The Essential Guide to Growing Your Early-Stage SaaS Startup

If you’re an early-stage SaaS startup with a fresh Minimum Viable Product (MVP), congratulations! You’ve already achieved a lot more than many, but there’s plenty of hard work and challenges ahead. As an early-stage SaaS startup founder or team member, you’re likely to be very excited about running and growing your business… and also lost, confused, and anxious because of the amount of stuff you need to focus on to make it happen.

Sound familiar? Hotjar been there – they grew their own SaaS company to $10 million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in less than three years without funding, and they’ve seen first-hand how easy it is to get distracted and overwhelmed when trying to take it all in.

Why this guide was written?

Books, podcasts, videos, case studies, you name it’there is so much content out there about growing a SaaS startup that you can just go on forever. Hotjar thought it would be more useful to have one resource, in one place, to guide new teams along their growth journeys, helping them focus on the fundamentals and getting their bases covered. Something they could use and come back to, over and over. Hotjar couldn’t find one, so they wrote it themselves.

How it was written?

In May 2017 Hotjar hosted an event for early-stage startups whose agenda became the framework for this guide. They wrote most of the content by reaching out to and documenting the experiences of people at Basecamp, Receptive, Pipedrive, Price Intelligently, SaaStock, EnhanCV, and others who have ‘been there, done that’ multiple times. Hotjar also shared some of their later drafts with over 500 people in the SaaS space, who gave Hotjar open, actionable suggestions on what they needed to cover.

How you can use it?

The word ‘essential’ in the title has two meanings: the content Hotjar shares in the following chapters is crucial for growing your startup, but the focus is on the fundamentals to help you get all your bases covered. Think of this guide as a launchpad: if you’re hungry for more, Hotjar has added a resource list at the end of each chapter with several hours of video and podcasts, and hand-picked links to additional books and articles by entrepreneurs and business-builders like yourself. Each chapter can be read independently, so you can jump to any topic that is relevant to you.