Company Growth: From Struggling to Cash Flow Positive in 1.5 Years

 

This post is the complete text of one of my twitter thread.

One of my company moved from 'struggling' to 'cash flow positive' by banning FRs (Feature Requests) during pre-sales cycle. The ban pulled the company out of the vicious circle and allowed to grow.

Back then, start to launch took ~2 years. When the company was launched, feedback from the field was that the product had good features for the problem it was solving. Some enterprise readiness features were suggested before the launch.

As sales team came on-board, we started hearing that some features - critical for sale - are missing. The team decided to support sales and started working on the FRs. I remember getting call almost everyday around 8 PM India time i.e. 7.30 AM pacific and sometimes 2.30 AM IST.

Even after many quarters of rigor, revenue didn't grow. Sales team kept complaining abt product gaps & quality issues. Engg team kept complaining abt changing priorities, tight timelines & continuous burnout. Felt as-if there is no way out. Everyone was hiding behind something.

Then came a milestone decision of banning the FRs from pre-sales. Some felt comfortable & were told "if everything that customer needs is in the product, salesperson is not needed." New sales team was strongly told to just sell whatever is on the truck - No future selling.

It is sounding very simple and logical now when I am writing it. It was never simple to understand & implement all that - a lot ups and downs happened. But results were great: - Product became much better, stable, usable - Company gone cash flow positive w/o reducing head count

I always see some companies in the same vicious circle. They think they can say 'no' to a customer only when they become big. In reality, they will become big only when they focus. For focus, they need to say 'no' to everything that tries them to stray from target.

Couple more things: 1. There is a difference between listening to market feedback and implementing customer asks. 2. Justifying FRs by saying "The item was anyway in the plan - the FR is just accelerating it" is mostly a fallacy. I have never seen it working.

If your company is also in the cycle - Sales is not able to meet targets because FRs are not delivered on time - Engg is burnt with the changing priorities and product quality is going down

Consider this strategy.

Extending the thread as some people asked to put details of how life of different teams changed after putting ban on FRs by pre-sales team. Any change brings some initial disturbances. But everyone was happier after the change settled down.

Sales team had to put more effort for building the pipeline. One can't just put a lead based on relationship. A lead qualification criterion is added - "Does existing product solve customer's pain?" For this, "Relationship Builder" sales people were replaced with "Challengers".

The sales cycles became shorter and predicable. Everything was standard. No dependency on Engg team No chasing for features No frustration due to communication gaps or missed timelines etc. Simplified implementation and support.

Sales people were much more confidant because all the selling material was available and they have rehearsed it well. PoCs were simple & fast. SEs were confidant about the features. This brought rapid growth in revenue.

The new Product Management leader suggested not to complete some of the features until there is a taker for it in the market. Such features were dropped after some time during the re-architecting exercise.

Engg team not just got relieved from changing priorities but also didn't had to spend time on support. No more night calls. Time was spent building strategic features & clearing tech debt. This made the quality of product much better and further enhanced confidence of sellers.

A very senior & deep knowledgeable yet down-to-earth architect was brought to take product to the next level. It took a few years - Re-Architecture was done shipping sale-able features, backward compatibility and moving product from appliance-based to SaaS-ready.

Overall it was win-win for everyone. Everything became better: - Quality of product - Customer satisfaction - Quality of life of all teams members - Profitability of the company