Stuck at $3-5M ARR? The answer likely isn't better marketing.
It's operations: flat orgs, analytics debt, founders still executing as ICs, no product process.
Customer acquisition is the least efficient lever at this stage.
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Our latest episode of In Demand just dropped: demandmaven.io/ep60-from-g...
You need to know when you're thrashing.
When you're spending a lot of energy doing a whole lot of nothing.
When you're wasting energy over something that's not actually crucial.
That's self-awareness. And it's critical for leadership.
Hear more on our latest episode of In Demand demandmaven.io/ep59-when-t...
A founder fed customer interviews into ChatGPT to get jobs-to-be-done.
Output wasn't wrong. Just goofy. Missed all the nuance.
The AI tension: incredibly useful, incredibly easy to misuse when you're not the expert.
AI-assisted ✅ speeds up your work
AI-led ❌ replaces your judgment
So if you're stuck and your first instinct is "we need more marketing," pause. Look at all seven levers. Figure out what's actually on fire. And then go fix that.
Full episode: demandmaven.io/ep58-why-ma...
Most founders stay stuck in the boiler room. They keep dumping resources into customer acquisition because that's what worked before. But the market doesn't move as fast as you do. Your addressable market is limited. And all channels have diminishing returns.
Once you're past a million, your job changes. You go from being in the boiler room to being in the captain's deck. Now you're looking out at all seven levers asking: which one is on fire? And if nothing's on fire, which one will give us the greatest possible outcome when we pull it?
5. Expansion - How customers pay more as their needs grow
6. Operations - How you deliver value while staying afloat (meetings, processes, decision-making, cross-functional work)
7. People - Who you have doing these things (hiring, culture, team building)
2. Activation - Getting customers to experience the value and achieve their first success
3. Retention - Keeping them around because the product delivers sustained value
4. Monetization - What you're charging for access to your product
But once you stabilize and cross that $1M ARR threshold? Marketing becomes a player on your team. It's not the captain anymore.
Here are the seven growth levers you need to understand as you transition from operator to CEO:
1. Customer Acquisition - Marketing & sales getting people in the door
It’s fascinating to me how marketing is the center of the universe for an up-and-coming SaaS business despite it being the least efficient lever to pull.
It makes sense — customers pay the bills and you need as many as possible to survive.
Product is the center of the universe for PLG SaaS.
Marketing depends more on product than product depends on marketing.
You can't put lipstick on a pig. And if people don't want the pig, they're not buying it.
Latest In Demand: demandmaven.io/ep58-why-ma...
Customers can't tell you what to build. They can tell you bugs and quality of life fixes. But value generators? The features that extend how long they stay? You have to discover those yourself. demandmaven.io/ep57-why-yo...
Monthly churn: 3-4%. Looks fine.
NRR at 12 months: 70%. Not fine.
This is value decline. Your product isn't getting worse — it just stopped growing with your customers.
Three causes, all preventable.
New In Demand ep - demandmaven.io/ep57-why-yo...
Talked about this and the full activation process on the latest episode of In Demand 👇 demandmaven.io/ep56-the-bu...
And I promise you: by interview #3, you'll already know exactly what's broken.
If you've been throwing pop-ups and tooltips at your activation problem and wondering why nothing's moving the needle, this is probably why. 👀
Step 5: Make meaningful design and UX changes. Go big. Then do another round of 3–5 interviews with a fresh batch.
The whole thing — start to finish including design changes — can run in about 6 weeks if you move with urgency.
Take what they say with a grain of salt. Pay more attention to what they're doing and when they're pausing.
Step 4: Screenshot every screen. Annotate it in a Miro board. Now you've got a map of where your product is bleeding activation.
Note: keep in mind that users will literally blame themselves for not understanding something. They'll also lie — despite watching them struggle for their lives, they'll convince themselves something was easy.
Step 3: Watch where they get stuck, confused, or lost. Pay attention to the three culprits — cognitive overload (too much happening), uncertainty (not knowing what's next), and limited attention (too many steps, too much friction).
Step 2: Have them share their screen. Give them a prompt tied to your product's core value moment and watch them try to accomplish it. Do not help them. Do not guide them.
Step 1: Source 3–5 qualified strangers through platforms like userinterviews.com or respondent.io. Budget roughly $200/person. You can have people lined up within 24–48 hours.
The real work is seeing your product through a stranger's eyes. Not a customer (customers are survivors of your experience — they give you a false sense of security). Not a session replay. An actual person, in your ICP, who has never touched your product before.
Here's the process we use:
It's not going to do what we hope it's going to do.
But in most products, nothing really changes. When you think about it, it makes sense: if we're depending on pop-ups or screen overlays to do our activation work despite gen pop being *extremely* pop-up blind and screen-overlay-adverse, then yeah.
They add tooltips. They build a checklist. They install a walkthrough.
In rare cases, the needle moves.
In most of the growth troubleshooting I do — which spans qualitative research and a deep dive into product, marketing, and subscription analytics — activation is almost always where the opportunity is hiding.
And the #1 mistake I see? Teams treating activation like a box to check.
demandmaven.io/ep56-the-bu...…de-to-activation/
Your customers are survivors. They made it through whatever friction exists in your product. They're not representative of the people who left. That's why UX research with strangers beats research with customers every time. New In Demand episode on activation: