The Man Who Got Banned From Three Platforms Before Lunch - and Built $1M ARR by Dinner
Collin Stewart is the kind of founder who, when his first startup collapsed after 18 months and one paying customer, didn't hire a therapist. He sent 1,100 LinkedIn messages instead. He got banned from LinkedIn. Then Facebook. Then Twitter. He kept going.
That relentlessness is the through-line of everything Stewart has built. As Co-Founder and CEO of Predictable Revenue - the Vancouver-based B2B sales outsourcing firm that has booked over 10,000 meetings and scaled outbound for 55+ companies including Toptal and Vox Media - he has turned what was once a scrappy solo experiment into one of the most trusted names in sales development on the continent.
The company merged with Aaron Ross's consulting practice in 2014. Ross literally wrote the book on predictable revenue - his 2011 text became a Silicon Valley bible. Stewart became the operating engine behind the brand, the person who showed up, ran the calls, built the systems, and kept the machine moving while the philosophy caught up with the market.
"Just because something is interesting and a great thought experiment doesn't mean people are going to pay for it."
Collin Stewart - the lesson from VoltageCRM, 2012
He learned that line the hard way. VoltageCRM, his first company, spent 18 months interviewing 150+ potential customers and walked away with exactly one paying client generating $20,000 CAD per year. The key failure? He was validating assumptions, not discovering what people actually needed. His co-founder eventually left - to open a yoga studio in Guatemala. Stewart found that funny. Then he got back to work.
The second act - Carb.io, later known as Carburetor - was run on a different operating principle: find five paying customers before writing a single line of code. He cold-messaged the entirety of Vancouver's startup scene, attended every sales and entrepreneurship event he could find, and interviewed 20 people who were struggling to implement the outbound playbook from Ross's book. He offered them $500 a month to just do it for them. Five said yes. Those five became seven through referrals. That was the signal he needed.
By the time Carb.io merged into Predictable Revenue in late 2014, they were doing $83,333 MRR. The company hit exactly $1M ARR on October 31 - Halloween - 2014. The timing was, Stewart acknowledges, a little on the nose.
