Break Through the 7 SaaS Plateaus

# Break Through the 7 SaaS Plateaus

MicroConf analyzed 7 SaaS companies and found their plateaus and ways to get over them.

Key Observations

These Apply After Strong Product-market fit: After $30k+.
The Solutions Are Obvious
Predicting And Avoiding is Much Easier

SaaS Plateau Equation

The formula for plateau is $\frac{N e w M R R}{M o n t l y R e v e n u e C h u r n %}$ .

For example with Monthly Recurring Revenue $3000$ and Churn $2.5 %$ the expected plateau is $$ 120000$ .

Plateau Causes

1. Leaky funels

See How to Diagnose a Leaky SaaS Funnel for details on finding out.
Churn Is the Silent Killer of SaaS Businesses describes the good-bad churn rates.

Sometimes you think you need more churn, but you need better Churn, you can't outrun your Churn.

Sometimes you are missing the important feature, but usually the solution is to stop serving high-churn prospects. You have to move upmarket: maybe remove your cheapest plan.

3. Not enough leads

If your Churn is good, but you're not growing, then you need more leads. Try The 3 High 3 Low Metrics Framework to fix it.

4. Competition

Don't just build features, go talk to customers first.

5. Tapped Out the Market

This is very uncommon, rarely happens. You shoudn't try to go to other product, shoudn't translate the app.

6. Strong Product-market fit with One Segment of the Market

Build features to reach other segment.