# Break Through the 7 SaaS Plateaus - Rob Walling at MicroConf US 2025

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv1IO5mmTKY
Duration: 30 min
Language: English
Words: 6372
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Sv1IO5mmTKY

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[0:00] Plateaus are the death of SAS. Well, churn is the death of SAS, but churn causes plateaus. I went through tiny seed. We have 192 investments. So, I have 192 MR graphs. And so, I started flipping through. I I went through literally every one of them. And I tried to find plateaus that people broke through. And then I reached out to the founders in Slack and then I said, "Hey, what what caused this plateau and then how did you get through it?" Now, the bad news, I think I'll try to only say this once because it is kind of sad. I wasn't I always knew the plateaus were

[0:30] really brutal to get through. What I learned going through the 192 tiny sea companies is that it was about 85 or 90% of folks who who did plateau never made it through their plateau. I mean it's really grim. So, as I was going through these, I learned some stuff from this, right? Because I always have a hypothesis of like, plateaus, XYZ, hey, they're hard to get through. But as I went through all these revenue graphs, I learned number one. Um, these seven apply after you have some type of emerging product market fit. So, think about this as like, you know what, I'm already at 10, 20, 30k MR minimum up

[1:05] into the millions of ARR. That's where this talk applies. The solutions are obvious. I think I already said that. Usually, it's like, hey, you're plateaued because you don't have enough leads. Well, what's the solution? Get more leads, right? The solutions are obvious. It's not going to be helpful. The the helpful part is being able to identify if you're in the plateau if that's the reason for it. And then uh to hear an example of another founder who struggled with it and got through it. As I already said, predicting and avoiding a plateau is much better than hitting it because the numbers are they're not great, at least in my sample size of,

[1:36] you know, just under 200. And the other interesting thing was of the six examples I'm going to give you, three of them are actual plateaus someone hit and made it through and three of them are we saw a plateau coming. Profit well kept telling us we were going to plateau and we made this change and avoided it. And that's also good, right? So just before we dive in to these seven, the SAS plateau equation, how much new MR are you adding in a

[2:04] given month? I know it's not consistent. And I know it's not the exact same number every month, but let's say you're adding well, we do an example. You're adding $3,000 of MR and your monthly revenue churn is 5%. 3,000 divided by 0.05, you will math dictates that you will plateau at 60k of MR. And likewise, since it's just a linear equation, if you cut your churn in half, right, to 2 and a half%, 120k MR, that's it. If you're adding three, I mean 2.5% turn is not the worst, right? and 3% MR, I'm sorry, $3,000 MR. Also not the worst, but that's it. You have a $1.4 million

[2:40] business. And unless you change the fundamentals of these through, you know, there's a bunch of different levers to pull to change churn and to change new MR. Unless you change that, that's your business. You're going to plateau. Predict it. Avoid it. All right. Seven SAS plateaus. Oh, and the other thing I'm going to say, the first four are the most common and then the the latter three are almost a they're just a lot less common, right? So, they're a subset or a lower category of it. So, the first one's a leaky funnel. What is a leaky funnel? So, I'm not including churn in your funnel. There's a separate one for

[3:13] churn. Leaky funnel is, hey, you know, someone hears about you, then maybe they sign up for a trial, then they do they convert or not, that type of stuff. So, that's the funnel. So, what does this look like? How do you know if you have a leaky funnel? How do I know if my funnel is the problem or if I don't have enough

[3:27] leads or if my churn is too high, right? I define a leaky funnel as something that's not in these ranges. These are my rule of thumb ranges. If you have a trial, and this is for low touch, there's a whole other stuff for high touch, but a low touch funnel. Trial requires a credit card. You can go to

[3:41] sasplaybook.com/resources. And that's a literally the one on the right is a screenshot from the website. This is in SAS playbook if you have a copy. 10 bucks on Kindle. I won't read through these numbers here, but if you're within these ranges, generally your funnel's probably okay. You probably don't need to really spend a lot of time on it. I mean, there's some exceptions, but like this is a general guideline. This is why when I posted on Twitter one time about rules of thumb and how important they are, whether in SAS or anything else, and someone said,

[4:09] "Bullshit, there are no rules of thumb. That's common knowledge. And common knowledge is da da da." And it's like, no, having a rule of thumb generally, if I started another SAS tomorrow and I had a credit card up front and my trial to paid was 20%. I know that that's the weakest part of my funnel. I know it from experience. I know it from looking at a bunch of companies. So, you can at least take this, you know, this loose thing and realize ah, if I'm within these, I'm probably doing okay. And if I'm below these, I probably need to work on this first. And this is one of the

[4:35] most common. High churn and and leaky funnel are the the two that I see the most common. All right. So, the cause is a leaky funnel. What do you do? Of course, you fix your funnel. You troubleshoot your funnel. You start at the bottom. There's a whole process here I don't have time to go into because I only have four minutes per uh per point here. But the example I'm going to give you today is scraping B. I got

[4:56] permission from all of these founders. Is Pierre in here? Pierre. Pierre. There you are in the way in the back. So, Scraping B um highly successful SAS company. Last time they were public about MR I think they were at two or three I think. Uh yeah, million of oh of ARR I'm sorry, not ARR. Um they they've been building in public. So Pierre said I said hey you know why did you plateau and why do you think it was a leaky funnel? And Pierre said we're selling a commodity and we were between 50 and 100% more expensive than competition

[5:27] on some dimension which was concurrency. So a I like the fact that he was just like we're selling a commodity. Like how many people would admit that? It was it's kind of cool. So once we were able to offer the same kind of price thanks to new infrastructure. We almost doubled our number of new customers per month overnight. So they were losing people were signing up and then just bailing right in the middle of the funnel. It the lowering the price didn't allow us to overcome a plateau per se, but it sure allowed us to avoid it as we were

[5:54] close to the churn equals new MR phase. That's the equation I had earlier in the talk, right? We offered way more for the same price. Haven't touched the nominal price of the plan, but increased what each plan had to offer. So, this is another clever way to raise pricing. I did this twice with Drip where I really liked our price points with Drip. 49.99 149 and up. And if we just lowered the number of subscribers you got per plan, we effectively had people upgrading quicker. And that's what Pierre is saying is you just kept the same pricing because you like the round number. You didn't want to go to 59 and 159 like

[6:25] this awkward pricing. You just kind of lower. So, that's how they raised pricing. And so, uh, this is Mr. Graph. I removed by request for for everyone. I removed the um the date and the uh you know the actual um MR AR on the left but I will say everyone that I show in this

[6:42] talk is mid6 figures into seven figures. So that gives you an idea none of the these are not like 10k MR companies right so avoided a plateau by fixing their funnel number two as I've referenced high churn so what does high churn look like? This is a screenshot from the PDF of the SAS playbook. Um, this is how I define it. Now, here's the

[7:09] thing is gross turn, not net turn. There's a whole we can dive into the whole thing. This is revenue churn, not uh logo turn. If you are an enterprise sales company doing a lot of annual stuff, you should probably be two almost two points below this at any given point. I saw someone post to ex Twitter today and said, I have nine 9% monthly

[7:25] churn. Is that good or is that very bad? And I say that is not good based on this definition. almost catastrophic. So this is how you know you literally come to this and say I'm 23% all right I'm okay if I have two 3% churn and I'm not enterprise sales I'm probably doing all right I'm not doing the worst and so the solution if you have if you're good or no no yeah if you have we're back high churn you have high churn so here's the problem is this the solution that I see some people doing is like I'm not growing I just need more leads

[8:03] And I'll look and I'll say, "Let's look through your funnel. It's Wait, you're turning at 9 10% a month. You don't need more leads. You can't possibly outrun your churn. It's too much. You're turning over your whole customer base every eight months. This is not a subscription business at all. You you haven't built a subscription business. It's on fire." So, the the idea of adding more leads tends to be the the

[8:23] whack or the the um fix all, right? Everyone thinks if I have more leads, it fix everything. It doesn't. Not if you have the fundamentals of your business are not working, not if your turn is too high. And that is why I'm giving this talk is so you can say, "Oh, if I'm at 7% churn, I should probably work on that. And if I'm at, you know, 2% churn, I should probably know that I'm in a good spot here." So there's a couple things you can do um to get around churn. It is a huge topic. I think I've given entire talks on it. There's an

[8:49] entire chapter of the book. It's a lot to say. So sometimes it depends on which why people are turning. Sometimes people are turning because oh, you're missing this feature, this checkbox feature. We'll get into that a little later. Competition, right? So you can build missing features, but realistically um the way I see it more often is that you stop serving high churn prospects or customers. Oftent times you have two types of customers, three types of customers. You have folks who are paying you more, who churn low, who sometimes are net negative churn, who stick around for a long time, who really aren't that much of a pain in the ass. And then you

[9:21] have the proumer B TOCish, the folks who are kind of dabbling in it, who are paying you less, who are the most headache, who churn the highest, right? and trying to figure out who you know what what how the the ICP is different from that is is the challenge here. Um and in that case you're essentially kind of moving up market. Even if you don't raise your prices, you often will just cancel your lowest plan, right? If you have a $19 plan and then a bunch of other plans up upstream, that $19 plan is usually going to turn higher and be a lot more demand. Uh you know, have a lot

[9:50] more demand. So we saw Jordan G do this with Cart Hook. If you go back and and reference how he had a velvet rope policy because they were doing 49 a month and up and at a certain point he said minimum plan is $300 a month and everyone has to do a demo with me and it pissed off a bunch of prospects and you didn't qu he if you were a brand new Shopify store you didn't qualify and they would turn you away and people were like mythed like why can't I do this and he said because our turn is catastrophic their turn I don't remember what it was

[10:16] eight or nine% probably but he knew that they wanted to grow to a multi-million dollar business and so he literally stopped serving the bottom end of the market we saw Gather do this in season two of Tiny Seed Tales where their bottom plan was $29 a month when they joined Tiny Seed. And we said, "This is not a viable business. You're doing one, you're doing one demo to close. $29 a

[10:34] month is completely uh unsustainable." And by the end of the season, I think they were at 200 or 250 a month uh as the bottom end. So, took them 18 months to move up market. They had a bunch of missing features. They were trying to uh cater to architecture firms that had like 10 people instead of one. And that's a whole that's a whole thing. So moving up market is another way to do this. And the example I have of this is Marty at JBboard, which is SAS. If you wanted to start a job board, that's what JBboard does. And so Marty says, "At JBboard, we never actually hit

[11:05] a plateau." All right, I told you half of them wouldn't hit a plateau. But our analytic software consistently predicted a decline in MR due to high churn. After analyzing our trial users, we identified two distinct groups. So they had solarreneurs wantreneurs drawn by our affordable pricing and more established businesses that showed initial interest but ultimately didn't convert due to

[11:22] missing key features. So Marty pinpointed and implemented these critical features for larger customers. They managed to almost double their pricing while maintaining conversion rates of their funnel coming in. This allowed us to overcome the projected decline and continue growing even in a high churn market segment. And JBboard is doing very very well. So he did basically the playbook of what I was saying, which is kind of like at a certain point you do have to focus on that ICP um of the folks who are sticking around and and uh you know and paying you a lot. Usually they're the least headache anyways. And so that's his revenue curve. Um again, all mid6

[11:58] and seven figure businesses. Well, hello. I wanted to break in here and let you know that if you're enjoying this talk, you should consider joining us in person at our next micro comp event. We're just a couple months out from our gathering in Istanbul, Turkey. We'll have great talks from Michelle Hansen, Mark Thomas, and James Moing, as well as our incredible hallway track, which is honestly one of the best parts of Microcom. And I'll be there MCing and giving a talk as well. You can grab your

[12:24] ticket at microcom.com/events. And if Turkey is a bit too far for you, make sure you get on our mailing list to be notified when we announce our next event, which will be in the US in early 2026. You can head to microcom.com and look for anywhere to sign up for that list. Hope to see you there. Now, back to the talk. Okay, so we're two of seven. Again, the first four are by far the most common and the by far the most um important for you to know. All right, third one is not enough leads. Actually, not enough leads. This is the one that most people jump to first. And I'm going

[12:56] to say the reason I put it third is usually it's funnel or churn and not actually not enough leads. Uh but how do you know when it's not enough leads? Well, again going back to the churn rate or to the uh the funnel and the churn, if your churn's okay, if your churn is good or great and if your funnel metrics are within these or yeah, within these numbers and you're still not growing, well then yeah, you need more leads, right? And I can't just tell you how many leads do you need because it depends on your price point, right? If you're selling $10,000 a month

[13:29] software, well, you need a lot fewer leads than if you're selling $10, $50 a month software. So usually again I come back to my rules of thumb. So if you're within these and you're still not growing probably you need to drive more traffic, drive more leads. That's why I include these rules of thumb folks. Example of this is uh Kieran at flat plan and this is one that actually these are enterprise sales. This is one

[13:52] that actually did plateau. Look at that. Brutal. And that's long. I don't remember if that was like nine months. I mean it's a long time he was plateaued. So Kieran told me before we joined Tiny Seed, we were heavily reliant on inbound direct referrals from one large partner and some SEO. The Tiny Seed marketing playbook call did a great job of breaking down the channels we had to experiment with following the three-factor framework of speed, cost, and scalability. We found that fast the fast uh uh marketing approaches just didn't work for us, right? So cold outreach is relatively fast. Paper clicks relatively fast. Uh three-factor

[14:25] framework again it's in this playbook. That's why I wrote it in the chapter. It's um just a way to decision make around what marketing approaches you should try. So Kieran said, "I accepted it' be a slog." And I love that sentence. I want if entrepreneurs had money, we would print that would be the the thing we would print on it. I accepted it would be a slog. He doubled down on slow and scalable. It was partnerships, organic search, PBC on LinkedIn, posting daily on LinkedIn, podcast, and very recently uh very recently moving into events. Each of these is a genuine slog and many of them you need to really hold your nerve on,

[14:58] especially if it's muddy in terms of tracking. I'm still a bottleneck, which is why I'm trying to hire a salesperson. And so this was a case where the funnel metrics were amazing. Their retention was amazing. They closed a lot of deals and they just needed more leads. And so that's what they did. They expanded. They're doing a bunch of slogging. That

[15:16] is almost the definition of SAS, right? Okay. So the fourth of uh as I said, you know, the fourth of the the most common is competition. This is the hardest one to say. What does it look like? I don't have numbers. I know what it feels like to have competition eating your lunch. And it's when you keep hearing, well, we went with HubSpot because they have a CRM. Well, we went with Mailchimp because they're 30% cheaper than you are. We went with infusionoft said no

[15:48] one ever. But it that's what it feels like. It feels like when you just keep hearing over and over and it's either as you're getting started where you're getting beat on deals or you may have some semblance of product market fit. So product market fit is a is a moving target and you can lose it. You can have it and lose it. There's a tiny seed

[16:09] company is growing, doing really well. And then a big open-source competitor came into the space and is completely free and it started just pulling like crazy from from his leads and even people were churning and going over and using this tool that was about as good. And so competition that's and he instantly knew he said I feel like I'm losing product market fit because again product market fit. So his product was the same but the market had shifted under his feet. That's why it's called product market fit. Most of us don't think about that. So, what does it look like? There's a little bit of an

[16:43] intuition, but you kind of start feeling it like, why is this company growing so much faster? Why am I losing these deals to these other competitors? All right, so if you feel like you're losing it to competition, how do you figure this out? Well, this one's tough, right? It kind of depends. Um, sometimes it is. If it's an open source competitor, it's like, well, going back to our talk yesterday from Anthony about positioning, there was a you you know, how are you different? How do you become different than this um than this open source competitor, right? How do you position yourself in a way that you have a

[17:17] differentiator and we could that talk yesterday was just a amazing, you know, kind of textbook example of how to figure this kind of thing out. The shitty part is if you're a SAS founder and you bootstrap and you finally make it and you're doing half a million AR, you're doing a million, you're doing 1.5, everything's working, it can just stop working if this happens. Like competition is brutal. And whether it's a funded competitor who raises so much money that they can basically lose money and undercut half undercut your pricing by half and they can just lose money for

[17:47] years. It sucks, but it happens, right? Or the open source competitor comes out or what have you. This is a a very um challenging part of being an entrepreneur, right? And so at that point, this is where you admit what's happening and you go to let's say Anony's talk or you look at April Dunford stuff where you think how do I now differentiate? How do I dig myself out? There's a little bit of a restart of like I got to reenter this market thinking about it in a new way if you still have the energy. So that's the kind of depends the example I have here

[18:15] is user list Jane and Benedict email marketing automation for SAS growth and that is their revenue you can see they had a plateau there pretty hard noticeable and then they broke through it and I asked uh Benedict you know what happened and he said I think that building and launching the visual workflows helped us break through that 2023 plateau since we launched that feature we're growing again my hunch is that it is such a table stakes feature at this point that not having it was causing people to dismiss user list right way, even though our linear campaigns were pretty much powerful and

[18:45] covered most of the use cases. Oh, I want to go back. Um, and here's the interesting thing. You know, user list has been around now for I would guess seven years, six or seven years. And I bet when they first launched, you didn't need a visual workflow builder to have decent product market fit to have people coming and signing up and using it. But over time, the market shifts and eventually you plateau and you got to build it. So, am I telling a room of developers to go build features? No, not really. Like I'm I don't want to give you permission to just randomly build features, but sometimes sometimes, you

[19:17] know, talk to your customers first, too, before doing that. All right, so those are the four that I consider the most common by far. Now, we're going to go to three more. Five, six, seven. Yeah, three more. So, number five is one that I hear way too much. And this one's almost uh it's very, very rare that you have literally tapped your market out. That's usually That's usually an excuse to not do the hard things and do more marketing and do more sales and figure out better product market fit. And usually it's like tapped out the market

[19:44] so I'm going to launch a second product. This is so common. I'm going to translate my app into Spanish to expand the market. So what does this look like?

[19:58] I've actually seen this. Like your market must be so tiny if you've tapped it out. Um, I've talked about Jason and JD who have Senior Place. Uh, they're a tiny C company and their market is is small. It's singledigit thousands number of customers, right? And yet they keep growing and they're doing really well. Singledigit thousand thousands of customers. Think about that. Is it possible to tap a market out? Yeah. And if I were to truly tap it out and know that I tapped it out and I got five people to corroborate that information with me and it wasn't just a founder gut thing, it's probably because I'm in a

[20:29] tight vertical and I either need to go more horizontal or I need to add verticals. So if I'm catering to realtors right now, you know, what's what's next? Is it real estate attorneys? Is it mortgage brokers? Is it, you know, there's something next to it? You can add verticals. But be careful with this. This is way less

[20:44] common than people think. Expand vertically or horizontally. Great. I had a whole slide and I just talked over it. All right. So, postpone is the example. Postpone.app. When Grant came, uh, he applied to tiny seed and it was a Reddit postuler. And we said, "We like you, Grant. You're smart. We want to make a bet on you. A Reddit posteduler is not a seven or eight figure business. That's what we want to invest in." And he said, "I'm going to add I'm already on on on board with that to add something aside from Reddit." Right? So, expand. And since

[21:18] then he's added like six, seven, eight. So he's added blue sky, Instagram threads, Facebook, whatever. He's added a ton. And that was that was a thing of going from a single vertical before he plateaued to be honest or he had a light plateau and then adding the verticals and that that got him up. So this is Grant's graph and this is a plateau I'm talking about which was about 6 months or more. Now there's a second plateau up in the upper right. It's a whole other story. And I asked Grant, I said, "Do

[21:41] you want me to like cut off the graph?" And he said, "No, it's fine. Show the whole thing." and then gave me the cry face emoji because he's currently I was like I'm sorry dude he's currently in a you know in a plateau for other for other reasons for not this but doing this expanding the verticals um allowed him to keep growing right he would have plateaued uh well that's like a year and a half two years ago now so to quote Grant Grant says I attribute breaking through the plateau to a couple reasons one raising prices by 25% hooray micro comp and number two focusing on

[22:12] supporting new verticals right new social platform forms which both increase signups and expansion revenue. User would users would cancel their sub subscriptions to other scheduling apps to bring their non-reddit accounts to postpone and manage all of their social media under one roof. Number six, this one's a trip. Strong product market fit with one segment of a market.

[22:42] It looks like what does it look like? It looks like it's completely opaque and non-obvious if you are not digging into who your best customers are either through segmenting through metrics or having conversations. This is a matter of all right I have all these leads coming in. I have hundreds of customers maybe thousands depending on price point. And if you look at it's like if you look at an Amazon rating of of three stars that could have a thousand fivestar and

[23:09] a thousand one-star reviews, right? Three stars actually obfiscates a bunch of information that's really important. And it's not until you dig into the fives and the ones and realize why people are giving it fives and ones. This is similar. If you're just looking at your customer base as your churn, as your average revenue per account, as your LTV, if you're just looking about that as an average across all your customers, you're looking at a three-star review. It's once you segment, this is something I tell in every tiny C playbook. I think I said this SAS playbook, too. Segment your

[23:41] customers either by pick pick a thing. Do all the things. Get in get in a spreadsheet. Segment it by industry, segment it by lead source, segment it by price point that they pay you and look at these metrics because that's when you start to see five stars and one stars. And you'll start to see a group who is your what's the opposite of an ICP? NIC non ideal customer profile. I don't know. I just coined a really bad acronym. There's the ideal customer profile and the worst the WCP the worst customer profile. you will see this, right? So, what it looks like on the surface is I don't know, I'm super

[24:12] confused, but if you dig into the numbers, what it looks like is really obvious once you figure out what the ICP is, right? And this I can't believe I put this slide in here. I now regret it. It's my next slide. Don't quote me on this. Don't take a photo of this. Um, sometimes, uh, it actually is to build features. Um, that's not the only solution to this one realistically, but if you have product market fit with one segment and not with another segment, it's either to build features to find product market fit with another segment or it's to do the velvet rope thing that Jordan did. And it's just to not serve

[24:52] your not ideal customer profile assuming the ideal customer profile is big enough and there's enough people you know I don't look at TAM I look at term which is total reachable market how much in a given month how many people are switching from other tools or are new and looking for your tools and you can have a TAM of a billion dollars but if there's only five people a month five companies a month I call that that the five would be the term right um five people a month looking for a tool then you're not going to grow very quickly right so focusing on the folks who

[25:21] actually need your tool whether it's to build features or whether it's to turn others away is the real solution example of this is monolith monolith forensics case management for digital forensics so Matt Danner says I've been fortunate that I haven't had a real plateau so he's one of the three but I've noticed that we have at least three segments in our market where our product market fit is at varying levels so he did the exercise I I recommend so one segment we're going to call segment A has high product market fit but another segment segment B has lower product market fit So segment A if I recall is uh

[25:52] governments and like government agencies and uh law enforcement and segment B is like these private digital forensics labs. I didn't put them in there because it made it all complicated but you get the idea. It's there's no secret of who they are. But he said I have high product market fit with segment A. So if I stratify our growth with segments in mind, we see consistent plateaus with that segment B. I think segment B growth suffers from some missing case and analysis management features. writing code in monolith uh which we were working on. We also market heavily to segment A and the segment B funnel suffers from this over time will close

[26:26] both the marketing and product market gaps and I think we'll see a lot more growth in segment B. So again he's focusing on uh expanding into segment B rather than just turning them away. Depends on your space. Obviously digital forensics is a it's a market but it's not as big as you know CRM or ESPs. So he's saying I got to I got to dive into

[26:44] it. And the last one, I debated a little bit whether to include this, but when I first started compiling this, so I I don't know if I said at the beginning, but three years is what it took me to nail all these plateaus down. The the Google doc, I look back at the first entry I made, and it was from 3 years prior to 24. So it was like 2021 when I started putting it in. And what was

[27:04] happening three years prior to 2021? There were some one-time events that were rocking some SAS. And so I had to had to include it. So onetime events can include things like, you know, you piss off your customer base. And I don't I don't call it this, but I've heard some people call it pulling an intercom, which I thought was funny. It's basically raising your, you know, like raising your prices four times or whatever. Um, not communicating that very well, which a company that I once owned and sold may have done that after I left. I can neither confirm nor deny, but angry on your customer base is one

[27:33] thing, right, where people will start turning uh and you can see a plateau or you just get such negative press that that people there's kind of a rumble in the rumble in the market. You can have a major marketing setback. This is where, man, 80% of our leads come from SEO and guess what Google did last week. You know, they just smacked you and so

[27:50] suddenly boom, you're plateaued, right? And then a black swan event. Excuse me. Like COVID, which is the one I was thinking of when I wrote this. So, I don't actually have an example for this one. Um, I mean, I just gave you three examples, but I don't have a, you know, example. I in tiny seed when we were watching folks apply there were some folks that were doubling every month and some folks that were basically going to zero during co. So the way you get around this is you you basically apologize if you make your customer base

[28:16] mad you try to fix it you write it out. Um yeah that's number seven. So what's interesting is there is an eighth with an asterisk that I built slides for and I I'll just mention it. I was going to wait for Q&A but you know we got 10 minutes. Um the eighth one that I wasn't aware I was not on my radar to be honest uh but it has an asterisk is seasonality and this is Jade from Glitch Secure said we have a seasonal product and what we notice is that we plateau and I forget if it was during the summer or something but they plateau every year at a certain

[28:52] time of year. That's not the plateaus I'm talking about. I don't know that there's a way to fix that, which is why I didn't include it in here, but I wanted it's an consider it an honorable mention. So, in conclusion, thank you for coming to my TED talk. No, in conclusion, 1, two, three, and four are what I see as uh far more common than the the bottom three, but I wanted to include them all. Yeah. And serious, if someone has encountered a plateau, whether you've gotten through it or not, that wasn't on this list, please ping me because I do want to kind of have a as

[29:21] much of a complete list before this winds up in a book somewhere. So that's it for me. Thank you so much for having me. If you enjoyed that talk, I hope you'll join us at our next MicroM event. Getting in the room with two or 300 like-minded SAS founders for a few days is an incredible experience. If you want to learn more or get notified when our next event is announced, head to

[29:40] microcom.com/events. If you're on the fence and want to check out another talk to see if it's the right vibe, watch this next talk that Peldy Gzone gave from the Microcom stage in Drovnik last year. In it, he details his sevenstep journey from maker to entrepreneur as he grew Balsamic to $6.6 million per year. Thanks for watching.

[30:00] We'll see you next time.

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