As a tech co-founder you often are the OG, the architect and master coder, but your team has grown too large to lead on your own, and your sales team needs a predictable roadmap. Your infrastructure cost soars because nobody cares. Your team needs a growth path or they will eventually quit. You need a wingperson to bring focus and a reliable translation between can-do and make-it-happen.

Raising funds demands intense focus that can pull you away from running your core business. You need to manage both simultaneously while presenting a clear, credible case to investors and maintaining availability and transparency towards your team.

Achieving Rule of 40 (or beyond!) is a balancing exercise between productivity/velocity, successful lead generation, reasonable cost of service, and continued cost efficiency initiatives. Marketing asks for more budget, Engineering for more people — both claiming to hold the one gold key towards success. How do you get your entire team aligned and accountable on this key metric?

Your business is doing great and you’re landing your first big tickets. Enterprise customers require special dealing with: consultative sales, roadmap commitments, compliancy frameworks, complex implementation tracks. These deals can make or break your future. How will you benefit from these opportunities without selling out to these high bidders, yet use them to consistently raise the value of your solution.

Acquiring a company is a direct path to growth, but requires careful evaluation. You will take on their team, culture, technology, revenue, and liabilities. A thorough due diligence process must reveal the true situation and provide appropriate de-risking. After acquisition, you need a proper plan for integrating or consolidating the business, its people and its intellectual property.

This has been your fifth pivot and after 8 years you’re finally on your route to break-even. You’ve grown wary of your co-founders, one of them has left already. You need a break but you can’t, you need a sparring partner for an outside-in view, a cardboard engineer to bounce ideas off or someone who presents you with a mirror. Ideally, someone who can share the burden by stepping in.

Service-as-Software will be switching the equation of cost vs. value around. Customers have become increasingly intolerant of fashionable, sometimes forcefully imposed product roadmaps: instead they want a trust-based, long-lasting relationship with a reliable service provider. As a SaaS company operator, I’m exploring how I can preserve my company’s expertise worth for the future to come.