So I caught up by email with a VP of Sales who told me he wasn’t coming to SaaStr Annual this year for the first time.
I asked why — what could we do better? Was it us?
He said it wasn’t that. It was that his startup “was just growing 15%-20% now, so I’m slowing things down. I’m not going to travel much anymore.”
This is a tough one. Does Slow Growth = Slow Effort? Is it a Doom Loop?
This is a tough issue with no perfect answer that many founders and execs are facing today. If you’re in the 70% or so of B2B startups that are growing more slowly, do you cut the team slack? You almost have to.
But if so, how much?
And if you cut so much slack that there isn’t any true urgency, can a startup even survive, let alone thrive?
I don’t know the perfect answer. What I do know is almost 100% of startups can do a >smidge< better than they are doing now. At least 10%-20%. That’s in fact been most of the post of all our SaaStr content for more than a decade. How to do 10%-30% better, with improvements, tweaks, and upgrades.
Now going from say 80% growth to 100% growth can have an epic impact a few years down the road.
But does going from say 20% growth to 25% growth by doing better have the same impact?
That’s the tough part. It still matters. But it doesn’t compound at the same rate, and it doesn’t take you to the next echelon of startups.
What I do know is that VP of Sales I talked about, 90% of their core ICP and customer base is at SaaStr Annual. He should be there. But if all it gets him is going from 20% to 25% growth this year, I get it.
This is the challenge for founders at slower growing SaaS companies: you have to keep the team in the game. But you’ve also got to fight a total slowdown in inertia however possible.
#1. Usually, injecting some new energy into the team helps. A few new hires without the bagging of seeing things being just … so much harder than they used to be.
#2. Sometimes, setting micro-milestones (e.g., usage growth) that are doing better than revenue growth can help as well.
More on that here:
Try Micromilestones to Push Through Slower Growth: The 2024 Edition
At a minimum, founders, don’t let your own inertia falter.
You have to keep that urgency, that commitment. You have to show folks at least a path to the next stage. Be that to $10m ARR, to $100m ARR, to doubling.
If you show them the path, the believers will still believe. At least some.
Image from here
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
