What to do at different stages of your startup's growth
Important areas to pay attention to while you grow.
There are different challenges at different stages of your growth as a SaaS/PaaS company. For simplistic reasons, I have grouped them under different revenue stages.
$0 - $5M
$5 - $10M
$10 - $25M
$25 - $50M
$50 - $100M
$0 - $5M | 3 to 20 Employees
Product
Product Market Fit - This matters a lot. Btw for developer tools, it’s called developer-market fit.
Product Market Price Fit - This matters even more. Founders are too excited to build but not how best to monetize their product. Don’t be gun-shy about asking for money.
GRR - Gross revenue retention is a metric you track and then work with Customer Success to understand why churn happens
Growth loop identification and acquisition - you start looking at signups and high-level usage numbers
Operations
Doing things that don’t scale in every department. Founders have to do a lot of interviewing. After product-market fit, it is also important to identify and acquire a growth loop, and to focus on operational efficiency by finding heroes to carry the company through this stage. Burnouts are the norm with these one-person armies.
The pace these heroes drive is a key marker and those who can’t catchup to them are probably not a good fit for your company.
Your “culture” has to breathe “get it done”.
Runway is your primary concern. Profitability is always your concern especially if you are bootstrapped.
Marketing
Nobody really knows you exist so Marketing has to do more reach outs and build connections
Increase surface area - content is the easiest one to start off on
Try to time channels where your audience shows up once in a while.
Go chase down that Gartner and Forrester analyst and meet them in person after you have product market fit.
Marketing efforts should focus on building connections and using one or two channels effectively to reach the target audience
Sales
Say yes to almost everything from your target persona. This is counter intuitive but there is no point disqualifying prospects needs at this stage. The only condition I would add is not to dilute the personas.
Being smart with problem pattern recognition.
Start documenting your go-to-market playbook
Customer Success
Create a bible of hacks. Hack away at solving customer’s problems. Be creative with problem solving. You can’t depend on the product team to help solve all the problems fast enough.
Be ready to pick up calls at unusual hours.
Send your initial and important customers gifts. Build relationships.
$5M - $10M | 20 to 100 Employees
Product
Product stability starts becoming a priority. Hacks have to be un-hacked
UX talent starts focusing on areas of growth (e.g. onboarding)
Product discovery needs more attention vs just shipping
Growth loop investing and ongoing assessment is a new habit to pickup
Operations
Think about scale.
There is a lack of defined processes across the organization. Process Owners are the new heroes.
Growth oriented talent is critical. Hiring becomes front and center.
Investing inside with strategic investors outside will be a theme.
Founders start building their delegation muscle.
Marketing
Marketing Ops is a thing
Agreement on moving away from MQL thinking. MQL is an output metric and it is subject to gaming.
Reducing the height of your funnel becomes important
Serious discussion of “strategy” and how marketing “gets you there”
Customer Success
Understanding how to layer on Account Managers
Map organizations with pain points
Build knowledge bases for your customers
$10M - $25M | 100 to 200 Employees
Product
You have two problems now Product stability and Product Velocity. Product managers have to think of more non-functional roadmaps.
Friction between engineering and product folks are more common.
The most likely cause for friction is tech debt. Engineering managers have to have tech debt burnout charts.
Create Fast lanes. e.g. at QuestionPro, we call them HIVE - HIgh VElocity lanes
Building “Enterprise” features
Pricing and Packaging processes and testing is important during this stage
Early attempt at product expansion for different ICP is needed
Operations
Customer processes have to be well optimized (including billing, account receivables etc.)
First round of OGs leaving. Alignment issues are usually the cause. Or they are not in the same fight as the founders.
Focus in on these two areas of Growth = Retention + Acquisition (in that order ;))
Sales
Don’t say yes to everything
Plan misses are getting more obvious. So go back to basics.
Focus on a steady-state funnel
Win-loss analysis has to be done with both marketing and product
Channel partnerships have to be considered
Marketing
Product marketing has to build better sales artifacts.
Move from Funnel thinking to Flywheel thinking
Start auditing your marketing tools. Marketing automation spend is going to start ballooning and you want to start pruning your unused “lists” and reducing your overlapping capabilities.
Customer Success
The only question you ask is “What does it take to retain my customer?”
Working closely with the product team to identify retention vectors
$25 - $50M | 201 to 400 Employees
Product
Hire high quality engineering talent at scale. Multiple Product and Engineering leaders spanning across Infrastructure, Security, Application.
Ongoing attempt at product expansion for different ICP
Operations
Culture and alignment is an issue and needs budgets and metrics
If the high maintenance employees do not give you high value fire them
CRM strategy is a thing. PLG data and CRM have to be in sync. Attitudinal and behavior data helps with finding new opportunities.
Business development with strategic partners
Next wave of OGs leave. They have truly hit a ceiling or they are not happy with the directions taken.
Sales
Sales playbooks were a thing in the past. Getting GTM playbooks integrated with PLG is the new thinking.
New leadership causes reseting of rhythm
Complacency kicks in and you need a reboot of the sales organization
New onboarding requirements for new ICP sales cycles
Geo focused GTM requires strong geo leaders.
$50 - $100M | 400 to 600 EE
Product
Leadership roles needs to be filled up for all product lines
Monetization is a serious game and you need dedicated leadership for that
Complexity of mature products increases exponentially because of larger deal sizes. Product velocity was a thing of the past.
Operations
Everything is revisited because of a lack of a clear decision framework
Performance management with clear distinction of “A” players vs “C” players across the organization
Bloating teams needs refactoring
The third wave of “culture pillars” are pushed out.
Data governance needs are high so have dedicated folks for that
Too many “internal problem” meetings. Meeting audits are needed.
If you are a senior leader, reduce your surface area
Sales
Scaling sales teams across regions
Multiple sales leaders and multiple hierarchies. Start reducing complexity of sales compensation models
If you think there are other points which I have to add here - connect with me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/anupsurendran/ or https://twitter.com/anupsurendran