The biggest challenge for most SaaS companies isn’t building a better product.

Contrary to popular belief, the Achilles’ heel of most SaaS companies isn’t building more features on their product; instead, it’s the inability to master getting new customers, revenue, and growth reliably and efficiently.

Building a Better Product Is Not Enough

The “go-to” answer I hear from almost every question in startups, is “build a great product.” Every time I hear that answer it makes me feel unsatisfied. Building a great product is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s far from the full picture.

There are great products that never reach $100M+. There are also terrible products by many people’s definition that reach far greater than $100M+.

“Build a great product” can’t be the answer to accelerating growth and achieving success, if the above two statements are true. It is certainly a starting point, but not the answer.

The problem with the answer of “build a great product” is that it leads to the Product Death Cycle, which illustrates the perilous loop of adding features without customer validation, a common pitfall that accelerates the demise of a product through continuous cycles of complexity, diminishing user value, and eventual market irrelevance.

The truth is, almost every SaaS founder or CEO I’ve spoken with will say they can build a stellar product given enough time and resources. Building products is hard, yes, but it’s a challenge that can be figured out.

Having a product that has strong “Market-Product” fit is merely the prologue; the real saga unfolds in the arena of sustainable and efficient customer acquisition and retention.

The battleground of SaaS is in GTM

I have read articles that cite less than 0.04% of SaaS businesses scale past the $10M ARR milestone. What sets companies that scale beyond $10mm ARR apart is not their product but their GTM process.

GTM goes beyond a Sales and/or Marketing strategy. Think of it like a product. Every day, week, and month, leadership make trade-offs in their organizations like should we hire another salesperson or give money to marketing? Do we acquire one company or partner with another? Should we open up a new office or add more engineers to the product team to create a scalable ecosystem? All these questions and decisions are part of the ongoing GTM process.

GTM is the single most important thing that drives business to and beyond the $10M ARR milestone.

Growth is the Sum of a Lot of Small Parts

All too common I see companies executing a series of random acts or tactics in pursuit of the silver bullet that will catapult them to their destination. It seems like a lot of this has been driven by an insatiable appetite around “Growth Hacking”. You have strong product market fit, now all you need is to find a growth hack to grease the growth wheels. No other term makes my stomach churn more.

While the term started with good intentions, it has morphed into a concept around random acts — that there is a tip, trick, secret, or tool that is going to unlock growth in your business. This is not how it works in building a great company.

Before tactics you need a process. And before a process you need a strategy. The GTM framework is all about how you construct your strategy and position yourself for efficient and sustainable growth.

A GTM Growth Framework for Success

The decisive factor distinguishing consistently scaling enterprises from those grappling or stagnating lies in the adept interlocking of four pivotal pieces: Market-Product fit, ensuring the alignment of offerings with market demands; Product-Channel fit, optimizing the synergy between the product and chosen distribution channels; Channel-Model fit, aligning the channel strategy with the business model; and Model-Market fit, harmonizing the overall business model with the target market.

This GTM Growth Framework crystallizes the essence of successful scaling, emphasizing the intricacies of fitting these puzzle pieces seamlessly to propel a SaaS venture beyond the $10M ARR mark and toward the coveted $100M ARR milestone.

Similar in concept to Jim Collins’ Growth Flywheel, this GTM Growth Framework becomes a nuanced lens through which to comprehend and implement the essential components for propelling a SaaS company. The intricate interplay of Market-Product fit, Product-Channel fit, Channel-Model fit, and Model-Market fit mirrors the perpetual momentum of Collins’ transformative business philosophy, providing a holistic understanding of the underlying principles driving sustainable growth.

Reliably and efficiently acquiring customers

Getting into the game requires a great product.

Winning the game is about reliably and efficiently acquiring customers and growing revenue.

It has never been easier to create a B2B SaaS product. For B2B SaaS building the software / product is the easy part. Acquiring customers affordably and efficiently is incredibly challenging. Retaining customers is even harder. The fortunes go to the winner of customer acquisition and retention.

Thanks for reading. I’m John McAuliffe and I help companies accelerate growth more consistently and with greater predictability using repeatable processes.