I’ve been helping SaaS companies of all shapes and sizes grow for the last 9 years. I’ve seen companies go from $15K MRR all the way up to $2M+ ARR in just a couple of years.
I’ve seen companies at the $35M+ ARR mark striving for acquisition and companies with $0 MRR in the early go-to-market stage. I’ve worked with enterprise SaaS companies learning how to rollout product-led growth at $500M ARR and wanting to grow 30% in a year.
I’ve been part of a successful acquisition as a board member and served as an in-house marketer at two high-growth VC-funded companies.
I’ve worked with bootstrapped founders, indie-funded companies, product leaders, growth leaders, marketers, sales leaders, and success leaders on identifying growth opportunities and troubleshooting specific KPIs.
I’ve worked with and for both B2B and B2C SaaS companies across all kinds verticals and software categories. And I’ve talked to all of these companies’ customers — every title, role, demographic, and psychographic you can imagine.
Even with all of this, I can confidently tell you that the companies that saw growth — meaningful, life-changing, team-supporting growth — were all companies who did “the work.”
They did the work.
The hard, sleeve-rolling, nail-biting, number-crunching, document-squinting, question-asking, brow-sweating work that comes with the territory of growing a SaaS company (or really any company).
Some were certainly lucky, but most of them created their luck.
They didn’t depend on hacking a social channel or scraping a database and batching and blasting a bunch of cold emails to random people.
They didn’t accomplish their goals by changing the headline on their website or launching a Google Ads campaign for two weeks and then quitting.
They didn’t reach their goals by building every single feature their customers asked for or their competitors had.
Those things might have helped, but it wasn’t the real work. Here’s a few examples of the kind of work I’m talking about:
Realizing monetization is your best growth lever and needing insights in order to inform your first pricing tests
Gathering data about the behaviors of best-paying customers versus non-best-paying customers
Deciding it’s time to overhaul your onboarding and activation experience and needing a way to do a teardown or audit that won’t take a century
Auditing the business for growth opportunities based on performance across awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, expansion, and the team’s perspectives on growth
Discovering your product’s positioning and messaging need an update, so you kick-off a project to work with the sales team on defining a new pitch and updating the copy on the website
Adjusting the product discovery and development process to focus on solving customer’s “jobs” rather than just features they requested
Conducting customer interviews of a specific segment because someone on your team realized there’s a huge experience gap (and therefore opportunity) to close that could be very lucrative
Adoption of a new feature isn’t quite landing right with customers, so you need a new adoption strategy and it’s not clear what to execute
… and so much more. All of these are examples of “the work” that seem simple at first, but can quickly become complex — often to the point of analysis paralysis.
My goal is to give you ways to simplify and clarify “the work” that goes into growing your SaaS company — no matter if you’re a product leader in an enterprise SaaS, an in-house marketer of a growing SaaS, or a bootstrapped founder with limited time and resources.
I want to get you thinking, deciding, and moving.
I want you to feel like complex, scary problems are actually soft, cuddly lambs in disguise when you’ve got the right tools.
I want you to laugh in the face of “the work” and know that you’ve got this.
I’ll be giving you some deep-dives along with quick, bite-sized takeaways, action items, and reflections of “the work” in this newsletter.
Join me on this journey and hopefully we can all do the thing together. ✨