I asked more than 30 practical SaaS founders about the progress they made in their businesses this year, starting with the question:
What was your revenue growth rate in 2024–and how do you feel about it?
Practical founders are building valuable software companies without big VC funding, so they don’t have big investors driving them to grow too fast and spend too much.
These founders shared growth rates of between 10% and 100%. The median was about 30% annual growth with a few outliers.
That’s pretty good overall. They are doing things that matter and building more valuable companies.
Here’s a surprising thing:
Most of these founders didn’t know their estimated 2024 growth rates off the top of their heads. They had to dig it up or make some guesses.
Revenue growth is important to bootstrapped and capital-efficient founders, but it’s not their only religion like it is in a VC-funded board meeting.
Then we got to the real question:
How do you feel about the progress you made this year in your business?
- Some founders had 20% growth rates and were OK with their progress. They made big improvements to their products, teams, strategies, operations, or other things that would fuel healthy growth in the future. Like profits.
- Some founders with 50%+ growth rates were not as happy. They grew faster but didn’t make as much progress on the important stuff in their business. New big challenges popped up, or their expectations (and costs) were higher.
- Some of these founders didn’t have a specific annual revenue goal this year. They just worked on the important stuff, kept costs in line, and did their best on the best things.
All of these founders think about revenue, profit, and cash flow, but that’s not all they think about.
Topline revenue growth is one important score of the game–it’s not the only game.
Do the right things for your customers, spend less than you make, and revenue should improve.
It’s never easy, but that’s far healthier and more sustainable than praying to the god of crazy growth goals for the sake of crazy growth.
Higher growth isn’t always better or healthier for your business. Everyone has a different “best growth rate” for their business.
