The easiest way to create a growth plan for your B2B SaaS (read till the end)
Hi everyone!
Outside of my 9-5, I’m trying to blend two things I love: diving into new products and interviewing customers to understand how they make decisions. And I’m turning it into a newsletter.
I’m not trying to sell you anything, but I know I’m going out on a limb with this request, so bear with me! Genuinely looking to create a helpful resource I’m proud of and trying to find a way to get started.
My quick backstory:
After 15 years of hands-on growth work in B2B SaaS, one thing that has never failed is customer interviews. They’ve helped me solve the hardest growth challenges: getting attention, gaining engagement, influencing buying decisions, and keeping customers around longer.
So, here’s my ask:
I'm launching a monthly newsletter called Growth Stage, and I'm looking for the first startup to feature.
Here's how it works:
- I'll work with you to understand your growth bottlenecks, whether it's awareness, leads, trials, conversions, or retention.
- I'll interview 5-10 customers from the strongest and weakest stages in your funnel (you’re welcome to join the interviews if you like).
- I'll turn that research into a practical growth plan that directly addresses the weakest links in your growth engine, from messaging to marketing deliverables to product improvements.
- There’s no cost, whether your startup is featured or you’re an IH reader. I'm doing this to build the newsletter and create something valuable for the startup community.
- With your approval, I'll publish the work as a Growth Stage article so other founders and marketers can learn from it.
This isn't a teardown or a product review. The goal is to show how real customer research can uncover opportunities that analytics and best practices often miss.
I'm looking for a B2B SaaS company that:
- Has both recent deals they’ve won and recent lost deals and/or lost trials (ideally from the last 3-6 months).
- Can introduce me to 5 paying customers who recently signed up and 5 prospects or trials who ended up going another direction.
- Is open to receiving insights-backed recommendations.
👋 If that sounds interesting, take this 3-min survey to let me know you're interested.
I'll likely feature at least one company each month, so if multiple founders are interested (which would be amazing), I'll choose the company that's the best fit for an upcoming issue.
Thank you!
Honestly love this approach. Doing the free heavy lifting first to get your first case study is way smarter than just telling people to sub to a newsletter that doesn't exist yet.
One small thing: I think a lot of founders get nervous about handing over their lost deals, way more than their wins. Might be worth hammering home that it stays constructive and they sign off before anything goes public. You already say that, but really leaning on the "it's safe to be honest here" vibe could get you way better data to work with.
Also curious, are you gonna keep the interview questions consistent across companies so you build up comparable data over time, or just play it by ear for each one? Either way this is cool, subbed and hoping issue #1 goes great.
Thanks so much for the ideas! You're absolutely right, I want this to be truly helpful, not a critique. I hope others reading the comments here get double confirmation that being featured will be an amazing experience all around.
Really appreciate the support!
Really thoughtful approach here. The key insight is that customer interviews reveal the bottleneck, not just the symptoms - most founders ship features addressing the wrong problem because they never talk to customers who said no. Building a structured methodology around this (your Growth Stage newsletter) turns a tactical practice into strategic advantage. Your customer research framework (comparing recent wins vs losses across the funnel) is exactly how founders get unstuck from plateaus.
Thanks, Omri. I'm certainly a big believer in it and hope others see it that way too. It's always helpful to methodically interview customers after they've made a decision (either way). Then, you've got to know how to turn that insight into plans and action for the business. Not a one-and-done tactic, but something repeatable that compounds.
Interviewing from the weakest stage of the funnel and not just the happy customers is the part most teams skip, and it is where the uncomfortable answers live. Good choice for a first issue.
For B2B SaaS, I’d start with one ICP, one painful problem, and one measurable growth channel. Then use SEO data to validate demand and find content gaps. I use SerpSpur for SEO audits and identifying optimization opportunities.
The growth plan paradox: founders think they need a 5-year strategy before they know which customer segment actually has the problem they're solving.
Most of what you outlined works best as a discovery process, not a planning document. You interview 20 companies, see that only 2-person teams with your specific pain point stick around, and suddenly your "broad B2B SaaS" narrative gets replaced by a narrow, measurable target. The other 18 companies were interested, but interest isn't the same as having the problem badly enough to change.
What's missing from most growth plans: a clear feedback loop between "which customers adopted" and "who should we target next." You can have a beautiful strategy, but if your measurement only tracks vanity metrics, you'll optimize toward the wrong segment and never know it.
Customer interviews are the diagnostic tool founders rarely have. Most product conversations are about feature lists, but the real signal is in why people half-need you - or don't at all.
Someone tells you "I'd use this if you added X" but that's not data. It's noise. What matters is watching who reaches for your category in the first place - that tells you if you've got a positioning problem, a targeting problem, or whether you're building for the wrong person entirely.
The distribution bottleneck gets blamed for lots of growth stalls, but most of the time it's earlier - you're broadcasting to people who don't have the problem you solved. Customer interviews aren't about feature validation. They're about understanding who has the problem strongly enough that they'll pay for the solution, then working backward to where those people actually are.