Thoroughpass’s Path to $10M ARR: Why Market Timing Beats Perfect Execution

Four years versus six quarters. That’s the stark difference between reaching similar revenue milestones at Austin Ogilvie‘s two startups. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, the Thoroughpass founder revealed how market timing can accelerate growth more dramatically than even the most polished execution.

A Tale of Two Startups

First came Yhat, a data science platform born from Austin’s experience at Ondeck Capital. Despite strong product-market fit and eventual acquisition by Alteryx, growth was steady but measured. “My last company, Yhat took us four years to get to a million and a half or so in ARR,” Austin recalls.

Enter Thoroughpass. Same founder, similar B2B software space, but dramatically different results. As Austin notes, they “hit that number in, I don’t know, 12-13 months. And then the one to 10 million we achieved in six quarters or something like that.”

Finding the Perfect Storm

What drove this explosive growth? Three converging market forces created an unprecedented opportunity:

First was the digitization of business processes. “Everything that we care about in life has been digitized,” Austin explains. This digital transformation meant every company suddenly needed robust security and compliance measures.

Second was the explosion of enterprise software vendors. “You take a bank like JPMorgan, who led our series B two, three years ago, they have 5000 software vendors,” Austin notes. “That’s an incredible amount of risk.”

Third was the growing recognition that compliance wasn’t just a bottom-line issue – it was increasingly affecting top-line growth. “If you’re a software company and you don’t take security and privacy controls seriously, not only is that a bad thing to do because it puts the company theoretically in jeopardy, but it also is really damaging to streamlined sales.”

Execution Still Matters

While market timing provided the opportunity, Thoroughpass still needed to execute effectively. Their key insight? The disconnect between automated data collection and manual audit processes. Austin explains, “If you’re passively collecting all of the digital exhaust that’s relevant in compliance audits, that’s great. But if you have to export all the data and go talk to a separate cottage industry audit firm, it really defeats the purpose of all of the automation in the first place.”

This understanding led them to build not just tools for companies to collect compliance data, but also solutions for auditors to leverage that structured data effectively. Rather than getting distracted by competitors, they maintained laser focus on this vision. “We just ran our playbook, we just ran our game, and we’re very focused on serving our customers with the best experience for getting through it audits in a way that we ourselves would want.”

The Lessons for Founders

Thoroughpass’s journey offers several crucial insights for B2B founders:

1. Market timing can compress growth timelines more dramatically than incremental improvements in execution.
2. The best opportunities often emerge from systemic inefficiencies in rapidly growing markets.
3. When you hit the right market timing, doubling down on your vision becomes more important than reacting to competition.

Looking ahead, Thoroughpass continues to expand its vision, building “this single pane of glass where all software companies come to manage their IT audits across any of these standards.” Their explosive growth demonstrates that while great execution is necessary, being in the right market at the right time with the right solution can be transformative.