Contributors

You are probably doing it better than you think.

Users don't want 1,000 features. They want something easy, simple, and fun to use. If you keep that as a North Star as you go from Series A to Series B to Series C, that's going to serve you well.

.. you spend more time with your founders and co-founders than you would with your spouse. The relationship is as intense as marriage gets, both emotionally and financially.

There is a time and a place where you need to have measurements and processes. There is a time and a place to get it done and tidy up afterward. The trick is understanding at what point you need to put the processes in.

Trust yourself and don't just be convinced by other people solely because of their credentials.

Three key elements allow a SaaS company to become profitable: don't lose your customer, create more sales to existing, happy customers, and extend lifetimes

The companies that have successfully grown, have scaled all parts of the business proportionately, not just product development, but also sales, marketing, finance, and operations.

I know what large companies do and what so-called best practices are. However, you don't necessarily want to bring all those practices to a startup from day one because it would be too much. It would kill the company in the process.

I try to do the same thing for all companies: building a platform where we can follow all metrics, no matter what their ARR is.

The sales process must reflect the key evaluation milestones along the customer's journey to purchase your product. So it all begins with the customer's journey, which guides how you should build your sales process.

I approach the finance function in terms of different levels of maturity.

You cannot keep doing the unscalable thing, but you also cannot scale too early because you need to know what works.

When you are mapping your sales process and marketing messaging, you need to think in terms of what is going through the buyer's mind and who additional is being looped into the processes at each stage in the journey.

A really critical part of growing your startup, even in the early stages, is to make sure that your brand is unique enough and sufficiently interesting for people to remember and then come back.

I want to provide others the ability to make better metrics-informed decisions using benchmarks. So they can not only see how they are performing against internal historical trends using a timeline series approach, but also how they are performing against similar cohort groups measured against similar companies.

simplicity and price differentiation are not mutually exclusive concepts. Normally a really good designer can create something simple that still has multiple options.

Nail it before you scale it. Don’t scale before the organization is ready for it.

Analytics without action is just reporting.

Being open-minded and respecting others' opinions is much more important than just coming up with good ideas. Ideas do not have value until they are transformed into a robust concept.

As a founder, your role will change many times. I've been able to find people who are complementary to me in doing the things that I don't excel at.

Not all people fit in with all stages: as I said, you need to look for the person that you might need in the next phase of growth at least a year before you need them.

Slowing down to speed up matters. Set a clear strategy and then win against that.

Which kinds of elements to build up
tech-wise and through scalable tech excellence, and which ones to keep pretty
low tech is an important consideration for a founder at each stage.

What's the ROI metric that you share with customers?

There is a balance between letting go and being drawn too much into the details. Sometimes details can send a massive signal.

As a CFO, you need to be a storyteller and business executive more than just being the finance executive.

What I have learned is that when you want to improve a market in which you have a lot of insights and knowledge, it’s better first to get investors on board who really understand what you’re after.

There’s a lot of pain in doing so, but I think it's an extremely important thing to become as mature as you can in your go-to-market, as soon as you can.

Most people decide their pace according to industry trends like “triple, triple, double, double". However, your pace needs to be determined by the capabilities that your business has developed.

The problem is often that you are trying to measure too many metrics. You must think about the top three metrics that align with your corporate objectives.

Start by understanding how growth works in your business, and then look for opportunities for improvement.

The first way of building a PLG culture is by building a culture of user empathy.

You sell the process. We didn't sell the product; we sold the process of how much time it can save you.

The minute you raise a buck in a startup, you're fighting against the clock.

In the startup community, we often think in terms of startup versus corporate. Do realize that corporations have smart people as well. Be in your learning mode.

Product-market fit is a non-linear, elusive process. It's actually very bumpy and you might have a couple of quarters where you feel like you're totally hitting it, then maybe a quarter where you're not.

In the early days and even today, it's all on the founder. The culture is a direct line from that person.

Thinking about how you're engaging your employees, and about how they're buying into the culture and the long-term vision is important.

Premature scaling is also a big mistake. Stepping on the gas with sales or raising a mega-round of funding without having customer success locked down is a mistake.

Everything should be uncomfortable. Get comfortable with the discomfort. You should be growing fast enough, which is super uncomfortable in itself.

If there’s no wow factor or there is a move to hiring by giving the benefit of the doubt, strongly disagree, and just find somebody else who can be better for the long-term cultural fit. It's never usually worth it to make compromises.

Ultimately, try and think about your financing partner in the same way you would about your VC partner. You want them to be bringing value to the business and not just their cheque book and some cash in your bank account.

In my view it’s not bad to spread yourself too thin in the beginning: it’s much more important to know when the time is right to focus.

Training for the right leadership skills is a key point in a scaling team and should not be underestimated.

Anything you do in a startup has a shelf life.

You cannot underestimate the value of a support network.

The only thing that matters in building wealth is ownership.