For most SaaS companies, scaling up from $1M to $10M in revenue is a game of phases. Push and grow. Then regroup and fix.
It’s rare to both grow fast and address your deepest challenges at the same time. You can expect bigger challenges than that.
Successful scaled-up founders create enough buffer in their cash and their plans to:
- deal with product delays
- make big product or team changes
- recover from major mistakes
- handle external crises
Yuval Selik is co-founder and CEO of Promomash, a software platform and managed service for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands to manage their trade promotions and field marketing activities.
Yuval is a former (failed) CPG founder who encountered the expensive, complex, and crucial process of managing trade promotions with stores and distributors.
Promomash was launched in 2015 to serve mid-sized CPG companies that lack custom software and their own in-house teams to manage promotion spend and ensure budget compliance with retailers.
With 125 employees, Promomash serves hundreds of CPG brands with its software and optional analysts who can perform complex sell-through reconciliation and spend analysis.
Yuval and his co-founder raised under $1 million from angel investors to get started, and the company is now profitable and growing steadily.
But it wasn’t a straight line for Promomash. They pivoted their offering entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There were many phases of growth—and regrouping—that were required, as Yuval describes:
“That’s really the reason why we did not raise funds from big investors, because I don’t want to have the pressures of somebody on my board telling me that I have to grow 50%, 80%, or 100% year over year.
“Sometimes you need to pull back to fix your product. Sometimes you need to push forward and step on the gas a little bit. But that decision needs to be my decision, not a VC investor’s decision.
“Others in our market that raised big VC funding, in our competitive landscape. Their founders do not run them: they’re run by their investors.”
VC-funded founders don’t get to regroup for six months or a year to fix things before their next growth spurt.
You get the irony.
It’s the lean bootstrappers who have more patience and control to accelerate when things are working and pull back to fix things when needed.
We experience the same phases of growth and rebuilding in our personal lives, don’t we?
Yuval also hosts The 7 Hats Podcast, which helps entrepreneurs invest in the seven key areas of their lives, in phases, ensuring both success and fulfillment.
Check out this authentic interview with Yuval Selik on the Practical Founders Podcast.
