Lenny's Newsletter - Scaling your B2B growth engine
Scaling your B2B growth enginePart seven of my seven-part series on kickstarting and scaling a B2B business👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. Welcome to part seven of our (now complete!) seven-part series on kickstarting and scaling a B2B business 🥳 Here’s an overview of the series so far:
Let’s do this. A huge thank-you to Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Ali Ghodsi (CEO of Databricks), Andrew Ofstad (co-founder of Airtable), Barry McCardel (CEO of Hex), Boris Jabes (CEO of Census), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment), Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO of Canva), Christina Cacioppo (CEO of Vanta), David Hsu (CEO of Retool), Eilon Reshef (CPO of Gong), Eric Glyman (CEO of Ramp), Guy Podjarny (CEO of Snyk), Jori Lallo (co-founder of Linear), Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel (co-founders of Stytch), Keenan Rice (founding team), Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front), Rick Song (CEO of Persona), Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng (co-founders of Zip), Ryan Glasgow (CEO of Sprig), Shahed Khan (co-founder of Loom), Shishir Mehrotra (CEO of Coda), Sho Kuwamoto (VP of Product of Figma), Spenser Skates (co-founder and CEO of Amplitude), Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), and Tomer London (co-founder and CPO of Gusto) for contributing to this series. Art by Natalie Harney. Although we’ve reached the end of this journey, we’re on a journey that never ends. Building a venture-scale business means endless challenges, surprises, and an unrelenting need for growth. I like to think of the startup journey as a huge puzzle board, where every challenge, decision, and opportunity is a piece of the puzzle. My job is to (slowly but surely) fill in this board and help you through every challenge, decision, and opportunity you’ll face. For reference, here are some puzzle pieces I’ve already put into place to help you scale your B2B startup prior to this series:
Today, I’ll answer four additional questions:
Let’s get into it. Typical times to get to $1M ARROn average, it took top B2B startups ~2 years from founding to hit $1m ARR, and roughly 1.5 years after closing their first customer. There are exceptions, like Ramp, Linear, Census, and Zip, that got there more quickly (some within months), and also companies like Loom and Vanta that took 2+ years. My takeaway is that once you’ve signed your first customer, you should strive to hit $1m ARR within 1.5 years if you want to be on pace with the top B2B companies. Interestingly, there isn’t a large difference in timelines between companies with large ACVs (e.g. Looker, Gong, Sprig, Vanta) and low ACVs (e.g. Loom, Figma). Also, in some instances, there’s good reason to push out monetization. In the case of Loom, co-founder Shahed Khan shared, “We didn’t monetize Loom for several years intentionally, as our focus was to become a ubiquitous tool within organizations. Thus it took us four years to hit $1m ARR.” With the recent acquisition news, seems like a good call. How B2B startups grow as they scaleBroadly, the biggest growth channel for top B2B companies (at least the 20+ I researched) is organic inbound. Essentially, word of mouth. This connects with a key lesson from part five of this series—that strong product-market fit often looks like strong organic growth. That being said, as we saw in part six, eventually 100% of B2B businesses build a sales team. Below I’ll explore all six B2B growth channels: self-serve organic inbound, sales-assist organic inbound, outbound sales, content/SEO, paid ads, and partnerships. Use this list not as “we should do all of these,” but instead as inspiration for one new channel to explore for your own product. You’re likely already growing primarily through one of the first three channels; ask yourself which of the remaining channels might be a new opportunity. 1. Organic inbound: Self-serve (aka Product-Led Growth)This channel is simply users hearing about your product from someone else (or being invited) and signing up on their own. No one from your company helps them through the funnel. This isn’t to say salespeople never talk to these leads (check out this podcast episode on product-led sales), but it does mean new customers come primarily from them first trying the product on their own. Companies like Loom, Figma, Segment, Gusto, Hex, and Linear grow primarily in this way. What this looks like:
2. Organic inbound: Sales-assistSimilar to the above channel, new customers come to you, but in this case, your sales team hand-holds leads through the process. Companies like Looker, Ramp, Vanta, Hex, Census, Persona, and some portion of Amplitude and Segment grow through this channel. The key determinant of whether you go self-service or sales-assist is how successfully new users can get activated without handholding. What this looks like:
3. Outbound salesThis is what you think of when you think of sales-led growth—your sales team reaches out to prospects, pitches them, and closes them. Companies that grow primarily through this channel include Gong and Zip, along with a meaningful portion of growth for Ramp and Segment. I’ll be doing more writing on this topic in the coming months, so stay tuned. 4. Content/SEOA surprisingly popular growth channel for top B2B companies is content. Companies like Vanta, Amplitude, Figma, Persona, and, famously, HubSpot have all found success using content (aka SEO) to grow. I’ve covered this topic in depth previously, so go read this if you’re looking to invest here. 5. Paid adsThey may be boring, but paid ads work. For B2B, this means running ads on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, along with the occasional ad on podcasts, newsletters, and other less-scalable channels. Companies that have found success here include both large (Figma and Amplitude) and smaller (Vanta and Census). For advice on running paid ads, here’s a good podcast episode to check out. 6. PartnershipsPartnerships: huge if successful, massive time suck if not. This is a meaningful growth channel for companies like Census, Hex, and Zip, but as one founder shared, “We have a big channel partnership with Snowflake, and though this doesn’t drive a big percentage of our leads, it does help to have that relationship.” I’ve written about channel partnerships before, so go read this if you’d like more examples and advice. A few additional takeaways
When and how much to chargeThese are the four key lessons that came up again and again when I talked to founders about their pricing strategy:... Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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