There’s a long-standing cliche concerning SaaS companies that once you get to $10m in ARR you are unkillable. As Jason Lemkin says in his post from early 2013:
Inevitability in SaaS comes around $10m in ARR, plus or minus. Once you hit this point, you have a brand, you have a fully baked team, you have a robust product, and you have a self-generating stream of new leads and new business. Will you get from $10m ARR to $100M ARR? I don’t know. Is an IPO in your future? Not sure. But once you hit $10m in ARR or so, you cannot be killed by anything. That’s the power of compounding SaaS revenue. And actually, as we’ll get to, $10m in ARR — this is when it really gets fun.
I’ve struggled with this concept and how to translate it into action in my world. While the phrase “you cannot be killed by anything” is evocative, your actual value can be killed, as there are many problems getting from this stage (whatever we are going to call it) to the next level.
I don’t like to think in ARR when I’m working with SaaS companies. I’ve always found MRR easier to process, especially when thinking about derivative measures, like growth rate and churn, that are so important to pay attention to on a monthly basis. And, instead of ARR thresholds ($10m ARR, $25m ARR, $50m ARR, $100m ARR), I like to use MRR thresholds, which I talked about extensively in a post from 2015 titled The Illusion of Product/Market Fit for SaaS Companies. The MRR thresholds I focus on are $1, $10k, $100k, $500k, and $1m. And $1m MRR is the particular moment that is analogous to the $10m ARR inevitability.
If you can blast through the $500k MRR mark and march to $1m MRR, you’ve found product/market fit. You are now at the magical point some people call “Initial Scale.” Cool – you’ve got a business.
If you believe the cliche, you are now unkillable. I’d suggest that instead, you are now in an entirely different zone as a company, where you will be evaluated on a different set of characteristics and will face different struggles. If you want a hint, read Fred Wilson’s recent post titled Team and Strategy.
If you are a CEO, the real work of scaling a company begins about now. The question you’ll be facing will have a lot less to do with product (and the product strategy), and a lot more to do with – well – strategy!
You can start exploring questions like: Are you the market leader? Who are your competitors? What are you doing to build a moat around your business? If this sounds like Competitive Strategy, instead of Strategy, it is, but it’s a critical starting point. If you don’t want to read Porter’s classic book (or read it again if you read it a long time ago), try a Wikipedia shortcut on Competitive Advantage.
You can shift to more specific questions around a category like sales such as: Are you making progress on lowering churn? Have you moved from monthly to annual deals? Are you trying to get three-year deals done? What is the composition and health of your channel?
These are all things that you likely ignored, or didn’t even think of when you were in the $100k to $500k MRR zone. Well – maybe you thought about churn, especially if it spiked up to a point as to undermine your growth rate and cause another cliche – the leaky bucket – to appear in all of your board discussions. But did you shift from monthly to annual deals so that you could lower your long-term capital needs significantly? If you did – great job!
We have many companies in our portfolio in the $1m MRR to $2m MRR zone. It’s fun, but challenging in a different way than the up to $1m MRR zone is. And, once you blast through $2m MRR, all the things you focus on as a CEO change again.