Startup Achieves 8-Figure Revenue with Floating Point Precision
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from user Chris Bakke (@ChrisJBakke). The tweet begins with a bold claim typical of startup success stories: 'In 12 months, my startup has gone from $0 in monthly revenue to 8-figures in monthly revenue.' It then offers to explain how they did it, listing the revenue for two consecutive years. 'August 2021: $0 revenue' is followed by 'August 2022: $0.0000000 revenue'. The punchline is that '8-figures' is achieved by adding seven zeros after the decimal point. The tweet ends with the ironic motivational phrase, 'Never give up.' This joke satirizes the exaggerated claims and 'hustle culture' narrative prevalent in the startup world, using a clever play on words and a nod to data representation that would be appreciated by a technical audience
Comments
8Comment deleted
That's not an 8-figure revenue, that's a rounding error in a `double`. The VC fund's due diligence script probably cast it to an `int` and approved the Series A funding
Growth hack: cast revenue to VARCHAR, count the characters after the decimal as “figures,” and voilà - 8-figure MRR. Just pray Finance doesn’t deserialize the burn rate the same way
The real 10x engineer is the one who can add zeros after the decimal point and still call it 'eight-figure revenue' with a straight face - technically correct is the best kind of correct when your burn rate exceeds your revenue by several orders of magnitude
This is the startup equivalent of refactoring your codebase for 12 months and proudly announcing you've reduced technical debt from 'catastrophic' to 'catastrophic with better variable naming.' The excessive floating-point precision on that zero is chef's kiss - like using a BigDecimal to represent your bank account balance when parseInt(0) would suffice. At least they're being honest about their burn rate: $0 revenue means infinite runway, which is technically the best unit economics you can achieve
Hit 8-figure MRR by switching the KPI type to float64; CAC still NaN, but the deck rounds it up
We finally hit 8 figures of MRR - after finance switched revenue from INT to FLOAT, marketing stopped clarifying which side of the decimal those figures are on
Revenue scaled to 8-figure precision at zero - proof positive that float underflow beats any distributed system failover
Don't give up and one day your revenue will be $0.30000000000000004. Comment deleted