Jason M. Lemkin advises SaaS founders on managing difficult periods (“a year of hell”), arguing that temporary strategic retreats to survive (reduce burn, change team) can be necessary, but founders must not abandon the long-term goal of building significant growth. He emphasizes diagnosing internal issues versus benchmarking public comps and believes strong product/engineering teams can rebuild growth if founders don’t prematurely settle.
Chapters
I think what many people are doing. I wrote, I wrote this up a couple months ago and I should update it not that long ago. But I. Too many folks are doing a strategic retreat. Too many folks are saying, woe is me. The world is terrible. I'm going to batten down the hatches. I'm going to, I'm going to not grow, but I'm going to get to cash flow positive. There are times I think most founders. I wrote an old Saster post update called the Year of Hell. Almost everyone has a terrible year. Not everyone. Almost everyone has a terrible year. Usually it's not actually tied to macroeconomics. It's tied to a phase transition. Terrible. Higher in sales and revenue, a market change. My year of hell was not during a global meltdown. It was during a rough VP of sales transition. But people have it. And sometimes in a year of hell and you have to make a strategic retreat, you have to say, listen, I got, I got to survive. So I got to take a couple quarters to get my act together, maybe move on from a few folks on the team that are destructive or not doing it. I got to get my burn rate under control. And that's fine. But you can't change the ultimate goal of building something big and real. So you just got to be very careful what the strategic retreat is. You have to be very aware of going back to our kickoff session, what's my public comp? If my public comp is ZoomInfo or Monday or Doximity or Cloudflare, why am I not growing at their rates? Because it's you. Not them. It's you. There's something wrong with you. But if you have a great team, you can fix it. We can build software. We're all building software. We can ship more code. We can't. We never get enough features. It's always too slow. It always takes too long. It's always frustrating. If you're a non technical founder, it takes even longer. If you're a technical founder, they don't understand. They just don't understand. They never understand. And they're supposed to sell what I built. But a great team can always. It's never too late for a great team in SaaS. They can always build more software and catch back up to the market. But if you, if you settle, if you settle in tougher times, I don't see those founders recovering.
