Scaling to $20M in 20 Days Without Taking a Single VC Call

One founder's $452,000 lesson: Stop building products people might want. Start testing what they actually need.

Written by: Patrick Moreau Original photography by: Muse Storytelling

Summary

The $452K lesson: Patrick Moreau spent nearly half a million dollars building Storybuilder, a storytelling organization app that 100 people loved but ultimately failed because it didn't make users smarter—it just kept them organized, like giving someone a filing cabinet instead of a mentor.
36 versions of failure: Over eight years, Moreau iterated through 36 different versions of his product idea, each time getting closer to understanding what people actually needed, while most failures took days rather than months to validate and kill.
The rapid testing protocol: Instead of spending months building products, Moreau's team learned to spin up landing pages and run ads in 24-48 hours, measuring demand through email signups at different price points and killing 90% of ideas before writing any code.
The perspective breakthrough: The turning point came from a conversation with unicorn founder Suneera Madhani, who revealed that people don't want their own brain as a second brain—they want access to how elite thinkers like her approach problems, ask questions, and see blind spots.
From zero to $20M in 20 days: MNTR launched as "intelligence infrastructure" that captures how expert mentors think (their "Narrative DNA") and makes it accessible 24/7, hitting a $20M valuation in 20 days, generating over $121K in first-month revenue, and tracking toward $1M monthly recurring revenue without needing traditional VC funding.

Introduction

Let me tell you about the day I lost $452,000.

It was 2017, and I thought I had finally cracked it. After years of making wedding films that went viral, after shooting national commercials for Canon, after somehow landing a 200-day contract with the NFL as a kid who'd just bought his first camera at Best Buy—I thought I understood what people needed.

I built an app called Storybuilder. It was beautiful. It used all our Emmy-winning storytelling frameworks. It helped you organize your stories, structure your narratives, apply the principles we'd proven worked.

One hundred people loved it.

And then it died.

Not because it was bad. But because it didn't actually make anyone smarter. It just kept them organized. It was like giving someone a filing cabinet when what they really needed was a mentor standing over their shoulder, pushing their thinking, making them better.

I didn't know it then, but that was version 1 of a 37-version journey that would take me another eight years, cost me half a million dollars in lessons, and eventually lead to a $20 million valuation in 20 days without taking a single traditional VC call.

This is that story.

And more importantly, it's the lesson I learned about why failing faster—not slower—is the only way to find what actually works.

The Long Game Nobody Sees

Here's what people don't understand about overnight success: it's almost never overnight.

My background is weddings. Before that, psychology. I was the guy at university bars trying to start conversations about the Stanford Prison Experiment while everyone's eyes glazed over. I loved understanding what was really happening inside people—the variables, the correlations, the piercing insights that explained human behavior.

The problem was that academic papers, no matter how fascinating to me, weren't something anyone wanted to engage with at a bar. Or anywhere else, really.

That's what got me interested in filmmaking. Not because I dreamed of being a filmmaker, but because I realized stories were the delivery mechanism for the ideas I wanted to share. If I could make people feel the insights instead of just reading them, maybe they'd actually care.

So when a friend of a friend needed a wedding filmed, I bought a camera at Best Buy on the way to the shoot. That first video? Absolute garbage. But it planted a seed: weddings could fund the gear I needed to make the films I was dreaming up.

That's where my co-founder Grant comes in.

Grant was 37, putting his boys to bed each night in Cowtown, Ohio, knowing he wasn't modeling the life he wanted for them. He'd put his dreams aside after graduating as a theater major and built a successful career in real estate and auctioneering. Yes, auctioneering. ("Five, ten, 15, 20, 25, 11 divided by 39, 35 and five, 35, 35—")

But he wanted to be a filmmaker.

The problem was, he didn't have access to education or other filmmakers. So he did what any obsessive person would do: he started reverse-engineering wedding films on Vimeo. Downloaded them, cut them up in an editor, exported the first frame of every edit, created storyboards, built spreadsheets tracking average and median shot lengths.

He was watching our wedding films. (Which, in retrospect, is a little creepy. But also kind of brilliant.)

What Grant saw in those films—and what we were starting to understand even then—was that stories need to lead with people if you want them to emotionally resonate. The wedding was just a backdrop. The couple, their connection, their transformation—that was the story.

Those wedding films were getting hundreds of thousands of views from random strangers. They caught Canon's attention, and suddenly a wedding I filmed was airing during prime time on Grey's Anatomy and House. I'll never forget walking into Best Buy and watching 200 televisions across the wall flip to show my work.

Then the NFL called. The actual NFL. Caller ID and everything.

They wanted to know if we could tell stories about football the way we told stories about weddings. That one test shoot landed us a 200-day contract.

But I still knew something was missing.

The Breakthrough That Wasn't

Fast forward to 2017. We'd won five national Emmys. We'd worked with Apple, Four Seasons, Toyota. We'd spoken at the United Nations in Geneva. We had a process, a methodology, a framework that worked.

So I built Storybuilder.

It was everything I thought people needed: a tool that guided you through our storytelling process, kept you organized, helped you structure your narrative using proven frameworks like the hero's journey.

I invested $452,000 into it. Development, marketing, launch—the whole thing.

One hundred people loved it. Genuinely loved it. They'd send emails about how helpful it was, how organized they felt, how much easier it was to structure their stories.

But nobody else signed up. And those hundred people? They eventually stopped using it.

Because here's what I didn't understand then: organization isn't transformation.

Storybuilder helped you arrange what you already knew. It didn't make you smarter. It didn't push your thinking. It didn't challenge your assumptions or help you see things differently.

It was a filing cabinet when what people needed was a mentor.

I couldn't shake the feeling that I was close to something. The idea was right—scale mentorship, make expertise accessible—but the execution was wrong.”

— Patrick Moreau, founder and CEO at MNTR

Versions 2 Through 36: The Education In Failure

After Storybuilder crashed, I could have given up. I should have, probably. $452,000 is a lot of lessons learned the hard way.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was close to something. The idea was right—scale mentorship, make expertise accessible—but the execution was wrong.

So I kept iterating.

Version 2 was a Typeform that triggered automation agents and delivered responses via email. Clunky, but it worked. People could ask a question and get back a personalized response based on our frameworks.

Version 15 was a Notion database with templates and frameworks. Better, but still just organization.

Version 23 was me vibe-coding in Lovable over a long weekend, building a prototype that actually talked to users. It was held together with duct tape and hope. I had no idea what was happening when it broke. But people loved it.

That's when I started seeing something different in the responses.

People weren't just saying "this is helpful." They were crying at their keyboards. They were texting me at 3 AM because they'd just closed a million-dollar fundraiser. They were landing gigs they'd been chasing for years. They were getting results on par with our $10,000 mentorship program.

That's when I knew we were close.

But I also knew I couldn't scale me. I couldn't personally mentor everyone who needed help. And I sure as hell couldn't maintain duct-tape code at scale.

So I started interviewing development teams. Most of them said 6-9 months to build what I was describing. When I explained why that was wrong—from first principles, showing them the architecture I needed—most interviews ended in 3-5 minutes because they didn't fundamentally understand the technology.

Then I met the team that said they could do it in 30 days. For 3x the price.

I asked why.

"Because we'll treat the code like it's ours."

I wrote back one line: "Let's go."

They deployed our infrastructure in 30 days. We launched. And that's when we really broke it—in the best possible way.

The Testing Protocol That Changed Everything

Here's the lesson that's actually worth $20 million: You can test 10 ideas in the time it takes to build one.

After version 36 finally worked—after people were getting $10K results from the platform—I realized we still didn't have "the one thing." The platform was powerful, but it was too complicated. Too custom. Too expensive to scale.

So we built a testing protocol.

The hypothesis was simple: Our IP had cracked something. If we find the right form to bring it to market, this could be big, big.

We could quickly spin up a landing page, deploy ads, and measure demand based on email signups—all in 24-48 hours. We wouldn’t be taking money (that would be irresponsible). But email signups at different price points would tell us which ideas had legs.

So we tested everything:

White-labeled MNTR instances at $997 (10 leads the next morning)
Personal "second brain" AI at $2,997 (leads kept coming)
Premium mentorship packages at $9,997 (still getting leads)
Industry-specific versions for filmmakers, founders, marketers
Subscription models vs. one-time payments
Different positioning, different benefits, different promises

We killed 90% of them before writing a single line of code.

The ideas that didn't generate interest? Dead immediately. No time wasted building something nobody wanted.

The ideas that did generate interest? We'd dig deeper. Test variations. Refine the positioning. Validate the demand before investing in development.

This is the opposite of how most people build. Most people have an idea, spend six months building it, launch it to crickets, and then wonder why nobody cares.

We had 10 ideas getting validated or killed every week. We were failing so fast that by the time we found the one that worked, we knew it would work because hundreds of people had already told us they wanted it.

The Unlock: Perspective Is The Ultimate Currency

But even with all that testing, we still hadn't found "the one thing."

The problem was, we were still thinking about it wrong.

We kept asking: "How do we give people their own AI mentor? How do we make them smarter? How do we scale our frameworks?"

The breakthrough came from a conversation I'd been chasing for months.

Suneera Madhani. If you don't know her, you should. She built her first company to unicorn status, a billion-dollar valuation, then transitioned out of the day-to-day operations to develop her next venture. Most founders would coast on that win. Suneera's building her second unicorn.

I'd met her while filming Spiraling Up, the HubSpot for Startups documentary series about founders. I saw how she thought. How she asked questions. How she pushed people to see their blind spots and think bigger.

And I kept thinking: Her mind is worth more than any framework I could ever build.

So I started texting her. Weekly. "Suneera, you have to see this. This could change everything for your community."

Radio silence.

I made her a Loom. Three minutes, explaining the whole vision. I checked the view count every day like a psycho.

Zero views.

More texts. More Looms. More "just 15 minutes, I promise this is worth your time."

Then one day, she replied: "Okay. You've got 15 minutes."

I was in London. Just landed. Standing on the terminal floor with my carry-on.

"Actually," she said when I called, "I've got 30 minutes."

I almost fell over.

Thirty minutes with Suneera Madhani. I needed seven to explain the idea. That meant 23 minutes of mentorship I could extract about how to navigate what we were building.

I walked her through the vision: MNTR as infrastructure. Not just a chatbot. Not just frameworks. But a way to capture how elite thinkers actually think—their patterns, their questions, their instincts—and make that accessible to everyone.

And then she started asking questions.

Not surface-level questions. Not "how does it work?" questions. Strategic, piercing, unicorn-founder-level questions:

"What's your go-to-market?" "How do we protect brand integrity?" "What happens if users try to get around the safety filters?" "How do we keep the community business-focused without losing the personal connection?"

Every question revealed something we hadn't thought about. Every question pushed our thinking. Every question made the platform better.

And that's when it hit me:

People don't want their own brain as a second brain. They want Suneera's brain.

They don't need another tool that organizes what they already know. They need access to how someone who's already done it thinks about problems. They need perspective that's better than theirs.

That was the missing code. That was version 37.

From Zero To $20M In 20 Days

We launched MNTR at our summit three weeks ago.

Not as a tool. Not as a framework. But as intelligence infrastructure—a way to systematically extract and scale how elite mentors think, so that anyone can access that perspective 24/7.

Suneera's UnicornOS would be the first installation beyond my own mind. Her frameworks, her questions, her thinking patterns, her strategic instincts—all captured in what we call "Narrative DNA" and made accessible to her community.

In 20 days, we hit a $20 million valuation based on our last funding round ($100K at 0.5% equity).

In the first 30 days post-launch, we did $121,428.10 in revenue—most of it recurring subscriptions.

We've turned down over $500K in additional investment offers because we didn't need the money and the equity asks were too high. We're tracking toward $1M monthly recurring revenue by the end of 2026. Without needing a Series A.

Why?

Because we finally understood what people actually need: Better perspective. Better questions. Better thinking.

Not more information. Not more tools. Not more organization.

Kill ideas fast. Build what's already validated.”

— Patrick Moreau, founder and CEO at MNTR

The Real Lesson: Fail Faster, Not Slower

Here's what I want you to take from this story if you take nothing else:

Most people fail too slowly.

They have an idea. They spend six months building it. They launch to silence. They iterate based on guesses. They run out of money before they find product-market fit.

We failed 36 times before version 37 worked. But most of those failures took days, not months. Because we learned to test ideas before building them.

Landing page. Ads. Email signups. If people don't sign up for the idea of your product, they sure as hell won't pay for the reality of it.

Kill ideas fast. Build what's already validated.

The second lesson is about perspective.

In 2025, information is free. ChatGPT and Claude will give you any answer you want. Courses are dead because knowledge is commoditized.

But perspective? The ability to think like someone who's already done what you're trying to do? To ask better questions? To see your blind spots?

That's the ultimate currency.

That's what MNTR is. That's what UnicornOS will be. That's what we're building for every thought leader who has a perspective worth scaling.

And that's what version 37 finally understood after 36 versions didn't.

Author: Patrick Moreau

Patrick Moreau is the founder and CEO of MNTR, an intelligence infrastructure platform that scales elite mentorship through Narrative DNA technology. He's an Emmy-winning filmmaker, former NFL storyteller, and the creator of Musey, the AI-powered mentorship platform for filmmakers and storytellers. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family and still can't believe Grant drove nine hours to be a PA for $50.

MNTR launches UnicornOS with Suneera Madhani in January 2026. Applications are opening at the Big Business Energy Summit in Orlando, February 19-20, 2025.