Serge van Dam: Playbook for Global SaaS Growth

We've pulled together Serge’s experience into a playbook for entrepreneurs of all stages:

The offence play - Offence is about making advancements that your opposition can’t keep up with. For Serge, creating new market categories or winning a particular market segment requires “getting lucid” about your ideal customer profile (ICP). A truly global company can unlock tens of millions of dollars in revenue from a single ideal customer profile.

The defence play - Defence is about backing up your offence and playing to your strengths. For New Zealand SaaS companies, this means launching new services by building on available technologies. The blueprint has been leveraging cloud infrastructure like Amazon and Microsoft, and to some extent Google. Serge predicts that AI will follow suit. “In terms of AI, I think it's a great thing for New Zealand tech because I think it lowers the price of everything. So capital efficient all-rounders, which is how I describe the average New Zealand founder, would actually do better proportionally.”

The team culture play - Serge describes Kiwi founders as “tinkerers.” That culture comes into play during the “accelerating growth” phase, a time when New Zealand startups most commonly fail by hitting a ceiling of growth, short of investor expectations. Having an experimentation mindset is what sets apart the companies that breakthrough that growth ceiling.

The investment play - “Physically make a list of the 20 people in the world who are best qualified to understand your market opportunity. If they all say no, it'll be for a reason. If some of them say yes, then you've got the best kind of investors because they can verify or validate that there's a market opportunity.”