I had the same initial reaction. A SaaS product taking that long to get to $10K ARR is not exciting from an ambition perspective - maybe from a side-project POV

I had the same initial reaction. A SaaS product taking that long to get to $10K ARR is not exciting from an ambition perspective - maybe from a side-project POV, though, it would be. While the traditional VC yardsticks* are both way too reductionist AND now well out-dated, they at least provide a rough sense of how good of an opportunity you have. * I've heard these are the perquisites for VC SaaS funding rounds (note this is probably 5 years out of date, and they are likely much higher now): $10k MRR for Seed, $100k MRR for Series A, $500K - $1M MRR for Series B. That all said, I like how Jason Lemkin talks about this. Basically, "I don't care how long it took you to get to $1M ARR - could be 10 years. But I need to see a clear path to getting to $100M ARR in 5 years from when you hit $1M". Paraphrasing. Obviously this is only for VC-scale businesses/approaches, not denigrating other ways of building a business.