welcome back to the grow your B2B SAS podcast in this podcast we cover all topics related to growing a B2B SAS no matter in which stage you're in I'm y hman the host of the show and the founder of ritas which is a B2B SAS that helps other B2B SAS companies to set up manage and grow an affiliate program being a Founder myself means that I'm going through the exact same Journey as you are experien the same issues and having the same questions and this is the reason why I started a podcast getting advice from from industry experts on a specific topic if you like this content make sure to follow subscribe review the show so we can help as much Founders as possible let's dive in in today's episode we're going to talk about growth hacking my guest today is Sean Ellis most people would probably know Sean from the book hacking growth which is available in 16 languages and he's on track on 1 million books sold he helped multiple companies with their initial growth engines setting up the process from inception to an IPO and from 2008 he started focusing on the more early phases of a startup to set up their growth engine he did this for drawbox Eventbrite and Lookout which all received multi-billion dollar valuations he helped startups and now on a onetoone interim basis on how to build your initial growth flywheel after you reach product Market fit when he's not growing startup he teaches growth at Business Schools such as Harvard UC Berkeley Imperial College BC in London inset in France and through the go practice imers simulator program Sean is also co-host on the breakout growth podcast where they interview business and growth leaders to understand all facets on their breakthrough growth engine I have no idea where he finds the time to come on but it's a real pleasure to have you on the show Sean yeah thank you for having me on if people are not convinced after this introduction why should people listen to you today I think one of the really unique perspectives that I have is that I've been on the ground floor of a lot of billion dollar companies and what do you you see differently on the ground floor you get a lot more insight into the cause and effect of results like I I personally I can't imagine if I went into say hinin and was trying to move bottles of hinin how do I know which of the promotions that I'm doing that that that really move it like that kind of getting the cause and effect relationship on all the things you're doing for like a big brand like that would be really tough but when I started with Dropbox and would log me in and some of the companies that went on to these multi-billion doll valuations we we start with kind of customer One customer two customer three and you get a lot more signal of what works and what doesn't work and then more importantly it gave me an opportunity to to really focus on a stage where I think very few people have a lot of Cycles which is like building that early growth trajectory I learned it after my second company where I know I'm maybe jumping ahead to some questions you might want to ask about but after the second company where I'd basically been on board for kind of full fiveyear stints on the first two companies I learned that the most important contribution I made was in the early growth phase so once we had a product that really resonated with the market how do we figure out how to get the right people to try that product and ultimately to keep using that product to buy that product to to get others to use that product and I think starting from a blank slate is a lot different than let's say you're hired in 3 years into the business and you basically are coming in and under understanding an engine and scaling and it becomes more about forecasting and where's that new growth going to come from but that early growth where you're going from the zero to one is I think a really unique Challenge and and one that I probably have more cycles and experience on successful companies than just about anyone else out there yeah I love it and I also love that you're now doing it on a onetoone interim basis so you're not just doing consultancy and just doing it from the sideline you actually want to go in and help companies on the ground floor as you mentioned yeah I really do love teaching and doing workshops and doing Keynotes and speaking at universities but it's easy to become an academic if you do that for too long and and Theory starts to take over and it must work this way so I'm going to start explaining it this way but when you jump back in the trenches and you're executing growth you quickly realize that some of the things that start to sound good don't actually work and it keeps my skills fresh and yeah and obviously Ai and things are changing yeah we didn't have to think about AI when I was at Dropbox and and now it's become a tool that's prettyy helpful for a lot of companies and and will become more so going forward and if I don't stay fresh on my experiences I'm going to I'm going to probably be there's still like some Evergreen things that I think like my book covers a lot of Evergreen things that aren't going to change growth Pro process is really based on the scientific process and that's been around since ancient Greek times and there's a lot of things that that actually don't change over time but there there are new tools and channels and opportunities that you emerge and being able to tap into those you want to have a good practice fresh practice doing that yeah nice yeah it's one thing to read a book or I have no idea but to write a book but actually keep doing it and keep educating yourself if we just go zoom out for one second the book is called hacking growth right people refer the term growth hacking like what does it mean to you as in if you really look at from an outside perspective so boiling it down I think it's good to to contrast it against what was the approach before the book and before the the term came out which is basically marketing as it's taught in a textbook what I saw as a lot of companies was just developing a strategy and you had a marketing team kind of executing that strategy and then you had a product team who's doing some other things and hopefully it all fits together so growth hacking to me is about experimentation as I said like kind based on the scientific process of scientific method of you analyze the situation you look for new opportunities for growth you come up with ideas of how to capitalize on those opportunities you need a system for prioritizing which ideas you want to test you run the test you analyze the results each time you repeat that you get smarter about how you drive growth in the business just to differentiate a bit someone listening to that who works in marketing might say yeah that's pretty much how you do marketing right these days You're testing advertisements you're testing channels I think what's different with growth hacking is that we're doing it not just in the channels but we're doing it on within the product too how do you get someone to a great firsttime experience in the product how do you keep them coming back and using it more often how do you monetize better drive up cells all of these are growth levers that you want to be executing that growth process on yeah we're going to dive into the process a little bit in a sec you can already hear it right you're really passionate about this topic I'm I'm just personal question like why are you so passionate about growth hacking I think it's just cool I've always felt if you're going to do anything do it the best you can be try to be great at whatever you do and if you're going to if you're going to go in and half asset then don't bother doing it and to me if you're responsible for growing a business you got to figure out the very best way you can grow that business and a process of continuous Improvement and learning is is really fun personally I think it's fun and it's and a lot of times it's about identifying who needs the product why they need it how do I connect them to the great experiences that product has to to deliver and ultimately impact on the market that has a need and and yeah that's something I I do get really excited about and I think Founders get excited about it too that's why they go out and build companies and I've also been a Founder I launched and sold a couple of companies to have the guts to launch a company you have to be really passionate about a need that you feel like is underserved and often you're wrong and you have to make some adjustments along the way but then once you start to make progress against solving that need the better and faster and and deeper progress you can make that that's really exciting that that means that you're doing something important and you're doing it well yeah and almost selling 1 million books is not nothing so I really love the journey already when we dive into more into the topic like I always like to start with mistakes and then we go into more best practices like what are the most common mistakes companies make while trying to implement growth hacking what's most challenging about growth hacking is that it is a a cross functional process and and so the most common mistake then is they try to kind of implement it one function at a time and it just doesn't really work very well to to do it that way I think it's better to think holistically about the entire customer journey and what are the opportunities across that entire customer journey and how do we capitalize on those opportunities that would be one thing and then the other thing that i' I've seen more recently and I'm surprised I didn't see it before but maybe I just was blind to it is there's kind of management Theory I think it's a good idea in management Theory to to to think in terms of ownership you own this number you own this part of the business you own this part of the business and as you break up the business by by different owners of and again that's the functional side of things so so the functions that each lead owns then people try to find a box to put growth into so growth becomes a function and it just doesn't work that way growth hacking growth head of growth whatever you want to call it is not a role of ownership it's much more a role of influence it's better to have a growth leader who looks holistically across the entire business and is able to collaborate well with the owners of each of those individual areas and if you identify that man we could really grow this business better if we could just do a better job retaining our customers and we think retention is falling down either on activation or we just don't have a good engagement Loop in this product so you narrow focus on that opportunity and usually there's a team that that would own that opportunity but then to have a growth team come in and say hey we're going to help you really contextualize this pull the data out understand everything we can about it run some customer research some user interviews some surveys uh user testing whatever we can do to really contextualize it come up with a bunch of ideas and start testing those ideas and we'll provide you with some additional design data and engineering resources there that's a model where hopefully those teams get really excited about that as opposed to getting Territorial and saying you know stay out of my business this is my area and so it's that's kind of a behavior change that I think is hard to make and so that's why I spend a lot of time thinking about these days trying to tackle that challenge yeah I think that's definitely going to be the biggest one where people think that this is my game we know what we're doing we have our own metrics keep focusing on your own department and try not to bother us basically yeah yeah and then that really means that the the the growth team gets marginalized down to really common in Europe you see them like get essentially they call it growth marketing they they essentially just get pushed to top of funnel and it's really even a growth hacking agency in Europe is often just a really creative clever marketing agency that's it's missing the point it's not about just coming up with a real creative way to get people's attention it's thinking how to how do you test through that entire customer experience to get more of the right people having the right experience that that lead to long-term valuable customers yeah yeah makes a lot of sense but if you come into a company I I can imagine it's not going to be easy right you have to change the mindset you have to go cross functional from the beginning probably what would be your process if you would go into a company like how would you set the the foundation yeah so very first thing I do is I go and do some primary research myself so that I I really go and ask the customers which customers you how would you feel if you could no longer use this product that's become a question that a lot of lot of people are asking I came up with that question when I was at Dropbox so 10 or 12 years ago and and when I ask that question I'm giving them the answer the the choice very disappointed somewhat disappointed not disappointed and so if I can find which customers say I would be very disappointed without this product then find out what is the key benefit they get from the product and really drill into okay this is the key benefit how you recommended it how would you describe it to other people when you recommend it what were you using before this product if this product weren't available what would you use instead really just getting the landscape of how the product fits into the customer needs and customer Choice set I do that research usually in the first couple of days I can do it really fast and then I kick off with a an alignment workshop with the broader team where we're initially starting in that that deep customer research and coming up with okay this is the primary benefit that we're delivering to customers how do we quantify that coming up with a metric that everyone can say this is the most important metric the metric that they may own in their functional Department always needs to map up to that main metric and so the lead conversion rate to a sale is not the most important metric it's the number of maybe active customers or active users is even better than act active customers so PE people who are actually using the product on a regular basis and then they can say okay my local metric that I'm responsible for this is how that feeds that broader metric and I I basically spent a full day with the team just getting that alignment around how growth Works getting the input of everyone and and then just deciding okay who's going to be involved in the kind of week to week growth testing process and and usually it's a combination of dedicated people and some people who may ad hoc serve on that so maybe like a head of engineering sits in on that meeting but wouldn't necessarily be considered on the growth team but there may be a a dedicated growth engineer though that is on the growth team but then dotted line reports into the head of engineering and same thing on the data side same thing on the design side and and that ultimately that team becomes the team that really keeps the company focused on what are the biggest growth opportunities that if we can get a doubling and activation rate that's going to drive 5x growth in the business if we can improve a you know a doubling of retention that's going to get whatever X Improvement in the business and so really shining the Spotlight both on where is The Leverage for driving improvement but also where is it most broken right now or the the most opportunity for improvement yeah yeah makes a lot of sense and is it going to be like a separate team from the beginning or is it more people are in the team and you create like a a squad or yeah it's I don't think there's a one siiz fits all required way to do that I I recently went in and and did this with with bounce a company out of Portugal where I was the interim VP of growth was there for six months and I very specifically Saidi don't want any direct reports and so being the head of growth without any direct reports it just meant that the the growth engineer directly reported into the engineering team the growth designer directly reported into the design team but everyone knew that their 100% of their Cycles were on on the growth teams I think it it it's going to depend on some on a super early stage company pre-product Market fit you're probably not even going to have a growth team you don't want to focus on growth you want to focus on getting the product right but once you have product Market fit then initially what I say is focus on experiment through putut and and so don't try to build the team and then experiment start experimenting and figure out where the bottlenecks are that are preventing you from experimenting and so I would generally start with an ad hoc team that kind of forms and then from existing teams and then if I'm constantly fighting the thing that stops us from experimenting is we never have design resources available then okay let's get a dedicated designer growth designer or engineering or whatever it might be whatever that bottleneck is that's preventing a high velocity of testing hiring dedicated to solve that bottleneck like I think in your book you also talk about the framework right can you tell a little bit more about about that i' I've referred to the growth engine a few times to me that's essentially the all of the levers of growth and so a a rrr is acquisition activation retention referral and revenue and so an improvement in any of those levers is going to improve the growth rate in the business so it's it's a a good way of looking at the business like originally came from Dave McClure U founder of uh 500 startups and you know it's it's been become pretty widely used in marketing and growth for a lot of years since then and so it was probably like I want to say around maybe 2005 that he he came up with that that and I think it's just a good way of bucketing increasingly what you're seeing is when people think about that not so much as an runnel but a a funnel that has Some Loops built into it too so referral would be really a loop and even engagement retention would be a loop and then Revenue potentially is a loop that feeds your paid marketing engine if you have paid marketing as part of it so it's not just this kind of linear funnel but it's it's a bit more complex and it's going to be different for every business at two Marketplace is going to have kind of both sides there so like for Uber you're going to have a a driver and a rider kind of part of the engine but what I find is again this is right up front when I'm working with a team one of the first things that I'm doing is is really trying to get the the viewpoints of each functional lead to combine those perspectives to to create kind of the richest view of what we think that growth Eng looks like yeah yeah and I think like that the framework indicates as well you need people within the different departments otherwise it's not going to work if you're going to go all the way to the the r funnel yeah and usually the hardest one to break into my experience as product one way around that you see a lot of times kind of product will actually own growth easier for product people to influence marketing than for marketing to influence product even though they teach us in the books that there's the four Ps of marketing and one of those PS is product but in the reality of the world it doesn't always work that way so I do think growth as a function that kind of sits outside all of the Departments probably makes the most sense but if I had to slot it into any one Department I would say product makes the most sense because if you're trying to impose it from the outside product tends to be the most territorial because I I get it they don't want someone junking up the product experience but the person who's leading growth hopefully realizes that junking up the product experience is the opposite of growth that it's about the fastest way to grow growth is figuring out what are the barriers to a great experience for a customer and how do you remove those barriers and build momentum and desire toward experiencing the product in the right way this podcast episode is sponsored by ritus Reus helps B2B SIU companies to set up manage and grow an affiliate program in short it means you're asking other people Affiliates to promote your s you would only pay the Affiliates a kickback fee when they deliver you paid clients making it a very cost effective and scalable way to grow your Mr see more at get rus.com you talked about a little bit already metrics as in when we look at B2B SAS companies are there any common metrics you always focus on can you explain a little bit about that yeah so I think obviously B2B SAS Mr ARR is going to be an important metric for most B2B SAS I think that's a great improvement over the traditional licensed software model where a lot of stuff ended up being just shelfware you make the initial sale and that's what the sales team is really incentivized On and nobody really cares if if the company is successful with it once it went to subscription then at least you have a big incentive to make sure they're getting enough value to renew those subscriptions but where I think ideally on a Northstar metric let's say you sell a bunch of annual subscriptions you can be blind to the fact that people aren't getting value if you're just focused on Mr or AR there because it if it's an annual you're not going to see the churn for 12 months and so if you can narrow down to how does someone get value from the product on a day-to-day basis if they're getting value every day the likelihood that they churn from the product is going to be really low and yes that's why like slack for example they look at daily active users and so knowing that the more daily active users they have on the slack platform the more likely that customers are going to continue to pay pay for it over time and yeah I'll give some B Toc examples just because most people know the B Toc companies more so like the Uber I think is a great one where they're looking at the weekly rides so there's a bit of a cyclical pattern of usage so maybe Friday and Saturday nights you're going to get more Uber usage or in some places maybe it's more workday Transportation so you're going to be more Monday through Friday but so they look at it in weekly increments and they're looking at weekly rides is the goal that the Uber team is trying to drive try to increase over time and weekly rides is going to be a function of how many drivers are in the network how many riders and and how frequently drivers are delivering rides and how frequently Riders are asking for rides and you know you can grow that by adding New Riders you can grow that by increasing the number of rides per Rider but all of that kind of maps up to increasing the weekly rides and they know that if they have 10% more weekly rides this month than they had last month that they're creating more value for people and that growth is likely to sustain over time versus let's say if they were just tracking app downloads a lot of people download apps that they never use and it's important to actually focus on what is the primary benefit people get from the product and how do I measure how much of that benefit is being delivered in any given time period yeah I think when it sounds really simple right find the value your drive put your noar metric against it like in practice it's often a bit more tricky like for us as an example example we put the mondly recurring revenue generated for our clients as the norstar metric but we also even put our pricing against it so if they don't have success we're not going to charge them anym as well so we even went all in on on that one oh that's awesome good for you you said it it can be more complicated but I also think I've seen teams literally debate it for three months and I don't think they come up with any better Northstar metric than a team that that talks about it for 30 minutes and and just decides I would just be careful not to overthink it also yeah and just reserving the right I think the one thing is you don't want to change your Northstar metric every month it may take you a couple of iterations to hone in on the right one and that's okay you're better off having a metric that you use say for a month or two and then say it would be even better if we actually switched it to this and that's fine but yeah I think sometimes people make the mistake then of feeling like okay what's going to be this quarters northst metric and and that's not what you want to do ni that's like a common mistake maybe also like a best practice to not to stick to it can you maybe share some best practices regarding companies who implemented grow haing really well what did they do why did it went so well for them I like to try to really simplify things down as much as possible so one of the things that I think really important that we've covered already Northstar metric if everyone on the team knows the Northstar metric and it's reported very publicly where everyone sees progress of that Northstar metric whether it's every day or weekly changes in it but that's beamed up on on on big screens in your office or of your remote team that first screen that people see when they log in they see that Northstar metric that should be the thing everybody's focused on because that's units of value delivered to customers and then but that's a result metric and then what is it that you do that moves that result I would go the other end of the extreme on that and that's really a function of you don't drive Improvement until you try new stuff and trying new stuff is called testing and so quantifying the amount of testing that you're running in any given time period I think a lot of people spend so much time trying to figure out the best test to run that they may run one test in three months or one test in three weeks where you know if they can have a a much more consistent release of tests which is going to then directly lead to a more consistent units of learning and units of learning is what feeds your ability to improve your growth rate and so yeah quantify how many tests you're running set goals around the number of tests and and stick with them and if you're not hitting that test velocity test smaller figure out you know smaller things to test take a big test that maybe weighing you down and figure out how do we break that into three separate smaller tests and then uh we get three units of learning instead of just one unit where we may not be able to isolate what it was that actually caused the the the benefit so that would be on a big level of best practice then the next level down from there would be not just random testing but testing based on understanding it's really hard to improve something that you don't understand so really taking the time to understand if I have a big drop off I I'll give you an example from log me in we had a a channel that sent 200,000 new people per day to the website and it was really cheap like two cents a visit and so we got really excited about this channel 10% signup rate from that channel so 20 cent signups which were way below what our allowable you know cost per signup was but at the next step in the funnel we had a 90% drop off so at the download step and so we were really confused why and so we basically we thought okay maybe they just don't believe it's secure so then we went and got magazines that security magazines put their symbol on there and quotes on why it's really secure and that didn't really help we so maybe they didn't see the download button let's make it bigger and red yeah all these let's make sure that they they know that that it's it's free to download so let's put the word free big on there and we did all these things and none of I think we ran at least like 10 experiments none of them improved the download rate ready to pull the plug on the channel and then we finally said we have 20,000 people a day that're actually signing up through this channel we have their emails let's just ask them why why did they sign up and not download the software and it would be a little creepy to ask it that way so we just made it look like it was coming from customer support and said I know she didn't get a chance to use it yet can you help me understand why and I can help you with and in one day we got a bunch of people coming back saying I don't believe this is free and so it was the early days of freemium software and so now that we understood what we were solving for we weren't solving for how to get a higher download rate we were solving for how to have people feel comfortable that it really is free our next experiment gave us a 300% Improvement in the download rate and we it was basically we gave them a choice download the free version or download a trial of the paid version put a big graphical check mark on the free version but when they saw that we had a paid version also it gave credibility that the free version was real and and that made that channel work but it just shows that yes a lot of testing there's no improvement without testing so you and I talked about that before it's like in the the soccer analogy or football for Europeans that you know shots on goal is going to every shot you don't take is a shot that's missed for sure and so every test you don't run is a test that did not improve your results and so you you do need to run the test but if you can be smarter about really being clear about the problem you're solving and and contextualizing that problem the likelihood of of big winning tests is going to go up nice really random question what was behind the buttons were the buttons doing the exact same thing were they downloading the exact same software that was a different test that we learned was before it used to be you would download the same piece of software but the software would basically display the free version or display the premium version but then one of the experiments we ran was instead of thinking of it as okay first we got to get them on the free and then we got to convince them to do the trial of the paid let's combine those funnels and so they they they clicked on the download for free and then it said congratulations for the first 30 days we're giving you full premium functionality and and you it will automatically turn off after 30 days so you won't lose anything and you'll still have remote access to your computer but then we had a lawyer come up to us and say hey that's a bait and switch and so we had to add one little piece of text in there that basically said if you don't want premium functionality just go to settings and you can turn it off when we added that that doubled our conversion rate to premium that's really interesting I love it maybe final question before we dive into the final four questions like you've been implementing and I asked it a little bit already you've been implementing growth hacking mindset within like lots of companies right I can imagine it doesn't go as smooth as always you you would think or you would like to what are the most common challenges you ran into and how did you overcome those I think there's two extremes so on one extreme is the company that's too small that they that they don't have product Market fit yet and they can't growth hack their way out of that they need to patiently iterate on core product to to dial in product Market fit so that's on one extreme but the other extreme is you get a really big company that you you know 10,000 employees it's a cultural change when you start to work cross functionally around a shared metric with a unified view on the customer experience these are things that are are really hard to change in companies that have been around for 50 years or 20 years and thousands of employees and this part of the reason why startups often disrupt larger companies is that they can be more agile and make the changes but you are seeing some very large companies that have had success in adopting this Microsoft has definitely been successful in adopting growth hacking they were actually one of the first workshops that I ran and but IBM as well so you're seeing like big tech companies that have adopted this and it has to be very very top down support but at the same time very organic where everyone across the company buys in and that's why a workshop tends to work really well works well for companies of all sizes but particularly for the really big companies that need to go through some major cultural changes I would say that the I've underestimated the importance of the right growth lead I think the right growth lead what I'm finding increasingly that they need a mix of both essentially diplomacy but aggressiveness and there almost sound like two opposites but aggressiveness to insist that just because we have a new product release coming out we're not going to temporarily take the engineers away from the growth team to help that or the designer for a new homepage release that we're trying to do like that they have to have those kind of dedicated resources they have to they have to be able to push against some of those forces where I said okay we're moving to a system of ownership and so the grow team's getting pushed into a little corner and so they need to have kind of the the spine to push back on some of those things and say this is what we need to be effective and here's why growth really matters and we were all in the workshop together and and being able to keep ref referencing back and but doing it in a way where they're diplomatic enough that they don't create that resentment and permanent push back from people who are going to be needed to be successful with it and so I think that's that's one of the biggest challenges in in the right growth leader is finding that that balance of dis diplomacy but also aggressiveness in in making sure that um the the the key elements are in place and stay in place that are needed for Success nice and you mentioned workshops quite a bit I think we have some good news for people listening cuz you are doing a wool tour starting from January 2024 right basically helping companies with workshops all around the world yep so yeah I'll do my first leg will be South America then traveling turkey Middle East India up and down Asia Australia and then a couple months later go home visit my family for a little while and then a couple months later I'll I'll I'll go to Europe and do several countries in Europe as well I I just got back from Egypt so I did just touch the the African continent nice nice it sounds also really fun as in really trying to kick it off and then you can go back and you can actually start implementing it yep we're going to come to the four final questions so when we talk about growth hacking like what kind of advice would you give somebody uh who's just starting out and growing to 10K monthly recurring Revenue to to get to 10K a monthly recurring Revenue the biggest thing there is you're going to need to experiment with channels a lot because people need to discover the product and then but channels only work if activation works well so I would basically in in the early you know sub 10K Mr be going back and forth between new customer activation and new channel Discovery so a month on one a month on the other a month on one a month on the other and yeah you might have some people who are constantly owning that but having the team having a growth team kind of Bounce ing back and forth between those the only kind of caveat there that I would say is when you're sub 10,000 Mr there is a very good chance that you have a false indicator of product Market fit so I would make sure that you're going back and monitoring the metrics that relate to product Market fit one of those being retention am I actually able to retain usage from the people who are coming in and buying the product or if I have a free version that are coming in and signing up for the product the leading indicator of that is the one that I mentioned just asking users how would you feel if you could no longer use this product generally when I see around 40% or more of the users saying that they'd be very disappointed without it those are companies that I I tend to see grow over time and so that's a kind of a quicker way if you don't have really good retention tracking in place um to to at least get some indication if if you have that product Market fit but those would be the three Focus areas making sure you got product Market fit and then making sure that you are sending enough new people in but that you are also doing enough Cycles to make sure they have a great experience with the product yeah yeah because in this phas it's really easy to put on some money on ads or start running called Emil Outreach and you started growing your M so you look like fake product Market fit but in the end you mean to like really focus on retention because otherwise you're going to fill a leaking bucket at the end basically absolutely and I think a lot of people underestimate how important first user experience is to long-term retention so that activation work is going to benefit you in being able to drive retention as well but if you don't have product Market fit even if you're really good at activating and getting them to the right first experience that first experience isn't good enough to retain the users long term then then you probably don't have product Market fit yeah makes sense if we go past that point let's say we reach 10K monthly recurrent revenue and I'm going to make a big jump what kind of advice would you give somebody who's growing towards 10 million in AR yeah I mean at that point I just I like to spend a lot of time understanding what's working monitoring where are all users coming from so if one of those channels drops off I can find out why sometimes it can be as simple as like it's just a broken link that happened or a budget ran out somewhere and then which customers are we able to retain best making sure that we're we're going out and targeting more of those types of customers but really learning from the data of of your success and just doubling down on the things that are working and and then yeah build out more of a full experien growth team that is constantly looking for that next great opportunity to drive Improvement and and so sometimes it may seem like you have a great opportunity to drive Improvement you spend a full month say working on improving your frequency of usage or your engagement Loop and and you're not able to make any progress maybe you were more optimized there than you thought you were and so that's okay then then you focus on a different area that's why I don't like to do real long-term a six-month camp pain on one area because if you're wrong then you just you end up burning a lot of resources so I'll do Max 45 day kind of focus area and then after that 45 days I may say let's do another 45 days or another 30 days if we made a lot of progress but it's just easier to to switch off to something else if the opportunity wasn't as good as you thought it might me yeah it makes sense come back to what you already saying right velocity of the experiments make sure you keep running them but also keep them short so you can see the results in quickly yeah and the better a lot of it's just yeah operationalizing the growth once you get beyond that 10,000 when you're setting your targets Revenue targets being able to say how am I going to get to those Revenue targets what are the things that we're doing right now if we just take the trend lines on those will those get us to the targets if not where's that extra 20% going to come from and then being able to have a hypothesis around it's going to be from one of these three channels and here's how much money we're investing into those channels and so that you just get better on on being able to do that forecasting because increasingly as the business grows forecasting does become important and and I personally I like the figuring out stage up front I don't like as much personally the operationalizing the growth stage because it is a lot of managing existing things but within a company I I have found that some people really like to be those explorers to figure out new channels and others like to be the ones that that manage they they like the certainty and predictability a lot more and they want to manage the existing ones figuring out which people on your team prefer one or the other and letting them sit in the zone they feel more comfortable in makes sense if we zoom out is there any advice like more general advice you want to give towards B2B s Founders who are on their Journey no matter like the stage you're in right now I would say in my own experience with two B2B SAS startups that by far the hardest is getting to product Market fit and if you're past product Market fit congratulations if you have product Market fit congratulations then it all comes down to execution and hopefully some of the the tips I've I've given today will help you with that execution but you have created value that is better than anything else out there that the that your customers know about and so it's all about how do I get it in the hands of more people who need it and and get them using it in the right way and yeah it's it's move fast and and and capture those markets but it's yeah my my main thing is though recognizing that the hardest part is getting to product Market fit and that's where I think before I was a SAS founder I underestimated how hard that part would be and so if you have it then you definitely want to maximize it yeah yeah what I learned with insas everything takes longer than you wanted it to take that's for sure yeah yeah and it's really tempting toy try to jump into growth prematurely and that's the fast way to kill a business final question what is one thing you wish you knew 10 years ago I think it would be exactly what I just said that creating product Market fit is a lot harder than I I think I recognized and so I spent 10 years chasing product Market fit when I had developed and and still feel like I have a unique skill set around executing on product Market fit to maximize the the value of a company you start getting greedy and you're like gosh instead of 05% I could have 100% of something that I'm the founder of and then even by the time I Dole out the rest of the equity to other people I've still got 50% but 50% of a grape is not as good as you 10% of a watermelon I guess you say yeah yeah nice if people want to get in contact with you Sean how can they do so I'm most active on LinkedIn these days so yeah just Sean LinkedIn Shan Ellis but I also I I have a website that lays out some of the things I'm doing on Sean ellis. me so this probably be the two two best ways cool we're going to link them to your site we're going to link to your LinkedIn profile I think like one thing for people listening the key takeway like definitely put your noar metric somewhere where people see that the first login that's one thing I'm going to ask my developers to do tomorrow Sean is doing his workshops in his world to starting 2024 so definitely check that out as well we're going to link to it and then also check out his book hacking growth he's on his way to 1 million copies sold so really well done and hopefully we're going to sell some after this show as well perfect nice thanks for making time Sean and and coming on to the show of course thanks for having me out thanks again for listening to the grow your bb sa podcast if you found value in today's episode please leave us a review follow us thumbs up uh you know what to do if you want to sponsor the show to reach assas Founders just ping us on LinkedIn and if you're experiencing any kind of specific challenges right now let us know as well we're always looking for topics to cover in our show for now have a great day and keep growing your bdb si