As an early-stage SaaS startup founder or team member, you’re likely to be very excited about running and growing your business... and also lost, confused, and anxious because of the amount of stuff you need to focus on to make it happen.
Sound familiar? We've been there—we grew our own SaaS company, Hotjar, to $15 million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in less than four years without funding, and we've seen first-hand how easy it is to get distracted and overwhelmed when trying to take it all in.
Why we wrote this guide
Books, podcasts, videos, case studies, you name it—there is so much content out there about growing a SaaS startup that you can just go on forever. We thought it would be more useful to have one resource, in one place, to guide new teams along their growth journeys, helping them focus on the fundamentals and getting their bases covered. Something they could use and come back to, over and over. We couldn't find one, so we wrote it ourselves.
How we wrote it
In May 2017 we hosted an event for early-stage startups whose agenda became the framework for this guide. We wrote most of the content by reaching out to and documenting the experiences of people at Basecamp, Receptive, Pipedrive, Price Intelligently, SaaStock, EnhanCV, and others who have ‘been there, done that’ multiple times. We also shared some of our later drafts with over 500 people in the SaaS space, who gave us open, actionable suggestions on what we needed to cover.
How you can use it
The word ‘essential’ in the title has two meanings: the content we share in the following chapters is crucial for growing your startup, but the focus is on the fundamentals to help you get all your bases covered. Think of this guide as a launchpad: if you’re hungry for more, we added a resource list at the end of each chapter with several hours of video and podcasts, and hand-picked links to additional books and articles by entrepreneurs and business-builders like yourself. Each chapter can be read independently, so you can jump to any topic that is relevant to you.
The remaining chapters of this guide cover:- Four key ingredients for startup success
- Positioning and branding your product
- Finding and maintaining product/market fit
- When, how and where to get funding
- Pricing your product
- Launching your product and getting traction
- Setting up your business operations
- Growing your team
- Credits
