Don't die

Building a SaaS company is hard. Bootstrapping is hard. Growth can come slower than you want, and much slower than the talking heads on Twitter tout. Churn can hit harder than you expect, especially in the beginning. The grind of the day-to-day can induce a desire to give up. But the most important thing you can do is stay alive.

Don't die. In SaaS, survival is the secret.

To survive, growth must outpace churn. That's the rule.

Growth doesn't have to happen in giant leaps — it's not about explosive growth or fairy tales of overnight success. Every single customer gained net of churn is progress. Every one, a win.

The longer you survive, the more trust you earn. Markets — especially enterprise markets — value stability. Potential customers, partners, and the entire market, will eventually notice a business that continues to exist year after year after year.

They might not even know you exist yet — and maybe so for a long time — but they will. You will become a business they can depend on; a business they can trust. It's a function of time.

Simply existing signals reliability in a way no marketing campaign or fanatical audience or hockey-stick growth chart can.

Businesses choose businesses they believe be will around tomorrow, and the next day, and the next — not through clever campaigns or flashy features. Again, trust is a function of time.

Survival also gives you time to adapt. Early on, your product might not be quite right, or your messaging may be off, or if you're like I was, you may just not know what you're doing yet, much less be very good at it. That's normal. Don't die, and you give yourself the opportunity to iterate, refine, and most importantly, learn.

The businesses that thrive aren't always the ones that come out of the gate with a perfect idea and flawless execution — they're the ones that survive long enough to find and build what the market needs.

But if it's not hockey-stick growth, you should give up early, right? At least, that's what the talking heads on Twitter tout. In reality, that's unrealistic and you shouldn't buy into their fairy tales.

It's easy to give up when churn is high, or when growth is slow, or when everything you're trying isn't working yet. But giving up guarantees failure. So don't give up, and keep trying things.

Simply not giving up leaves the door open to success. A SaaS company doesn't have to grow fast to succeed; it just has to not die. Trust builds. Revenue compounds. Opportunities emerge.

Growth, no matter how incremental, is good. Time does the rest.

Don't die.