Monevate

How My Startup Hit $4M in 18 Months

February 26th, 2025

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About
Business

James Wilton

Founder, Monevate

$60K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Monevate

monevate.com

from Saratoga Springs, NY, USA

started April 2021

$60,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m James D. Wilton, the founder of Monevate - the world's leading boutique SaaS pricing strategy consulting firm. At our core, we help high-growth startups and SaaS companies capture the value they create through transforming and optimizing their pricing strategies.

Monevate was operational in six months, and we hit $4M in annual revenue within eighteen months.

James D. Wilton

How do you come up with the idea for Monevate?

Monevate wasn’t a sudden lightbulb moment—it developed gradually. The idea of starting my own firm first hit me at ZS, more as a career aspiration than a concrete plan.

It took on more shape at RELX, where I worked with a talented internal pricing consulting team. We often joked about launching our own firm one day. It was mostly banter, but the idea stuck. By 2015, I was already brainstorming names. "Monevate"—a blend of "monetize" and "innovate"—struck me, so much so that I secretly bought the domain and kept renewing it.

After RELX, I built a pricing practice at SBI Growth and later joined McKinsey, where I led the pricing service line focused on startups and scaleups. That experience made me realize smaller, fast-growing companies couldn’t access premier pricing consulting—McKinsey, BCG, and Bain were too expensive, and quality boutique alternatives didn’t exist. That’s when Monevate went from an abstract idea to a real plan, and I launched the firm in 2021.

How did you build the initial version of Monevate?

Since Monevate is a consulting firm, our "product" in this context is delivering pricing strategy transformations—something I had already been doing for nearly a decade. Getting started was less about building from scratch and more about packaging my expertise into a structured offering.

The key steps were:

Defining the brand and value proposition: Positioning Monevate as a high-caliber alternative to big firms.
Documenting methodologies: Codifying my approach to pricing transformations.
Creating marketing materials: Developing proposal documents and pitch decks to showcase our expertise.
Projecting stability: Clients hesitate to trust tiny firms. Being small is fine; looking unstable isn’t.
Building a team: I started with contractors from Catalant and Graphite for Engagement Manager and Associate roles. By late 2021, I made a couple of full-time hires once I was confident in demand.
Winning business: With the infrastructure in place, I began pitching and securing projects.

Early Monevate Team

How did you launch Monevate and get initial traction?

I announced Monevate on LinkedIn, explaining why I started the firm and what we offered. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Many former colleagues and clients referred me to their networks, fueling early growth. I’ll always be grateful for that support.

Monevate was operational in six months, and we hit $4M in annual revenue within eighteen months.

But building a firm that wasn’t dependent on me for all key processes? That was much harder and took much longer. Establishing a strong reputation and company culture required significant effort—not just from me, but from the whole team.

A few months in, I was introduced to a B2B SaaS company looking for pricing strategy help. Competing against major firms for a ~$300K engagement was surreal.

The client wanted to work with me but was hesitant about Monevate’s size. At one point, they asked: "James, when you say 'we,' do you mean you, or is there a actually a team?" I was taken aback - "Gasp! They know!" - but I reassured them that I used trusted contractors and had a full-time hire starting soon. That was enough—I won the project.

Execution-wise, it was a 6/10. We struggled to drive a client decision, two contractors didn’t work out, and the project ran over. But the client was very happy, the recommendations were solid and creative, and I learned a lot.

What was the growth strategy for Monevate and how did you scale?

Startup costs were low—about $10,000 for the website, $2,000 for a computer, plus legal and admin fees. Ongoing expenses included software and bookkeeping tools. Since professional services don’t require much upfront investment, bootstrapping was doable.

Scaling costs, however, were a different story. Hiring full-time employees meant serious financial exposure. By the end of 2021, annualized people expenses hit $500K; by the end of 2022, over $1.5M.

A key decision was invoicing 50% of project fees upfront and enforcing 30-day payment terms. This kept cash flow steady enough to cover payroll and operations.

Early demand generation wasn’t strategic—it was almost entirely word-of-mouth. As we completed projects, clients and investors referred us to others, keeping opportunities flowing.

Later, we leaned into content marketing, sharing insights on LinkedIn to stay visible. Engagement wasn’t always high, but it didn’t need to be—some of our biggest projects came from silent readers who found value in the content.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building Monevate?

What lessons did you learn about yourself or the business? The biggest lesson: in a premium consulting firm, the true product is the people. Frameworks and methodologies matter, but true differentiation comes from having exceptional consultants who can solve complex problems. A firm's competitive advantage is its ability to attract, onboard, grow and retain top talent.

Founding Monevate reinforced this for me. The pivotal moments in the firm’s history for me are when I made certain key consulting hires, and our overall capabilities leveled up. And, more importantly, the way those people worked helped forge the culture at the firm. The behaviors and habits I admired in them became part of the culture, and so became self-propagating.

A personal takeaway was recognizing my ability to recruit top talent. At McKinsey, I had strong followership—Associates and Engagement Managers wanted to work with me. That skill became even more valuable at Monevate, where convincing top-tier consultants to join a startup was a challenge. Without those early hires, we wouldn’t be here today.

Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs? Build and nurture your network. I never saw myself as a great networker (and still don’t!), but previous jobs forced me to learn enough to be dangerous. My network directly or indirectly drove almost all of Monevate’s business in the first three years.

Networking doesn’t have to be salesy. At SBI, we had a philosophy of "give to give"—help people, connect them, share useful resources, and expect nothing in return. It works like karma: over time, opportunities come back to you.

Monevate Acquisition: How much did Monevate sell for and what was the acquisition price?

Not acquired - going strong - growing quickly!

The Full Monevate Team 2024

In-person offsite Dec 2024

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