So Hunter Walk of Homebrew aptly summarized what I’ve been trying to say less eloquently for about 2-3 months.
For 90% of startups, if you’re struggling right now … sure blame the market. But it’s not that, if your market is huge. It’s You.
“Note: I don’t want to hear seed companies complain about ‘the market.’ You literally just showed me a deck that said your TAM was 10,000 customers” @hunterwalk https://t.co/dHVPxo7mZ0
— Jason
2022 SaaStr Annual Sep 13-15
Let’s think about it for a minute — and then look at some data from literally the worst recession any of have seen in our lifetimes, that of ’08-’09. It was 1000x worse than anything today, trust me.
- First, let’s do the TAM discussion Hunter is summarizing. If your market is say 100,000 potential customers — even if your “TTAM” is only 5,000 initial customers — then you have no market excuse not getting at least 10, 20, 100 or even 500 of them. If your product really matters. If it solves a true, 10x problem. Because you’ve barely penetrated a huge market.
- Even if that market is slowing down a little bit of buying, in the aggregate, that shouldn’t stop you stealing 0.1% market share from Shopify, Zendesk, Salesforce, etc. They are still growing like a weed. And there’s still a group of customers looking for a better solution.
- Almost every Cloud leader is growing like a weed. From Datadog to Snowflake to Zendesk to Box to Twilio. Some are much more impacted post-Covid, like Shopify and Zoom. But even there, the growth is real.
- Even when the global economy literally melted down, and >froze< in 2009 — the buyers in SaaS still came. Churn went way up, for sure. But buyers still came. More on the actual data here.
No, if your growth has radically slowed the past few months — it’s you. Gartner is still predicting epic growth in CIO spend in 2023. Our economy still has essentially no unemployment.
This isn’t to say maybe things haven’t gotten a bit harder. But don’t give yourself an “excuse” that the economy has stopped you from getting to 0.1% or even 1% market share. Especially when the leaders in SaaS are growing faster than ever. Even, accelerating.
No, be honest. Your product may just need to get more valuable, and better. And fast.
Be honest here, and you have time. You can course correct. You can lean in on what is working. But blame the “market”? Hooray. Use that excuse. It will play. Folks will believe it.
And you’ll be throwing your chance to do something amazing down the drain.
The post Most Likely, It’s Not The Market. It’s You. appeared first on SaaStr.
via https://www.aiupnow.com
Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
