How to Grow a SaaS Company From $1m-$10m ARR – Experience From Mailshake & When I Work

Reaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) is a big target for a lot of small businesses.

I get that. It’s a big, impressive-sounding number. 

But it’s important to remember that your job isn’t just to get to $1 million – it’s to build a marketing or growth engine that can get you to $1 million and beyond.

And that’s a very different mindset.

I buy companies at all stages of growth. What I usually see at this level is that people don’t  build scalable marketing channels or growth engines that can actually get them past this point. They maybe have a tactic that got them to $100k or a strategy that got them to $1 million, but they have nothing else.

My experience with companies like Mailshake and When I Work means that I know what it takes to maximize growth at this stage of a company’s life. Here’s what you should be doing:

Figure Out Your Processes

This is probably the first thing you’d want to do at $1 million to get to $10 million.

Figuring out your processes touches on every aspect of your business. There’s just so much stuff for you to consider:

• Are you going to use OKR?
• How do you meet with the other departments?
• What should your communication look like?
• How are you going to get feedback from your customers? 
• Where does support or sales go when they have feedback? 
• How are you going to set goals for your team?
• How are you going to manage this company?
• How are you going to calculate the lead score of your leads?

And that’s only just scratching the surface. If it’s something that happens regularly in your business, you likely need to figure a process for it, because otherwise you’re going to get different outcomes every time you do it. That’s really inefficient, and it also makes it much harder to scale up.

The biggest failure here is people just don’t have channels. As people will learn from their first million dollars, it’s really hard to pull a channel out of thin air and get it to work. You have to test it. It takes a long time and you ultimately slow down growth.

Tap Into New Audiences

You’ve likely got one or two key audiences who’ve helped you grow to this size. 

Maybe you’ve been targeting early-stage startups and founders. You’ve created a fantastic blog aimed at founders and it’s brought you a ton of business. 

But there’s only so many founders in the world that would buy your product, so that total addressable market is fairly small.

So you need to think about what else you can do. Start targeting a new persona, or using other types of marketing, before you hit the ceiling on your current activity.

Find Mentors & Support for Your Team

Sure, you deserve credit for building a business with an ARR of $1 million. But your job is far from over!

There’s always so much more for you to learn – and the same goes for your team.

Let’s say you’re planning to test PPC for the first time. Wouldn’t it be valuable to speak to people who’ve been there, done it, and bought the T-shirt? To hear what they’re doing, what’s worked for them, and where they’ve gone wrong?

You’re going to want to get out into the world and talk to other marketers and founders. Get yourself in some Slack groups, or use a platform like Clarity.

This is also a really good time for you to get some mentors and coaches onboard, both for your team and yourself.

Now, I know that coaches and mentors sound expensive. Maybe they charge $200, $400, $600 an hour. That’s a lot of money.

But this isn’t someone you need for 10 hours a week, every week, for the next year. It’s about giving your team access to an expert resource for an hour or two a month – someone they can go to who really knows their stuff. 

We find coaches and mentors on sites like JBarrows and My Sales Coach. In fact, I just got off a call with one of our sales coaches, and he reviewed this outbound campaign we’ve been planning. He pointed out three or four slight adjustments and one major pitch change that we’re going to action. That hour-long session cost me $500, but the changes he recommended are going to dramatically improve the outcome of our campaign.

You could just go hire a very specific sales coach and solve the very specific problem you’re facing for 50, 100, 200 bucks per hour or per session. And you end up generating 10X the return on your investment.

Build Your Management Team

Going from $1 million to $10 million ARR is kind of like going from a teenager to an adult. Now you really need to figure out how the world works and how to control your finances.

Building your management team will help you thrive in the big, bad world.

Let’s say you’re a sales-led organization, so your biggest challenge for growth is bringing in business. At this stage, your one or two-person sales team will definitely break, so you need to hire a sales manager – maybe a VP who can take you from one salesperson to 20. Or if you’re going to manage them yourself, you need coaches to help you learn how to manage better.

Usually you want to get a marketing manager or director too, or maybe this is where you go for a top-down approach, where you bring in a VP and they figure out the next steps for you.

Depending on your channels of growth, you’re going to want to double down in those areas, but you’re going to want a management team and a system to align all the moving parts of your business. We use EOS Traction for this, or another option that a lot of startups use is Scaling Up.

Define Where You’re Going

What outcome do you want from this company?

Hopefully as a founder or marketer or growth person, you’ve figured this out early on. If not, you need to ask yourself what your goal is and what that means for you personally.

It’s critical to say, “Okay, now I have this aspirational goal of where I want to get, I put pencil to paper for X amount of time. Now, based on where I’m at, where do I think this company can go?”

What’s realistic for you to achieve? If your ultimate objective is to devote 5-10 years to your business then get bought by a bigger rival, you’ve got to understand that’s unlikely to happen.

At Mailshake, we said, “When we’re at $1 million, we want to get to $10 million – and here’s what we think we can do to get there. And then from $10 million, we want to get to $50 million.” 

When we get to $7 or $8 million, we’re going to check in and ask ourselves, “Is $10 million still possible? How about $50 million?”

Obviously, I would love to go a lot higher than $50 million, but that’s just too far out to be thinking about right now. So I put two rocks in place and say, “When I get close to that, I’m going to go think about those other things.”

Understand What Drives Your Business

This is where pricing levers and product become more critical. 

In my experience, companies are usually led by one of three things:

• Sales: A great example of a sales-led organization is Salesforce, which has clearly led through salespeople and selling.
• Product: With these businesses, the product is doing the heavy lifting. HubSpot is a good example of this, although they’ve added marketing to the fuel too.
• Marketing: These businesses are just amazing at marketing, maybe they’ve got a big brand. A good example would be ClickFunnels – sure, their product’s good, but their marketing is better. They’ve got a huge, brand-loyal following and produce a crazy amount of content.

You’re going to want to figure out which camp you fall into. Maybe you have a little bit of everything – a lot of companies do – but ultimately you’re still going to be dominant in one area or another, and that’s where you should be building your team to be as strong as possible.

Review Your Pricing

To get to $1 million, you need to be generating about $83,000 in monthly recurring revenue. So how many customers does it take to get you there?

Well, let’s say you’re charging $50 a month for your product. That means you need approximately 1,600 customers to hit an ARR of $1 million. But if you’re charging $100 a month, you only need half that number of customers. Or if it’s $1,000, you only need 83 customers. If it’s $10,000, you only need eight customers to reach that magic $1 million mark.

This is important to know, because you can see how pricing has a very clear and substantial impact on hitting your revenue goals.

Can you increase your pricing? At Mailshake, on our road from zero to $100,000 ARR, we signed up 15,000 users. We wouldn’t even make it to $100k with that customer base, because we did a lifetime deal and used it to build our word-of-mouth engine, which got us entry into a market that we were pretty late to. So effectively, our fees were dirt cheap or nothing.

Now, to get from $100,000 to over $1 million, it was clear we needed to change our pricing. We were charging $9 a month, so we would need thousands and thousands of customers (9,259, to be precise) to make it work – it just wasn’t going to happen.

So we increased pricing – in fact, we doubled or even tripled it. And then at $1 million we’re asking ourselves, “Okay, how many more customers can we get? How many more customers are out there?”

Address Your Churn

This stage of growth is also when you should hire somebody to look at churn – maybe a customer success person, maybe a consultant, maybe someone in product metrics.

Whoever they are, you need them to find your bad customers. Where are your high-churn customers coming from? Then you can do less of that specific activity, or you can fix what’s going wrong early on in the funnel. 

Typically, I’ve found activation is the biggest problem, by which I mean customers fail to activate, or maybe they’re aggressively sold to, or you’ve got a product issue at the activation stage that’s causing people to churn.

If you have high churn further down the line, it’s typically because your product isn’t being used enough. So you need to be asking:

• How do you get your product to be used more? 
• What sort of marketing education do you need to give your customers? 
• How can you add stuff to your product to make it more useful?

Use Your Product as a Marketing Tool

You don’t want your product to be seen as a “nice little tool” that saves users a bit of time; you want them to see it as a whole platform.

To get there, you need to figure out how you can expand your product to be used more, so that it’s valuable for a longer period of time.

In other words, you’re effectively using your product as a marketing channel that compels customers to use it more. Maybe you can continue to grow by creating more micro-tools and features, or launching new updates all the time.

So how do you figure out what your dev and product teams should be focusing on?

Speak to your sales reps! Ask them about the most common reason that they don’t close a deal.

Let’s say it’s because you don’t integrate with X, Y and Z. So if you built those three integrations, guess what? You can go back to the prospects and sell them. 

Or maybe you’ve missed the boat on those specific prospects, but that will reduce friction with other potential customers, so you increase conversion by expanding your product. 

That’s why I see product as a very big function of marketing.

Decide What to Do With Your Money

So far, it’s mostly been about the decisions you need to take within specific areas of your business – which processes do you need to build? Are your prices right? Are you chasing the right customers?

But as a founder, you also have to make some personal decisions at this stage.

Full disclosure: I hate the term “lifestyle business.” It’s really, really hard to build any business of any size, and I would never discount any business in the world that’s making $5 million or $8 million or $10 million. Those smaller businesses make up more of the US economy than the larger companies do.

You need to ask yourself some honest questions here. If you have a $5 million business, what do you want to do with that money?

Do you want to just increase your own salary?

Or do you want to invest in growth to help it become a $50 million business?

Prepare Your Business to Be Sold

This is a super valuable piece of advice: whether or not you actually want to sell your business: act like you do.

You want to operate your business as if it’ll be sold in six months or a year from now, because it forces you to focus on all the right areas. Operating a company that’s built to be sold ensures that you have a good management team, you’re profitable, and you have healthy growth.

If you get a lot of churn, you have a sputtering growth engine that needs work every couple of months.

So if you build your company to be sold, it will be more efficient. You’ll be happier as a founder. And you’ll be focusing on those hard things. Like, what can I build in my product that can give me strategic value? 

And frankly, this is an exercise I don’t think people do enough of, or early enough.

Now, let’s say your goal is 100% to sell the business. That means you also need to figure out who you’d be a strategic acquisition to, and what they would want from you.

If this is the route you’re going down, I’d urge you to actually reach out and introduce yourself to those people, whether they’re your competitors or are in adjacent fields.

Go to the events they go to, and make sure you find an excuse to bump into them or get an intro. You want them to know your name. Maybe you share a little bit about your company before you’re ready to sell because in a perfect world, you would keep them up to date.

So here’s an example: at Mailshake, one of our potential acquirers would be Salesforce. 

Now at the moment we’re too small for Salesforce, and we likely will be for a long time. But we know a lot of people at Salesforce. We’ve gotten feedback from them. We know some of the Salesforce ventures folks, we just say “Hi” to them. We keep them up to date. 

They laugh at our numbers – and when we first built the relationship, they were definitely laughable! But now they’re like, “Oh, okay, that’s a little better, but still laughable.” 

It gets better every time! And this is definitely the stage to start cementing those relationships.

Is your business at this stage? What are you doing to maximize growth? Let me know in the comments below: