How John Hu Scaled Stan to $30M in ARR Within Two Years While Building in Public

Tell us about your background and where you were before Stan. What was the inspiration that led you to start this company?

Stan's mission is really personal to me and the rest of the team. It's just to empower anyone to get to work for themselves. The reason for that is that if you're like me, and you grow up as an Asian immigrant kid with a single mom, you're probably told by society to do certain things to be happy in life. You go to college and get X job and Y job and what have you, and you'll be happy and satisfied. So I did those things. I took out loans and paid for school and went through undergrad, working my way through college nights and weekends with kitchen jobs to pay for it. 

And then I was on to my next major checklist event in life: hustling my way into a job that would have me “set.” So I went off and worked my way into a job at Goldman Sachs — I cold-called my way there, as I didn’t know a single person with a connection. I emailed probably hundreds of alumni only to finally get through to a few, get an introduction internally, and prep like crazy for the interviews. I obviously thought it was going to be very fulfilling, but once I was finally working there, I looked at my peers and my bosses and saw how unhappy they were. I told myself, no WAY — I don’t want to be like that.

After Goldman, I went after private equity and VC, seeking out an investment role and getting accepted to Stanford’s business school. All this said on the surface that I was checking all the marks and getting to where I needed to be, but none of it felt fulfilling. I knew I wanted to do something myself. Content creation proved to be the first way that I could immediately start to do that. This was early in the pandemic, and I was spending a lot of time on TikTok…I started making some of my own content and it blew up. 

I ultimately just asked myself what kind of value I could create for the world, and for me that was about helping people get their dream job by working for themselves — which is what I ultimately did. Stan is like Shopify for creators — we enable anyone to be their own business, supporting them with the tools I found I was craving as an emerging creator. And so that's the mission of Stan and how it manifested. I built Stan for my own account, just to be able to live it for myself. And now we have 70,000 people on Stan doing that with me. It’s awesome.

The creator tools industry has a lot of activity. Another way to put it is that it’s crowded. But Stan is working. What do you think the reason for that is?

This is a fun story to tell. There’s an analogy: when Google started, there were dozens of different search engines with nominal points of differentiation. Same with Stan — there were dozens of "link in bio" companies competing for the same opportunity.

At Stanford, they teach you all about the significant advantage you get in being a first mover. And when you reckon with the fact that all of these companies in the Creator Economy had raised hundreds of millions of dollars by the time I got started, you could reasonably say that Stan was objectively a stupid idea. But I went with my gut, and knew that we'd build something better — and looking back just a few years later, we've surpassed most of our competition.

It may sound silly, but the reason why our growth is so strong is simply because we care about our customers the most. We are our own customers, we talk to our customers every day — we are not just our customers’ champions, we are our own champions alongside those whom we’re building for.

Am I correct in understanding that other business-in-a-box companies in the creator economy aren’t founded by creators?

Yes, that’s definitely a big part of our success. We are for creators, by creators. And then the team and the talent level we have is just exceptional. 

That’s awesome. I guess a crowded market doesn't really matter that much if no one's doing it that well or with true authenticity. So you guys have seen significant growth. Tell me about it. 

We are in our second year of business and on track to do $30M in ARR, after doing $15M last year (our first full year of business).

Our growth strategy is about recognizing that our customers are our best salespeople. We haven’t spent a single dollar on paid ads. Instead, we recognize that our customers are literally the best marketers in the world. That's what a creator is — they're a marketer. And so we do everything we can to delight them and give them a phenomenal experience. We align incentives with a profit share, so they are essentially affiliates, and then they end up doing all the BD work for us.

I was watching one of your videos and you were commenting on how fragile Stan felt. We understand that may often feel true for any early stage company, but can you elaborate on that?

Yeah, we understand that things could always shift and we have to be ready for that. I live by the mantra my mom used to impress, which was “John, it takes 20 years to build a house and a single match to burn it down.” One of the reasons why it's fragile is because we're two steps ahead of everyone else — and people try to rip us off and copy us at every turn. If we stop moving, people will catch up. 

What do you feel like you got the most right in what you set out to do, and where do you feel like you were the most wrong? Either an assumption you had, or a learning lesson?

I knew that the Creator Economy would be the future of work. The reason why Stan has a $100B opportunity ahead of it is because it sits at the crossroads of 1) macro tailwinds and 2) human nature. Who doesn't want to make a living working for themselves, on something they're actually passionate about? And who isn't getting disillusioned with corporate America and the legacy institutions we have to work through? The Creator Economy is the future of how we work — side hustles or full-time.

This is absolutely what I got right and what will carry us forward every day.

What I got most wrong: I think my development as a leader is recognizing that I can't do it all myself. And the best organizations are the ones that cultivate a team of incredible people to go off and do their own thing.

Looking ahead, what’s next?

Our end goal vision is that literally anyone, if they have any desire to work for themselves either full-time or as a side hustle, can just show up and we'll give them the entire playbook and all the tools they need to be successful. So it’s giving literally the entire guaranteed partner track to entrepreneurship.

Back to where we started: what does your mom think of this iteration of your career?

She always has absolutely no idea what I do. But she knows that it's becoming some sort of success and that makes her proud. She just wants me to be happy — and at some point, to work less.

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