The #1 Thing To Do When Times Are Harder
[ad_1]
I know it may not be what you want to hear
But the answer to how to get through tougher times is generally to work even harder. At least for a while – Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin
So as we’ve talked about many times on SaaStr, tougher times are here for many, but not for all. The pain and the so-called “downturn” isn’t evenly distributed. OpenAI, Stripe, Palantir, Cloudflare, Monday, Shopify, HubSpot and more are on a tear. ZoomInfo, Zoom, Bill and other leaders we love are hitting some of the same headwinds many startups are. It just really varies.
We’ve written a lot of I think good advice on SaaStr over the years on what to do in Tougher Times. Here are some of our favorites:
But if I had to summarize all of it, it’s this: Just Do Better Than Last Quarter. Claiming you are magically going to go from 10% growth to 100% in 1 year? Go for it, if you want. Hoping a magic new deal will do wonders? I hope so. All good. But if things have gone from Good to Not Great, you have to reestablish a baseline. And then just do better.
Booked $500k last quarter? At least book $700k this quarter. More is better. But at least do better. Everyone will get it. Not everyone will know how to get back to 100%+ growth. But everyone will know how to do a little bit better than last quarter. How to ship that one feature. Which customer to go visit. How to work that much harder on the pipeline. To do a bit better.
Back at the 2017 SaaStr Annual, Peter Gassner of $36 Billion Veeva gave one of the subtly best SaaStr talks ever. He’d been CTO of Salesforce before, and got to a $36 Billion market cap raising less than $10m in venture capital. But the early days weren’t easy. One of his hacks? He took a quarter at a time. He focused on just doing better than the last quarter. It worked for Veeva. I bet it will work for you.
