Chasing rabbits as a growth strategy?

When I built Autonix in late 2020, the vision was fairly clear. I thought the combination of the rise of QR Code usage and the need for businesses to create more insight into visitors on location due to COVID would yield a great opportunity. Coming off a successful 8+ years as a D2C performance marketer, I thought owning an marketing my own software would be fairly straight forward. Of course there would be challenges, but with a decent budget to test ideas, I thought I'd be on target within a few months and 2 yrs later I would have either built a solid business or raised money to go after the broader TAM.

Of course, I was wrong.

We pivoted heavily to focus on a broader industry and have since found success and a feeling we have market fit by providing an organizational trackable dynamic QR Code solution. We have onboarded several larger customers and feel the platform is in a good spot.

The challenge we continue to have though is we dont have critical mass to be confident in the offering. So what happens is we wind up chasing rabbits.

What I mean by this is, we'll be courted by a decent sized customer who is looking for a feature slightly different than our offering. Usually it is a feature that makes sense, but we dont have it... so to try to win that business, we pull resources from our roadmap to deliver in the hopes they sign up. I'd say its worked 50% of the time, but we're moving sideways in trying to find confidence to say "no we dont do that."

This is my 2nd SaaS business and this is how we grew to exit from the first, but I'm wondering how to balance the confidence in the platform with perpetually trying to win all the business we could.

Would love to hear other founders perspectives on it!

Scott via Autonix