Episode 499.5 | The (First) Six Stages of SaaS Growth - Part 2

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is part two in a two-part conversation. If you haven't already, listen to Part 1 first. This week is the second part of a conversation between Rob and Jordan Gal, the founder of CartHook. In the episode, Rob and Jordan dig into the 4th, 5th and 6th stages of SaaS growth and compare their journeys 1:1 between growing Drip and growing CartHook. They come across several parallels between their journeys, as well as some differences. This episode is part two in a two-part conversation. Jordan started CartHook as cart abandonment software and later pivoted into a checkout replacement solution for Shopify. He has been on the podcast several times answering listener questions and has spoken at a handful of MicroConfs. He is also the co-host of the Bootstrapped Web podcast. Every time we come up against the hill and then climb it and get to the top, when we look outward, we see so much more. So, the opportunity just keeps getting bigger the further we go. We're not even close. We're just barely getting started. - Jordan Gal What we discuss with Jordan Gal 1:10 Rob's experience with Stage 4: Escape Velocity 4:35 Jordan Gal's experience with Stage 4: Escape Velocity 9:06 Parallels between Drip & CartHook's journeys 9:50 Jordon on hitting limitations and looking beyond money 15:27 A fast-growing business isn't profitable 17:26 Rob's experience with Stage 5: Scale 21:54 Jordan's experience with Stage 5: Scale 25:10 Stage 6: Company Building 27:39 The range of skills founders need when building a startup 30:18 Jordan Gal on the future of CartHook Links from the show: CartHook Bootstrapped Web Jordan Gal | Twitter [Watch] Two Years in the SaaS Trenches - Jordan Gal | MicroConf Starter 2017 [Listen] “We Went from Hundreds of Free Trials to a Few Dozen…On Purpose” with Jordan Gal | Episode 476 How can I support the podcast? If you enjoyed this episode with Jordal Gal, let him know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out on Twitter: Click here to thank Jordan Gal on Twitter. Click here to share your number one takeaway from the episode. Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the special bonus part two episode of Startup for the rest of us this week.
0:04.3	If you haven't heard the episode that came out on Tuesday, Jordan Gall and I got into such just,
0:09.5	it was such a good conversation that we ran really long and I just let it go. I didn't want to cut it off
0:13.9	because we were talking through our journeys and I wanted to cover the first six stages of SaaS growth
0:19.5	and it took us longer than I thought it would to get to everything given the, you know, just the anecdotes and kind of the deep dive into what it looked like to grow, drip and cart hook.
0:29.0	And so this episode covers the final stages of SaaS growth that we didn't have time to cover in part one.
0:35.3	If you haven't already listened to part one, I would highly recommend doing that. So you have the context as we finish up our conversation with
0:41.3	Jordan Gahl of Cart Hook. Stage four I'm calling escape velocity. And this is where you have
0:47.1	product market fit and you have, you've discovered at least one, maybe two repeatable channels
0:51.8	that are driving leads and you're converting and you're just,
0:55.2	you have repeatable sustained growth. Maybe that growth rate is increasing month a month,
0:59.2	or maybe it's just, if it's three grand, five grand a month, maybe it doesn't need to increase.
1:03.3	If you, if you haven't raised a series A, like it doesn't take that much time growing at five
1:08.1	grand a month to build a hell of a business. So for me,
1:11.0	I put a scale velocity. It was from about 25K MRR up to about 80K MRR. I liked it. It's probably
1:17.6	about a million bucks. It's really when I think about it, maybe three, three. And during that time,
1:22.4	we did a bunch of, we'd already done some integrations, but we realized they were working really well. And the more integrations we built, not only did we drive traffic, but we were able to retain customers more
1:31.3	because they would link them up. And then there's just a lot of value created. We did quite a bit of
1:36.5	content with some success. It was enough success to keep doing it, but it was not like the main
1:41.8	driver of growth. But there was ROI there. We did some paper
1:44.7	click and it worked so-so. I was doing a ton of podcasting, public speaking, and that was kind of
1:50.4	raising, you know, it's hard to measure, but it just continued to have drippy in the conversation.
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