product is self-serve and pricing is transparent. We do not negotiate and we do not bullshit about our capabilities and we want our customers to test it out themselves.

Admittedly, I do think I am losing on customers who are not sold because we aren't actively upselling them.

Why self-serve onboarding is best

James: So how has this self-serve onboarding approach helped you?

Steven: It has allowed us (myself and the dev team) to ship at a ridiculous pace at a cost that is 90% cheaper than our competitors.

There's no way I could get on 20 calls a day and be productive, but with a self-onboarding product, I could easily strive to convert 20 new paying users a day.

My team can focus on building, I can reply to emails in an async manner while gathering customer feedback, and we can focus on reaching out to potential customers through good marketing.

James: Will you ever bring on a sales team to onboard enterprise users?

Steven: No, I am not saying it is a good solution for the long-term. But for a young, budding indie startup without much for funds, team, or sales experience, focusing our energy on building an easy-to-use product that a customer can try out and validate in one minute was a great way to grow and build fast.

James: So how do you make this type of onboarding work?

Steven: We invested in writing good, detailed documentation. And all they need is an API key. So after registration, the user gets some trial credits and an API key. They make a curl command and get the aha-moment immediately.

James: Simple enough. And it's probably helpful that your customers are software engineers, as they probably need less handholding.

Niche down hard and turn down customers

James: So let's talk about that. How did niching down help you?

Steven: Product-market fit came when we decided to focus on a very specific target market - software engineers at mid-market companies within certain industries. Once this was in place, everything fell into place.

James: How so?

Steven: It is a matter of taste. I am a software engineer and I know what good tooling for software engineers looks like. My competitors are products made by business people for software engineers.

Plus, we knew how to price within this market. We knew where to reach out to our target audience for our marketing efforts.

James: So when you figured that out, how did you niche down?

Steven: We learned to say no to customers a whole lot. Saying “we are not a good fit for your needs” is a superpower.

How to grow to $100k MRR

James: You just hit $100k MRR with Proxycurl. How did you grow it?

Steven: After launch, I knew I had to talk to as many customers as possible. So I purchased a Crunchbase Pro subscription and performed a search for all recently funded companies in the space of marketing/sales automation, recruitment tech, or web scraping. Then, I exported the results in .csv format with their corresponding general emails and began a series of cold email outreach to their general emails.

James: And it worked.

Steven: I sent thousands of cold emails and received hundreds of responses. With the help of Calendly and Google Meet, my calendar was booked full of calls for a whole month.

We made a few thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue in the first few months.

James: You detailed exactly how you did that here. Did anything else help?

Steven: At the time, I also had a habit of writing a daily blog post to practice story-telling and communication. With SEO and cold-email outreach, we grew the company to our first million dollars in revenue.

James: How long have you been working on Proxycurl?

Steven: It's three years old.

James: What was the biggest growing pain?

Steven: Hiring senior management. It still is.

Don't build castles on top of castles

James: You learned by doing. What was one of your biggest learnings?

Steven: Proxycurl was a LinkedIn Scraping API at launch. It is not a sexy business, and one of the many lessons I learned from my failures is never to build my castle on top of another.

So it became my mission to transform our business away from just scraping LinkedIn profiles to being a data enrichment service provider.

James: Were you able to do it?

Steven: We are not entirely independent from LinkedIn scraping, but I am intricately aware that LinkedIn scraping is not sustainable. Today, we make the majority of our revenue from activities other than LinkedIn scraping.

James: How did you do that?

Steven: To be independent from LinkedIn’s data, we have to be the supplier of our own data. That means building datasets way beyond what LinkedIn offers. For example, we’re building a customer list dataset. That means to say, we’re able to identify who are the customers of any company. Something like builtwith.com, but for customers.

What we have done is turned our Achilles heel, which was LinkedIn scraping, into our strength. Instead of shying away from LinkedIn scraping, we leaned into LinkedIn and embraced the fact that LinkedIn profile URLs are the best identifier for people and business entities.

With LinkedIn Profile URLs as source inputs, we aggregate fresh and rich data on these entities from a myriad of sources, make sense of them, and sell access to these rich data to developers.

James: Turning weaknesses into strengths seems to be a theme for you. Alright, where can people find you?

Steven: People can find me personally on Twitter or they can check out Proxycurl

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