Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unlocking Growth: The Power of a Diverse Customer Base, SMB and Enterprise with CEO Greenhouse

1 Nov 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:59

A YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin (CEO Greenhouse) about the strategic benefits of maintaining a diverse customer base across SMB and enterprise segments. The speaker argues a multi‑segment approach creates a portfolio effect that stabilizes growth across economic cycles—when SMBs underperform, enterprise customers (now larger for this speaker) can sustain net retention and long‑term value, and vice versa in growth years. The speaker also highlights the value of thousands of startups as a testing ‘lab’ that drive product learning and adoption.

Chapters

We're doing it knowingly, but we always thought, number one, you get a great portfolio effect. I mean, I think we've always tried to be really intentional in our, in our strategy and in this way in particular, we've always thought of it as we want to be multi segment. So in a year like this, the SMB is just doing worse. But the enterprise segment that we have, which by the way is bigger now than our SMB segment is doing great. And so the net retention characteristics and the long term nature of it like is really nice. At the same time there's other years where you know, SMBs are just, you know, jumping in the boat and it's all you can do to take the orders as fast as possible and so you get this amazing growth. So like the portfolio effect of that at our scale is really helpful because you're going to have a bunch of different years with a bunch of different things happening. Secondly is I do think there's something really neat about having a couple thousand startups using your product every day. Like if they're the lab that the start, the tech companies are the lab, the startups are the lab, right?