- So here's the big question,
if you've got some revenues
and you're looking to scale your SaaS business,
what do you do?
How do you actually grow faster?
Now, here's the most counter-intuitive thing I learned
when I went through that stage at ToutApp.
You would think the answer is to do more,
do a billion more things.
In reality,
it's not about doing more,
it's about doing less.
It's about focusing on what moves.
It's about finding your one growth engine.
That's the hack,
that's the growth hack.
And in this video,
I'm gonna walk you through the three questions,
if you ask yourself and your team,
and answer,
you'll be able to find your one growth engine
so you can scale faster.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody?
Welcome to unstoppable
I'm TK, and on this channel
I help SaaS founders like you,
grow your businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to the channel,
I drop a video like this
with the TK Energy,
three times a week
to help you grow SaaS businesses.
So if you're new, be sure to hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon that way you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
Also, if you're part
of my SaaS go-to-market coaching program,
if you're part of this community,
welcome back.
It's really great to see you over here.
So, I remember when I was building out ToutApp,
we were growing ToutApp.
We had raised our seed round,
we're going into our A round.
During our seed round,
we had this mantra in the team.
It was basically like,
focus on what moves
We were fortunate enough to be in a market
that had it's natural pull.
We were sales engagement software,
and software companies like us
and other high growth companies were looking for ways
to spin up outbound.
And they were able to use our platform
to actually email people,
to respond to leads,
they were able to add automation.
So, there's massive pull in the market
for what we were doing.
Wasn't always the case,
we hit a certain tipping point,
once we started educating the market around it.
But, we had leads coming in,
we had some outbound working.
We had ads, like there was a bunch of stuff going on.
And we were essentially just trying to keep up.
That's essentially, we were a small team,
we were a team of seven people.
With seven people, we hit a million ARR,
we were actually cashflow breakeven.
And then we raised our A,
we were just trying to keep up.
And the mantra that we had
was just focus on what moves.
Focus on what moves,
meaning if a deal is like ready to go, ready to buy
focus on those and get them through.
If someone's like hemming and hawing,
don't waste as much time convincing,
just focusing on the people that are moving.
And that's what allowed us to move a lot faster.
Now, fast forward we raised our series A
and then we looked ahead on like,
"Alright, how do we grow even faster?"
And one thing I realized was okay,
my natural inclination was okay now we have more resources,
we have more money,
let's spin up more things.
But what I started realizing was like,
that's a mistake.
What we really need to do is just hone in on what's working
really, really, really well.
That's our goal.
And that's kind of counter-intuitive, right?
Because you would think like okay,
we need to make more money,
we need to grow faster,
we need to do more things and get more awareness.
But the counter-intuitive thing
and I'm glad I got coached on this
was okay, just find what pieces are actually working
and if you do that
and hone in on that,
then you're gonna be able to scale a lot faster.
And sure enough,
we did that through that year.
We brought in some incredible revenue leaders
that helped us do that well.
And because of that,
that year we grew 300%.
And within that year we grew 300%
and we went and raised our series B.
It was led by Andreessen Horowitz,
and that allowed us to go to that next stage of growth.
So the question is,
how do you find your one growth engine? Right?
What's the growth hack for that?
How do you actually do that?
Having gone through it,
there's three questions
that I always get founders to ask themselves,
especially when I'm looking at a SaaS business
and trying to understand how to grow it faster.
So I'm gonna walk you through
those three questions so you too,
can growth hack your way
to that one growth engine
and grow a lot faster
and focus on what's moving, right?
To be excited to dig in
and go through these questions
go and smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm
and let's go into question number one.
Question number one
this is what we asked ourselves was,
what is the channel
that is driving the most quality customers for us?
Now, if you're like us,
by the time we got to a million ARR
or on the way there,
we were trying a whole bunch of stuff.
We were in the Salesforce AppExchange.
We were in the Google Chrome store.
We were doing inbound.
We had our manifesto out there.
We were doing weekly webinars,
we were spinning up outbound.
We were working with influencers, sales trainers
so they would recommend our product.
All of this stuff was going on
and we're like,
"Okay, let's just take a step back,
"we're a million ARR so there's enough data in here."
How did these customers find us?
What worked well for us?
So the question I would get you to figure out is
okay, what are the channels
or what is the channel
that is being the most effective for you?
Now, your channel could be
some sort of marketplace at you're part,
your channel could be inbound,
your channel could be outbound.
Whatever it may be identify it.
What you'll find out of this question
is you're gonna start to see some patterns
and where some of the best customers are coming from.
And you're also gonna find some patterns around channels
or sources where a bunch of crappy leads are coming in.
It's taking up time
for your marketing team
and your sales team.
For example, for us at that stage,
we found that cold Facebook advertising
just wasn't very effective,
it just wasn't.
However, we did find was remarketing
to people that were coming on our website
so that we could get them access to our manifesto
was very effective.
So, those are kind of things
that you'll get aha moments around.
And all you need to do
is look at all the channels that you're spending time on
and looking at what are the channels
that are driving the most results.
Now for us,
we found two key channels that were the most effective.
We found like clearly okay,
outbound is working really well for us.
And the other thing that was working really well for us
was working through influencers,
working with sales trainers,
\\cause that got the word of mouth going around
this big platform.
And we powered all of that with our manifesto
or you need you in the market
and that, like led to that 300% growth.
So number one, channel.
The second thing
that you want to look into
is out of your customers that are coming through,
they're successful,
they're happy.
You know, what is the segment?
What is the vertical?
What is the industry that is the best performing for you?
Now, how do you define best performing?
Best performing is your win rates are higher,
your sales cycles are shorter,
your deal sizes are bigger.
Those are the things that you're looking for, right?
So look at all your customers that you close.
Look at the ones that actually,
and the churn rates are lower.
So win rate, you win faster,
they're shorter,
deal sizes are bigger
and they never leave.
That's essentially what is moving, right?
Let's focus on what's moving.
So, you want to understand is
out of these customers
that are just buying a lot quicker
because they're like, "Oh my God, we need this."
They're the ones that are paying more,
they're growing faster,
they're staying,
they're not leaving.
And the sales cycles are shorter.
What industry are they in?
What vertical are they in?
What segment of the market are they in?
Once you start to hone in on this,
then you'll start to understand okay,
we may get a lot of customers that we can go after,
but, if we focus in on this group,
this is clearly a specific set of people
that have an urgent important need.
They have the budget,
they're willing to work with a startup.
Let's get more of those
because they'll get the momentum going.
And that's kind of the thing that helps you drive growth.
Now look,
I totally recognize that your Tam is huge.
You can go after everybody
and you will, right?
Let's just say you're at 10 million ARR,
you're 10 better be huge.
You will go after more people, right?
It'll be easier to go after
some of the bigger guys in, for example.
So, what I always say is
at this early stage,
what is the segment, the vertical,
the industry that is just ripe to move on you right now
and look at your data and figure that out.
If you do that,
you'll be able to focus on what moves
and double down on that one growth engine
that's gonna take you a lot faster
to the next stage of growth.
Now, before I go to the third one,
we just pause here for a second.
If you're starting to see the power in this
on less is more, focused on what moves
and the way you can get to that
is answering even these two simple questions.
Can I just get a yes in the comments below
also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
It just means the world to us, honestly.
It just does, it sounds silly
but it means a lot to us to hear from you guys.
If you have questions around this,
let me know as well in the comments.
I answer all the questions that come up in the comments,
at least I try to.
And also if you are building out your growth engine,
if you're at that stage where you're a seed stage founder,
early stage founder
and you're looking to build a go-to-market engine,
drive distribution, drive growth,
be sure to check out my
five point SaaS growth strategy guide.
Completely free,
goes into detail on how to build a growth strategy
for your SaaS business.
But I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video
but let's dig into principle number three,
question number three.
So the third thing I want you to ask
is based on all your successful customers,
what is the core use case they are buying for?
What is the reason they are buying now?
There's two things here, so let me explain one by one.
The first is the use case.
Your platform may do a lot of things.
May have a bunch of different features,
but there's always this one thing
that all these guys are really buying from,
the core loop.
What is that core loop?
What is a core thing
that they're gonna be using in the platform.
As entrepreneurs I'm an engineering based founder first,
then I learned sales and marketing.
I always value product
over index on product.
And I'm always like,
"We need to get this one more feature and one more feature."
But the truth is,
customers usually buy
for one key reason when it comes to an early platform.
And what you want to do
is really get clarity on what is that one use case.
For us, we had a bunch of productivity tools,
we had a bunch of scheduling tools,
we had a bunch of email tracking tools,
but the real reason
the real, real reason
people bought ToutApp
at least at scale,
was because they wanted to send out 10 emails
on an inbound lead or an outbound prospect.
And they wanted to automate that.
That was the core use case and feature.
Now, it's for a separate video
on whether that's why I started the company or not.
I'm not gonna go into that here
but you need to understand why people are buying
even if you don't like it.
So, you need to understand what is the use case.
Separate for that,
there's also a reason for buying, right?
The use case has more to do with you guys, your company.
The reason for buying has to do with the customer.
There's something going on inside the customer's business.
There's something going on
that makes us an urgent and important need
and you need to understand that.
And if you can understand that,
then everything else becomes a lot easier
because you can start to incorporate that reasoning
in the sales process, in the marketing process.
They'll help you hone in
on the type of company that is happening
and that where X is happening,
that we need to go after them
and sell them on this use case
because then they're gonna be much quicker to buy.
That's essentially what you're doing.
And then based on those learnings,
your marketing message will become clearer.
Your R and D product roadmap will become a lot clearer.
Instead of more features,
you'll strengthen the core use case,
everything rises.
So, those are the three questions
that you want to ask yourself
to figure out what's really moving
in your SaaS business
and how you double down on that.
That's the growth hack. How do you double down on that,
so you can grow faster.
To recap number one,
what is your most profitable channel?
Number two,
what is your best segment, vertical and industry?
And number three,
what is the number one use case and reason for buying?
Those are three things.
Now, I have two things for you,
number one,
if you are SaaS founder
and you're looking to drive growth for your SaaS business,
and you're trying to find out
what is the strategy to really grow effectively.
I invite you to download
my five point SaaS growth strategy guide.
Completely free and it goes into a lot more detail
on exactly how to create a strategy to win.
Let's go to getunstoppable.com/strategy
or follow the link below.
Also, if you want help in building out your growth strategy,
your go-to-market machine
and growing faster.
I have a step-by-step coaching program
where I give you a framework to follow
and my coaching every week.
It's my SaaS go to market program,
we are taking in new members right now.
So go to tkkader.com/gtm
When you go over there
you'll learn more about the program
and you can apply to join.
The reason we have an application process
is because we want to make sure you're the right fit.
We can actually help you. So you just fill out a quick form,
we get on a strategy call just you and I
and we'll figure out if we can help you or not.
So I invite you to check that out as well.
Lastly, if you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button,
if you haven't already for the YouTube algorithm.
Also, I drop a video like this
three times a week
to help you grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure you hit the subscribe button
and that bell icon
that way you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
And lastly remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life
and their business.
But when you are with us,
yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK,
I'll see you the next episode.
(instrumental music)
We were like,
"Let's double down on outbound
"because that's clearly working
"for us and we know exactly"
- [Woman] I'm having trouble hearing you.
(laughing)
- That's funny.