The #1 Thing To Do When Times Are Harder

So as we’ve talked about many times on SaaStr, tougher times are here for many, but not for all. The pain and the so-called “downturn” isn’t evenly distributed.  OpenAI, Stripe, Palantir, Cloudflare, Monday, Shopify, HubSpot and more are on a tear.  ZoomInfo, Zoom, Bill and other leaders we love are hitting some of the same headwinds many startups are.  It just really varies.

We’ve written a lot of I think good advice on SaaStr over the years on what to do in Tougher Times.  Here are some of our favorites:

• Try Micromilestones to Push Through Slower Growth

• You Just Gotta Push Through the Tough Times. It Always Pays Off.

• What to Do If Your Business Decelerates

But if I had to summarize all of it, it’s this:  Just Do Better Than Last Quarter

Claiming you are magically going to go from 10% growth to 100% in 1 year?  Go for it, if you want.

Hoping a magic new deal will do wonders?  I hope so.

All good.

But if things have gone from Good to Not Great, you have to reestablish a baseline.  And then just do better.

Booked $500k last quarter?  At least book $700k this quarter.  More is better.  But at least do better.

Everyone will get it.  Not everyone will know how to get back to 100%+ growth.  But everyone will know how to do a little bit better than last quarter.  How to ship that one feature.  Which customer to go visit.  How to work that much harder on the pipeline.  To do a bit better.

Back at the 2017 SaaStr Annual, Peter Gassner of $36 Billion Veeva gave one of the subtly best SaaStr talks ever.  He’d been CTO of Salesforce before, and got to a $36 Billion market cap raising less than $10m in venture capital.  But the early days weren’t easy.  One of his hacks?  He took a quarter at a time.  He focused on just doing better than the last quarter.

It worked for Veeva.  I bet it will work for you.