How Oceans scaled to $15M ARR by solving for talent.

I don’t think I’ve been as excited for a deep dive as I am for this one. “Why?” I hear you all asking at once.

Well this week is extra special because I’ve sat down with the founder of today’s company to get a behind-the-scenes, never-seen-before look at the growth tactics that scaled Oceans to $15M ARR in just 3 years.

I had a ton of fun doing this and can’t wait for you to read it. Not only because I believe this is one of the more practical deep dives I’ve done, but also because it’s a service that will fit a lot of you perfectly, and help you grow your business.

So without further ado, this is the story of how Oceans went from Zero to One.

Oceans’ Growth

It’s late 2021, and after exiting his previous business, Ian Myers decided he wanted to do it again. This time with a few more criteria:

• Didn’t want to have to raise money

• Cash-flowing in 3 months

• Know if the business is viable in 6 months

And so in December 2021, he launched Oceans. A service business helping US startups hire EAs from the best talent in Sri Lanka, a market Ian knew well from working there in the past.

3 months later in Feb 2022, their first cohort of EAs had joined and taken an EA+ training designed to upskill and ready them for the job.

Within 7 months, Oceans was at $2M ARR all from word of mouth. Not a cent was spent on advertising to this point. Customers loved the service and shared it amongst their networks (still Oceans’ biggest growth channel today).

Fast forward to today, and Oceans is at over $15M ARR, having placed over 400 of Sri Lanka’s top talent with over 250 startups, mid-market businesses, and service agencies, including Morning Brew, beehiiv, and True Classic, and is currently placing an additional 30-40 employees per month.

Along the way, they expanded beyond their initial offering of EAs and into other roles in finance, marketing, and operations.

So to not bury the lead, how did Oceans get here?

1. Stack and deliver on your entry wedge

When you’re trying to get a business off the ground, you need something. Something unique enough to appeal to a specific segment of people. Your ICP.

A lot of offshoring companies see their wedge as cheap talent. So they: find cheap overseas talent in a market like India, the Philippines, or LATAM, add a markup, and sell their service.

The problem is that cheap overseas talent is not a wedge anymore. There have been thousands of companies to do it. So why should I care that you do it as well?

So Ian knew he needed something different to find his first customers. Something that would position Oceans as unique.

Price and exceptional talent weren’t enough. Location wasn’t either. And neither was the type of role.

But together, Oceans created an entry wedge that positioned Oceans as one-of-one, in an uber-competitive market like offshoring.

Oceans is like a great YouTube thumbnail - looks almost too good to be true, but then delivers on actually being that good (if not better).

Here’s how Oceans stacked an undeniably great entry wedge:

🔬 Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

🇱🇰 Using Sri Lanka to spark curiosity

If you’re a founder you’ve probably seen this in your inbox:

• "Top developers from India"

• "Virtual assistants from the Philippines"

• “Marketers from LATAM”

It’s nothing new.

These markets have been used since the dawn of offshoring. So telling me you can hire talent in one of these places doesn’t interest me. I already knew I could. If I want to do it, I’ll just go to your proven competitor.

But Sri Lanka? That’s new.

It’s worthy of people stopping mid-scroll and exploring it some more.

In a sea of sameness, different is powerful.

Powerful enough to spark curiosity and to get questions popping up in potential customers' minds.

Questions they want answered and so they lead to conversations. And if you deliver on the rest of your wedge, those conversations lead to long-term customers (as is the case with Oceans).

The fact that no one uses Sri Lanka for offshore talent makes it interesting enough that people want to learn more about it.

Why is Sri Lanka better than these other countries for offshore talent?

🥅 Delivering on curiosity with Sri Lanka’s talent edge

Having great talent exist in a country isn’t an edge by itself. Every country has great people on its spectrum of talent.

What makes a country great for offshore talent is three things:

1. Ability of top talent

2. Availability of top talent

3. Price of top talent

A talent triangle if you will.

Let’s start with the ability of Sri Lanka’s top talent.

Sri Lanka has a great education system, with a high percentage of STEM degrees.

You also have many Sri Lankans studying at world-renowned universities like the Ivies, Oxford, and Cambridge, and working in developed markets like the US and UK before returning home.

Where Sri Lanka has an extremely professionalized and established workforce with English as the predominant language of business.

So Sri Lanka ticks the quality of talent box. More so than a lot of other offshoring markets.

Okay so there’s great talent in Sri Lanka - but how much of it is available? And can you find them and get them to work for you?

The first thing when looking for the best talent in a country is to recognize that they’re not on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork.

Top-percentile talent wants the benefits that come with full-time employment:

• Insurance

• Office culture

• Team events

• Leave

• Normal working hours

• And the safety of full-time employment

This is even more prevalent in smaller, more conservative markets - like Sri Lanka.

And because Sri Lanka has an extremely developed business services industry, the best talent typically convenes not only in FTE, but for a small set of globally recognized companies:

• Ogilvy

• KPMG

• JP Morgan…

So Oceans is able to identify who the top percentile talent is a lot easier than in other markets.

The question becomes how do you make this top talent available to you?

Well you don’t have to, because Oceans solves it all for you.

They hire the talent as full-time employees in Sri Lanka. And give them all the perks and stability of working for an established company, not contracted at a foreign startup.

At over 400 people placed, Oceans is seen as a stable company to work at, with benefits and an established team culture.

This makes it attractive for top talent to work at Oceans - and ultimately with you.

And they aren’t competing with hundreds of other companies all trying to place the same talent, like they would be in the Philippines or LATAM.

Meaning you get uncontested access to this top talent. But with Oceans taking on the risks of full-time employees for you.

The last infinity stone to Sri Lanka’s talent triangle is price.

Unlike more competitive offshore markets, like India, where top talent has gone from an 80% discount to a 20% discount, the top talent in Sri Lanka remains at a substantial discount compared to the US.

Giving Sri Lanka an unbeatable price:availability ratio (with Oceans) for its top talent.

🏆 Retaining customers with innovation and exceptional quality

Sri Lanka’s talent edge isn’t the only angle Oceans leaned into.

The Oceans team believes that delegation is just a fancy word for managing. Which rather than removing workload, just shifts it.

A killer antithesis marketing angle that has proven to deeply resonate with CEOs and founders.

So they introduced the anti-delegation EA+.

While competitors chase experienced EAs who are good task-doers when delegated to, Oceans goes in the opposite direction.

Targeting: Smart & driven services professionals, with strong experience (both locally and internationally) and high potential over direct experience.

And then training them to think beyond delegation and admin tasks. Ie. to be proactive. Taking the onus away from the founder and onto the EA+.

Ultimately providing a higher ROI and business impact for customers.

And it’s working.

With >86% first-time placement success rate.

And only a fraction of that is due to unhappy placements. With the majority of that 14% coming from their customers pivoting, running out of money, closing, and other typical startup problems.

Oceans scaled to $2M ARR with only word of mouth. You can’t do that without an exceptional service that resonates deeply with your ICP.

2. Create distribution moats

There’s no such thing as a new service.

Just new angles and new approaches.

This means your offering becomes a commodity. But it also means you don’t have to validate your business thesis - you know it can work.

What matters is how you get the business out into the market.

Like most startups, Oceans got off the ground by serving other startups in Ian’s network. With a key difference:

Because of the $3k+ price point, his friends wouldn’t stick around if the delivery wasn’t great. It’s not a cost businesses will eat up because their friend is the founder.

So unless Oceans was truly valuable. They would churn.

But even if you can retain all your friends - your network eventually gets exhausted. And this is the point where a lot of businesses are made or break.

You need to find distribution channels that are defensible and can repeatably scale.

You need to build distribution moats.

🔬 Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

📢 Find validators and distributors

If you’re in a services business and you want to grow with referrals, you need two things:

Validators and distributors.

No one will know about you without distribution and no one will trust you without external validation.

Ian knew early on that he was neither a distributor nor a validator.

So to solve this, Oceans raised $200k, not for cash flow, but to strategically align selected people who could provide validation and/or distribution.

Raising from big names in the crypto and venture communities, an NFL player, and Austin Rief (founder of Morning Brew) to name a few.

Oceans built a cap table that had influence and an audience. That was trusted and recognized.

And could say, “Hey, I work with Oceans and they’re great” - and people would listen.

↻ Natural virality triggers

Oceans entered with one role: EA+.

And it wasn’t by luck or circumstance, but rather very intentional.

If you think about an EA, they are part of your correspondence all day, every day. Interacting with everyone that you are interacting with.

They are being introduced to your network, by you - giving them inherent trust with your founder friends and sparking interest in:

• Why you have an EA,and

• How it’s going

It’s a form of PLG. But for a services business. Instead of “Sent with Mailchimp”, it’s sent by Devni.

There’s another benefit to EAs as well.

They’re like a personal trainer. You want to show them off. You want to talk about how much your life has improved with them.

You want others to feel the same way - so you recommend they get one. And of course, because Oceans worked so well for you, you recommend they go straight to Oceans.

And so this natural referral loop is created.

Not everyone needs an EA. But those who have them, love talking about them.

Everyone needs a junior bookkeeper. They just don’t brag to their friends about them (and they’re not involved in their daily correspondence).

3. Find self-selecting flywheels

A lot of offshoring companies, and service companies in general, get stuck at the $1-2M revenue mark.

They don’t know how to go beyond their immediate network.

Oceans on the other hand has scaled to $15M ARR in just three years.

The big difference? Three compounding flywheels that have helped Oceans find their ideal customers, hire the best talent, and attract great fitting customers:

🔬 Why this worked:

Practical insights from the tactic.

🙋‍♂️ The Customer flywheel

Like many startups, Oceans made an early mistake: saying yes to everyone.

We’ve all done it. When you’re a small startup, you want revenue. As much as you can and as soon as possible.

The problem is that this isn’t scaleable, it can break your unit economics, and it leads to you attracting the wrong types of customers.

People’s networks are typically similar to them. So bad clients mostly refer bad clients.

You don’t want one-person consulting shops to be your biggest customer segment, where if they lose one client, they churn and you’re stuck with a full-time employee on your hands.

Saying no as early as possible allows you to fill this referral flywheel with your ideal customers as soon as possible.

For Oceans this was first the founder community. Where they got in and started to spread to other founders. Because, you guessed it, that’s typically who founders are friends with.

As Oceans have grown, they’ve started to get into more customer flywheels. With a bigger focus on mid-market, more traditional companies, such as manufacturers.

This is to break out of the early-stage startup barrier that a lot of service businesses hit when serving other startups.

Underpinning this customer flywheel is the delivery of a great service. Your customer flywheel will end at your first one if you’re not good at what you do.

Or it will continue to grow into the hundreds if you deliver a service like Oceans does.

Like with product building, the best form of marketing is great work.

👩‍🎓 The Talent flywheel

The core of Oceans’ business is people.

If they consistently place underperforming talent, they will run themselves out of business.

But we know the inverse is true for Oceans. They consistently place great talent, which drives their growth (as we discussed above).

So to continue this, the most valuable activity Oceans can do is find and retain great talent.

We spoke earlier about the challenges of finding and hiring great talent, but retaining them is in some ways more challenging

The average offshore retention is ~6 months. People think they can do it. But in reality, it’s lonely to be working in your living room, at 2 am, away from your whole team.

This is where the Oceans model delivers:

• Full-time employment

• Benefits

• Career growth

• Local community

• Events

• Team environment

Great talents love working at Oceans. So they stick around.

They get to do exciting work, with companies like yours, and they still get all the benefits of FTE that contract work avoids.

Beyond sticking around they refer their friends to join. And as with great companies, talented people are typically friends with other talented people.

People who worked at JP Morgan, know other people who worked at JP Morgan - and they tell them how great Oceans is.

So this depth of talent compounds at Oceans.

It becomes self-selecting. Top percentile talent starts to see that other top percentile talent work at Oceans. So they want to as well.

This makes Oceans a great signal for other companies to know that if someone has worked at Oceans then they are really great at what they do.

Which only further reinforces the top talents’ desires to work at Oceans. And so the cycle repeats itself.

To illustrate the success of this, Oceans' biggest source of talent is referrals from their employees.

🎯 The Positioning flywheel

The best way to position yourself within a market is to be different. People remember different.

A great way to do this is with an antithhesis marketing angle (which we spoke about earlier). They’re unique, memorable, and people feel glad to have their worldview confirmed.

So they’re more likely to buy from you.

But what it also does is attract people who see the world the same way as you, and pushes away people who wouldn’t be a match.

Oceans is anti-delegation. A successful match for them doesn’t involve the typical delegation cycle of an EA.

So if a customer wants that, they won’t be happy with Oceans’ service.

But because they are open and push their counter-positioning, Oceans don’t attract people like this.

They attract people who will thrive in their model of approaching delegation as a short-term action to get the EA up to speed to be proactive and drive impact.

This angle has ensured that people who come in as customers have the same expectations as them. And believe that delegation is a talent issue.

This makes customer and talent fit much simpler as the measurements for success are on the same metrics for Oceans, their customers, and their talent.

Making customer support and client success easier and more successful.

Where this angle is even more exceptional is that it highlights Oceans’ confidence in having the best talent who can deliver a great service.

It’s easy for an offshoring company to hide behind a wall of “you need to get better at delegating” when the real problem is that they don’t have the talent to justify their prices.

In saying all of this, if you’re looking to work with awesome talent to help unlock your time and drive business impact, then click this link.

For The Zero to One, it’s been your host Sheldon.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

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