u/spicygines

Title: Built a €1.5M business almost entirely through cold calling. How do we get to €10M?

I'm 29, co-founder of a recruitment outsourcing company in the Netherlands. We've grown from zero to roughly €1.5M in annualized revenue, and I'm starting to realize that scaling to €10M is a completely different game.

A bit of background:

We started in 2021/2022, bootstrapped, with no outside funding.

We help mid-sized and larger companies outsource their recruitment. We basically become their external recruitment department, handling everything from advertising and sourcing candidates to screening and recruitment strategy.

Unlike traditional recruitment agencies, we work on fixed monthly retainers instead of charging per hire.

Some numbers:

2024 revenue: ~€750K

Current annualized revenue: ~€1.5M

Average customer value: ~€80K/year

Team: ~12 people

Around 380 hires delivered for clients

Entirely bootstrapped

Here's the interesting part: Almost all our growth has come from cold calling.

No meaningful inbound. No established organic acquisition channel. No paid acquisition engine bringing us customers. Just outbound sales, building relationships, delivering results and occasionally getting referrals.

And that has worked surprisingly well.

We built a sales process, hired people, improved our service delivery and gradually moved toward larger clients with bigger contracts.

But we're starting to hit a ceiling.

New business comes in, but existing customers leave. We grow, but nowhere near as fast as we should. Every additional million in revenue seems to require more people, more sales activity and more operational complexity.

We're now investing in brand, content, SEO and other acquisition channels, but none of those have become predictable growth engines yet.

Our ambition is €10M in annual revenue. Not €2M or €3M.

And I'm questioning whether the playbook that got us here is even remotely suitable for getting us there.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from founders who have scaled B2B service businesses from €1M-€2M to €10M+.

A few things I'm struggling with:

Acquisition: Did you continue scaling outbound, or did you eventually build a completely different acquisition engine?

Retention: How did you solve the problem of constantly replacing customers just to maintain growth?

Positioning: Did you narrow your niche and dominate one segment, or expand your offering and addressable market?

Organization: At what point did you fundamentally change your management structure and stop relying on the founders?

Business model: Can a people-heavy service business realistically reach €10M with attractive margins, or does the model itself need to evolve?

I'm not looking for generic advice like "hire better salespeople" or "build a personal brand."

I'm interested in the actual strategic decisions, mistakes and structural changes that helped you break through the €1M-€3M ceiling.

If you've made that jump, what did you have to stop doing that got you to your first million?

I understand how no cure no pay recruitment works.

I just don’t understand why so many agencies willingly commit to that model.

You chase individual placements.

Fight for exclusivity.

Compete with other agencies on the same roles.

Have a great month, followed by a terrible one.

Revenue is unpredictable and every month feels like starting over again.

When I started my recruitment agency, we skipped that model completely and went straight to subscriptions.

Monthly retainers. Annual contracts. Actual recurring revenue.

That gives us the ability to forecast, invest in our team and build something long term for companies that continuously need people and lack the internal talent acquisition capacity to solve it themselves.

So I’m genuinely curious.

Are most recruitment agencies simply unaware that this model exists?

Or do they truly believe no cure no pay is the best way to build a recruitment business?

I already use Lovable quite a bit, mainly for one-pagers and quick builds. That part works great.

But I’m wondering how far people are actually taking it in real-world use.

Are any of you using Lovable for serious multi-page websites that:

• have a clear structure (not just routes, but real page hierarchy)
• are built with SEO in mind
• actually perform (traffic, rankings, conversions)

Visually I know it can look good, and building is fast. But I’m curious if people are using it beyond MVP/landing page level.

Also part of my motivation: I’m honestly tired of relying on a web agency for every small change and paying hundreds to €1000+ for things that feel pretty straightforward. Tools like Lovable give way more speed and control, but I’m not sure where the ceiling is.

So yeah, curious about real experiences:

• Anyone running a full site on Lovable?
• What’s working / what breaks?
• Any examples?

Would appreciate honest takes, not just hype.