Akeel Jabbar at Horizon Capital walks through a five-year framework for scaling SaaS companies. It starts with auditing unit economics and team structure, then benchmarks competitors, then moves through five tiers: hiring, P&L efficiency, conversion optimization, retention, and growth marketing tactics like SEO, paid ads, and partnerships.
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Hey everybody, Akeel Jabbar here, Investment Director and Growth Marketer at Horizon Capital. I thought I'd put together a quick video to explain to everybody how our process works when we approach a SaaS company. It doesn't matter if it's our own portfolio company which we're looking to invest in or acquire, or whether it's a client that we partner with to help them scale and grow their business. Now a lot of people think we just go right into the marketing and drive growth into the business, But that's actually wrong. The first thing we do is we approach your business and audit it with a nonjudgmental approach. Okay? We come in there as if we don't understand anything. We don't know anything about your business, and we need to really understand and dig the complete— understand the whole picture of what's going on with your business. Okay? So the first thing is we understand the unit economics. What are your KPIs? What are the metrics? What are the growth? What is your financial situation? What is your, your team structure at the moment? So we look at it from a whole holistic angle. We speak to your team members, speak to your board, go into your, your, your tools and your systems to understand and put together a picture of the business. Okay. We review your product. We review your website. Once we understand where we are, we need a benchmark of where we are. We know where we need to go. Once we know where we are, we want to understand where we want to go. And that's where we look to start doing a competitor analysis. So we'll go into your competitors. You tell us what are your top competitors, or we can have a look and see what else we can find. And then we'll, we'll do some research onto them. Okay. We look at what is their product features that they have? How fast are they growing? How much money have they raised? Have they had any exits? What are their valuation? And then what is their marketing strategy that's working for them? Okay. So we're here. We want to get you over here, which is where your competitors are. And then we want to take you above that to grow beyond them. Okay. So that's kind of how we approach it. Now we look at it as a kind of a 5-year, 5-tier system. Okay. Tier number 1, what does your team look like at the moment to get you there? Right? We need to understand how we can get there. And before we can do that, we need to know what does your team look like? Do we have the right resources? Do we have the right team members in place? We look at different low-cost alternatives. And options to maybe help you kind of outsource that task or maybe find a maybe cheaper option. And you know, maybe then we need to fill in some gaps of hiring as well. So we actually help you on the hiring side as well. Maybe we need more developers, maybe we need more content writers. We'll help you fill in that gap to get you there. Secondly, we'll look at your costs. Okay. We'll look at your P&L and we need to be super, super ruthless and honest with what's going on. Is there any areas of inefficiencies that we can cut out completely? And let's see where we need to focus. Once we know where we're going to focus, we're going to focus all of our activity on those high-level, high-value activities. So that's on the cost side. This is where we're going to invest our money. And we put this out for the next 12 months. We put a plan and budget for that. Okay? Now, before we start driving traffic to your website, driving a lot of volume of business to your page or your product, we need to improve your product. Make sure it's at the level that's going to drive long-term value for your user. So the first thing we'll look at is your website. We'll, we'll see how we can improve conversions. And what I mean by conversions is we want to optimize the website for more trials, for more leads, whether it's signups, whether it's conversions, people paying. Let's look at what that percentage is on a conversion basis, whether it's say 1% at the moment, how do we get that to 2%? Just by making that little uplift on the conversion side, we can easily double our volume of sales. Okay. Once that website is done, the next thing we'll look at is your actual product. How's your onboarding experience? How's your user experience? How are you built your product and features in comparison to your competitors? How do we reduce churn? How can we improve our NPS score? You know, are people rating you at a 5 out of 10? How do we get that to a 7? Or an 8 or a 9, right? We want to get all that feedback. How do we improve retention? Are people dropping off at say 2 or 3 months in terms of their lifetime value? So once we have a better picture of the backend, then we go in and focus really, really deeply onto those features. Okay? So we want to improve your product, improve your website. Now finally, the last, last step is going into marketing. Okay? So remember there was 4 steps before that. Now we get into step 5, Now we drive growth. This is where we focus on traffic. How do we get more qualified traffic to your website so that'll then lead to more conversions, which will lead to more sales, which will lead to more growth? And that is through our specialty, which is SEO. So we do a lot of content, technical SEO, or link building. And we also do paid advertising. So whether it's Google AdWords or Facebook advertising, we're very comfortable with working with high-level budgets and scaling campaigns, emails, you know, marketing partnerships and affiliates, webinars. These are all areas where our expertises will come in and help you get more traffic and sales to your website. All right, so that's our overall process. Hope that was helpful. And if you guys are interested, simply set up a call and we'll set— learn more about your company. Thank you so much.
