--- title: "Building a $3.6M ARR product inside Bain" description: "Aura reached $3.6M ARR inside Bain in 18 months. The useful lesson is which constraints helped, which slowed us down, and why." canonical: https://prasad.tech/blog/zero-to-one-bain.html source: html generated_at: 2026-05-26T13:56:27.812Z --- [Home](/) / [Blog](/blog/) / Zero to one Oct 2025 13 min read Zero to one # Building a $3.6M ARR product inside Bain Aura reached $3.6M ARR inside Bain in 18 months. The useful lesson is which constraints helped, which slowed us down, and why. Aura went from zero to $3.6M ARR inside Bain & Company in 18 months. The useful question is which constraints helped and which constraints slowed us down. Bain gave Aura distribution, trust, domain access, and customer proximity. It also added alignment work, incentive complexity, and speed limits a startup would not have had. The argument in one paragraph Corporate venture building and the startup path give you different moves. The environment decides which ones are available. For something like due diligence software, where distribution and trust are everything, the corporate setting made sense. For something requiring rapid iteration and pivoting, the startup path is faster. Pick the setting your specific problem actually requires. **$3.6M** ARR in 18 months Built inside Bain & Company. PE due diligence platform from concept to revenue. **Partner** Workflow access Customer development happened close to the people living the diligence workflow. **Firm** Funded build Bain funded development, with distribution and trust already present inside the setting. ## Why consulting firms build products Consulting firms have been building products for years, often quietly. The logic is simple: consulting revenue is linear (more hours equals more revenue) while product revenue can be exponential (build once, sell many times). The deeper reason is access. Consulting firms already sit close to decision-makers at large companies. They spend thousands of hours understanding customer problems at the highest levels. That access changes the first mile of product discovery. The translation cost from access to product is also real. ## How Aura started Aura was a PE due diligence platform. Bain runs hundreds of due diligence projects for private equity firms every year. Each project involves collecting massive amounts of data, running analyses, and producing reports under extreme time pressure. The existing process was artisanal. Consultants manually gathered data from dozens of sources, built one-off spreadsheets, spent nights reformatting slides. Each project reinvented the wheel. The product idea was straightforward. Build a platform that systematizes this. Automate data collection. Standardize analyses. Make the repeatable parts instant so consultants can focus on the parts that actually require thinking. That is easy to say. Making it happen inside a consulting firm is hard for reasons that are not obvious from the outside. ## The corporate venture trade-off | | What the firm gives you | What the firm costs you | | -------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Distribution | Trusted access to enterprise buyers from day one. Go-to-market is 'walk down the hall.' | Slower decisions. Approvals route through partners with their own priorities. | | Customer development | Unlimited access to partners who live the problem daily. Watch real projects, not interviews. | Conflicting incentive systems. Billable targets vs product adoption pull against each other. | | Funding | Funded development. No raise, no dilution, no investor follow-ups. | Talent expectations shaped by consulting comp. Hard to attract startup engineers. | | Brand | Trust by association. Skeptical PE firms open doors that startups would have to earn for years. | Brand risk. A failure in front of a client reflects on the firm. | Two columns of the same trade. The advantages and disadvantages are not equal in every problem domain. They were favourable for Aura. ## The disadvantages I underestimated Four things made the work harder than the advantages would suggest. Where the corporate setting actively works against you - **Organizational immune system.** Large organizations evolved sophisticated mechanisms for rejecting new things. The same machinery that protects against bad ideas also attacks good ones. Every meeting requires explaining why this matters. - **Conflicting incentives.** Consulting firms make money by selling partner time. A product that automates work competes with the core business. We had to structure economics so using Aura was clearly better for partners, not just for the firm. - **Speed limits.** Startups ship broken code, pivot weekly, apologize later. Inside Bain, every release carried the firm’s brand. Caution was always the safer career move. - **Talent constraints.** Consulting firms know how to hire consultants. They are less optimized for hiring engineers, designers, product managers. The people we attracted were exceptional. It was always harder than it needed to be. ## What actually made it work Three things were decisive. None of them was the product itself. The product mattered. The setting mattered more. | | What we did | What it bought us | | -------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Executive air cover | Senior partners protected us from organizational gravity. When committees wanted oversight, they pushed back. | Space to actually build, instead of spending energy on internal survival | | Revenue focus from day one | Treated as a business with revenue targets, ARR tracking, unit economics, not as innovation theater. | Internal credibility, plus the discipline to build something people would pay for | | Borrowed conviction | Consultants who used early versions, partners who introduced us to clients, skeptics who asked hard questions. | Their credibility opened doors before we had earned our own. The skeptics improved the product. | Three structural choices that produced the $3.6M outcome. Each one is a deliberate countermeasure to one of the disadvantages above. > A corporate venture gets weak when it is funded for “innovation” rather than revenue. Once it is measured differently from a business, no one cares enough whether it succeeds. ## The 18-month timeline From zero to $3.6M ARR, quarter by quarter Months 1 to 3 **Discovery.** 30-plus partners and managers interviewed. Shadowed real due diligence projects. Mapped the workflow in excruciating detail. No code written. Months 4 to 6 **First version.** Smallest thing that could be useful. Focused on data collection automation, the most painful and least interesting part of the work. Deployed on three real projects. Months 7 to 12 **Iteration.** Expanded functionality based on real usage. Added analysis modules. Improved reporting. Grew to 15 projects per month. Months 13 to 18 **Scale.** Standardized the platform. Built self-service capabilities. Expanded to multiple PE clients. Hit $3.6M ARR run rate. No big launch. Organic growth, one project at a time, with each success creating demand for the next. ## Lessons for both sides | | If you are building inside a large org | If you are competing as a startup | | ------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Choose the right problem | Look for problems where the org's existing assets (distribution, trust, access) are real advantages | Find buyers the big players have not yet noticed. New buyers emerge constantly. | | Get air cover early | Find executives who believe in the mission. Without this you fight with one hand tied. | Speed is the advantage. Use it while you still have it. | | Make revenue real | Structure success the same way as any other business. Innovation theater dies first. | Focus beats resources. Corporate ventures fight for attention internally. You only have to care about one thing. | | Move faster than is comfortable | Default is caution. Push for speed while respecting real constraints. | Distribution can be built. Their relationships seem insurmountable. Markets expand. | Different rules of engagement depending on which side you are building from. Same product market in both cases. ## The honest conclusion Building Aura inside Bain was one of the most educational experiences of my career. I learned things about product development, organizational dynamics, and enterprise sales that would have taken much longer to learn elsewhere. Where this leaves the question By the end, the decision was about fit between problem and setting. Distribution and trust were everything for Aura, so the corporate setting made sense. I am building Luminik as an independent startup now. Different problem, different setting. The lessons from Bain still apply: enter the buyer’s work, make the operating model explicit, and do not confuse institutional resources with product truth. ![Prasad Subrahmanya](/assets/images/header/prasad.jpeg) ## Prasad Subrahmanya Builder and operator at Luminik. Built Aura at Bain to $3.6M ARR, co-founded Mainteny through its $2.7M seed, and helped build the initial product and team. [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/prasadus) [GitHub](https://github.com/prasadus92) [ Back to blog](/blog/) ## Filed under Zero to one AuraBainventure building ## Related notes [**How to build the first version of a startup product**A practical lesson from Mainteny: pick one market, make one daily workflow work, sell while building, and keep the stack easy to change.](/blog/mvp-three-months.html)[**Alfred: how I run repeated work as a solo founder**How I use Alfred to turn repeated company work into plans, summaries, draft replies, and pull requests I can review before anything ships.](/blog/alfred-solo-founder-operating-system.html)[**Separating agent work from founder work**Why I moved recurring agent work out of my daily workspace, what the boundary controls, and which approvals still stay with me.](/blog/dedicated-mac-mini-solo-startup.html)