Growth Slowed? Try Micro-Milestones To Push Through Tougher Times

Hey, everybody. Years ago on Saster, I wrote what I think was one of the most important posts, most useful posts ever, which is try micro milestones to push through slower growth. And you know, over the last couple years, there have been times when it seems like everything was roses late 2020, 2021. No one really cared about tactics to deal with tougher times, or more importantly, tactics to deal with slower growth. But boy, the last 24 months, many of us are experienced that some, some leaders, actually, these are the best of times. Whether it's Wiz insecurity, Rocke 400 million in a couple of years, Palantir, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, there are many leaders for whom this is the best of times. But not most of us in B2B. Most of us in B2B have suffered impacts from app layoffs, from seat contraction, from NRR declining. It. It is tougher out there. It is tougher. And one of the worst things I have seen so many founders do and it's, it is, it is an unforced error is giving up on goals. Giving up on goals. And you know, 2021 was great. 2022 was like a knife falling. 2023 was what's going on. There's layoffs in 2024. And beyond is this new era of efficiency. We all have to get more efficient. And times are tougher. And I've seen folks that maybe a couple years ago were growing a hundred percent that today are growing 10, 20 or 30 just plain hide. They stopped sending investor updates. And more importantly, investor updates are important because they keep you honest. But more importantly, they stop setting real goals for the team. And, you know, maybe that's okay for a month or so to catch your breath, but you'll never get anywhere without goals. Best efforts for the most part in growing software companies is, is nothing. There's no output. Best efforts yields nothing. And so what do you do? What do you do? If you were growing 100% a couple of years ago and you're growing 20% today, things are much harder. Micro milestones is the answer. Micro milestones. And I've done it, and I've seen a handful of others do it very effectively. And what is a micro milestone? Well, micro milestone is something you can grow that is one layer abstracted away from revenue. Okay, maybe we can't grow our revenue a hundred percent or 80% this year, but let's grow something. Let's grow free users, let's grow mouths, let's grow new logos. Let's grow something. And these work. Magically in the early days of Adobe Sign Echo Sign, when, when our growth was just okay actually it would have been tolerable in many ways, but I thought it was too slow. I the. The slow pace of Mr. Growth was too much for some of the team to handle. So I abstracted away and just called it seats. How many paid seats did we have? And we just tried to double the number of paid seats each year. And that that kind of helped us hide from the fact our our ARR and MRR were a little low. Try your own version of this. Try your own version that you can't get. Find something, something that is one level away abstracted from revenue that is still connected to it, that when you pull out of tougher times it will drag you to growth. So a couple that I pointed out in this article that I still like, one is just shrinking it to number of customers. Hey guys, we're at 10 customers today. We're going to get to 20 by in three months we're going to get to 40, we're going to get to a hundred. Okay, maybe it's not enough ARR to get us to an ipo, but it is progress. So customer count is a great one to show progress every month, every quarter, every year. Another one that can sometimes work are things like revenue under management. This can work well for folks that have a fintech component or a payments component. Maybe you're only doing a million of ARR, but get your customers to manage 100 million, 200 million, 500 million through your product. It can be very rewarding to the team and can show end progress. Mouse Daos wows. We talked about this. I didn't used to love usage as a core metric for micro milestones. I felt it's too B2C. Frankly. The SaaS companies I've invested in or worked with were Mouse and Daos were a core KPI. I always worried they were they were losing a bit of the picture in terms of connecting that to revenue. But I was partly wrong. What I mean is I do think it is a decent micro milestone if you're struggling to grow revenue, but your usage is growing your logins, your workflows. If folks are using your app more, much more often, especially radically more often, like doubling, that can show folks the path to the future. You will figure out how to monetize that. If people are in love with your app and by contrast if usage is dropping, it is, it is a bad sign. So I don't think Mouse and Daos and usage metrics are a bad one. A classic Sastra one is driving NPS up. Maybe a lot of us the last year or so have driven it down by ramming price increases through our base. But driving NPS up each quarter always wins. It's always a winner. It will always, in the long run, get you more revenue. And then a final one that I also like sometimes is new bookings from the base. Sometimes we get stressed because it is hard in tougher times to acquire new logos. Folks are in some categories shrinking the number of vendors they use. But if people love you, if you deliver insane value to customers, they will still add more usage, more seats, more workflows over time. So sometimes if new logo growth has slowed, you can take a little pressure off the team by saying, okay guys, let's just focus on revenue from the existing base. These are just different ideas. Customer count. Ma find something that you can grow this quarter materially, something that can grow north of 50% this year that can inspire the team, even if revenue isn't quite there. You will have a much better outcome than just giving up on goals and saying, best efforts, guys, do your best. I always see that lead to essentially no growth.