Why early stage growth is different

Why early stage growth is different

There are lots of courses about how to grow a B2B SaaS company and many of those courses are really good.

But here's the thing, they fall into one of three categories: 

  1. People who made them have never done what they're actually telling you to (The worst)

  2. People who made them have only done early stage growth and probably on one company (relevant to you – but usually pretty myopic)

  3. People who made them are people who are writing for mainly established businesses (the best – but largely irrelevant to you)


That's why I made this course.

Early stage growth is different to later stage growth. You need special insights that you can only really get if you've actually run growth on many companies... or if you've slogged it out and got the scars to prove it.

And friend, I have both of those things.

My day job is Head of Growth at the world's leading SaaS Marketing Agency where I work with companies who are doing somewhere between $5-60M annual recurring revenue. My area of expertise is demand gen which includes: 

  • Positioning

  • Messaging

  • Landing Pages

  • Conversion


But before I did that, I was a founder of a B2B SaaS product in the survey tools market. I grew it from $0 all the way up to $190K ARR. 

It took five years. 

And I hated the first three because I made every mistake in the book (this course). 

Then in year 3, I course adjusted and we doubled our ARR in 18 months. 

Early stage growth is different from growing a mature SaaS product in the following ways: 

  • Early stage products are evolving – you can't afford to build complex systems when your system might be outdated in a matter of weeks

  • Early stage products fail often – once you hit $1M ARR, your ability to build solid systems changes

  • Early stage products are untested – you don't know for sure that there are enough people who find the pain points your product tries to relieve valuable enough to pay for


Those are the reasons that you need to invest less in building systems and spend more time getting dirty in the customer acquisition during the early stages. 

You can build scaleable systems later on. 

I know that's not what you want to hear, but it's the reality. 

That's why early stage growth is different.

Early Stage Growth Playbook

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  • Why early stage growth is different
  • How to use this course
  • Narration – Why early stage growth is different1

Validation

  • Why validation is genuinely important
  • The 2 deadly validation mistakes
  • Running user research interviews that don’t suck
  • Turning user research into useful stuff
  • Questions you can ask that don’t lead your interviewees
  • Tool: User Research Feedback Collector
  • Tool: Example of User Research Feedback Collector
  • Narration – Validation

Value Props

  • Why value props matter more than positioning at early-early stage
  • What’s the difference between value propositions and positioning?
  • The 4 components of effective value propositions
  • How to create value propositions with examples
  • Tool: Value Props Template
  • Tool: Example of Completed Value Props Template
  • Narration – Value Props

Message testing

  • Why you don’t need a website yet
  • How to test your concept in less than 20 minutes
  • How to get your first customers at this stage
  • What to do if you don’t get a good response
  • Tool: Simple cold outreach template2
  • Narration – Message Testing

Early stage landing pages

  • Components of early stage landing pages
  • Tool: Copy for early stage landing pages3
  • Narration — Early Stage SaaS Landing Pages

Tracking conversion

  • Why you should care about tracking conversion
  • What events you should be tracking
  • Where you should track progress
  • Tool: Funnel Data Template
  • Narration – Tracking Conversion

Getting strangers to buy from you

  • How to find the places where your prospects are
  • How to pitch to them without being salesy
  • Narration – Getting Strangers to buy from you

Tracking conversion: The funnel strikes back

  • Revisiting your conversion tracking is really important
  • 3 real world examples of why this matters
  • Narration — Tracking conversion: The funnel strikes back

Pain Point Content

  • Why pain point content works so well
  • How to come up with pain point ideas
  • How to write pain point content
  • Tool: Pain point content blog outline
  • Thread: How to 10x your value as a marketer with pain point content
  • Narration – Pain Point Content

Bonus resources

  • Twitter Summary Thread