INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Neeraj AgrawalContributorMore posts by this contributorIt’s been four years since TechCrunch published my blog post The SaaS Adventure,
which introduced the concept of a “T2D3” roadmap to help SaaS companies scale — and, as an aside, explored how well my mom understood
my job as an “adventure capitalist.” The piece detailed seven distinct stages that enterprise cloud startups must navigate to achieve
$100 million in annualized revenue
Specifically, the post encouraged companies to “triple, triple, double, double, double” their revenue as they hit certain milestones.I
was blown away by the response to the piece and gratified that so many founders and investors found the T2D3 framework helpful
Looking back now, I think a lot of the advice has stood the test of time
But plenty has also changed in the broader tech and software markets since 2015, and I wanted to update this advice for founders of
hyper-growth companies in light of the market shifts that have occurred.Perhaps the most notable change in the last four years is that the
number of playbooks for companies to follow as they sell software has expanded
Today, more companies are embracing product-led growth and a less-formal, bottoms-up model — employees are swiping credit cards to buy a
product, and not necessarily interacting with a human salesperson.Many of the most high-profile, recent software IPOs structure their
go-to-market operations this way
T2D3’s stages, by contrast, focus quite a bit on scaling a company’s internal sales function to grow
Indeed, both a product-led and a sales-led approach are viable in today’s growing B2B-tech market.What’s more, the revenue needed for a
software company to go public has increased dramatically in the last four years
This means that software founders need to focus not only on building a scalable product and finding scalable go-to-market channels, but also
building a scalable org chart
These days, what is scarce for software founders isn’t money from investors; it’s great human talent.So in addition to T2D3, my firm and
I are now focusing on another founder journey: F2C, or the transition from founder/CEO to CEO/founder
This journey can take many paths, but ideally it starts with the traditional hustle to find early product/market fit.
