Mark Velik: B2B SaaS - How to Thrive in Turbulent Times

Read the show notes from our chat with Mark:

Prioritise valuable revenue streams - Be weary of accepting not quite ideal customers. As you grow, you naturally pick up a bunch of customers that don't fit the ideal customer profile, or come from another industry who can still make use of your software, so you might start spending some money to acquire those customers. In challenging times you must narrow your focus and understand which are the most profitable customers that can afford to pay for your product. Find those customers that are not going to churn out after a couple of months.

Deliberate cash management & capital stewarding - Historically when cash is abundant or when your business is flying, burn rate management prioritises speed. When things got a little scary during COVID, the best founders in the EVP portfolio were deliberate about their risk parameters, for example identifying the minimum cash balance, and how many months or runway or OPEX was tolerable, then agreeing with the Board what the cash depletion cycle looks like. Mark reflects - “We didn’t want to be running out of cash when they're still burning. We had to figure out what a soft landing might look like. We asked - how do we make sure we use the cash we've got earlier in the funding cycle?"

If you’re not mission critical, how resilient is the value you provide in a disrupted environment? - Since COVID, Mark and his team are placing more emphasis on defensibility and stickiness."Having a really strong appreciation of what is the value that the software is providing and how resilient could that potentially be in a disrupted environment is something we just ask ourselves a little bit more.”