I believe there are seven key phases in SaaS companies’ go-to-market success. I’ve outlined each phase below and hope to elaborate on some of these in later posts and videos. Most of the phases center around a mantra I call “triple, triple, double, double, double”, (T2D3 for short), referring to a company’s annualized revenue growth. (

Engineer Wei Dai on reinventing yourself:

"Once you achieve high status, a part of your mind makes you lose interest in the thing that you achieved high status with in the first place. You might feel obligated to maintain an appearance of interest, and defend your position from time to time, but you no longer feel a burning need to know the truth.

One solution that might work (and I think has worked for me, although I didn't consciously choose it) is to periodically start over. Once you've achieved recognition in some area, and no longer have as much interest in it as you used to, go into a different community focused on a different topic, and start over from a low-status (or at least not very high status) position."

Be brutally honest: What do you do all day, and how neatly does it align with what your boss, or your boss’s boss, thinks you do? Executives tend to think managers focus on high-level tasks, such as leading institutional change and helping employees chart their personal growth. Managers, meanwhile, tend to find themselves tackling more mundane problems, like how (or whether) to hold meetings and find talent. Start taking back your time by using collaboration tools and visualization strategies to streamline your meetings—or better yet, get rid of them altogether. Moving work forward doesn’t always mean “let’s meet.” When you do, think about how you can make that time more about building interpersonal connections—starting with conversations that are less about substantive "outcomes" and more about an attitude or philosophy towards the work.

Little decisions compound and then anchor systems.

Our commitment to defending sunk costs keeps those systems long after they’re no longer serving a purpose.

The early days are exciting. Customers are seen and heard and served. Variations are created and value is produced as problems are solved.

In the early days, the most celebrated employees are the ones who figure out what someone needs and then determines a way to fill that need.

Once the organization gains traction, it’s possible that a short-term profit maximizer will join the team. They push to treat the customers as replaceable flanges, almost identical, income opportunities to be processed. And the employees? They are expenses, not part of a team.

It can seem like the fastest way for a stable business to increase profits is simply to remove some sticks. Process more flanges with fewer expenses. Lower overhead, measure the easy stuff, do it faster.

We spend too much time dealing with shaky towers. The resilience of people connecting, of organizations evolving, of service and clarity and generative work is far too important to be threatened by a few hustlers who insist on measuring the wrong thing.