Episode 499 | The (First) Six Stages of SaaS Growth - Part 1

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week is a conversation between Rob and Jordan Gal, the founder of Cart Hook. We dig into the six stages of SaaS growth. We compare our journeys 1:1 between growing Drip and growing CartHook. It's shocking how well the journeys line up with each other. Some of the differences in the journey are also quite striking. This episode is part one, and part two will go live later this week. Jordan started CartHook as cart abandonment software and became a checkout replacement solution for Shopify. He has been on the podcast a few times answering questions, and he has spoken at MicroConf a few times. He is also the co-host of the Bootstrapped Web podcast. The finer points of the episode: 6:00 - Stage 1: Prelaunch 8:33 - How to create your own luck when your SaaS app is in the prelaunch phase 13:37 - Stage 2: Post Launch 14:25 - The journey to finding product-market fit 22:25 - The most challenging parts of the journey for Rob and Jordan 23:29 - Stage 3: Product Market Fit Items mentioned in this episode: CartHook Bootstrapped Web Find Jordan on Twitter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the rest of us. I am your host, Rob Walling.
0:04.1	Every week on this show, I cover topics relating to building and growing startups using an ambitious
0:08.7	approach that's also sane and that allows us to be human beings and have relationships
0:14.0	and hopefully not burn ourselves out. This week's episode feels like it's going to be one of my
0:18.8	favorite episodes in a long time.
0:21.7	It's a conversation with myself and Jordan Gahl, the founder of Cart Hook, and he and I dig
0:27.7	into the six stages of SaaS growth. And what we do is we compare our journeys one to one
0:35.0	between growing drip and growing Cart Hook. And what's interesting is that we
0:39.6	took different paths to get there. He raised money. We didn't. And yet there are so many parallels
0:45.3	between the two journeys and the stages line up shockingly well in terms of MRR ranges of
0:52.8	pre-launch to product market fit to escape velocity.
0:56.1	And I was struck by, A, some of the parallels and B, some of the deviations.
1:01.9	And when we started, I figured it would be a normal length episode.
1:05.6	We wound it up chatting for almost an hour and 15 minutes.
1:09.1	And so I've broken this up into a part one and a part two.
1:13.1	Part one is what you're listening to today.
1:15.1	And in part two, we'll go live on Thursday.
1:17.9	I would kick it to next week, but of course,
1:20.0	episode 500 is next week,
1:21.6	and I've been planning for that for several weeks.
1:23.6	So we're just going to do a two-for this week.
1:25.7	I didn't want to drop a 70-minute episode in your
	...

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