Here’s the dirty secret about building a startup business. It never really gets easy. It’s fun and the challenges change, but I’ve never seen a business just run on autopilot. There are always critical junctions.

In my experience, selling business-to-business (B2B), we’re not a fad so there’s not the sense that our time will run out. We fill a customer need, have longer sales cycles, and competition is present but not overwhelming. And yet our reality is we always feel a certain sense of anxiety about if we’re doing the right thing, are we focusing on the right products, and are we set up for success for the next important milestone.

Milestones

We were just proving whether we could convince a handful of customers that we knew what we were doing and that we were legit. The next phase was really about could we scale this up and mature it and become more than just a publicity story with a few customers before fading into nothing. And when we went from 10 customers to 30 customers, it was really about proving we weren’t a fluke, we weren’t just the shiny new toy. Once we crossed $1M ARR, the question is where do we focus.

Focus

And focus means that we have to say no. It might sound like champagne promblems to most people, but your customers at this point are going to come to you and ask for wide raning features and services all across the board, and they’ll pay you for it. The problem is that if you’re going to continue the growth rate, you have to place bets on products that we can build and that will scale across the customer base. But, you also have to know where you’re going to sell to in the future. Will you go grow by selling (per customer revenue), going after more of the same customers (higher velocity), and/or larger enterprises (higher average contract value). And those answers are almost more challenging than the initial customer market fit. A lot of people don’t get to this stage, but it is a lot harder to turn down opportunities that come to you. But you have to say no if you want to be focused and you want to have an area of discipline. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with yourself spread too thin and you’ll realize what you’ve started as a project that you were going to build and scale actually becomes fragmented. And when you’re fragmented, you’re doing the opposite of what you set out to do which is to serve a large customer base with an established SaaS product.

Failure to Focus

Instead you serve a whole lot of customers in a very superficial manner. And now that you’ve grown to a size you’ve become noticed by other young companies that want to do what you do but better. And on the flip side, large established companies who ignored you initially, now see that there is opportunity and they don’t want you to grow any larger and steal opportunity from their customers. So they set their sights on killing you, copying you, and undermining your success.