In yesterday’s CEO Mastermind, we focused on a case study about what it took to turn a failing startup into a success.

Here’s the story

It concerns an analytics platform that got early traction and collected $28 million between 2015 and 2018 but had to throw the towel into the ring shortly after the last round.

What happened next? A new owner picked up the leftovers and turned it into a glowing success in just three years with benchmark unit metrics.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲?

In short, here are the three main changes made:

🔥 – Instead of being obsessed with chasing large top-down Enterprise deals, they started fueling bottom-up momentum by serving ‘the underserved’ with a land-and-expand approach.

🔥 – They turned a ‘we know what the market needs’ development mindset into an iterative discovery-led approach listening for the essential signals from their ideal users.

🔥 – They stopped comparing their progress to others in the industry based on how much money we’ve raised and started focusing on how much value they’d created for each customer.

𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆:

Three issues were about changing the mindset from status-obsessed to customer-value-obsessed.

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴

Through the status obsession of the previous owners, they got giddy with the amount of money they raised, got blind to what was essential, spent it their funding on the wrong things, and got themselves into trouble meeting the raised valuation expectations from their investors. End of story.

𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘂𝗽𝗼𝗻

What mindset is driving the critical decisions in the SaaS startup you lead? What would your customers say?