What I Did to Grow $20M Revenue as Founder of 3 B2B SaaS companies

“I'm going to talk about essentially building out of founder lead sales um particularly um at the 1 million range ARR but going through and there's some principles that I've applied across three of my companies um that have stood me in pretty good stead when it comes to scaling out of foundered sales and there are some problems with it inherent problems I see a lot of companies make that I've made firstly um I'm just back from burning man who's been to burning”

“me so it was largely concluded by found a relationships um I was given discounts and pricing concessions a lot um it was kind of off-road map products you know we want this you know oh we you don't have that we want this okay yeah we'll build it you know who cares um nobody else can do that apart from me that's not scalable um I was we were spending and I was spending so much time with our customers and it's great I love I'm I'm great friends with a bunch of my early”

“start to scope that out product Innovation starts to happen and you start to say well for us to go out and win in this market you know we need to make sure we're integrated into sap we need to make sure we've got a sales force integration we need to make sure you know we've we've just got this we're connected into into the right ecosystems for and the workflows that this new type of customer is going to want from US security and compliance might be an issue you know we didn't think about securit”

“communicated that with the CEO and the CEO then wouldn't have made the decision that they made so focus on value not relationships and I'll talk a bit about that in a minute and for me this is the biggest lever to scale that you can think about and whoever's seen me talk before would have definitely heard me talk about this um what is your customer buying nailing that nailing that question will help you scale more than”

“MY FOUNDER-LED SALES MOMENTUM M10 M11 M12 M13 M14 $62k $69k $58k $52k $54k $38k $51k $11k $43k $49k $0 $0 $27k $19k $500k ARR by month 14 < 6 month MRR pacing $500k M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M2 M3 M4 M1 $0 $20K $40K $60K $80K”

“GTM HEAD COUNT To first $500k ARR Me 1 1 SDR 2 At $500k ARR Head of Sales 1 2 SDR’s 2 2 Account Executives 3 2 Marketing 4”

“I SET THE NEW HIRES UP TO FAIL Discounts and pricing concessions made Sales largely concluded through founder relationships Off-roadmap product and features promised An unscalable amount of time invested in customer Different customers/company dna/use cases/value creation”

“KNOW THE RIGHT TIME TO SHIFT STAGES $0-$1M $1M-$3M $3M-$6M Founder-led Sales-led Alliances $6M-$10M $10M-$30M Position for Up Market Scale fast Fast product iteration Land grab ICP Security & Compliance Segment customer base Product innovation Determine ICP Integrate Evaluate ICP Technical GTM hires Internationalize Reach repeatability Invest in success Hiring VP’s Hiring C-suite Expand market verticals Build playbooks Test up-market Build for Enterprise Create process”

“3 PRINCIPLES FOR GROWTH Nail your hiring strategy for each stage of growth Sell value, not relationships Know what your customer is buying”