#advice

When growth takes off, a startup could be on its fifth salesperson, fourth marketing manager, third customer success manager, and second product manager. This week, we explore how goals can set up startup employees for success.

Cognitive overload plagues startups. People frequently bombard you with problems, ideas, questions, complaints, and requests. One tactic that works for individuals and teams is to centralise requests and ideas into queues, which you later prioritise, schedule, and complete.

Bottom-up SaaS is a sales strategy that targets individual users or teams within an organisation rather than the organisation as a whole. Given large organisations tend to buy slowly, especially when buying critical components of their digital architecture, this can accelerate growth for B2B SaaS startups.

First-mover advantage argues that businesses first to enter a market have an advantage over latecomers. This common-sense idea discourages prospective founders, giving them the impression that they are too late to tackle a problem they’ve identified because someone else got there first. While first-mover advantage exists and has helped some projects establish a lead, there are many counter-examples where very late market entrants have won. In fact, the benefit of being late into a market often outweighs the costs.

Differentiation is required to build a great startup. This means you need to do things differently. But you can’t reinvent everything as you go: founders need to recognise where it makes sense to be contrarian, and where it makes sense to adopt common practices. This week, we explore the value of contrarian approaches in startup building, and the way the introduction of AI copilots impact this principle

In B2B SaaS, it has become the norm to charge extra for single sign-on. This week, we explore the argument for why SaaS companies should resist the urge to gate this feature.

It is difficult for startup leaders to deliver major projects without neglecting their business-as-usual responsibilities. An operations team can solve this problem for startups by helping leaders with projects. This week, we talk about the best ways to set an operations discipline up for success.

Some software engineers are worried about AI taking their jobs. Some SaaS founders are excited for cheaper R&D costs, while others are fearful of the new market entrants this will empower. Today, we explore the potential impact of developer copilots, no-code, and app-generating LLMs.

A small, skilled, and effective operations team presents a startup with the opportunity to allow team leaders to focus on their business-as-usual responsibilities without the need to forgo business-changing improvements to how the business runs.

Great delegation is about handing ownership over to your team. Autonomy and accountability are the two sides of the ownership coin. Effective delegation requires a balance of these two forces. When startup leaders fail, it’s often the result of an imbalance between their autonomy and their accountability.

Teams can tackle increasingly ambitious initiatives if they learn to challenge risky assumptions with proofs-of-concept, research, and other forms of experimentation.

Sometimes, delegation leads to poorer results, and founders regret giving up certain areas of control. Other times, founders retain too much control over duties their team should own. While nobody can get this right every time, startup leaders can improve outcomes if they are strategic about delegation.

Engineers are the most important recruits for early-stage software startups, but many startups fumble their first engineering hires because they don’t understand what type of engineer they need. Even a great engineer can fail at a company they’re not suited to. Fortunately, there are a few broad principles that startup leaders can employ.

To build a startup, you need to build a great team. Recruiting can be tough for early-stage startups, though. This week, we explore how a strong employer brand can give startups a recruiting advantage.

Startups can be flippant with cybersecurity, but even small companies are targets for attack. Worse, many startups never outgrow their poor security habits. This week, we explore a few ways startups can improve their security posture.

For something that startups pay little attention to, pricing greatly impacts business outcomes like growth, revenue, profitability, and viability. But, some second-order consequences are just as important. This week, we explore how great pricing models can make it easy to prioritise initiatives within your startup.

Every startup needs a repeatable and sustainable sales model. This week, we explore the various strategies that work for SaaS products.

Startup leaders want to integrate AI into their products. Prospective founders want to build businesses on top of AI. Investors wish to create alpha. Today, we explore how startups can capture value when deploying AI.

Tough economic conditions have a way of forcing us to do what we should have always been doing. This year, startup leaders need to make sure their teams are focused on the right things.

Today, we cover the two most tempting (and fraught) pivots for B2B startup founders: moving down-market, and adding additional product lines. We explore why these shifts are so difficult to pull off, and how to get them right.

SaaS startups should aim for the recurring revenue they earn from each customer to grow over time. This week, we cover the foundational strategies for achieving recurring revenue expansion.

As B2B SaaS startups achieve scale, they gain the ability to achieve massive revenue growth by simply better monetising existing customers. This week, we explore some pricing strategies that make this type of revenue growth easy.

A self-service experience, including a free trial or freemium plan, is a cost-effective way to sell a product that is capable of selling itself. Many startup leaders underestimate how much work it takes to truly make this work, though. This week, we explore how to deliver a self-service SaaS experience, and how to decide whether this strategy for growth is right for you.

For many SaaS companies and startup leaders, the 2022-2023 recession will be their first. This week, we look at how SaaS companies can optimise costs, adjust their value proposition, and build a strong business during a recession.

As startups achieve product-market fit, product strategy simultaneously becomes more important and more difficult. Startups become unfocused by chasing new opportunities when they should be optimising what they’ve already brought to market. This week, explore the importance of focus as you scale your SaaS company.