The 3 Foundational Systems That Separate High-Growth Startups from the Walking Dead
We are raising prices at the end of this month.
Going to $15/month and $150 for the annual. You can get a whole year for $95 right now. Lock-in the great rate.
This isn’t a cash grab. I’m doing this because the article quality keeps improving, I’m appearing on podcasts and speaking at conferences on RevOps x Business Strategy x Investing (and even AI), and there are over 100+ paid pieces on Mastering Revenue Operations today.
is where I write about wealth building. is where I write about technology. is dedicated to the business of building revenue engines.All three of my substacks will be $20+ per month in 2026. I’m trying to drive enough value to Wealth Systems to justify $30/month. Going to launch some novel dashboards and an AI tool over there to turn that place into something special.
You see, it’s all about systems.
The Systems That Make Money
The view from my office in NYC isn’t just skyscrapers and yellow cabs. It’s a front-row seat to the relentless metabolism of ambition that defines New York City. I spend my days meeting founders, dissecting pitch decks, and trying to find that rare combination of a brilliant idea, an unstoppable team, and a massive market. I write checks for Seed and Series A companies. These are my favorite parts of the journey. The stages where the dream begins to collide with the brutal reality of execution.
But my job doesn’t end when the wire transfer clears.
In fact, that’s when it truly begins. I’m not a passive investor who shows up for a quarterly board meeting. I don’t invest so I can brag to my buddies about my portfolio. I don’t care about bragging rights. I want performance and I want to succeed on the mission.
That’s why I roll up my sleeves and embed myself in my portfolio companies, specifically to build their Revenue Operations function from the ground up.
Why? Because I’ve seen the same pattern play out dozens of times. A company achieves product-market fit. They have happy customers and a spark of momentum. The founders, buoyed by their new funding, do what seems logical: they hire more salespeople.
Founder-led sales can be a drag for some people. Personally, I get energy when I chat with potential clients about their problems and opportunities.. but most founders cant wait to hire that first VP Sales.
They pour money into marketing. They buy a dozen new SaaS tools that promise silver-bullet solutions. And twelve months later, they’ve burned through half their cash, missed their revenue targets, and the board is asking hard questions.
The problem wasn’t the product, the team, or the market. The problem was the absence of a scalable revenue engine. They were trying to bolt a V8 engine onto a wooden go-kart frame.
It was loud, chaotic, and destined to fall apart.
Revenue Operations isn’t about creating fancy dashboards or being the “Salesforce admin” it’s real mission is architecting the machine that manufactures revenue. It’s about converting the art of a few heroic, early sales into a science that can be scaled predictably. For any early-stage company I work with, the mandate is clear: before we scale the team, we must first build the systems. And there are three non-negotiable, foundational systems that form the bedrock of every successful GTM strategy.
These are the systems that turn chaos into clarity, gut feelings into data-driven decisions, and unpredictable revenue into a forecast I can actually take to my partners.
System 1: The Single Source of Truth (SSoT)
The Single Source of Truth is not just your CRM. Let me repeat that: your CRM is not your SSoT.
I love feeding my SSoT with enriched and cleaned data from the CRM… but it is NOT the CRM. A CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot is merely the central application within a broader SSoT philosophy.
The SSoT is the unified, governed, and undisputed data ecosystem that houses every piece of information about your prospects and customers. It’s the central nervous system of your entire Go-to-Market motion. It combines your transactional system (the CRM) with data from your product analytics (e.g., Mixpanel, Amplitude), financial system (e.g., Stripe, Chargebee), marketing automation platform (e.g., Marketo, Pardot), and customer support tools (e.g., Zendesk, Intercom).
Building a true SSoT involves three critical components:
A Centralized Hub: This is typically the CRM, which acts as the primary repository for account, contact, and opportunity data.
Rigorous Data Governance: This is the hard, unglamorous work that most startups skip. It means defining and enforcing strict rules for data entry and management. What constitutes a “Lead”? What are the exact stages of our sales process? What are the non-negotiable fields an AE must fill out to move an opportunity to the next stage? We create a data dictionary and we treat it like scripture.
Strategic Integrations: Data must flow seamlessly and intelligently between systems. When a customer’s usage in Mixpanel hits a certain threshold, that data needs to be visible on the Account record in Salesforce. When a customer submits a support ticket in Zendesk, the CSM needs to see it. The goal is to create a 360-degree view of the customer relationship without the user having to log into five different platforms.
Why It’s Foundational
In a seed-stage company, data is pure chaos. It lives in spreadsheets, on individual reps’ notepads, in Stripe, and in a dozen other disconnected silos. The result is a GTM team flying blind.
Without an SSoT, you get meetings where Marketing presents a deck showing they generated 200 “Marketing Qualified Leads” (MQLs), and the Head of Sales counters that they only received 30 viable leads. Both are technically “right” based on their own siloed data, but the company is fundamentally broken. You can’t diagnose problems, let alone solve them. You can’t calculate a basic metric like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) because you can’t agree on which marketing touchpoints influenced the closed-won deals.
Building the SSoT first is non-negotiable because the other two systems I’m about to describe are entirely dependent on it. Attempting to build a predictable revenue lifecycle or an accurate forecasting model on top of a fragmented, untrustworthy data foundation is like building a skyscraper on a swamp. It will inevitably collapse.
The Benefits of an SSoT
Trust and Alignment: When everyone from the BDR to the CEO is looking at the same data, the conversations change. Instead of arguing about whose numbers are correct, you start collaborating on how to improve the numbers. The SSoT eliminates data politics and fosters a culture of shared ownership and accountability across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success.
Actionable Business Intelligence: With a clean, holistic dataset, you can finally answer the most critical questions. Which lead sources generate the highest lifetime value (LTV)? What is our average sales cycle length for our enterprise segment versus our SMB segment? What user behaviors within our product are leading indicators of churn or expansion? These insights move you from reactive problem-solving to proactive strategy.
Enhanced Customer Experience: When your team has a complete view of the customer’s history—every marketing email they’ve opened, every support ticket they’ve filed, their product usage data—they can have more intelligent, empathetic conversations. The customer doesn’t have to repeat their story to three different people. This seamless experience is a massive competitive differentiator in a crowded market.
Operational Scalability: As you hire more reps, a well-defined SSoT with strong data governance is what allows you to scale efficiently. Onboarding is faster because the “way we do things” is embedded in the system. You prevent the accumulation of “data debt” that cripples so many growth-stage companies.
System 2: The Lead-to-Revenue Lifecycle Engine
If the SSoT is the central nervous system, the Lead-to-Revenue Lifecycle Engine is the circulatory system. It is the operational framework that dictates the precise journey of a person from an anonymous website visitor to a delighted, renewing customer.
This isn’t just a diagram with boxes and arrows you draw on a whiteboard once. It’s a living, breathing, automated system built within your marketing automation platform and CRM.
It defines, manages, and measures every single stage and handoff in the revenue funnel. Once you have one of these, you will realize how chaotic your revenue journey was before.
Key components of this engine include: