How To Grow A SaaS Company From $0-$100k ARR – Experience from Narrow & Voila Norbert

Every business wants to maximize growth.

But “maximizing growth” can look very different depending on the size of your company.

Here, I’m going to look at growing a up businesses with an ARR of $0–$100K. I know what it takes to drive growth at companies in this bracket, because I’ve done it this a few times with Narrow, VoilaNorbert.com, Mailshake and a handful of others SaaS companies I’ve invested in or advised.

At that size, you likely don’t have the budget for a huge brand-building campaign. You might not be in a place to hire your first salesperson.

So what can you do?

Quick disclaimer here: I’m assuming you’ve already got product-market fit. In other words, I’m assuming that you’re in a good market, and you have a product that can satisfy customers in that market. If you don’t have that, you’ve got issues way beyond what I’ll be discussing here.

Identify Your Growth Channels

Your main objective at this stage is to grow revenue, so you need to figure out one or two channels that will help you get there.

For a company in the $0–$100K bracket, there are a few different ways you could go, like:

• Banner ads: Promoting your product or business on third-party websites
• PPC: Bidding on relevant keywords via search engines like Google and Bing
• SEO: Optimizing your website to rank organically within search results
• Cold email: Building a list of prospects and reaching out to them via email
• Cold calling: Like cold email, but on the phone
• Social: Engaging your audience by publishing interesting content on social platforms. You can hire a SaaS content marketing agency to get the job done more professionally

It’s really all about the hustle. There’s no “one way to grow.” It’s just about doing whatever you can to hit those numbers and get your brand out there, because at this point you’ll be pretty unknown in the market. 

You’ll want to put some focus on outbound – things like cold calling and cold emails – and you should also pump some budget into paid search and advertising on platforms like Google and Facebook.

Down the line, you’ll want to really monetize your product, but at this stage it’s worth considering launching with something free. Maybe you offer a freemium tier, or a free trial that’ll help you build some hype around your product and grow your brand and email list.

One thing that worked for me at Mailshake was offering a lifetime deal via AppSumo. We quickly signed up 6,000 customers, with multiple users at a lot of those accounts. 

Sure, we didn’t make a ton of money from those subscriptions, but I treated it like a marketing channel. Almost overnight, we went from a pretty much unknown brand to having a substantial base of people using, enjoying and talking about our product. By building a word-of-mouth channel, this approach helped us generate hundreds of new customers every month.

Which brings me to a broader point: optimizing your pricing to grow your business. When your SaaS is turning over a nice profit, you can use a free SaaS valuation from a number of online business brokerages and M&A advisors

Say you want to get to a point where you’re generating an ARR of $100 million – shoot for the sky, right? Well, there’s more than one way to get there.

Maybe you’ve got 10 million active consumers visiting your site every month, and you’re generating $10 a year from each of them through ads. Or at the other end of the scale, you could have 1,000 big accounts – enterprise customers – each paying you $100,000 a year. The end result is the same, but the way you get there is totally different.

Run the Numbers

When it comes to identifying the right channels to maximize your growth, it’s vital that you do the math upfront.

Can you get 10X the return from this channel? What about 100X? 

The answer won’t always be “yes,” but those are the channels you want to be targeting.

Say I’ve been growing my company through affiliates. I’ve been going after solopreneurs or mommy bloggers, maybe I’ve been using some networks. Can I generate 10X more from them? Let’s be honest: probably not. Especially if I’m going after very niche markets. 

Or maybe I’m targeting word of mouth and referrals. Perhaps I’m incentivizing it by offering X months of free access for successful referrals. Can I scale this up?

Maybe a more compelling offer would help me get 30% more out of it, but double, triple or 10X the return would require a substantially larger customer base. Realistically, it’s going to take me a long time to see a healthy return from this channel.

But some channels are scalable and can deliver that 10X return.

A great example is content and SEO. You can see that you’re driving X amount of traffic from the content you’ve already created. You know that there are dozens, or hundreds, or thousands more keywords for you to target. So you know that if you increase the volume and go after those additional keywords, you can scale up. It’s a very proven model.

The reality is that if you’re in the first two examples, you probably need to be running other channels alongside it while you optimize performance.

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