Half of the SaaS growth game is keeping your company alive long enough to try things that can unlock efficient growth.

Most software startups don’t succeed – VC-funded or not.

And the successful ones rarely get there in a straight line. Don’t let those simple “magic” success stories get you down.

There are always crises, bumps, and plateaus that test your confidence—and your endurance.

Scott Desgrosseilliers is the founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, a leading multi-touch marketing attribution software provider for SMBs that use paid online advertising.

Scott is a wicked smart data and analytics expert who saw the costly limitations of simple performance reports from popular ad platforms.

Wicked Reports was started as a bootstrapped software company in 2016 to serve smaller companies that spend millions on digital ads and other marketing, including email, SEO, and digital events.

Scott raised a little practical angel funding and a little SaaS debt along the way to help grow a little faster.

Determining which marketing activities drive incremental revenue is a tricky puzzle to unravel, but the payback of those insights is huge. Stop wasting money there; spend more money here.

Wicked Reports is going strong with 28 employees, but they are still figuring out how to accelerate their scalable growth puzzle after 8 years.

He wasn’t tempted by many enticing offers for VC funding. That wasn’t the problem—or his vision for the company.

As Scott describes it:

“We had offers, and we could have raised VC funding early on, but then the growth rate we would have had to hit was too high, which didn’t make sense for our business.

“A competitor of ours took $20 million from a similar VC, and then they had to cut a third of their team. I’m not saying anything against them. They have a nice product and they seem like good guys. They hired a ton of people and didn’t hit the growth number, so they had to whack a bunch of them.

“Money isn’t always the answer. I’m sure there are cases where it solved all sorts of problems, but most VCs want to invest when you already have growth and net revenue retention at 120% when the efficient growth problem’s already solved!”

Scott shares the really tough challenges he faced through the years and how they got through them.

He’s still testing and trying new things, following the data and what customers actually do with their software.

Check out the inspiring interview with Scott Desgrosseilliers on the Practical Founders Podcast.

Keep going Scott!