Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.
What’s “the secret” behind winners?
Many founders set out to scale, but only a fraction exit at the right time, on the right terms. For early-stage operators, a single successful exit is a career milestone. Yet, some do it repeatedly, spotting the right opportunities, backing the right teams, and scaling businesses to the finish line.
So, what separates companies that attract buyers, strategic investors, or IPO opportunities from those that stall?
Patterns emerge when analyzing businesses that have successfully exited—often multiple times. The best-run SaaS companies don’t just grow revenue; they build operational discipline, create high-retention products, and structure themselves for long-term enterprise value.
We spoke with operators who have built, scaled, and sold multiple high-growth companies. Their consensus? People, product, and numbers are the three defining factors in predicting a successful exit.
1. People
Ask any seasoned operator, and they’ll say the same thing—the single biggest determinant of a company’s success is its team. Talent, decision-making, and execution all start with the people running the business.
When evaluating a team’s potential, these are key questions to ask:
- Is the leadership team world-class? The strongest founding teams and executives have scaled hyper-growth companies at similar stages before. Tier 1 VC backing often signals external confidence in their ability to execute.
- How do they make decisions? Success is a series of high-stakes choices. Do they assess options with rigor, adapt to new information, and move forward decisively?
- Is operational excellence ingrained in the culture? Strategy means little without execution. The best teams translate vision into measurable results.
- Can the founder tell a compelling story? Storytelling is core to leadership. Great founders rally teams, win customers, and attract capital by clearly articulating their vision and why their product matters.
- Would you want to work with them? Beyond skill, character matters. The most effective leaders are sharp yet pragmatic. They’re able to build trust with employees, investors, and partners alike.
2. Product
Even the best team can’t succeed without a product that truly resonates. Gone are the days of “nice-to-haves.” The strongest SaaS companies create “need-to-haves.”
Here’s what sets a high-potential product apart:
- It’s a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. Winning products transform how work gets done. They eliminate inefficiencies, unlock new capabilities, or solve mission-critical problems. The strongest validation? A passionate, loyal user base that depends on the product, not just enjoys it.
- It serves a large and growing market. The best SaaS businesses tackle high-value problems in expansive markets.
- It has defensible moats. Defensible moats support long-term differentiation. Proprietary data, deep integrations, strong brand equity, and high switching costs make it difficult for competitors to replicate.
- It’s relentlessly user-centric. Teams embed continuous iteration and evolution into their DNA, ensuring the product adapts to real customer needs over time.
3. Numbers
Behind successfully exited companies was often a balance of aggressive expansion with strong retention and capital efficiency.
Key metrics for evaluating a SaaS company’s growth trajectory:
- Net Revenue Retention (NRR): >130% for growth-stage PLG companies—high retention signals strong product-market fit.
- Annual Growth Rate: >100% YoY (varies by stage)—momentum matters, but efficiency is just as crucial.
- Logo Churn: <5%—low churn reflects high customer satisfaction and product stickiness.
Sean Marshall, former SVP of Global Sales at Klaviyo (IPO 2023), highlights Klaviyo as a prime example of a company that maintained control over its own growth by prioritizing capital efficiency:
“When I interviewed at Klaviyo, CEO Andrew Bialecki was crystal clear: ‘We’re profitable now, and we intend to maintain this capital efficiency for years to come.’ He viewed fundraising as a strategic option, not a necessity. That mindset minimized dilution and set the company up for long-term success. This perspective still shapes how I evaluate founders today.”
Patterns of companies that successfully exit
Beyond people, product, and numbers, common themes emerged among companies that scale successfully and achieve strong exits:
- Operational discipline and execution. Great strategies only matter if executed effectively. High-performing companies define clear priorities, establish tight operational cadences, and measure outcomes rigorously.
- Ruthless focus. Discipline around focus is a defining trait. The best companies go deep on a core set of problems for a specific customer base rather than chasing distractions.
- Speed paired with depth. Speed is a competitive advantage, but the best teams also operate with rigor. They constantly seek ways to shorten feedback loops, iterate faster, and refine decision-making processes.
- Culture of experimentation. A learning-oriented culture, where teams continuously test, refine, and scale what works, is a consistent trait of successful companies. Iteration cycles are fast, and insights are quickly integrated into execution.
Success comes down to forming an opinion, executing quickly—whether on a feature, content, or sales tactic—and embedding learning loops that enable rapid iteration and improvement.
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More for your eardrums
Katrina Wong is the CMO of New Relic and a top marketing leader. She specializes in launching products, entering new markets, and scaling companies to the enterprise. With 15 years of experience at Twilio, Zuora, Salesforce, and SAP, she has led award-winning campaigns and helped six companies exit successfully.
GTM 135GTM 135: How Marketing Creates Million-Dollar Exits: 6 SaaS Success Stories | Katrina Wong
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Startup to watch
DocUnlock – announced a $3M round with a TechCrunch feature, led by GTMfund. Customs brokerage and international shipping have long relied on manual, time-consuming processes. DocUnlock is changing that with cutting-edge generative AI, automating workflows for brokers and eliminating inefficiencies.
Default – announced both an additional $4M in funding and a huge launch around their new inbound orchestration platform. The launch of Default 2.0 unlocks endless new capabilities via website intent and session tracking, AI routing agents, waterfall enrichment, and much more.
Superhuman – announced the launch of some big exciting updates to Superhuman AI. These updates include automatically organizing your inbox, emails that write themselves, along with features like workflows and auto reminders to help make work effortless. They published an epic launch video to break down the new features designed to elevate your productivity.
Writer – named one of Business Insider’s top startups to bet your career on in 2025. Writer has carved out a niche in enterprise AI and offers a secure, customizable generative AI platform tailored for businesses — which sets it apart from more generalist models like OpenAI.
More for your eyeballs
7 top CRO tips on annual planning. Including setting “s-curves,” the percentages for attrition planning and making progress visible.
Hire people that you love working with. When your team is small, the key to overcoming challenges and building a product you’re proud of is surrounding yourself with people you genuinely enjoy working with.
Hottest GTM jobs of the week
- Head of Marketing at Lindy (San Francisco)
- VP of Sales at Gorgias (Hybrid – New York, Toronto, San Francisco)
- Account Executive, Connect at Armada (Remote – San Francisco)
- GTM Engineer at Pocus (New York / San Francisco)
- Revenue Operations Lead at Patch (San Francisco)
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.
GTM industry events
Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:
- The GTM Workshop for AI Founders (GTMfund event): March 25, 2025 (San Francisco, CA) – private registration
- GTMfund Dinner: March 25, 2025 (San Francisco, CA) – private registration
- More GTMfund events TBA
- Spryng by Wynter: March 24-26, 2025 (Austin, TX)
- Pavilion CMO Summit: April 17, 2025 (Atlanta, GA)
- Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
- Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
- SaaStr Annual: September 10-12 (San Francisco, CA)
- Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Dallas, TX)
This newsletter was entirely written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi and Scott Barker (not AI!).
The post Decoding SaaS Exits: The Most Common Patterns of Successful SaaS Companies appeared first on GTMnow.