- For your early stage SaaS business,
unless it's the early stages zero to say 10 million ARR,
10 million ARR you're no longer early stage.
For that stage, there's three critical phases
that you go through especially when it comes
to go-to-market strategy,
when it comes to go-to-market process.
The three stages are,
first you do completely unscalable things,
you don't have anything that's scalable.
Then you have the second stage where it's a kinda scalable,
it's a mix of completely unscalable things
and some scalable things.
And then you get the truly scalable go-to-market machine
and go-to-market strategy.
Now here's the thing, you don't ever quite know
which stage you should be in and when you should scale
and when you should not.
I've scaled too early and that was a mistake,
and there were times where I fell behind
and pushing aggressively to scale
and that was a mistake too.
And I learned those lessons the hard way.
So, here's the big question.
How do you know what phase you should be in,
when you should be pushing on scaling,
when you should be actually forcing yourself to
do the unscalable things?
How do you navigate this path?
How do you navigate this path through these three stages
in the go-to-market process?
So that's what we're gonna dig into in this episode,
I'm gonna walk you through the three stages,
how to think about them, how to navigate them
so you can accelerate the growth of your SaaS business
without scaling too early or scaling too late.
Intro.
(lively upbeat music)
What's up everybody?
Welcome to unstoppable,
I'm TK and on this channel, I help SaaS founders like you
grow your SaaS businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
Now if you are new to the channel, welcome.
Be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon
'cause I drop a video like this
with actionable strategies to grow,
two to three times a week with the TK energy.
Now if you're already part of this channel, welcome back.
If you're part of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program,
double welcome back.
It's really awesome to see you over here.
When we were scaling Tout-Out, my last SaaS business
we started in the sales engagement space.
We went through some critical inflection points
from zero to revenues to exit.
Now in that journey, I learned the hard way
that there are times where you actually have to
force yourself to do the unscalable things,
and there are times where you really need to scale
as hard as possible.
And it's not always obvious which way to go.
I learned it the hard way,
so in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through
the three stages you're gonna go through
and how to think about
when you need to do the unscalable things
versus the scalable things and what you do in between.
So if you're excited digging go ahead
and smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm really likes it
when you do that, it means a lot to us when you do that,
and then let's go to principle number one,
stage number one.
Stage number one is you are doing the completely
unscalable, go-to-market.
First of all, what is this stage?
Generally this stage from everything that I've seen
with the 50 plus SaaS founders that I coach
inside of my go-to market program
and another, probably 25, 30 of them
in my new SaaS launch program, zero to 10K MRR,
you're still doing a lot of the unscalable things.
That's kinda how it goes.
You're doing completely unscalable things
and the idea is that you're doing the unscalable things
so you know what to scale
and a lot of times and I've been guilty of this also,
founders go in and wanna scale really quickly
and start doing all the channels, all the activities,
but the problem is they don't have their value
proposition fully nailed yet.
They haven't fully validated it yet.
Something magical happens at 10K MRR,
enough people and enough customers you've talked to
or have seen your product, if you get to that point
you've validated your value proposition,
you've gone through enough of the iterations
where you kinda know what your true value proposition is,
what the true urgent and important problem is,
until then you're still kinda guessing
and if you start to scale too fast
you're in this giant convincing game
and you may not know why no one's paying attention
it's because you haven't really validated value props.
You have to do completely unscalable things
on stage number one.
And generally speaking,
you wanna think about zero to 10K MRR
and as you're doing this, you are really
really validating your value proposition.
That's stage number one and you go-to-market machine.
The second stage and this is the most awkward stage
as you go from your Shawshank Crawl from idea
to product-market fit and that 10 million ARR,
this is like the most awkward phase, a worst phase.
This is your kinda scalable, kinda repeatable stage.
This is the most technical term I could find for it
because it truly is just like a giant kinda.
'Cause you're still in this middle zone
and not fully out yet.
And the revenue stage for this is roughly 10K MRR,
you're trying to go from 10K MRR to a 100K MRR
or really that 1 million ARR stage.
That's what you're trying to get to in.
As you're trying to get to that stage,
if you try to scale too quickly,
again you might actually scale too fast
and you might not really hit it
because you don't fully really know,
like here you got to 10K MRR
but there's not enough people that you've stressed
tested this value proposition on this messaging on.
So the real thing you're really trying to do here
is you're trying to get more data
and you try to really nail down your positioning,
your core messaging.
The reason you want to do unscalable things here still
is because there's not enough systems
and processes to really know,
there's some quality of judgment required
to actually understand,
okay, we're talking to way more people,
is this hitting, is this not, is our time making off?
And so therefore you actually can't go full on scale.
So, what's an example of this?
Like, well, if you're still in this stage,
if you are going aggressive on outbound emailing,
aggressive on Ads,
but you're not putting yourself in the conversation
at the end, you're trying to put them into a webinar
or a free trial that might actually be to your detriment.
That's too much scaling,
because what's happening here is that
you're piping all these people
through this scalable the machine
and they might hit a wall,
they might not move,
you might not see the revenue, but you don't know why.
And so it's super important
that you still do the unscalable things
at this stage in the sales side
and the onboarding side and the product side,
so that you really, really get more data
and actually nail the positioning and the messaging.
That's super important.
What's the difference between phase one and phase two?
The best way I can describe it is in phase one,
you're doing everything manual, everything unscalable
from pipeline generation, lead generation to closing.
On phase number two, you can start to scale some
of the things around lead generation,
on how people get their attention.
You can start to spin up more channels,
but you still have humans, yourself and others in your team
in the sales process or the onboarding process
depending on whether your product-led growth,
self-service growth or sales-driven,
you still want human beings
to really start to talk to these people
and really, really validate the messaging, the positioning
and how they're reacting to things and drive that close.
What this will allow you to do is really strengthen some
of the key strategic pieces we always talk about,
this is your Ideal Customer Profile,
this is your value proposition,
this is the messaging, the strategic narrative
all these things start to get validated
because you're in there
and you're getting more and more people.
So that's your second stage, which is your kinda scalable.
If you go directly to scalable and remove yourself
from this process and you might actually hit a wall
because you will not be able to validate it
with more people,
validate your core strategic messaging and positioning
and all those pieces that are super important
and it hasn't fully been proven out yet.
Okay. So now we're going to talk about the third stage
and when you make the switch and why.
Before I do that, before I go into the third stage,
let me just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
This is one of the toughest things as founders to grapple,
in order to get to scale, you have to do a whole bunch
of unscalable things,
and it sounds counterintuitive, right?
Like we wanna build incredibly scalable businesses,
we want to go after huge TAMs,
but you have to understand that duality.
You have to understand that in order to do that,
you have to do very, very small things,
very unscalable things so that you earn the right to scale
so that you know what to scale, what to turn up on the dial.
That's super important.
If you start to see the power in this,
go and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
Can I just also get a 'Yes' in the comments below,
so I can hear from you.
The YouTube algorithm loves it
when you smash that like button, so do we,
we put a lot of love into these videos
and when we hear from you in the comments,
it just makes our day
and I respond to every single one myself.
Also, if you're in this stage where you're building
out your go-to-market process, your go-to-market strategy,
you're driving growth in early stage
and you want a framework to follow
on how to navigate this path,
this is why I created my coaching programs.
So I'll tell you more about my coaching programs,
all at the end,
but right now let's go to stage number three
and how do you know you can go
from stage two to the stage three.
Stage three kicks in once you hit that
millionaire RR to 100K MRR
and you're ready to get the 3 million,
that's the next inflection point, right?
And in this case, what you're really doing is
once you've hit this inflection one
that means you've talked to enough people,
dealt with enough people, stress-tested with enough people,
and you really really know
and validated your ICP, your core messaging, your manifesto,
and so now what you're really saying is,
okay, let's fully solidify that
and lean into that in your ICP.
Let's fully lean into that in my manifesto
and let's now really lean into scale,
meaning let's spin up Ads,
Let's really scale up outbound,
Let's take ourselves out of the process to
start to automate those pieces a little bit more,
maybe there's a webinar or we throw up?
Maybe there's a well-defined training video,
maybe there's purely product-led growth,
and then we take it in back in.
Maybe it's still a salesperson,
but you can start to hire more sales people.
This is where true scale really comes into play,
but the only reason you're doing this,
you're graduating from number two to number three
is because there's enough revenue there
to validate your thesis around your messaging,
your positioning, your Ideal Customer Profile,
and that allows you to scale.
So to recap, number one, or near sub 10K MRR
you're doing all the completely
and utterly unscalable things, that's what it takes
so that you can really validate your value prop,
really validate your messaging
and really validate your positioning, all those pieces.
And then once you get to 10K you're switching
you don't want to scale too early
so you're kinda doing the scalable thing, right?
And still doing a lot of the unscalable things.
You're doing a lot more on scalable things on the back end,
while you're doing some more scalable things
on the front end when you're generating leads
and to actually convert them to revenue, activate them,
you're still keeping it very unscalable.
And then once you get to the 100K MRR,
then you switch to much more scale
so you can get to 3 million or 250K MRR
and that's when you start to scale all aspects
of the business. That's how to think about it.
That's how you make sure that you don't start to
scale too late in the game and give up growth.
You also make sure that you don't scale too early
and just kinda frail out of control
even though you were doing well
when you were doing the unscalable things,
Is it hard work?
Absolutely, but I promise you, if you do the hard work
on the unscalable things,
the scaling it becomes a lot more manageable,
the scaling becomes a lot more effective
and you make less mistakes on the scale.
It requires less money on the scaling
and that's where the power really comes.
So that's what I had for you today.
Those are the three stages as you are building out
your go-to-market process
and the three critical phases that you go through
as you are navigating this path to a scalable SaaS business.
Now, if you're in this stage where you're building
out your go-to-market strategy
and you want a proven framework to follow,
you want to reduce the execution risk,
maybe you have questions around
how do we develop our value proposition
or our messaging or positioning or Ideal Customer Profile
or how do we navigate this path on being completely
unscalable or getting to this,
what is this kinda scalable?
This is why I created my go-to-market coaching program.
Inside of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program,
I actually give you the framework to follow
to actually build all these pieces out,
and it also give you the coaching to help you
navigate that path because I've done it before.
So if you're interested in learning more about that,
just go to TKKADER.COM/GTM.
Now over there, you'll see our GTM program.
Our GTM program is primarily focused
on this kinda scalable kinda unscalable
and this full-scale piece.
This is so you have to be at least 10K MRR
to be able to go into the GTM program.
That's my main program,
that's my biggest program,
that's where I focus a lot of my time.
So if you're in that stage, go to TKKADER.COM/GTM.
It is application-based,
you just fill out your email, answer a couple of questions
then we'll get on a call,
we want to make sure you're the right fit.
I'll ask you a bunch of questions,
I'll help you think through this strategy
around your business,
and if it's a fit,
I'll make you an offer to join the program.
That's kind of how it works, it's super straightforward.
Now that's for people that are above 10K MRR
and getting to that scale we'll go-to-market machine.
I also have a lot of founders
that have reached out to me recently
that are saying, "hey we're below 10K MRR,
we're trying to get to 10K MRR."
The go-to-market program is too much scale,
like how do we do the unscalable things.
So this is why I also created my SaaS launch program.
The SaaS launch program helps you in this phase
where you go from zero to 10K MRR,
and it helps you actually really validate
your value proposition, test the market
test your thesis and get you initial revenues.
So that program is completely self-service.
It includes the framework, the training
just like the go-to-market program
and it includes a monthly coaching call
whereas the go-to-market program is a weekly coaching call.
So it just requires different levels of involvement from me
but you still get access to work with me.
So if you're in this unscalable stage
check out my launch program, that's TKKADER.COM/LAUNCH.
All the details are in there
and if you're above 10K MRR
you want a proven playbook to follow,
you want a framework to follow and you want the coaching
then go check out my go-to-market program TKKADER.COM/GTM.
Both those programs are linked to the details below,
you can learn more about them
and based on what revenue stage you're on,
you can join my program
work with me, and then we'll help you scale faster
and get to the next stage of growth
and navigate that Shawshank Crawl to product-market fit.
So that's all I have for you today,
if you got value from this video, be sure to smash
that like button, YouTube algorithm loves it,
my team loves it,
and I love it.
Also comment below with a 'Yes',
if you have a fellow founder
or a team member that would get value from this video
please share it with them, it would mean the world to us.
We put a lot of love into these videos.
And also I drop an episode every two to three times a week,
so be sure the subscribe button
and that bell icon, if you haven't already.
And lastly, remember everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode.
(soft music)