Mastering SaaS Growth with Strategic Product Development
Explore how top SaaS companies achieve rapid growth through strategic planning and innovation. Learn about the 'core and explore' approach to product development and the importance of anticipating market trends to maintain a competitive edge.
Key Takeaways
- Top SaaS companies achieve growth through triple, triple, double, double revenue strategy.
- Anticipating enterprise needs can help maintain a competitive edge in a shifting market.
- The 'core and explore' method balances current product focus with future innovation.
Topics
- SaaS
- Product Development
- Innovation
- Business Strategy
Transcript
like the very best SaaS companies, when they kind of start to generate revenue, they do the triple, triple, double, double, right? Tripling in revenue annually, tripling, and then doubling and doubling. That is kind of like, that's like the gold standard for doing SaaS really, really well. And we were on that trajectory pre-COVID. But we actually took the bold decision is whilst we were even tripling in size, to actually start rebuilding our whole platform to anticipate the needs of enterprise, knowing that probably the defensive moat around the SMB was going to end up being a race to the bottom on price once they caught up a bit. So we kind of got ahead of ourselves. And thankfully, we did do that. Product market fit is almost like, it's not like a single thing. It's like you have it for a period, and then you've got to almost like anticipate what it's going to be again. So you've got to both catch current product market fit, but you've also got to have one eye down the road for like, what are the trends that are coming? And I call it, I call this thing core and explore, right? And it's how we generate, generally divide our kind of design and development product resources, basically. So 80% goes on core, which is like what you're building now, your roadmap, and 20% goes on these experimental down the road ideas. And right now, one of our biggest products, which is our own operating system for screens itself, it was an explore idea for a first year for one year, just with a couple of developers on it, just working out the viability and testing it a bit with some customers. That's now one of our core. So it does move, explore moves into core, doesn't always do that. We've had other things which have kind of been dropped and not developed further.