You ship a new feature and 10% of your customer base uses it. You thought it would solve a real problem. Customers said they wanted it. But now it's sitting there, mostly ignored. Here's what happened. You skipped problem space discovery and went straight to building...

 We haven't really talked about this much despite it being one of the top things we help teams overcome. Growth stalls. A growth stall is when you're growing extremely slowly or not growing at all. Net new MRR is basically being neutralized by the churn you're...

I love UX interviews because they are so cringe. Sometimes I like the cringe, but I love the feeling you get after two to three UX interviews where it becomes crystal clear that something is confusing and you can make it better just by changing the color of a button...

 I've noticed a pattern with companies that get stuck between $3M and $5M in ARR. They're doing well enough to have real traction. They've found product-market fit. They're generating meaningful revenue. But when it comes time to push through to $10M and beyond, they...

I'm a little more than a year into my fractional CMO role, and something's shifted. Not in a bad way. Actually, in a really important way. But it's the kind of shift that requires me to flex a muscle I haven't had to use as much. And I think it's a shift that every...

I'll never forget the moment a founder told me, "I'll just take these transcripts and tell ChatGPT to spit out jobs to be done." We were in the middle of a jobs-to-be-done research project. We were mapping customer interviews, identifying patterns, understanding the...

 Marketing is the most critical growth lever in the early days—sub-$1M ARR especially. But once you stabilize? It's not your best lever anymore. And I think this is a really hard concept for especially first-time CEOs and founders of SaaS companies to wrap their...

I'm going to use a term that probably doesn't have a formal name in any textbook: value decline. I'm calling it that because it's the easiest way to communicate what it is. And once you see it, you can't unsee it in almost every SaaS business that's stuck. Here's the...

Every SaaS founder I talk to thinks they've handled activation. They've got an onboarding checklist. Maybe a welcome email sequence. A tooltip or two on the complicated screens. They've "done activation" and moved on to what feels more important: marketing, features,...

  Theme of 2025: Alignment DemandMaven turned eight years old on February 4th. Eight years. I've been running this business longer than I've been at any full-time, in-house role. Almost as long as my entire career before starting it. That kind of hit me this year...

 Here's something most founders don't want to hear: that "winning strategy" you copied from your competitor? It might not work for you at all. I know, I know. You've been watching what the big players do, following their playbooks, trying to replicate their success....

A few weeks ago at Spark Together, I found myself in the same conversation I've had dozens of times with other consultants and researchers: "How do you make sure clients actually do something with the research?" "What do you do when they hire you, you deliver great...