Exploring The Growth Path: A Self-Assessment Questionnaire For SaaS Founders

While many SaaS founders instinctively prioritize customer acquisition for business growth, industry benchmarks signal a shift towards emphasizing customer retention, which has become increasingly challenging.

However, we must broaden our perspective to uncover untapped opportunities for SaaS growth. This questionnaire, designed to assess key SaaS business areas, offers a unique lens to identify overlooked paths for scaling your SaaS.

Most Founders Are Concerned About The Top Of The Funnel (TOFU)

I recently led a workshop, "Personalized Insights to Take Your 20K MRR to 1 Million (and Beyond) ARR". The workshop brought together an impressive mix of SaaS startups, each ranging from 5K to 25K MRR, all sharing the common aspiration to reach the 30-100K MRR mark by 2024. 📊📈

At the workshop kickoff, I prompted founders to pinpoint the major hurdles they faced on their growth journey. To my (un)surprise, a recurring theme emerged—most founders identified challenges at the top of the funnel (TOFU) as the primary roadblock to scaling their SaaS business.

Numerous examples were shared, providing a snapshot of the common struggles faced by founders:

🎯 Uncertainty in product positioning

📢 Generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) at a reasonable cost

🤝 Getting prospects to commit to demo meetings

⚙️ Lack of an efficient sales system, with founders still handling everything.

Industry Benchmarks Signal To Focus On Retention First

Retention in 2023 was harder than it has ever been. Over half of SaaS businesses saw lower retention rates than in 2022 (ChartMogul, SaaS Benchmarks Report 2023).

 “In reality, for every B2B SaaS business retention becomes the biggest growth driver in a way. So it is worth focussing on retention really from day one, perhaps even before you actually have any meaningful retention data to look at.”

Nick Franklin, Founder & CEO, ChartMogul

Diving deeper into industry metrics, the B2B SaaS Metrics Benchmark 2023 Report by RevOps reveals a crucial insight: the customer acquisition cost (CAC) payback period fluctuates between 16-19 months.

👉 This means that, on average, B2B SaaS businesses must retain customers for about 1.5 years to recover their marketing and sales costs. Hence, retention emerges as the unequivocal priority for sustained growth.

The outlook is more favorable for those below the 1 million ARR threshold. According to OpenView's 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report, the CAC payback period averages around eight months in this segment.

This is further corroborated by the European SaaS Benchmark 2023 by Serena, indicating that the midmarket's best-in-class CAC payback is less than eight months.

But Customer Acquisition And Retention Is Not Enough for Assured Scaling-up

During last week's live workshop, each founder self-assessed their situation to find clues for SaaS growth, and I provided personal insights. We reviewed each SaaS through four lenses:

📊The Offer

📈 Sales Process

🤝Team & Resources

🛠️ Optimization & Automation

The least I can do is share this insightful SaaS scale-up readiness questionnaire with you. You can access it via this Google Docs link and make a copy for yourself.

Taking this questionnaire seriously is your key to revealing overlooked areas where your SaaS business can generate additional revenue. 💪🌱🚀

Let's Explore Your Growth Strategies Together

I specialize in guiding SaaS companies to reach 1M ARR and beyond through strategic Scale-up Sprints, freeing founders to focus on their core strengths.

👉 Check this 2-pager for more details.

If you are still in the pre-launch stage or doing less than 5.000 MRR, I invite you to book a free Double Sprint audit to identify your blind spots and create an action plan for getting your first customers or scaling your SaaS.