Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from founders and leaders in service and product/software businesses who have successfully scaled from startups to established companies. Along the way, I’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t, when trying to find product market fit and growing from $0 to $100M. Some businesses struggle to break past $10M, while others hit a ceiling at $30M, unable to systematize their growth.
Through these experiences, one thing has become clear: scaling isn’t about luck or a great product. It’s about keeping your customer at the center of everything and building repeatable systems of scale – including the systems that enable you to evolve and grow as a customer-centric organisation.
This article distills my key lessons from those journeys, outlining the essential components of scaling, from market selection and product-market fit to feedback loops and leadership time horizons.
1. Pick the Market Before You Pick a Product
Choosing the right market is the single most important decision when building a business. This should come before developing your product or service.
Key questions to consider:
- What’s the size of your addressable market? Is it big enough to match your growth ambition?
- How will you differentiate in this market?
- What are the key business problems you want to solve in this market? What need are you addressing?
- Who are your main competitors—whose lunch will you be eating?
- Who do you need to hire to win in this market?
It’s important that you ask these questions before you spend a single $ on your product or service development. The size of the addressable market is also a key question most VCs want to understand to determine their level of interest. Getting some good data on this is useful, because it’s easy to make assumptions about the size of the addressable market and overestimate it, especially if you are a ‘glass half full’ kind of person as many founders are!
Once you have some confidence over it and you’ve started building services or products, it is useful to book a time in your diary to reflect on your market at least quarterly. Ask yourself, if you’re still in the right market. If your sales results are not where they need to be, is it possible that rather than not working hard enough and leaving money on the table, you might be focusing on a wrong segment of customers, vertical/industry, geo or customer size? Do you need to go up a tier and move from SMB to Corporate or Enterprise focus? Do you need to pivot to another geo, enter a new market in addition to your focus on Australia or NZ? Or go deep in a specific vertical like FSI, agriculture or sport? Do you need to reframe your conversation from ‘not leaving any money on the table’ to seeing if there could, in fact, be much ‘more money on a completely different table’?
If you pivot, or extend your addressable market, do you have change management competency in your leadership team to bring the entire organisation on the journey? If you don’t, how can you build it or who do you need to hire?
2. Finding Product-Market Fit
One of the most exciting yet challenging phases of scaling is achieving product-market fit (PMF)—typically occurring between $0 to $15M in revenue. We can call this the Discovery Phase. It’s about recognizing patterns that work and refining your understanding of the business you’re actually in.
This phase demands resilience, adaptability, and investor faith. Vision clarity is critical, but so is flexibility in early performance milestones. Maintaining some discipline around your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) prevents costly customer misalignment and high COGS (or opex) later. At the same time, that discipline can backfire as it could prevent you from uncovering other, more significant market opportunities. The product and go-to-market (GTM) strategy must remain highly flexible in this phase of growth and iterate very quickly. If you have to choose, at this stage it’s a lot better to have a sales-led, rather than a product-led organisation.
The $15M to $30M ‘Pattern Matching’ Phase
Once early PMF is established, the focus shifts to pattern recognition and repeatability. This is the bridge to profitability and predictable growth. The $30M mark is particularly significant—companies that reach this milestone with solid execution can typically scale to $100M. At this stage, the balance needs to shift from a sales-led, experimental approach, to a more product-led approach, and it’s important to have controls in place that prevent you selling to customers outside of your ICP, especially if this puts a pressure on COGS. In saying that, having active customer feedback loops and regular reflections on ‘who are you building for’ is important to sense-check your direction. You can never have ‘too much’ customer feedback or spend ‘too much time with customers’ – the more you do it, the better aligned your business will be with their needs.
3. Four Interconnected Plans
Scaling successfully requires four interconnected plans:
- Product/Service Plan: What you’re building and when—your intellectual property (IP) for differentiation and repeatability.
- Go-to-Market (GTM) Plan: How you reach customers—which services/products go to which segments for relevance and resonance.
- Operations Plan: How you’ll deliver now and how you scale resources.
- Financial Budget: The detailed thesis for hitting revenue and profitability milestones.
This is supported by a People Plan, defining who you need to hire and where.
These plans cascade into one another—your product roadmap informs GTM, which dictates operational needs and ultimately drives financial outcomes. In smaller firms, one leader might oversee multiple plans. By $30M, specialisation becomes necessary and you need to have an individual leading each of these plans. It goes without saying, that the individual needs to know it is their responsibility – quite often you encouter scenrios where two people assume they both own the plan, which means, in reality, that nobody truly owns it. A good exercise is to ask in your next SLT ‘Who owns our XY plan’? and see how many hands are raised.
4. Feedback Loops for Growth
A high-performing product or service business thrives on structured feedback loops that drive continuous improvement, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence. To keep a product-market fit and keep growing, these feedback loops are absolutely critical and need to be recognised as a priority.
1. Customer & Partner Feedback Loops
- Transactional Surveys (CSAT, NPS etc): Gauge customer sentiment after interactions.
- Sales to Product/Service Development & Marketing: The concept of Revenue Operations (RevOps) is really useful to align these teams. This includes capturing the customer value drivers (the business needs informing their buying decisions) in a format that is easily accessible and able to be analysed by your product team.
- Partner/Vendor Performance Reviews: Ensuring external partners meet service excellence standards.
2. Employee Feedback Loops
- Frontline Insights: Employees closest to customers often spot issues first—structured feedback channels surface them.
- Employee Engagement & Pulse Surveys: Regular check-ins help track morale and uncover operational challenges.
- Retrospectives & Post-Mortems: Reviewing successes and failures improves processes.
3. Operational & Performance Feedback Loops
- Service Quality Monitoring and Performance Dashboards: real time data to inform decision making
4. Market & Competitive Feedback Loops
- Competitor Benchmarking & Industry Trends: Industry trend tracking refines offerings.
- Customer Churn Analysis & Loss Reviews: Understanding why customers leave informs retention strategies. A great mentoring advice from a senior executive at Microsoft was to “sit in the mess” to allow enough time for a reflection, discussion and learning from ones mistakes.
Each of these loops informs strategic decisions, keeping the business agile, customer-centric, and continuously improving.
5. Time Horizons for Execution
Management structures operate on different time horizons:
- Individual Contributors: 90 days
- Managers & Leadership Team: 12-18 months
- CEO/General Manager: 36+ months
These timelines shape decision-making, resource allocation, and strategic focus at every level. It’s worth asking yourself, if each of these people have a plan for their time horizon.
Scaling from $0 to $100M is a journey of market selection, product fit, execution excellence, and continuous iteration. By implementing structured feedback loops, aligning leadership around key plans, and respecting the right time horizons, businesses can build repeatable, scalable, and profitable systems of growth.
Scaling Beyond 
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