I’ve said this before, but perhaps, it can’t be said enough:
To get from $1m to $10m as quickly as possible: Keep doing what you are doing. Just better.
You are at $1.5m ARR now. You know how to close customers. You have a product people want to buy. You have done “the impossible”.
Mistake #1 folks make at this stage is getting distracting, often with the good intention of wanting to grow faster. They try to enter market segments in particular where they have no traction. Don’t do this until $10m ARR or so.
Instead, double down on what is working:
- Raise pricing. At least at the high end of your customer base. You understand value better now that you’ve been doing it a while.
- Go upmarket, a smidge, if you have bigger customers. Related to prior point, but going upmarket is a great multiplier on your time. Add an Enterprise edition.
- Hire a VP of Demand Gen that gets you more leads like the ones you already have. Just getting you 25% more qualified leads than you have now will have a huge impact.
- Hire a VP of Customer Success to make sure your customers are happy so they refer you more prospects and customers.
- Improve your product, every quarter, for real. That way, more leads will close (fewer feature gaps), and your NPS will grow (= more referrals).
- Put on a customer conference. Even if you only have 50 customers. It can just be a lunch at first.
- Upgrade the sales team. Rep by rep at first. This way, your revenue per lead will go up. Leads are still precious at this phase. Don’t waste them — let’s start there. And then use data to not under optimize who works each one.
- Visit more customers. Show them love. 5 in person per month.
Do what’s working. At $1.5m ARR, there’s no fat, there’s no slack. You don’t really have bandwidth to spare. You will as you approach $10m ARR.
Get good at what you know how to do. Get better at it.
Do this, and you will get to $4m-$5m ARR, and then $10m ARR, in plenty of time.
