How Scripe grew to $500k ARR in under 7 months

What's up! This is Sheldon from The Zero to One - helping you grow your product by breaking down the growth tactics, strategic playbooks, and GTM motions behind your favorite early-stage startups and giving you the path to replicate them. Check out all my previous deep dives here.

This week, it’s another first. And I’m super excited for you all to read it!

Not only did I sit down with Eva Johanna Egg, CEO of Scripe, but I also spoke with Carmen Jenny, their CMO. Scripe is an AI-powered personal branding tool that's rapidly scaling toward 850+ paying customers in less than a year, and is becoming the go-to solution for LinkedIn content creation.

I had a blast diving into Scripe's story. Eva and Carmen are redefining what's possible with AI content creation while making personal branding accessible to everyone - we’ve even started using it in our agency, and it’s great at getting ideas and expertise out of your head and onto the proverbial page.

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

Scripe’s Rapid Rise

Before launching Scripe, both Eva and Carmen ran a personal branding agency, where they would manually craft content for clients and build the systems behind them. But something was missing.

Both Eva and Carmen realised this approach was just not scalable. And that there must be a solution to make personal branding accessible to everyone - not just those who can afford agencies.

The opportunity was clear - a product that could make LinkedIn content creation effortless for both individuals and teams, while maintaining authenticity was needed.

So in September 2024, Scripe was launched publicly.

The early days looked like your typical founder hustle:

• Building an MVP that could turn voice notes into LinkedIn posts

• Constantly asking users for feedback

• Shipping features rapidly and iterating based on real-time feedback

• Testing what works and what doesn't in a very public way

Their approach paid off.

By prioritizing real-time user feedback and building in public, Scripe created a product people genuinely loved.

From here, the first few users became evangelists. Spreading the Scripe word in their networks.

And this scaled quickly. With Scripe hitting $500k ARR in just 7 months.

Today, Scripe has grown to over 10,000 total users with 850+ paying customers. Their content has generated over 100,000 posts and 350+ million impressions on LinkedIn.

This is insanely impressive for a tool that is not even a year old.

And they did it all while being singularly focused on one acquisition channel: LinkedIn.

So it begs the question: How did Scripe get here?

💌 Building a Personal Branding Ecosystem

If you consume any business or startup content (a bit of a silly question to ask, considering you're reading this), you've probably noticed the explosion of “personal branding" & “thought leadership” over the past few years.

From LinkedIn to Twitter to newsletters, founders and executives are building audiences and communities more intentionally than ever before.

But here's the thing - it's still incredibly hard to do it well.

Posting consistently requires time most founders don't have. Creating engaging content demands skills many execs haven't developed. And maintaining authenticity while scaling your reach feels nearly impossible, and leads to self-doubt.

Plus, it’s more competitive than ever. The bar for good is higher than it used to be (although still not as high as most people think).

Scripe recognised this fundamental tension.

Personal branding is one of the most effective growth channels for startups, but it's a massive investment that most founders and teams simply can't, or don’t know how to sustain and scale.

What makes Scripe's approach fascinating isn't just that they built a tool to solve this problem. It’s that it does this AND expands on it. Why stop at your founders? Heck, why even stop at execs? Scripe is built to make personal branding accessible to and systematized for your whole team.

Turning it into a company-wide philosophy.

And they don't just help others build personal brands - they've created an entire ecosystem of personal brands within their own company. From the CEO, to the CTO, to new hires, everyone at Scripe actively builds their personal brand using Scripe.

Scripe is pioneering personal branding as a core part of their culture, their product, and their GTM strategy.

It's a brilliant way to practice what they preach. And the results speak for themselves.

Why this worked:

Practical insights & actionable takeaways from the tactic.

1. Creating a multi-voice brand ecosystem

One of Scripe's most powerful moves was making personal branding a company-wide initiative. Unlike most startups, where only the CEO is visible, Scripe ensured everyone on the team was building their personal brand - from the jump.

This strategy creates multiple touchpoints with different audience segments. And it was something all the founders did to grow Scripe, because they believed that each founder could resonate with different people:

Now you might be thinking, “What is the value in a CTO posting content?” Well, it turns out, a lot.

By building this culture of personal branding, Scripe was able to build relationships with users previously unreachable. And when you’re selling into a business that needs multiple seats, it makes a big difference that the CEO, CMO, and CTO all feel heard, AND a connection to the brand - and by Scripe’s three founders posting regularly, they’re able to do this.

This culture has also scaled as the team has grown, with new team members sharing their unique perspectives, opinions, and POVs - building a Scripe ecosystem, filled with different personalities, and entry points for potential buyers.

Having multiple voices speaking with credibility from different angles, Scripe created a more relatable brand that can connect with different personas and decision makers.

Whether you're a technical founder, a marketing exec, or a community builder, there's someone at Scripe who speaks your language.

2. Authentic content through product usage

The Scripe team doesn't just talk about personal branding - they live by it.

By dogfooding their product daily, they gain insights no user research session could provide.

This real usage means the team isn't just theorising about what might work - they're speaking from direct experience.

Eva explained how this translates to credibility:

The impact on their business is extremely tangible:

"We get a lot of customers with our posts," Eva told me.

This creates a beautiful viral loop:

The team uses Scripe to talk about Scripe → This demonstrates Scripe's value → This value brings in new customers who want the same results → These customers start getting results → The Scripe team then uses Scripe to talk about these results → The cycle continues.

3. LinkedIn focus & founder-market fit

A lot of startups take a spray & pray approach when trying to find growth channels. And sometimes it works. But the problem with that is that you never get good at any of them.

Scripe, on the other hand, knew they had an unfair advantage, given their founders’ experiences, and made a deliberate choice to focus on LinkedIn as their primary growth channel.

A focus that allowed them to develop deep expertise. And ultimately, results.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they used posting on LinkedIn as their sole acquisition channel. Their approach to LinkedIn was multi-dimensional and extremely methodical (as we will discuss later).

But a lot of people view growth as trying to find a silver bullet. So they jump from one tactic to the next - in the hope of immediate, outsized returns.

But after doing more than 30 of these deep dives, and growing my own businesses, I’m confident in saying that’s the wrong approach.

Searching for a silver bullet doesn’t yield results.

What you need is to just shoot lead bullet, after lead bullet, and eventually the results will compound as you improve.

Ed Sheeran didn't become a superstar by waiting for the perfect song. He wrote hundreds (if not thousands) of songs, day-in-day-out, and only a fraction of them became hits.

Reps beat perfection every time.

Plus, when you focus on reps, you are much more likely to find those silver bullets (inflection points).

For Scripe, this was posting on LinkedIn.

Slowly, they built their brands, even if their first posts didn’t go viral. But now and then, a new inflection point appeared.

Their backgrounds gave them the confidence that they could execute on this. Not only had they seen it work for others, but they were the ones making it work.

And so they knew with enough patience, practice, and testing, results would come.

This founder-market fit also gave them intuitive insights into both the technical challenges and user needs. They could address problems and solutions as users, not just salespeople.

A deep-set industry knowledge that gave them an edge on not just building an audience, but converting them into customers too.

By becoming experts in one channel and crafting specialized content for each stage of the customer journey, Scripe built a highly efficient growth engine that continually brings in high-quality leads.

But building a personal branding ecosystem is only powerful if you can figure out what actually works and resonates. This is where Scripe's second major advantage comes into play...

🧪 Testing & Experimentation Mindset

I'm a big believer in momentum. It happens all around us.

Some games, your favorite players just can’t stop scoring.

Many studies prove this ‘hot hand’ exists.

The problem is that most people attribute it to one-off moments - or luck.

Yes, there is luck involved. But what people forget to account for is the thousands of hours their favorite athletes put into practicing what they do for just a few minutes, sometimes for just seconds.

And I have a strong belief that this same principle applies to building a business.

People see these inflection points and massive growth jumps and note them down as luck.

But momentum rarely happens by accident.

It comes from consistency in the mundane.

Scripe embodies this approach better than most early-stage startups I've seen.

Many founders seek magical "aha moments" or transformative pivots, but Scripe's team embraced a methodical, scientific mindset from day one. The same approach the athletes I mentioned above do - practising for when momentum arrives.

The Scripe team systematically tested their way to success through hundreds of micro-experiments across marketing, sales, product, and fundamental business questions like "Who are our ideal customers?" and "How should we structure our trial?"

And by letting data answer these questions rather than assumptions, they built a stronger foundation for sustainable growth.

Why this worked:

Practical insights & actionable takeaways from the tactic.

1. Hundreds of micro-experiments

When I asked Eva about any inflection point in their growth, her answer was refreshingly honest:

This commitment to consistent experimentation over seeking a silver bullet is something I see in most successful startups.

Growth rarely comes from a single ‘brilliant’ idea but rather from methodical testing, learning, and improvement.

Eva described how real growth doesn't follow a smooth curve:

This reframing of growth is vital.

It changes mistakes into lessons and opportunities to get closer to growth.

This realistic understanding of the growth journey helped the team stay focused during inevitable downturns, like when they changed their trial model and saw metrics temporarily drop. Instead of panicking, they trusted the experimentation process and eventually came out stronger.

The problem with searching for a silver bullet, is that most times they don’t exist. And even if they do, you spend so much time trying to find it, that the person who was just testing different ideas gets to it before you.

Don't look for the ‘perfect’ solution. There is none. Instead, commit to a steady drumbeat of experiments, learn from each one, and let the insights compound over time.

2. Data-driven refinement

One of Scripe's most powerful experiments focused on user activation - the crucial moment when a user just gets it. They get the core value of your product.

In other words, the “aha moment”

Rather than relying on intuition to find it, Scripe took a deeply analytical approach:

This analysis led to a surprising insight: "For us, it takes us three hours to upgrade a user.” This is interesting. Because most products have a 14 day/1 month free trial. But Scripe figured out that users didn’t need time on the product. They just needed to it.

So they switched to a usage-based trial and not a time-bound one.

This discovery completely changed their onboarding approach. Instead of slowly nurturing their activation, they focused on optimising for those critical three hours when users make their decision.

They also then reverse-engineered the behaviors of successful users:

One specific pattern they noticed? "Most of them were uploading a file, so we now ask in our onboarding for people to upload a file. To immediately see results from the file and to have a better first post."

This point is important.

Scripe figured out what key action allowed for two people, both going through the same process, to have completely different experiences. And for them, it was giving context for a post to be written for you.

By mapping the exact journey of their successful users and redesigning the onboarding to guide new users down that same path, Scripe dramatically improved its conversion rates from free to paid.

3. Excellence in one area over feature bloat

We are taught our whole lives that excellence is being well-rounded.

Getting into university = you need good grades + extracurriculars + volunteering + hobbies + 20 other things if you want to get into a top school.

But this is not the case for (most) startups.

It’s the opposite.

Especially at the beginning.

If you are not the best at one specific thing, you don’t have a compelling reason for people to switch.

Even tools like Hubspot or ClickUp that bundle products together. They didn’t start at an 80% for everything. They were more 95% in one thing and okay in the rest.

And slowly over time that changed.

For Scripe, this means focusing intently on content quality and creation speed, even if it means saying no to other seemingly valuable features:

This insight is intuitive. But often overlooked.

Startups typically fall into one of two categories: (i) painkillers & (ii) vitamins.

There are pros and cons to both. But being a painkiller is generally easier.

Especially if you’re a first-time founder. Because unlike vitamins, you don’t have to convince people that they need you.

To take this medication metaphor further, think about when you’re in pain. You don’t need medication that treats all symptoms reasonably well. You just need your pain gone.

The same applies to startups.

If I’m an executive struggling to write content, I don’t need decent copy, a good content calendar, robust engagement features…

I just need great content. And I don’t want to spend lots of time on it.

That’s my problem.

The calendar and engagement features - those are nice-to-haves. But only if the core is the best.

Scripe is this painkiller.

And from personal experience, my symptoms are gone.

This intentional focus extends to how they interpret user requests.

Eva shared an insight about looking beyond surface-level feature requests to understand the true need:

This distinction in what a user asks for and what they actually want/need is critical. And it’s one of the most important parts in product management and avoiding bloat.

You need to translate user requirements into what they ACTUALLY want and need.

Sometimes it’s as easy as just copy-pasting. But often it requires deep understanding of your users and the problems you are solving.

4. ICP refinement & trial model evolution

Scripe's commitment to experimentation extended to fundamental business model questions: Who are their ideal customers? How should they structure their pricing?

Two questions that every business will go through.

Initially, Scripe targeted early-stage startups, but the data revealed a problem:

This is a common theme when you’re targeting early-stage startups, like Oceans also did. Early-stage startups die at disproportionate rates.

And they can take your business out with them.

This insight led to a strategic pivot in Scripe’s target market:

Similarly, they experimented with different pricing and trial models, moving from payment-first (requiring a credit card upfront) to a free trial approach.

However, this caused initial metrics to drop: "And then we switched to no credit card, free trial, ungated. And at first, everything dropped." Eva explained.

And despite pressure to revert, they stayed the course:

Their persistence paid off:

By continuously testing core business assumptions and being willing to weather short-term drops for long-term gains, Scripe dramatically improved its unit economics and growth trajectory.

All this experimentation also revealed something crucial: their best growth didn't come from optimising their product in isolation, but from systematically turning users into evangelists. Which brings us to their third core tactic...

🏘️ Community & Partnerships as Distribution Engine

For every startup, referrals from your immediate network eventually run out.

There are only so many people, that the people you know, know. You know?

This is usually a sad day, because referrals are one of the best ways to acquire customers - they have built-in trust, convert at higher rates, and usually cost a lot less to acquire (often even free).

Scaling this beyond your network is the hard part.

Scripe, however, has managed to create a sustainable growth engine that turns users into evangelists, and ultimately distributors.

They've done it by being extremely intentional about building community and structured partnerships, turning what for most companies would be ad-hoc connections into a systematic growth machine.

Community-led growth at its finest.

Formalizing community connections into structured partnerships with clear objectives and incentives. And developing a three-tiered approach to partnerships that systematically expanded their reach while maintaining trust.

Let's break down how they've made this work.

Why this worked:

Practical insights & actionable takeaways from the tactic.

1. Building in public with real-time community feedback

From day one, Scripe made transparency and community feedback core to their business.

Rather than building in isolation and hoping for market fit, they invited users directly into the creation process and to find it.

The one consistent theme I’ve seen in every deep dive is proximity to customers.

You need to be speaking to your users.

If you don’t do it, you will not have a sustainable business.

The closer you are to your customers, the higher your odds are to succeed.

Scripe is a great example of user proximity.

Inviting users directly into their product development process through a WhatsApp group with 300 beta testers who receive every product iteration in real-time.

This has not only led to better product decisions, but has also created a sense of ownership among early users. Which gets them to proactively share insights and feedback.

Wanting Scripe to win.

2. Strategic partnership ecosystem

For an early-stage startup, Scripe has developed a very mature and systematic approach to working with different types of partners. Creating a structured program that drives predictable growth.

Each partner type serves a different function in Scripe's growth engine:

For service partners (agencies):

For influence partners:

For revenue partners:

This structured approach allowed Scripe to systematically expand its reach through carefully cultivated relationships, each with a different purpose.

“It was bringing us 80% of our growth," Eva revealed.

One particularly powerful partnership came from one of the largest creators on LinkedIn, Lara Acosta:

"The post with Lara was crazy. We had more sign-ups than on our launch day," Eva shared.

I think it’s important to note here - Scripe only works with partners who use and like their product. They will not partner with anyone who doesn’t truly believe in it.

The power of this approach is that it naturally selects for creators who genuinely benefit from the product, creating more authentic testimonials and recommendations.

And ultimately drives more users at lower churn rates.

Eva also described how some of their earliest customers became powerful evangelists:

This focus on creating genuine success stories that naturally spread through word of mouth has been a core sustainable growth machine that continues to drive Scripe's expansion.

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

In case you missed it ⏮️

Last week I looked at Thera. An awesome business quickly becoming the Financial Operating System for SMBs.

Building Hubspot in a world of Salesforces.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

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