S6E22 – How to grow your B2B SaaS to 10M ARR? Advice from 20 experts

What does it really take to grow from $10K MRR to $10M ARR? learn the steps to grow SaaS from $10K MRR to $10M ARR. That leap isn’t just big; it’s transformative. It marks the shift from being a scrappy startup to becoming a high-growth, scalable SaaS business with a repeatable revenue engine.

In Season 6 of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, Joran Hofman, founder of Reditus, sat down with 20 industry experts: founders, operators, and advisors who have either made this leap themselves or helped others do it. Together, they explored what it really takes to scale successfully.

In this special episode, we’ve compiled all 20 answers into one insight-packed session you can absorb in just 30 to 40 minutes. If you’re serious about scaling, this isn’t just worth your time; it could change your entire growth trajectory. Don’t miss it.

Season 6 full episodes

• Episode 1: ⁠Kristi Faltorusso on Customer Success⁠
• Episode 2: ⁠Aaron Ross on Predictable Revenue⁠
• Episode 3: ⁠Clark Barron on Demand Gen Strategy⁠
• Episode 4: ⁠Pablo Assensio on Product-Led Growth⁠
• Episode 5: ⁠Peter Loving on UX and Revenue⁠
• Episode 6: ⁠Tom Shapiro on SEO for SaaS⁠
• Episode 7: ⁠Mina Golesorkhi on SaaS Hiring⁠
• Episode 8: ⁠Johnny Staker on SaaS Growth Strategies⁠
• Episode 9: ⁠Elliott Rayner on Strategic Storytelling⁠
• Episode 10: ⁠Craig Brown on ICP and Messaging⁠
• Episode 11: ⁠Ben Murray on Financial Strategy⁠
• Episode 12: ⁠Nicolas Calabrese on International Expansion⁠
• Episode 13: ⁠Kevin Lems on SaaS Pricing in the AI Era⁠
• Episode 14: ⁠Ramly John on Onboarding Strategies⁠
• Episode 15: ⁠Patrick Cumming on Paid Ads⁠
• Episode 16: ⁠Zoltan Vardy on Founder-Led Sales⁠
• Episode 17: ⁠Alexander Estner on Go-To-Market Playbook⁠
• Episode 18: ⁠Frank Sonders on Go-To-Market Strategy⁠
• Episode 19: ⁠Ezean and Oji Odeze on Product Management Lessons

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Speaker 1

Scaling from 10K MR to 10 million AAR is a big step. I know. It basically means going from a scrappy startup to a serious sustainable business and all about building a repeatable go-to-market motion and a repeatable revenue machine. In season 6, I interview 20 industry experts who either are on their way themselves, have done it before, or have advised companies on how to actually do this. I all asked them at the end of the podcast interview the same question, what advice would they give a SaaS founder who’s on their way from 10K MR to 10 million ARR? In this episode, we combined their answers, so you can listen to the advice of 20 people in around 30 to 40 minutes. So it’s going to be super valuable and interesting to listen to this one. For the people who don’t know, my name is Joran Hofman, and I’m the founder of Reditus, the affiliate management platform and network purely built for B2B SaaS, currently on my way to 10 million ARR as well. And I’m the host of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. Without further ado, let’s dive into the advice of my guests, we’re going to start off with episode one, where I interviewed Christie Fauteruso on the CS playbook and how to scale retention and growth in B2B SaaS.

[00:01:10.680] – Speaker 1

You have to figure out what works and scale that. It’s easy to build process and infrastructure that works at a specific period of time to solve a very specific objective, that is going to be and needs to be iterative. Just because you built something and it’s working today, what works at 5 million, won’t work at 10 million, won’t work at 20 million. We’ll work at 100 million. So your processes and your infrastructure need to be iterative, and you need to continue to measure the success and understand when those moments where you have to pivot, when those occur. It doesn’t happen at 10 million, it doesn’t happen at 10 million. It doesn’t happen at 20 million. I wish it was that clean and obvious for us all to say, Yeah, okay, great. We hit 20 million today. Let’s go back to the drawing board. It doesn’t work that way. So you have to have the right indicators that say and suggest, Oh, we’ve gotten to a certain place where the process is starting to break down and be able to get ahead of it and start to design for that future state. And there’s going to be certain parts that are going to be scalable, and you’re going to have to figure out how do you pull those levers at the appropriate time.

[00:02:10.420] – Speaker 1

And I think that’s going to be the hardest part of going from that 10 million to that 100 million is understanding those pivotal moments and when to go on to that next stage. In episode two, I interviewed Aaron Ross with the title of From Impossible to Inevitable: How to Create a Predictable Revenue for your B2B SaaS. Working harder is not a great solution, despite what you think of Elon Musk. You’re not Elon Musk. It’s more important to figure out what your thing is and to get a team of people that can focus on what they do best. It’s really about the team at this point and helping people focus on what they’re really good at and offload what they’re not good at. In episode 3, I interviewed Clark Baron on how to build a high impact demand gen strategy. Delegate. Know your team better than anyone. Know your entire organization in and out. Don’t hover. Don’t keep your hands on everything. Don’t micromanage and whatnot. We’re starting to see organizations that are accomplishing those bigger numbers with fewer and fewer people. You can do that, but those teams are the ones that are so comfortable in who they are and what the organization is at that point, where it came from, how it evolved to get there.

[00:03:26.220] – Speaker 1

That’s how you do that because a lot of the plays, and I know there are some very canned answers that you could say for a question like this, but the way you want to look at it is take what you have done along the way to get from. I know we made a huge leap there, and a lot of things have changed there. You could have been on round two if you wanted to, or it could have been 10 years in that gap. At that point, you should have it pretty dialed in as to what works and what doesn’t. So get Getting to that, actually scaling means operationalizing everything that is already working and leaving room for experimentation, changes in the market dynamics, having a better sense of things that are going on with competitors and whatnot. Your optics should be wide open all the time. At that point, you should have built a brand that is not the top fuel drag racer that could, if you wanted to, get 10K We’re talking about the diesel that just won’t stop. It goes a little bit slower, but it won’t stop. That’s the brand and demand machine that you should have built.

[00:04:40.470] – Speaker 1

And of course, I’m just relating all these things or just speaking about marketing stuff. But there are so many other things to consider when you’re trying to hit a number like that. A lot of it doesn’t involve marketing and sales. Your product should have nailed customer service and other things. If I’m giving advice to a founder, it’s keep doing what you’re doing and make sure you’re delegating and employing people that you trust, that you know what you’re doing. Because once we start to get beyond that, then you don’t have to answer to anyone, even though you may have previously answered to someone. It’s a pretty important milestone. The thing is, just stick with what you’re doing while allowing for experimentation. In episode 4, I interviewed Pablo Ascendio on to master product-led growth and strategies for SaaS. I would say that optimize for that kinds of expansion revenue in terms of, we talk about wider loops, upgrades, notches, and so on, that requires… You have different ways to get there. But make sure that whatever you are building is helping you to drive that ARR over the 10 million at some point. Then, again, talking about optimization, the onboarding is never a finishing work.

[00:05:55.450] – Speaker 1

You can still optimize that. To keep an eye on your net revenue retention because if it’s over 100%, that means that the growth is compounding and you are in the good place. Also, we talk about PLG loops, but there is also a PLG sales connection that I would definitely advise those companies. Make sure that you convert those high-intent for users into bigger deals. We talk about that in terms of understanding the data and the profile of your customers to see, okay, some of those users that maybe they are using the platform, they have a level of usage that is just for a paid plan, it’s potentially for a enterprise or more complex plan. I think we talk about HubSpot as a good example. In this case, you might remember in the early years that they had this content driving model, which now is under fire with all the AI and so on. But then they move into a freemium-less PLG model, and that was very successful for them. But they also have this sales assistance for the bigger clients. In episode 5, I interviewed Peter Loving on how to triple your revenue with UX, how to optimize conversion, retention, and expansion.

[00:07:03.980] – Speaker 1

If I just focused it on our theme of UX, I would argue the power of UX for SaaS. I would argue that if you give two products all the same benefit, if they have the same marketing team, the same sales team, the same everything, the better product would win. I’ve heard this said in SaaS before. It’s like, you can succeed with an ugly product. And whilst I do know that to be true, I think the market is way more competitive now. I think that if two products were given all of the same parameters, the better product will win. I would say, appreciate the value of design, appreciate how that impacts your users, and invest in good UX talent as your team grows. The people who have skills with B2B, SaaS are now to do it. Hire them in your team, get advice from them you can. I would just suggest that just simply because I come from a product and UX background. I’ve seen the power of it. In episode 6, I interviewed Tom Shapiro on how top B2B SaaS companies are dominating SEO in 2025. Going from 10K to 10 million, what we’re looking to do there is you want to lean into optimizing your conversion rates as much as possible.

[00:08:26.140] – Speaker 1

That would be our recommendation there because you already have a certain you already have a certain level of traction, you already have a certain level of traffic, imagine capitalizing on that traffic to a much greater extent. In other words, monetizing the traffic that you already have much faster and into a much greater extent. And so conversion optimization can take many forms. One of the things you want to look at is your messaging. Can your messaging in your website or your messaging overall across all of your marketing, can that resonate more deeply? Can there be more urgency? Can you hit on their pain points more? A lot of B2B SaaS talk about features and benefits, but they might not talk about pain points and frustrations of the user as much. And so lean into those frustrations in as much detail as you can. That’s very effective. Other ways that you can look at improving your conversion rates might be doing CTA testing. A lot of B2B SaaS, what they’ll do is they’ll create CTAs across their website, and then they’ll forget about them. It’s just set it and forget it. But what we find is if you When you do a CTA analysis, you’ll see which CTAs are working and which aren’t getting any clicks.

[00:09:37.060] – Speaker 1

Then that gives you the opportunity to change them up, to do A/B testing of different CTAs, which is very easy to do nowadays with lots of different types of software. I’ll give you an example. We looked at B2B SaaS recently. The six-week period, all of their CTAs across their website, and over that period, zero people clicked on Contact Us. That means they were wasting a lot of real estate around their website. It just wasn’t something that resonated with them. People didn’t want to talk to a live human being. The book of demo CTAs were working very well for them or to watch this video, that was working very well for them. And so load up on the CTAs that are working well, double down on those, and get rid of the CTAs that are not driving any clicks or only driving minimal clicks. Another thing that I would recommend is behavioral intelligence. So looking at what are they doing on your site, where are they clicking, how How far down the page are they scrolling, what are they paying attention to, and where are they skipping over, and optimizing your site based on their behaviors.

[00:10:38.440] – Speaker 1

In episode seven, I interviewed Mina Gossi on master SaaS hiring and how you can build a high performance team. Don’t save on your management line. Make sure that you find the best people for your management, whatever it costs, whatever it means. You just need the right person because if you don’t have the right person at this stage in your company who is bringing your vision down to the business units and the departments, then the whole culture will be impacted for generations after that. Having the right management, don’t save on budget, don’t save on anything, just make sure to hire the right person. In episode 8, I interview Johnny Staker on SaaS Growth Strategies: How Founders Can Quickly Scale Revenue and Achieve a Profitable Exit. We’ve stepped out of the feasibility of founder led sales, which usually peaks out at around 3 million. Things start to break and it starts to become impossible to do. So we’ve taken it to 3 million on founder-led sales, which I’d advise any founder to commit to. And the next phase is obviously we’ve built this wonderful motion across 12 pillars. We’re selling in a really human way. We’re driving discovery calls and demos from very meaningful one-to-one conversations.

[00:12:04.780] – Speaker 1

That’s great when it’s founder-led. So how do we then go and replicate it? So the biggest challenge and the biggest focus then is, at around that point, how do we find probably a VP of sales who shares the founder’s ethos and vision for all the things we’ve talked about, human-centric behavior, smart in the machines, that stuff, and is willing to do the same work that the founder would because then that’s going to be VP plus founder. I think that’s the biggest challenge most then find is, how do I find the right VP that we’re aligned with? Then it’s a case of, how do we train our teams so that we can duplicate the same efforts across those twelve pillars and it doesn’t break, and we don’t start getting people going renegade, not following up in the wrong way, trying to automate too soon, and almost done doing all the stuff we’ve done. So I think the next phase is about replicating the founder in a VP role and then training a team to behave the way we do to maintain results at scale. In episode nine, I interviewed Elliot Reiner on strategic storytelling for SaaS, getting everyone aligned on why you matter.

[00:13:21.860] – Speaker 1

This is where you start to believe in brand. And it’s a very difficult thing to do, especially for founders, because it’s the one thing that you might not get clear ROI on every month. No matter how a lot of people tell you about how you detect a great brand, it’s really tough. It happens in the background. But all you have to ask yourself is to look at your favorite and most successful companies and competitors, and I guarantee you they have a strong brand. That’s why you have to learn to be uncomfortable that, yes, we’re in this age where we want to measure every single little detail, but that might harm you because one of the most important things to long term growth is brand, and it’s not that easy to measure. You have to have a little bit of trust in that area. In episode 10, I interviewed Craig Brown on the SaaS founder’s guide to ICP and create messaging that clicks with the buyers. I’ve spoken a lot about the process of narrowing down to a target market to a target ICP buyer. But then that point comes that you go, Okay, so at what point do I stop narrowing and then I actually start targeting new segments?

[00:14:31.060] – Speaker 1

The question for me is, have you got a system of acquiring those customers that you could say is broadly repeatable? Have you got that message market fit? Have you got a good onboarding process? Are customers sticking with you? Are they happy? Have you figured out the use case that they’re solving? Basically, the signals of product market fit. A BDR, SDR, you’ve got a customer success manager, someone that can do all the marketing stuff, hand it over to them, and it’s this engine that runs and it continues to generate new customers, great, you’re ready to move on to the next segment. That’s something to really think about during the growth stages is the moment you feel like you can start handing that over to other people, that’s where you’re ready to grow and broaden your target market. The new challenges you’ll come across when you’re on your way to 10 million is you’re potentially entering new markets. If you’re based in the UK, let’s say, for example, or Germany, and you want to enter the US market, you might be tempted to just take this very successful model that you’ve already built and just transplant it into the US market.

[00:15:35.640] – Speaker 1

But the reality is they’ve got different laws and regulations that might be new competitors, different competitors in the market. So your product looks different compared to theirs. Your differentiators are different. Their needs are different. So there are all these assumptions that because it’s a member of the same alliances and organizations, this market must therefore be really similar to ours. That’s something that you need to ensure that you are taking a much more thorough positioning approach to entering a big market like the US and any other market within Europe for that matter. For growth stage startups, have you finally got to something repeatable? How can you derisk the entry into new markets so that you can get to 10 million plus? Are you struggling to find a cost-effective and scalable marketing channel? Check out where it is. We help you to have other people recommend your SaaS, and you would only pay them when they deliver you paid clients, making it very cost-effective and scalable marketing channel. Want to learn more? Go to getReditus. Com. In episode 11, I interviewed Ben Murray, the SaaS CFO, and he created a playbook around magic margins and financial strategy for founders.

[00:16:43.110] – Speaker 1

If you’re nearing or you’re on a path to 10 million ARR fast or near there, you should have my five-pillar SASmetrics framework implemented. You’ll need that data to scale your business and also if you’re going to go through any due diligence. So I would say that’s expected. If you’re about 10 million or growing to 10, that would be my expectation. Expansion. I talked to a founder who was under 2 million and already had implemented a lot of my SASmetrics framework, which was impressive. I told them, You’re ahead of 99% of the founders out there. Now, he took my course, so he knew what to do. But at 10, you do need to put some financial framework in place. In episode 12, I interviewed Nicolas Calabrese on how to scale your SaaS internationally, a founder’s guide on going global. If you haven’t already, start preparing for international expansion, As we discussed, there’s so many different things to keep in mind and prepare. Start from there, and again, start small and then scale. First of all, do market research on the markets that you want to enter. Analyze your current use base to see where you already have a user active in different countries.

[00:17:46.940] – Speaker 1

Then analyze your customer journey, prepare the tech stack, prepare the teams, and then launch the initial experience, gather data, and iterate on your findings. But the market research is really important because it will guide you in your market expansion. In episode 13, I interviewed Kevin Lempz on how to future proof your B2B SaaS pricing and strategies for the AI era and beyond. By then, you should have defined, Hey, we’ve got 10 or 50 customers, of course, dependent on your ACV. But what are we good at? Where do we, as founders, come from? What do we see the commonality in the clients that we have? Let’s say you have 20 customers. And That’s stupid. That’s helpful, perhaps. But 10 of them are taxi companies. Then maybe that’s something you’re good at. Maybe it’s something you should stick with. Maybe that’s something your solution should be core focused on. Let’s say in this case, I take the CapDriver example. Are there enough cab drivers in Amsterdam? The answer is yes. Are there enough cab drivers in the Netherlands, in this case, the Netherlands, to scale our company to 10 billion R. Is that the answer? Most likely, you want to say if you corely focus on cab drivers, maybe it’s not.

[00:19:07.500] – Speaker 1

Maybe you already realized super early if you make some calculations, total addressable market, total deliverable market, of the sell of the market. Is that perhaps Europe? Or is it perhaps globally? Could be the answer. Don’t be afraid in that sense. But if that is the answer, we want to be the most prominent taxi driver, cab driver solution in the world, then that’s the answer. You have to, in this sense, a little bit, again, think of your sales process. Again, how much velocity can I create? How easy is it to close an account? The thing is, what you are solving, there are likely five other vendors in the world that can solve this, or in a similar manner. However, if you are talking to a CapDrivers’ company, to the CEO of this CapDrivers’ company with 10,000 CapDrivers, and they are talking to five vendors. One comes from 10,000 employees. They solve this in every market and they solve this in every market, and they solve this in manufacturing, they solve it in SaaS, they solve it in construction. You are the only one where the story is, we do cab drivers, we don’t do anything other than cab drivers.

[00:20:24.360] – Speaker 1

We understand your day-to-day operation. We know you run it to this. We know you have to lease cars. We know You want to bound that to employees, I don’t know. If that is your story, you will win out of these five accounts. One is make sure you have a strong story on your ideal customer profile by pinpointing a vertical who you can win. Then ask yourself, is that vertical big enough to just do the Netherlands or just do DACH, or wherever our watchers are tuning in from? Create a target audience that’s large enough. If Europe is the answer, Europe is the answer. Then from there on, stick to that ICP. Go. Because if you resonate with your target audience, you will be the preferred supplier if you’re commonly solving for them. The story from that one is the same. You will solve their problem by everything you’re going to develop in your platform because it’s purposely solves problems for cat drivers, taxi companies in this case. That’s just step one. Clearly, ICP, this is the type of accounts we’re going to close. We are the best in this vertical. We’re going to do that. Is the target audience large enough in my of the country or do I need to go globally or continental?

[00:21:49.840] – Speaker 1

Then secondly, there are stages all the way to 10 million in the ARR. Again, classifying, do we want to do this in a PLG motion on smaller accounts? I would say around 5 million in revenue, maybe above that, you should stick to that motion to keep the focus on that motion, to keep the focus on the target audience. At some point, let’s say between 5 and 8 million, You want to include a second go-to-market motion. It could be partner lab. If we have a cab driver’s company that becomes a customer and they have 10,000 cabs in their service or employees in their service, they will benefit way more from us and we will drive more revenue out of that if you found that answer. Make sure you address that market with a different motion. There could be overlapping cases where they still want to log into the system first before they get in touch with sales. But make sure you address the size of companies inside your vertical in a different manner than you address the smaller part of it. I think if you stick with that, raise your focus. Everyone in the organization, from development, support, customer success, sales, marketing, Everyone knows these are our IDM customer profiles, and they will love us because we do what we do.

[00:23:07.640] – Speaker 1

That’s where hybrid growth should come in. In episode 14, I interviewed Ramly John, RG on building habit transforming hybrid onboarding from first value to enterprise success. At this point now, there’s this whole organizations around success, product, marketing. The real true challenge is now about aligning on the same team, getting everybody rolling on the same team. That’s where I think this is where it’s now thinking about organization. How do I make sure that multiple team members from different functions are working together? There’s multiple ways they can do this. They can create temporary growth pods that we did at AppQs, where I was in marketing, somebody was in product, somebody was in design, we’re tackling specific problems around activation, retention for a short amount of time, 3-6 months. Or you can take an approach that HubSpot or Amplitude does, where they have full orgs that are cross-functional that tackle those particular part of the funnel. I think that’s where at that point, now I’m thinking about how do I make sure my team members continue to talk to each other. That’s where the unlock can happen when you have insights from customer success sales flowing into product and marketing to inform them with each other.

[00:24:26.240] – Speaker 1

Because at that point, a lot of people have specialized in their particular role. And in that case, I’m thinking a lot about how do I make sure that they’re continuing to be aligned with each other. In episode 15, I interviewed Patrick Cumming on why your paid ads aren’t working and how to fix them. Like 10 million ARR sounds big, right? And to some degree it is, but it’s not so big that you just have endless pools of money to spend. So the first thing is this is not an excuse to try and target your entire TAM, especially if you’re not allocating the right amount of budget to do that. So I think at this stage, what I would probably be doing is looking at what segments are working right now. Look at how can we scale those segments. So if we’ve already run some paid ads, is there enough existing demand for us to be able to increase spend on Google Ads? That’s easy to work out because you can just look at something called search impression share. Let’s say you’ve got a campaign with all of your core high intent keywords. If your search impression share is 10%, that means you’re not showing up for 90% of user searches on those terms, you can probably scale that a lot more.

[00:25:38.870] – Speaker 1

Theoretically, you can scale it so that you show up 90% of the time. Not always possible in a high competition ad market, but there’s at least some wiggle room there. On the paid social side, I would probably be looking to implement a couple of additional smaller segments. Again, not going for the small TAM. You can do this. A really good way to do this is to rank your actual existing customers into tier lists. Look at, okay, which industries and job titles are the highest value for us, are the easiest to work with, have the fastest sales cycles, have the lowest acquisition costs, and then build a tier list of, okay, it makes most sense to go after this segment right now, even though we could service these segments. That’s the challenge. Yes, you could, but you just want to do best bang for your buck. So I would go for the most valuable segment, implement them first, and then steadily start scaling new segments as opposed to trying to go and do everything all at once. And I think also at this 10 million mark, that’s when you can start experimenting with some channels outside of just Google Ads and LinkedIn ads, where most B2B SaaS companies will typically start.

[00:26:50.960] – Speaker 1

That’s when you can invest in a tool like Primer or Metadata that gives you LinkedIn level targeting for meta ads and Google ads. And then you can start actually getting more audience penetration because this is again another myth that B2B founders love to say, which is my audience isn’t on Facebook or Instagram. And I’m like, there’s what 3 billion users or something. I guarantee your audience is on there. You just need to be able to target them. You’re going to need a third party audience builder to do that. That’s the time when you can start also scaling channels as well. In episode 16, I interviewed Zoltan Vardy on mastering founder-led sales for your B2B SaaS. So you build it, but now you actually have to sell it. I think when you’re going into the next phase of development, it turns less from those fundamental building blocks into scalability. And that’s where you really have to create very clear company-wide goals and KPIs. You have to create a very transparent way of tracking performance, whether it’s through lead generation or conversion or retention. You start building a sales team, you start defining roles, you You train people on a playbook, you delegate responsibility, and you institutionalize a lot of the things that at the early stages you were just figuring out along the way.

[00:28:09.480] – Speaker 1

If you do that well, you actually will find yourself really hitting your stride and I think the great example I have is on Tavo, the loyalty technology, the SaaS company I’m a chairman of. These guys I’ve known from day one was just a couple of founders, and they’re trying to go through the tough parts of finding product-market fit. And then they got to a point where they were to hire a global sales leader. The founders stepped back from day-to-day sales, but still kept their face to the market, and they institutionalized a lot of things. And that’s basically what’s created, put them from a standpoint of making a couple of maybe 30, 40,000 MMRR to what it is today, which is probably over 400,000 MMRR. In episode 18, I interviewed Alexander Esne on the three-step go-to-market playbook, Growing your SaaS from zero to $1 million ARR. I do believe that customer success can be a big revenue driver. So implementing the mindset of customer success is more than support. So it can be one of your main revenue drivers. And I saw this happening, for instance, for the same company I mentioned before, that now customer success is the main source of new pipeline.

[00:29:13.740] – Speaker 1

They really build in a referral engine. Every time they talk to existing clients, they get one or two referrals for potential buyers, and this is handed over to the sales team. So they are number one pipeline source. And same for implementing expanding expansion goals. Don’t see customer success purely to retain clients, but also to drive a new business, or not new business, but expansion revenue. In episode 19, I interviewed Frank Sonders on how to future proof your go-to-market strategy, going from AI hype to real results. I typically think the one million, typically that step is now two, three million for different reasons, inflations, whatever. But essentially, my belief is that to this market, two, three million, you can do a lot of cool stuff without a big team. We scale nine employees to a million. Two employees with just a few engineers in support. Then at two, three, two million, we started to hire go-to-market people because I knew it back then, but it was a point where you’re like, damn, I’m never going to scale it on my own to 10 million. Never. It’s just not going to happen. It forces you, and it doesn’t matter how many AI agents I would apply.

[00:30:16.820] – Speaker 1

Even though we’re super lean and mean back in the days, you need a team. If somebody was watching the Silicon Valley, you need your stallions. You need the other CEOs that they used to work for. They’re called the core 50 employees. You need a team that will get you to 10 million, the key team in the early days of any company. Finding that team is super difficult. I highly recommend nearly every founder, hire, fost, and fire, fost. That is super important. I think one of the key things that we do once you’re 2, 3 million to 10 million, the number one thing you will be doing, it doesn’t matter how else we’re doing, is you’ll be hiring people aggressively and you’ll be firing them also aggressively. Ultimately, the dilemma is that there is a huge problem that you can’t really know whether these people that you’re hiring are actually good for the job. It doesn’t matter how many interviews you’re going to do. Doing more interviews does not de-risk, unfortunately enough. The best thing that you can do for your business, if you’re done one or two interviews and you feel like, I think this could be something here, just get them into your…

[00:31:09.480] – Speaker 1

Put the bums on seats as quick as possible. Give them the tools, the budget, everything. Run it for two, three months and see if you have the conviction on that employee. Just like he sees you have conviction on founders, have a feeling whether you have conviction, whether you see things going up or not. There’s the CEO of Revolut here in Europe. He says that he understands whether it’s a yes or no in two weeks. I can actually do that as well, I think, quite a while in two weeks. I can figure out this person is for us or not. Two weeks, like a person I don’t need, but we have this period of three months. By default, you will be let go by default in three months. That means we build a business case in Currently, there’s three of us, three cofounders, another person. We build a conviction that are we keeping this person or not? Everybody has to say yes or has to agree that we are keeping this person and we’re building a business case. And anybody Everybody in a team can veto to pass the probation. It has happened in engineering product that engineering product says, We’re keeping this person, and I have vetoed, and that person has been let go.

[00:32:11.300] – Speaker 1

There has to be conviction across go-to-market and product engineering that this is a person that definitely keeping every time up to 50 employees, because beyond 50, you’ll be forced to have management layers. But right now, we have no managers in the company. Imagine running a 40 people team, three cofounders, no manager. How you’re able to do that is by hiring what I call autonomous humans. Humans that will feel the ownership in their territory that they’re doing. Another guy that I listened to, actually, he called them entrepreneurs. Essentially, people are the CEO of your own turf. That’s how you can think about it. You have big sense of ownership. You want to make it, you want to grow this baby. The vice versa example, when do you know to let them go, is when you feel like you’re babysitting. When you feel like as a CEO or whatever, as a manager, you feel like you’re doing babysitting, hardcore babysitting in a company up to 50 employees, it’s a sign you have to let them go, typically, because you are spending as a manager or as an individual a lot of time managing these people to an extent where you feel like, damn, all that time spent.

[00:33:11.830] – Speaker 1

But really, the great employees, I think in every company, are the ones that are fully autonomous or as much as that can be. The big part is just hiring in people. I think this topic isn’t discussed as much as it should be, especially from the 2, 3 million mark to 10 million mark. That is the topic. The other topics or areas of importance naturally is, let’s call it the process of how does the business compound and everything that we do. For example, what doesn’t compound is me spending money on Google Ads because I know I’m just throwing thousands of dollars into Google Ads and it’s like a bottomless pit that doesn’t compound. What does compound is content, YouTube, word of mouth, brand. It should be easier for you to scale your business. You need to build a process in your business where unit economics gets better, margins get better, or your top line gets better. Figure how to compound from 3 to 10 million, super important because otherwise Otherwise, you will not succeed from 10 million then to 50 million if you haven’t built that logic and the process in your business. In our case, the compound, there’s multiple things we do, but from a product standpoint, the way we compound is by building multiple softwares that we stack on top of each other.

[00:34:14.200] – Speaker 1

It’s called the software compound model or startup compound model. Same thing, really. That’s how we’re compounding. The more products we ship, the more good products we ship, horizontally, there’s a lot of products. We sell it as the same user, our business compounds and the users buy multiple products from us. Same as Apple. There’s a logic that you have to build. There’s a lot that goes, I think, into strategy from 3 to 10 million on how to get this business really big. Because we are a team that goes big or goes home. Big for us or for anybody these days, 100 million plus in ARR, that’s the milestone we headed in 5 to 8 years, roughly. How do you get there and what needs to happen in the early days to get you there, to accelerate? You can’t just say the distribution will compound. The product has to somehow compound so people buy more of it or more consumption, etc. Because we don’t believe in For the humans as being the main lever to success for our customers, we decided that we’re not going to charge per seat for any of our products because most of the company’s legacy wants to charge per seat because they assume more people in sales say more sales that they do the company.

[00:35:14.840] – Speaker 1

We’re charged for consumption. How can we make our users consume more of our product? We have to make them more successful. It’s fully aligned. If our customers are not successful, then we’re going to see churn hitting us. It penalizes the product team to do better

[00:36:00.000] – Speaker 1

to run anything when it’s outcome-based. You need to have internally data that suggests that when any customer that comes through the doors and we have a certain degree of conviction that they’re actually moving even from consumption over to work out, sure, charge for outcome-based pricing. But there’s also a lot of debate there. But again, the pricing model, you have to think about how the product compounds, the hiring strategy, all of those things is what you need to think through to get you to 10 million. Then I think the other topic that’s not been really spoken about a lot is ensuring your cofounders have the right competence to get you to 10. Internally, you should be honest with yourself, whether you’re a CEO or CTO or whatever, in the business, whether you have the competence to get to 10. A lot of people try to make it to 10, but they’re not being intentional about their weaknesses as an individual and trying to do something about it. In some cases, what makes sense is that you get a sparring partner. Let’s say you are a CTO and you have never been a CTO, like our CTO.

[00:36:56.700] – Speaker 1

Maybe it makes sense that you get another CTO, the sparing partner, that has gone through this journey, and you have to be intentional about this. Meaning this is super important because if you don’t feel like you’ve got the competence and support in the right head and mindset to get to 10, Then you have a risk, essentially, as a company. How do you de-risk yourself? Super important, right? In episode 20, I interviewed Ezean and Oji Odeze on their product management lessons, going from zero to $100 million in they are. How to scale your product and scale your SaaS by leveraging product management. I think your product system matters. In order to get to 10 million, you’re going to have to be obsessed. Obsessed. Obsessed. To build something worthy of obsession. I think that where a lot of people get tripped up about is that they have a plan. They now have ICT, and they’ve built a roadmap. I think that my advice is don’t Fall in love with your roadmap. Fall in love with your customer and their messy life. All the things they’re doing, the things around them, the things that distract them from their job, know that intimately and be able to design around that.

[00:38:14.960] – Speaker 1

In order for you to go from 10K to 10 million, you’re going to have some level of obsession. So make sure you’re working on things that are worthy of obsession. You have to be your obsession, their obsession. So just make sure you’re finessing or finding and taking a look at that roadmap in a way that just makes sense. And it’s worth waking up every single moment to go work on because that’s what it’s going to take. 10 million ARR, a lot of it is knowing what to do and what not to do. Your revenue engine must be tuned. Your growth engine must start to really take shape because that’s basically the path, especially for B2B services, collecting money. Internally, You have to start to design an organization that can repeat innovation. How many people do you have? What do they do? How to keep that small without overgrowing? Because otherwise, you’re just relying on investors, and you’re not relying on getting profitable as soon as possible. There’s this idea that we talk about, it’s also in the book, about work it on things that are the hardest part of what your customer finds the hardest always.

[00:39:30.000] – Speaker 1

Work on things that have no good workaround. Accountly, we didn’t give you a way to send a link. We could have built it into the product. Send link, put email, send. We didn’t do that because we knew that people could copy the link and send it themselves. They had email, they had slack, and so on and so forth. We didn’t want to replicate the communication part of it. We wanted to replicate the scheduling part, which was very difficult. People was like, Why can’t you do this? I’m like, People know how to do it. And so we won’t work on that problem. So work on the hardest parts of the workflow that you can, not the ones that just deliver mere convenience. Obs is good, but not if you haven’t worked on the hardest parts people still experience for the core workflow you’re working on. And this goes back to the roadmap. I’m thinking about the revenue side of this because you’re talking about ARR. And so those are the things that I would say that you have to focus on. I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what occurs to me at the moment. The other one I need to underscore is the DOE, decisions when you’re not in the room.

[00:40:33.000] – Speaker 1

In order for you to actually go from 10K to 10 million, you’ve got to figure out. Honestly, and this is where we talk about product system, your decisioning, your strategy. How is it that you are clearly communicating where it is you want to go so that everybody in your building, everybody in the company, knows that I can make decisions and allow you to get to that 10 million. That’s a piece that I mentioned around culture, but it truly comes life here in terms of it being your compounding engine in how you can make the way you’d like decisions to be made. And that comes down to being clear about your strategy and ensuring people can make decisions based on that strategy when you, the founder, are not. Thank you for listening to the summary episode of Season 6. Hope you enjoyed it. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe, like this video or like the podcast you that you’re currently listening to, so we can boost the algorithms and help more SaaS founders out there. Again, my name is Jorn Othman and I’m the founder of Reditus, which helps B2B SaaS companies like yourself to grow the MRR via the indirect marketing channel.

[00:41:44.060] – Speaker 1

So either if you’re looking to set up an in-app referral program within your application, or if you are looking to leverage affiliates or partners which are currently outside your own network, check out getReditus. Com, and we’re more than happy to help you. For now, have a great day. See you in season seven.

Meet the author

Joran Hofman

Back in 2020 I was an affiliate for 80+ SaaS tools and I was generating an average of 30k in organic visits each month with my site. Due to the issues I experienced with the current affiliate management software tools, it never resulted in the passive income I was hoping for. Many clunky affiliate management tools lost me probably more than $20,000+ in affiliate revenue. So I decided to build my own software with a high focus on the affiliates, as in the end, they generate more money for SaaS companies.