Re-accelerate: Find new growth drivers in your business

At this year's Web Summit conference in Lisbon, I gave a talk on how companies should think about dealing with these tough economic conditions, and in fact how they can actually find growth during these.

You can view the slides here, or read on for an illustrated transcript of my talk.

Hello, I'm Des from Intercom. I hope you enjoy the Web Summit and that when it's over, I hope you return to offices, bedrooms or meeting rooms with great takeaways, new contacts, and also a little refreshed and reloaded.

Because my God, it's been a mess for our industry. Lack of revenue, M&As, mass layoffs, catastrophizing, and oh yeah, Figma has been bought.

Why talk about reacceleration?

Every startup I talk to shares the same core problem: "Last year was great, this year isn't, we need to grow faster, do you have any ideas?"

Last year really was "the best of times", right? You couldn't go wrong. Firms were truly raising at 500x ARR. The founders were doing secondaries in their early rounds. The due diligence came in the form of "I'm sure someone else has watched this". In fact, the past year has seen more new unicorns than ever, and more "mega towers" (>$100 million) than ever. If you're a B2B SaaS business, 2021 has seen your valuation increase massively, which has likely seen your bank balance increase, and so have your current customers. Meanwhile, there were more and more new startups being created, which had more money than ever before.

So you and all your customers had more money and ambition for growth than ever before, and every day many new customers were born. Awesome, right? We are all clearly geniuses, and all of this success is our doing. Well, either that or we're like that "metro guy" - we tell ourselves we do the heavy lifting here, but in practice these things happened with or without us.

Celebrating success without clearly understanding causality, in general, is something you should be very paranoid about.

And now here we are in 2022 - towers are down, prices are down, the whole cloud is down.

Fortunately, the hard times are when VCs shine. Some of my best friends are investors (etc) and of course when someone called "TOP" in November 2022 they did what you really like to see VCs do when their founders are in trouble. They started their Substacks and hired their phantom tweeters, and they got to work.

So we got our blog posts and Twitter feeds, and even some rabid TikToks. But in the midst of content marketing, the advice was there: come back to reality.

Healthy growth solves all problems

The reality is that healthy growth will solve everything, but the healthy part of this statement is incredibly important. For many of you, 2022 will be a bit of a bumpy year; you could hit your target, but not the way you expected, or you could miss it due to a flurry of circumstances beyond your control (or so you'll tell yourself).

But as we look to the year ahead, one thing is clear: startups need a healthy growth plan that is robust across many variables. So as we look to 2023 and think about what we're spending, where we're spending it, what we're building, who we're building, why we're building for them, what we're saying to prospects, and how we're competing against our competitors , there are a few thoughts I would like to share.

First things first: figure out what works

The first step is to determine exactly what is working well in your business. It seems like a silly question, but like many, you'd be surprised how many big companies can't give you a clear, solid answer. If I asked you "where is your business absolutely the healthiest?", I'm sure you'd say something fluffy like "Well, our main use case is really good".

But if I asked you to explain what are the most specific elements of your business that are really healthy and growing, end-to-end, from brand to demand, from demand to conversion, from usage and satisfaction to retention and expansion, can you answer?

You see, during the good times, you have this mode of experimentation; everything is budgeted and, in general, your ambition is high and your potential is limitless - so you are very tempted to explore the solution space. Sure, you might have started out as an expense tracker, but damn, "next business day" sounds pretty good.

Difficult times require you to discover what is really strong, what does nothing, what can wait a year, and finally these circumstances...