Jason M. Lemkin argues that once a SaaS company reaches roughly $1–2M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), most sales and marketing channels reliably begin to work. Founders should stop assuming only one tactic will scale: outbound, inbound, events, content/social, webinars, white papers, and field marketing can all generate customers if executed and scaled. The practical advice: focus on the few industry events that matter, run consistent webinars (e.g., one per week/52 per year) for mid-priced products, and hire/empower marketers to double down on the channels they do well because the ‘whole playbook works’ after the $1–2M ARR inflection.
Questions this video answers
After about $1–2 million in annual recurring revenue.
Do 52 webinars a year (one per week).
Weekly (Wednesday at 10am as an example).
Chapters
The next hack is, and this is just kind of to open your mind, is that after 1 or 2 million, everything works. Okay, Everything works. Yeah, you laugh, but listen to me. Like most of you as founders, you'll have some superpower. Some of you will be good at outbound. Like, you can work your way into a meeting magically at a big customer. Some of you are, like, good at. Like, I was really good at. I was good at that at my first start. My second one, I was somehow good at pr. I don't know how I did it, but I got everyone from TechCrunch all down to write about us again and again and again. I don't know how I did it. It was chutzpah. But content marketing, I guess, and PR was my skill. Some of you will be good at that. Some of you will be great at demand gen. Like, you'll buy lists or you'll be a growth hacker, or you'll get on the dark web and steal names. Whatever you do, you'll have different skill sets. And so what I find with founders is they tend to get. I hear so many stories about how they get from 1 to 2 million, and it's very different, right? But after that, everything works. So if you're only good at inbound, figure out how to do outbound. Hire someone, get on the phone, do something. If you're great at outbound, there's a startup I worked with where the CEO had never done sales, but he was good at outbound. He managed 12 SDRs with no AES. He was the AE himself in the beginning. I mean, that's crazy extreme. But because of that, he was so late to demand gen and inbound, he didn't even do it until 20 million. What if he'd done it earlier? Right? So outbound always works. Inbound always works. Right? But remember, and that after a couple million marketing, everything in marketing works. So, like, events work, okay? At least if you're good at them, show up to traction or whatever it is. Find the two events in your industry that matter. Usually in every industry, there's 100 events, but only two matter. Like the two where all your buyers are at, go to them. Okay, if your product's $5 a month, maybe the booth isn't worth it. Okay, but if your product's $10,000, even $5,000 a year, is it worth it to go and bring back a customer too? Of course it is. Some of you are not field marketing magicians. I can tell you, running SAS, Daniel, we have 20,000 people come some people literally perform 20x better than their competitors. I mean, we talked to Sastranial. We just talked to someone. In our Paris event, One competitor closed 700,000 in revenue from our event since June. Another closed zero. Okay? One's better at field marketing than the other, but both of them will make money. Go to the two places that matter. So events work. But you know what else works if you do it right? Content marketing and social work. One tweet today is not going to get you a lead, but if you hire someone and spend a year producing the best content in your industry, it will work. Even if it didn't work, even if when you started your company, you did three blog posts and no one read it, it will work later. As you scale, once you have 100 customers, the next hundred are going to be seeking out more information about you. They're going to be looking in other areas. It will work. You make fun of webinars. You know who does webinars now? Twilio. Okay? The coolest kid in the world for developers, they have a weekly webinar, okay? If it works for Twilio and it works for all the cool kids, it's going to work for you. When you have no leads, webinars don't work. But webinars, and this is just an example of this. You know what? Webinars are great for folks that are sort of interested but don't want to talk to a sales rep yet. Okay? I want to be sold to. I want to see the demo. I want to learn about the case studies. I'll invest 30 minutes or 40 minutes. I want to hear the other questions that people on the webinar are going to ask. If your product's $20,000 a year and one prospect comes to a webinar each week, it's worth it. That's 50 a year. These are qualified people. No one's wasting their time, okay? If they come to your webinar, they at least have some interest. So I say after a million, if even one person a week comes to a webinar, do it. So do 52 webinars a year at the same time. Wednesday at 10am how my product works, how it enables my customers. And if no one comes, you cancel. Works, right? Even things that you know are kind of dumb, like white papers, okay? If you've ever done marketing, everyone wants to write a white paper, and it's like it does. But you know what? It sort of works like someone. Eventually you're going to find some Fortune 500 company is going to inbound and they're going to be like, I read your white paper on your website. I'd like to talk about this. Just because white papers don't work as well as other things, it doesn't mean they don't work. And so what's the takeaway? The real takeaway is you can't do everything. Of course as a founder you have to pick your battles. But here's the real learning. When you hire marketers, whether it's your head of marketing, a mid level marketer, a hacker, whatever it is, they will typically be good at certain things. Marketers, they all are. And they'll want to do the things they're good at. Let them do it. Okay, to the extent you can't let them do what they're good at because it all works after a million. And just because you don't really believe in blog posts or you think events are stupid or, or you think webinars were dumb. If she's really good at it, if she's passionate and says I'm willing to commit an hour of my week for 52 weeks to do a webinar because I know it will work, let her do it because it will work. Is it the number one most impactful thing she could do with her time? Maybe not. But it will work after a million rep revenue. So let your marketers let anyone working on this do what they know it works. Because the whole playbook works. We do it again and again and again. And if she just adds a webinar every week for the next 52 weeks, or you, your sales team wants to kick off outbound, even though you're not sure, or you want to do 10 of an event a month this year, over the course of this year, you will grow faster. It always works.
