S5E22 – How to grow your B2B SaaS to 10M ARR? Advice from 20 experts

Are you building a B2B SaaS and aiming to hit 10M ARR? Then this episode is a must-listen! In this podcast, we talk about how to scale a B2B SaaS business to 10 million in annual revenue (ARR). The episode includes tips from 20 experts in the field, offering useful advice for SaaS founders. Sponsored by Reditus, a platform that helps manage affiliate programs for B2B SaaS companies, this episode pulls together key lessons from earlier episodes to guide founders aiming for this big milestone.

Episode 1: Scaling Beyond Founder-Led Sales

The first episode featuring Gavin Tye talks about moving past founder-led sales. The goal is to use tools and automation to close clients faster and with less effort. By creating a repeatable sales playbook, companies can share lessons across teams and close more clients at once.

Episode 2: Building Sustainable SaaS with Ferdinand Goetzen

Ferdinand Goetzen shares tips on building a lasting SaaS business. In the early stages, focus on getting traction and don’t worry too much about scaling. Once you have a solid product-market fit, focus on thought leadership, partnerships, and product-led growth to expand.

Episode 3: Tim Schumacher’s Playbook for Growth

Tim Schumacher talks about growing B2B SaaS companies. By the time you hit 10 million ARR, you’ll need a strong team in tech, marketing, and operations. Hiring the right people in these areas is key to continued growth.

Episode 4: Affiliate Marketing for B2B SaaS with Joran Hofman

Joran Hofman explains how important it is to plan for future growth. By predicting your revenue, you can prepare for hiring and resource allocation. This helps ensure your team is ready as your business grows.

Episode 5: Designing a Revenue Factory with Jacco van der Kooij

Jacco van der Kooij talks about creating a go-to-market team like a product. It’s important to hire real experts who can push your growth forward, rather than relying on assumptions about expertise that might not work.

Episode 6: Leveraging Customer Success with Mike Dry

Mike Dry explains the importance of defining your company’s functions early on. As you scale, having a clear vision for each department makes it easier to grow and ensures everyone is working toward the same goals.

Episode 7: Scaling Micro SaaS with Alex Urquhart

Alex Urquhart shares that early-stage founders often embrace chaos and try many strategies to gain traction. As the business grows, they need to delegate tasks and let experts handle different parts of the business while staying true to the company’s vision.

Episode 8: Mastering Message Market Fit with Diane Wiredu

Diane Wiredu highlights how messaging needs to change as your company grows. What worked at the beginning might not work anymore, so you need to research your customers to make sure your message still resonates with them.

Episode 9: Growing SaaS from Agency with Chris Out

Chris Out talks about setting a clear goal for reaching 10 million ARR. Whether you want to raise more funding or run a lifestyle business, knowing your end goal will guide your decisions and help you grow strategically.

Episode 10: Starting and Growing a B2B Podcast with Tom Hunt

Tom Hunt shares tips on using employer branding to attract top talent. Having a strong brand as an employer helps you hire skilled people at good rates, which will support your company’s growth and success.

Episode 11: Going Global with Gilles Bertaux

Gilles Bertaux recommends hiring a VP of Sales to focus on driving revenue and improving sales strategies. This way, founders can focus on other areas of the business while ensuring that sales are handled by someone dedicated to it.

Episode 12: Achieving a $100 Million SaaS Exit with Ryan Allis

Ryan Allis explains how to move from 10 million to 100 million ARR. To do this, you’ll need to create systems that can run without the founder. Hiring the right people in sales, marketing, finance, and HR will allow the founder to step back and focus on other areas.

Episode 13: Hiring a Marketing Leader with Andrew Davis

Andrew Davis talks about working on the business, not just in it. As your business grows, you need to focus on the bigger picture—strategy, resource planning, and leadership development—so you can keep scaling successfully.

Episode 14: Building SaaS without VC Funding with Greg Head

Greg Head discusses how to go from a startup to a fully functioning business. When you reach 10 million ARR, you need a senior leadership team and efficient systems to keep delivering value and bringing in new customers.

Episode 15: Leveraging Social Media with Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham explains the importance of relentless customer acquisition through social media. Getting everyone in client organizations involved and offering value can help drive major growth.

Episode 16: Growing SaaS Affiliate Programs with Adam Glazer

Adam Glazer talks about focusing on efficiency as you scale. This means investing in tools and processes that improve marketing efforts. As you grow, focusing on profitability and optimizing media buying becomes essential.

Episode 17: Building a Brand Strategy with Angeley Mullins

Angeley Mullins stresses the importance of creating a strong brand in the industry. A strong brand presence and leadership will help your business grow and reach important milestones.

Episode 18: Positioning for Explosive Growth with April Dunford

April Dunford explains how validating your positioning is key before scaling. Once you confirm your positioning, you can confidently invest in marketing and sales to target specific customers.

Episode 19: Building a SaaS SEO Strategy with Sam Dunning

Sam Dunning talks about using a multi-channel approach to marketing. To grow your business, you need to understand your customers’ problems and show them how your product solves those problems.

Episode 20: Building Brand Authority with Melissa Rosenthal

Melissa Rosenthal shares how to build a strong brand that drives growth. Being innovative, having a clear point of view, and providing exceptional customer experiences will help build your brand and attract more customers.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – Introduction and episode overview
• (1:07) – Episode 1: Scaling beyond founder-led sales
• (2:17) – Episode 2: Building a sustainable SaaS business with Ferdinand Goetzen
• (3:19) – Episode 3: Tim Schumacher’s B2B SaaS growth playbook
• (4:30) – Episode 4: Affiliate marketing for B2B SaaS with Joran Hofman
• (5:40) – Episode 5: Molding a go-to-market team into a revenue factory with Jacco van der Kooij
• (6:53) – Episode 6: Leveraging customer success for growth with Mike Dry
• (8:00) – Episode 7: Building and scaling a micro SaaS with Alex Urquhart
• (9:53) – Episode 8: Mastering message market fit with Diane Wiredu
• (11:36) – Episode 9: From agency to SaaS with Chris Out
• (12:32) – Episode 10: Starting and growing a B2B podcast with Tom Hunt
• (14:57) – Episode 11: Going global with Gilles Bertaux
• (17:08) – Episode 12: Path to a successful SaaS exit with Ryan Allis
• (18:08) – Episode 13: Hiring your first marketing leader with Andrew Davis
• (20:21) – Episode 14: Building SaaS without big VC funding with Greg Head
• (22:20) – Episode 15: Leveraging social media for growth with Chris Cunningham
• (24:43) – Episode 16: Growing a SaaS affiliate program with Adam Glazer
• (26:27) – Episode 17: Building a brand strategy with Angeley Mullins
• (28:56) – Episode 18: Positioning for explosive growth with April Dunford
• (30:10) – Episode 19: Building a profitable SaaS SEO strategy with Sam Dunning
• (33:20) – Episode 20: Building brand authority with Melissa Rosenthal

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Speaker 1

Are you growing a B2B SaaS and on your way to 10 million AR? This is your podcast episode. Because at every podcast episode, I ask my guests at the end, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who is on their way to 10 million AR? No matter, I guess, where they are in their journey, but at least past 10K MRR. This episode combines all the answers from all the 20 guests we had in season 5, making it really practical to listen to this one first before diving into the specific episodes. This episode is brought to you by Reditus, which is my platform, an affiliate management platform and network purely focused on B2B SaaS companies. But that’s enough promotion, so let’s just dive right in. In episode one, I talk to  on how to scale beyond founder-led sales. The biggest thing we want to do is increase our return on effort. People talk about ROI, a return on investment, but sales is about return on effort. You don’t want to have to spend 20 hours closing a client. If you can learn how to do it through automation or pre-done tools or other things, then you’re increasing your return on effort.

[00:01:07.660] – Speaker 1

This is why you’re going to make it repeatable, build a sales playbook, share lessons learned across teams, and eventually you’ll measure or you’ll see a downward trend in effort. Even if a company, say a company sales cycle is six months, but you’re only spending 10 hours of closing them, opposed to 25 hours, what you’re doing before, you’ve got a better It’s about a better cost of customer acquisition. You could, in theory, close to clients in that time period because you’re spending less time. Then it’s about concentrating on that return on effort. Then you do that by having other salespeople in the team transferring knowledge, scaling in a pragmatic way, managing deals, and then having the team being able to see possible speed humps and roadblocks and removing those before they get there to increase the likelihood of a deal closing. In episode 2, I chatted with Ferdinand Goetzen on building a sustainable SaaS business and the key strategies for long-term growth. Basically that is add thought leadership and think about PLG in a more purposeful way. To get to the 1 million or to get to the 100K, 200K, 300K ARR, don’t worry about scalability.

[00:02:17.430] – Speaker 1

Don’t worry about sustainable growth. Just do shit that gets relevant people onto the platform, learn from them, iterate, and just try to niche down clearly in all your messaging, all your operations. Once you’ve got that figured out, once you go like, This person buys my product in this context when I do these activities. Once you know that, that’s what a predictable engine is. Person X buys my shit when this happens. That’s predictability. Once you have that, you just build on that. Does thought leadership show promise? Think about how you can do thought leadership at scale. Does partnerships work? Think about how you can do partnerships at scale. That’s when you start building a team and hiring and doing things more aggressively. That’s where you start thinking about product-led growth as well. Think about, how can I get people who use the product to pull other people? How can I expand within accounts more quickly? How can I create an onboarding experience that actually delivers tons of value? Is the UX there? Talk to people, figure out what your biggest blockers are, and that’s it. Just iterate on that. In episode 3, I talked to Tim Schumacher and his playbook of growing 20 plus B2B SaaS companies.

[00:03:19.940] – Speaker 1

Ten million is a great range. You’ve built a real organization. I have a few companies which also I’ve started originally that are way beyond that. Phase Ceto, my original domain market The place I started, that one was about 100 million. I. O, which is the company behind ad blocking, is also about 100 million in annual recurring revenue. I’ve gone through it through a few times. After 10, that’s really when things change from something you manage in a small group. 10 million, you can manage with 20 or 30 people if you manage well. But you grow from a family to a real tribe. That means you need people in every function that are on the same level as your specialty, but in the end. What I mean is if you’re a tech person, and I consider you’re probably a top-notch tech person because you got this to 10 million with a good product, then you need someone equally good on marketing and That’s really good on operations, which is hard to judge if you’re a technical person and vice versa. But you really need a functioning team, at least consisting of those three functions: tech product, go-to-market side, and the operations, which includes finance, HR, R.

[00:04:30.610] – Speaker 1

Of course, it also gets more granular. I will really see that you Excel in all those areas. Bringing in the best people is probably the single most important. In episode 4, I chatted with myself Joran Hofman on affiliate marketing for B2B SaaS companies. The advice I would give here is you need to build processes, but the fun part is build processes for the super long term because they’re going to keep breaking. You need to start iterating them and ideally, even try get ahead of things. If you’re able to predict what the revenue growth is going to be or you know what the revenue growth probably is, but then where is the revenue at a certain point, you can also start predicting what resources or people you would need. To give, for example, a really practical example, I was able to predict, of course, with other leadership to see where the revenue is going to be in a number of months. Then we said, Okay, every CSM can take X amount of revenue or X amount of clients per person. We were able to see where are we going to be in six months. When do we need somebody new?

[00:05:40.910] – Speaker 1

How long do they need to actually be onboarded for? We started hiring Hiring. Before that, taking into account that somebody had to be onboarded. At the time, we were at that revenue point with the number of clients we were expecting. That person was already hired, onboarded, and ready to go. Often, you’re too late with certain things. The more you can get ahead of things, the better. It is hard. It is going to be trial and error to get there. But often, you can take a certain metric and then look at that, which is often revenue, to see what would you need at that point. In episode 5, I interviewed Jacco van der Kooij on how to mold your go-to-market team into a revenue factory. To design their growth, to architect it, and to architect it the same way they would have architected the product. To Every day, we see that most organizations or founders are handing that off to what they deem to be an expert on the other hand, only to come to learn two, three years into the agreement, that person never was an expert. Think of the following. Most sellers or successful salespeople have at the zenith of their career, they’re probably right at their early 40s.

[00:06:53.190] – Speaker 1

You think you start selling at about the age of 6, 26. Sales is not a trade. That That means at the age of 40, they probably have three or four jobs. That means that their experience with three or four years on average experience per customer, their experience generally is outdated because they have just coming into the new market. Compared that, in my case, I started engineering in the Netherlands at what’s called the LTS, but I started that journey, what, at what? At age 12 or something like that? By the time I was 26, I already had 12, 13, 14 years of engineering education creation behind me, most of which was spent at Philips Electronics. So you already have another 12, 14 years of experience in it that salespeople at the age 40 don’t have. That is often a misunderstanding. We want to make sure that when you bring on that expert that you contemplate and make sure that they’re a good fit. Tom, an advice that we see many companies go wrong. In episode 6, I chatted again with Mike Dry on leveraging customer success for SaaS growth. The good news is you’ve already got to the same, Kate.

[00:08:00.000] – Speaker 1

So you’re already on the track and it’s now just about building from there. I think I’ll probably reference something I said way back when we had the last meeting, really. I think the most important thing to do is to try and look ahead and think about, not just CS, but these various different functions within your business that are going to start to exist from 10K onwards. You’re going to have a fully defined sales team for the sake of argument. You’re going to have a CS team. You’re going to have to start to have other functions. And start to think for your business, for this thing that you’re building, what do you really want those things to look like? And what is it you want each of those groups of people to do? What is it you want them to know about you, about how you work, about your business and everything? And just start writing this stuff down. I know it’s difficult at the early stage. You don’t have that much time. You don’t have the opportunity to do all these things. But If you can at least give yourself a starting point and just define for yourself what you want from all these people, especially the people you’re going to hire, but obviously the customers as well, what do you want this to end up as?

[00:08:55.840] – Speaker 1

That clarity of thought that you will hopefully come to is going to mean a hell a lot down the line when you start to explain that vision to your team members and you start to try and inculcate them into what you’re trying to build. Because it’s clear to you, give yourself an opportunity for it to be clear for everybody else. In episode seven, I chatted with Alex Urquhart, How to build, launch, and scale a successful micro SaaS. I think the best founders in the early stages are the ones who are frankly chaotic. They get out there, they do stuff, they try stuff, they throw things at the wall, and they keep it going. And I think that probably gets you to your first 10K, in my opinion. That gets things moving But having the foresight, the humility and the self-awareness to go, hey, this business is more important than my vision for it. I still need to keep it there. But being able to, I think the ones I’ve seen that do really well can detach themselves in the right areas very well. And I think looking in terms of going to 10 mil, in the early days, I think all startups start with founder sales and they should, as I was saying before.

[00:09:53.310] – Speaker 1

But then they bring people in, they bring marketers in, they bring sales people in, they bring customer success people in, and they attach and let people slot into those roles. So I think growing to the 10 million is being able to detach your way out of areas and be able to let go of certain things. I think there’s also those quotes you hear about people saying, hire great people. Or what’s that Steve Jobs quotes? It’s, don’t hire smart people and get them to tell you what to do or something like that. And I do agree with that to an extent when they take ownership. But I think also back to that personal brand point, having that founder person at the head of the snake is so important, even the 10 mil or beyond that. I think it’s so important because people, and speaking with a marketing hat on people love people, they like brands and they’re into things like Nike and Apple. As far as brands, when you ever hear about brands, it’s always Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, or it’s always the person. It’s never usually the brand. So I think leaning on that personal brand, detaching yourself out of the operations, but staying in the front of that.

[00:10:47.220] – Speaker 1

And these are very generic terms, but I guess I’m seeing the ones where I see a lot of these companies when they reach these points start to fall down. And I think it’s like sometimes founders go, I’ve done my job, I’m going to step out and give it over to someone else. And I think you were the visionary, you had the idea. I think you need to be involved in some way. Once it scales to that point, if you’re looking at 10 million ARR, you probably need to look at more like culture. And I know, again, that’s a very generic comment, but I think I see so many awesome businesses with great products start to deteriorate when the culture is not led well at the top. There’s like accountability or seeing a founder of 10 million ARR company who is willing to go to a conference, do a speaking spot or jump on a call or lead from the front and keep that accountability. I think the hands free syndrome can crush a lot of really great companies when they detach too much and they just let everything go well from there. Bringing the right people in, keeping them involved.

[00:11:36.850] – Speaker 1

But great founders need to sit on top of it the whole time, still be in the driver’s seat to some extent, still have their personal brand and still give the company something to lead toward. As far as the technical side of things, I’d probably have to… Depends which product it is. If it turns into an enterprise product or a B2C or whatever it is, I think that varies a bit. But I think the companies I see scaling well and sustainably tend to have a really good culture that starts from the top down. Sounds like a bit of a self-help talk, but it is so true. A good founder at the top is worth its weight in gold. In episode 8, I chatted with Diane Wiredu on mastering message market fit. Essential strategy for B2B SaaS success. If we’re like 1 million ARR to 10 million ARR. Usually this phase now is really about shifting gears. Strong product market fit, you’ve got traction, you’ve got a huge customer base, there’s value. But what I see with those stage clients that come to me is that the messaging that got them to the current stage is not going to get them to the next stage.

[00:12:32.770] – Speaker 1

What got you here isn’t going to get you to the next stage of growth. Usually, it is pausing to evaluate markets of change, maybe our ICP is shifting at this stage, how do we break through the ceiling? This is that phase where I think the biggest uplift is around that customer-led approach and really performing a lot of voice of customer research to make sure that your messaging will resonate with customers as much as possible and those buyers, and that your messaging really speaks to your unique capabilities. When you’re going from 1 to 10 million, this is where a lot of companies lose their way with the messaging. You try to compete with the big dogs, Messaging gets wishy-washy and fluffy, it gets broader, it gets more generic. Here my advice would be resist the temptation and narrow down. Still stay narrow. Maybe not as narrow as I was talking about earlier with the 10K MRR going all in. That’s where that OKM and big idea messaging is really key, where you can start actually leading in with stickier point of view and more investment in brand across the board as well. In episode 9, I chatted with Chris out, going from agency to SaaS and the strategies for growing your SaaS side hustle within the agency.

[00:13:52.130] – Speaker 1

I would say, really start with the end in mind. Are you boosting it to 10 million ARR to get a next round of A round of funding, and a round of funding after that, and a round of funding after that? Or are you going to build it to 10 million ARR as a lifestyle business, where you make a healthy profit and you structure your team in a certain way? So I think that the road towards 10 million ARR is really dependent on how is the 10 million going to serve you in context of which goal are you doing that? And I think that’s where a lot of founders make the biggest mistake because they’re growing for the sake of growth. They’re building a big company. They make a very big exit on paper, but all the investors and everybody makes money, and they didn’t make any money. If they would have grown it a little bit slower towards 10 million and take home one or two million in profit every year, they will be free for life. In episode 10, I chatted with Tom Hunt on how to start and grow a B2B podcast. I think with this, it actually comes down to employer branding.

[00:14:57.530] – Speaker 1

That’s what I’m realizing at the moment, is that you’re likely not going to be the person directly doing the thing that’s going to grow revenue, whether that’s selling, building a product, doing customer service. And so then what you as a founder are trying to optimize for is the deal you’re making with the people doing those things, e. G, how much you’re paying that person and how good they are. And so that difference is proportional to how good your employer brand is. So if you have a really good employer brand, you’re probably going to be able to pay someone less that’s actually really good. And so then that helps you with profitability as you grow. So that That is my trick. In terms of, obviously, the next question is how do you do that? The way that we’ve been able to do that to some extent is through LinkedIn Organic, me posting and other people posting on the team. That’s my advice. But the caveat is we’re at four, not 10 million. So it’ll probably change when we get there. Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile?

[00:15:50.570] – Speaker 1

At Reditus, we just launched the second side of the marketplace, which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates which have access to the audience you’re looking for. We this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getreditus.com. In episode 11, I tell it with Gilles Bertaux on the secret to going global and how startups can succeed internationally. I would say something like, Try to hire VP sales, honestly. I think that’s definitely something that changed for us. Hire someone, if you’re not selling yourself, you’re sure product person, or if all you believe in is standard product, sole service, that thing, or maybe if you’re just too busy in doing something else, hire a VP sales. Obviously, there are different VP sales for different stages of the company, but hiring someone that can obsess around what revenue stream I can build, what offer I can iterate on to create, to double the ACV. Someone who can obsess about what are the pitch that I can build, maybe how I can tweak that pitch to sell more. It’s so valuable to have someone that is 100% focused on that specific thing because you have tons and tons of things to do.

[00:17:08.070] – Speaker 1

As a founder, you might have accounting to do, some hiring to do, some management to do, some VC, whatever to do. You’re not 100%. As much as you like, you’re not going to be 100% on it. They need to delegate that as soon as possible and have someone you can trust. I’m saying VP sales, it could be another role that is attached to revenue, obviously, but something similar. It’s definitely going to shift the company around for In episode 12, I tell it with Ryan Allis on the path to a successful $100 million plus SaaS exit. The first zero to $10 million is all about growth hacking, product building, and finding a way to get through to solving a problem that matters in the world to people. But once you get to $10 million, it’s like starting a whole new game. It’s like going from college football to the NFL. You have to learn a whole new playbook. The thing that got you from zero to $10 million is not going to get you from $10 to $50 million. What’s going to get you from 10 to $50 million is building a great team and building great systems that can operate without you.

[00:18:08.520] – Speaker 1

Once you get to 10 million in revenue, you want to make yourself completely redundant. You want to make yourself unnecessary in your own company. It’s funny because in the $0 to $10 million, you need to be extremely necessary. You’re creating all this content. You’re doing a lot of the last of the big sales. You’re closing the big deals. You’re reaching out. You’re doing a lot in the zero to 10 million in the first three to five years. But once you get to 10 million, it can’t be about you anymore. There’s no way to scale as a single individual beyond five to 10 million without building a great team. Who are the key people you need in this scaling phase? You’re going to need a really great head of sales that’s not you. You’re going to need a great head of marketing that’s not you. So great CRO and CMO. You’re eventually, probably around 15 or 20 million, going to need a CFO or controller who’s obviously not you. And you’re going to eventually, by the time you’re 20, 25 million, going to need a great head of HR who can handle recruiting all the people you’re bringing in in eye contact.

[00:19:11.180] – Speaker 1

We were hiring 10 people a month. We were going to hire 10 great people a month, 2-3 a week, you need a system for recruiting. Then you need a system for compensating and evaluating the performance of all the existing people you have on your team. This is where you want to build a system that can operate while you sleep. The key to making a lot of money is to make money while you sleep. Key to making money while you sleep is to build systems that can operate without you. In this phase, this phase two of a business going from, I guess, phase three, Phase one is product market fit, zero to one million. Phase 2 is 1-10 million of founder-led growth. Then phase 3 is scaling, and that’s 10 to 100 million to the ARR. In that third phase, you need to build a system that can work without you. I encourage encourage all the CEOs I coach within that 10 to 100 million ARR range to take a month off every summer. That is non-negotiable and in which they will not be checking email, in which the only way to get to them is if their one deputy that they have, either their COO or EA, has their SMS.

[00:20:21.960] – Speaker 1

In a real emergency, they can SMS them. But no slack, no email, no phone calls, literally take a vacation They can go start a new company or work on a new project. Great. But don’t do anything within the operations of your existing business for four weeks, for a full month every summer. The reason why you do that is because you have to find where the points of failure are, and you have to find where the business can’t scale without you. The only way to identify the areas that require you is to lead. It’s so that it’s just, Hey, we tried to do this thing and there wasn’t the right protocol in place to make the decision. Or we needed this password and it wasn’t saved. You need to figure out how to get the business to grow. The idea is you take a month off and the business, when you come back, needs to be stronger and it needs to be bigger than when you left. If you keep doing that every year, your team will make sure that they develop systems that don’t require you. That’s what you want. You want at that phase to have systems that don’t require you.

[00:21:23.010] – Speaker 1

Once you get to that 20 million, 30 million, 40 million in ARR range, which is hard, but it is definitely doable, That’s when you start to think about exiting, which is, of course, the next phase which we can talk about. But that’s when you start to think about, do you test the market? Do you get an M&A advisor? When’s the right time to sell? Those are the steps so far. Figure out your unit economics, figure out what you can pay to acquire a customer, do outbound, do paid advertising, do inbound, create your growth machine, raise capital if necessary, start scaling by building a system that can operate without you, and then the last step, think about when the right time to exit is. Episode 13, I chatted with Andrew Davis on how to hire your first marketing leader for a B2B SaaS. As you’re looking to scale to 10 million ARR, often the founder’s time is incredibly scarce in terms of the resource within the business. And so you’ve got to choose where you put your time. This is the same for marketing readers, too. As things get busier and bigger, you’ve got to choose where you have the highest impact.

[00:22:20.080] – Speaker 1

One of the pieces of advice that I was given myself and that I’ve given to multiple other people is to make sure a portion of your time is working on the business, not in the business. You’ve got to start getting outside of the business and looking back in, speaking to people who are outside, thinking about how this business as an asset grows, what are the resources you need, the leaders you need, the budgets you need. When you’re going to that scaled process of 10 million and beyond, make sure you’re working on the business, not just in the business. In episode 14, I chatted with Greg Head on seven ways to build a successful SaaS without big VC funding. Less than a million in revenue, you’re a startup, you’re figuring it out, it’s an experiment. You don’t really You’re trying to find it. What is it? And so forth. By the time you get to $10 million in revenue, whether your product has $100,000 a year per customer annual contract value or $300 a month contract I’ll tell you, by the time you get to $10 million in revenue, you have a factory that’s up and running.

[00:23:21.840] – Speaker 1

It’s no longer the scrappy startup founder. You are the CEO, and you have a leadership team that can deliver the value to the customers every day, marketing, sales, onboarding, product, R&D, and operations. You have a factory that can run, and the founder isn’t doing most of any of those jobs anymore. So you need a senior leadership team by the time you get to 10 million. Otherwise, it’s a mess and you won’t get there. It’s a factory to deliver the value in a consistent and efficient way, in a reliable way. And by the time you get to 10 million, you have a factory for acquiring customers efficiently. You’re doing two things. You’re saying, I’m acquiring customers and I’m delivering value. It’s not just, Oh, I sold my this deal and I talked to that person and did it like a startup. And it’s not a little bit of everything like a little bit more of a startup there. They have a reliable go-to-market motion. They’re adding layers to their revenue, expanding regions, expanding products, expanding their market, maybe expanding their vertical market focus, their ICP focus. So they have a way to do it. So any $10 million software CEO will say, There’s a hundred things we can do to acquire customers, but we are awesome at these two things.

[00:24:43.130] – Speaker 1

And that accounts for 80% of how we get new customers. You also would need to have fixed your churn problem. So there’s phases of the churn problem. But by that time, you know who the right customer is, you know how to get them on board, you know what features they want. You’ve segmented your customers and you do different things with different customers. Customers, and you have a reasonable churn rate and you can upsell them in the future. No software company gets to $10 million without fixing the logo churn problem and the revenue retention problem. In episode 15, I chatted with Chris Cunningham on how to leverage social media to become a $4 billion company. You got to get a little more relentless, right? I think you got to pay attention to every customer that comes in. You got to ask for referrals. You got to build. What we would do is we would get someone in, a small team in Home Depot, and then find a way to close that team and then find a way to really go through that team and say, Okay, look, what would it take to get your whole company to use this?

[00:25:36.740] – Speaker 1

I see your marketing team, what would it take? What do you need us to do? And start getting whole entire teams using you. Even if you charge less per seat and hook up a deal, I think you’re really going to make some deals. You’re going to really make some… It’s not devaluing your product. It’s getting more people on. It’s getting bigger, and then they’re going to tell more people about it. From that 10K to 10 mil, we really started doing a good job in infiltrating teams and just started adding immense value and then figuring out what you need to build, be very strategic in what you build. And then also find a really cool way, something that’s free where people can find you. Something that you can build and then just not charge for it. We did a little tool that would allow you to clip and things like that in your Chrome extension. We built a Chrome extension that we give away free. So find something that’s viral, that’s easy to use, that you can give someone, and they use it free and they start using it. In episode 16, I chatted with Adam Glazer on how to set up and grow a SaaS affiliate program.

[00:26:27.690] – Speaker 1

Once you’re at that point, then you’re going from growth to efficiency and starting to think about investing in things like maybe some tools that allow you to look at incrementality of all your marketing, which is not… That’s not directly growth. It’s a cost center. It’s like, if you’re investing in some tool that’s going to have a cost without being directly tied to revenue, but it’s going to help you be more efficient in the long term. I think at that point, you’re making those investments. Whereas at the beginning, it’s growth at any cost. Even if you’re losing money, you’re winning customers and scaling, and then you get to a certain point where you’re at critical mass, and now it’s okay, we have to start thinking about profitability. How do we be more intelligent with our media buying? We need to invest in some tools and processes to see that and optimize. In episode 17, I chatted with Angeley Mullins on how to build a brand strategy. Focus on your influencing. So whether it is founder-led influencing content, storytelling. Some founders like to be the influencers in their industries and spaces, some don’t. But if it’s the CEO or someone else in the C-level or whoever it might be, really just focus on your influencing.

[00:27:42.210] – Speaker 1

Because what you want to do is you want to create that movement within your industry. Getting to, whether it’s 10 million ARR or 10K MRR, whichever milestone you’re at, the first stage is about setting yourself up and establishing yourself and creating a story and proving that you have product market and you can get some revenue going. The second stage and further stages is showing that you are masters of your industry, that you’re here to stay, and that you are leaders of a movement. So think about Canva, for example. Melanie Perkins, she couldn’t get funding from however many investors. She finally got the funding, and she brings the money in, and people are like, What do you mean, this little design tool? What is this? She proved out the product market fit. They got everything going, but then Canva has created this movement. It’s something that I think everyone was just blown away by in the industry. So focus on creating that movement. In episode 18, I chatted with April Dunford on how to position your B2B SaaS for explosive growth. In my opinion, the first wave of customers is all about validating your thesis. Are we competing against who we thought we were competing against?

[00:28:56.550] – Speaker 1

Are our differentiators what we thought they were? What What is the value we can deliver that no one else can? And who’s a really good fit for that? Most companies go through a phase where they have a wave of customers where they’re trying to prove out those things. Once you’ve proven that out, then you’re looking at, Well, how can I really smash my foot on the gas and go after precisely these customers with precisely this message because I know I can beat these competitors all day with exactly that? Once you’ve gone through this first wave where we validated what I would call your positioning thesis, now we can really tighten up the positioning and just run right at that market and actually invest some money in marketing and sales resources to go get it because we know that it works. In episode 19, I chatted with Sam Dunning on how to build a profitable SaaS SEO strategy. Building out systems at scale, really. So most of our clients do a big multi-channel approach. They now understand the platforms that their ICP are on. They have a deep understanding of their dream client’s top three most painful, expensive problems, like the impact of those problems and how to position their product as a pain care as the solution.

[00:30:10.680] – Speaker 1

So they’re probably not just working on demand capture channels. So They’re probably doing a mix of organic search SEO. They’ve marketed well to that bottom of funnel, mid-funnel, and working on the top funnel. They’re probably doing paid media, so they’re probably doing Google paid search. If they’re a SaaS, they’re probably on paid review sites, be it G2 Terra, trust whatever makes sense for your offer. Ideally, their execs are doing what we said at a personal brand level. So they’re all posting on LinkedIn, building awareness around their product, their offer, and their brand. Those motions will get you to a decent level in terms of MRR. But then it depends on the go-to-market, right? Whether they’re product-led, sales-led, marketing-led, and all that good stuff. I suppose I’ve got a bit of a different background because I run an agency of BreakingB2B, so I’m not SaaS, but I work with a A lot of SaaS marketers, a lot of SaaS founders. And I probably have that strange mindset that outbound still works as well. So I’m often of the case like start with a no brainer channels. So start with capturing that 5% that’s searching for offer now with paid media, Google’s paid search, SEO, paid review sites, etc.

[00:31:21.800] – Speaker 1

Build up demand for your offer. So for those folks that aren’t necessarily in market now, but maybe wanting to learn about your or educate themselves or entertain themselves. So maybe that involves starting a podcast around your industry where maybe you invite potential prospects or clients or industry veterans, a bit like this. Or maybe you do solo episodes so you can build trust around your industry and showcase expertise. And then that fuels the demand engine. And that content is then distributed to LinkedIn. So your ICP continues to consume that, goes out on YouTube, goes out on the audio podcast. Maybe your sales team use that for enablement as well. And I still believe outbound sales works pretty well as well. So I’m a fan of things like cold email. I think cold calling can work if you do it in a strategic manner. You know who’s in contact, you know the right message, you know the right timing. And the last thing is experiments. I run experiments myself. A lot of companies I work with on experiments. Quite often that’s a case of what could be a risk but might make sense to the channel to experiment with.

[00:32:21.120] – Speaker 1

Is it cold email? Is it LinkedIn ads? Is it doing a founder brand on LinkedIn? Is it something else? Was it starting a podcast? Going in with a hypothesis that my middle client probably consumes this, probably will respond well to this, but I’m not 100 %. I’m going to give it a good test, be that two quarters, half a year, a year, depending on the typical run rate of the channel. And then giving it a good test, seeing how it goes, giving it a fair experiment. If it works, great. Ramp it up. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned from it. It’s not the end of the world. Move on to the next test. We run experiments with my agency all the time. Different channels, different ideas. And I think it’s a good way to see what works as well. In episode 20, I We’ll share it with Melissa Rosenthal on how to build up a brand authority as a B2B SaaS. That’s the growth engine where you are incredibly sticky. People use you every day. There’s growth loops where you’re able to retain pricing, but there’s instances where you can upsell in a very smart and strategic way.

[00:33:20.730] – Speaker 1

People are recommending you to other people. The customer experience is next to flawless. You’re getting ratings on all of the big sites that say that you’re number one, number two, we know what they are. But I think it’s that motion of that’s where the credibility meets is really important. And I think it starts at that zero to 10K. And then from there, it’s like adding fuel to the fire there. These are the motions that are working. And then it’s also building brand. You have to build brand to get to 10 million, which doesn’t need to be doing a Super Bowl or spending millions of dollars on performance, but it is building brand. It’s founder-led, potentially. It’s having a very clear point of view. It’s trying new things. It’s being happy about it. There’s less place to grow ever before. Seo is at a really interesting flex point where, I don’t know, we saw the HubSpot drop off from 9 million to what, 800,000 monthly organics? It’s not good. The future of SEO, and also with the operator, we just saw that now that it can go in and do the entire SEO function itself. So what does that mean?

[00:34:19.460] – Speaker 1

It means that the commodalization of SEO is just at this point where everything is going to look the same and feel the same. It’s starting to think outside the box. And I think a lot of people are just too used to the playbook. So my short answer, I think it’s really you got to think about new ways of thinking to grow to 10 million AR at this point. You got the fundamentals, correct. Great. But then now you have to completely adopt a new mindset to get there to the next phase. This is the end of the summary episode. As this is season five already, you could listen to the summary episodes from season one, two, three, and four, or, of course, dive into a specific episode of a person you liked. Before you do any of these things, could you give us a quick follow? Could you leave us a review on the platform you’re currently listening? It’s going to help us to boost the algorithms. Also, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Joran Hoffmann, and I’m the founder of Reditus. Either way, thank you for listening, and see you in season 6.