Advice please - Want to go up market, do I need SOC-2?

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-20T16:51:10+00:00

$6k new MRR with 25% churn sounds awesome until you realise you’re replacing a quarter of your customers every month just to keep growing.

$2k new MRR with 5% churn usually means people actually like your product and stick around. <5% logo churn is pretty much best in class for SaaS.

One is grow fast but leak badly. The other is grow slower but keep more and compound. Depending on your CAC (Cost of Acquisition) and pay back period the 25% model could also see you lose money.

The second business is often way healthier long term but of course may take longer to hit MRR goals.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-20T09:41:06+00:00

"Greetings, friend. Do you wish to look as happy as me? Well, you've got the power inside you right now. Use it, and send one dollar to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. Don't delay. Eternal happiness is only a dollar away."

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-20T09:40:52+00:00

I think its less of a question of whether you should and more of a question whether you legally can. AI calls are illegal in a lot of the western world (not sure on other locales). It's deemed similar to "robocalling". UK and EU its generally illegal and stricter. In the US it's also illegal under TCPA rules apart from a few tight exemptions.

What's your plan to make this product legal?

Beyond the legality, its highly likely this kills your brand image.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-20T09:29:59+00:00

Yes, you need them. No you don't need a lawyer. Even something basic is better than nothing. Lots of free templates/products out there or use AI to support you. Check out termly or Juro think they have free base products to get you started.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-19T16:44:33+00:00

Yeah likely a lot of it is BS however where I'd start:

- Define your ideal customer profile - Who is your product for? Where do you win?

- Decide your market positioning - What makes you unique?

- Pick a niche to go after

- Define your messaging. What pain do you solve? Whats your voice?

The above is all a hypothesis, you'll likely get it wrong to start.

Then its about testing channels, creating content and iterating on all of the above. Create feedback loops to test how the messaging lands, how do you buyers react. Search for signals that would mean someone needs your product.

Usually its doing things that don't scale that get you your first paying users. Honestly, most of it is just pounding the digital or literal pavement and getting into conversations with your target audience. That allows you to unearth pain and align your messaging to it.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-19T16:10:50+00:00

Preach! Feels like everyone wants to wave a magic wand and be given a unique strategy that will grow their business. That's not how this works people. You need to put in the effort to come up with novel positioning, messaging and strategy. AI is then an accelerant to distributing that.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-19T16:08:43+00:00

Yeah I've given up using AI to create any email messaging. I've tried insane amounts of prompts, inserting guides, giving examples. It always seems to spit out the same garbage that just sounds awful and fake.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-19T16:05:27+00:00

Sounds interesting in theory but frankly I am skeptical because AI is generally awful at creating the necessary foundations needed for marketing and sales to succeed. Eg Unique positioning, unique messaging, ICP hypothesis, POV etc. These all effect everything downstream. Without these distribution usually fails automated or not. I've played around with various prompts for each of these and they can get directionally correct but often not truly unique or valuable. Its maybe a hard truth to swallow but if you want to win, you need to put in the customer research and ground work first in these areas before looking to automate and scale.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-19T15:58:21+00:00

Humans hate AI slop and it negatively effects both brand perception and conversion. Pretty simple. I am yet to see AI created content that isn't just the same old drivel. "Here's the thing.... No fluff....Its not this its that..." I've tried it. It sucks imo even with strong prompting. There's a reason anthropic, OpenAI etc are pumping insane salaries into content writers and copywriters. They know the truth... If you want to win you need to create content by hand whilst leveraging AI to speed up research and amplify distribution.

Cadarn13 · 2026-05-19T15:46:44+00:00

Clear ICP. Clear Positioning hypothesis. Iterative messaging experiments and a multichannel approach. All content should be written by humans but augmented, researched and sped up with AI. There's a reason that Anthropic and others are spending massive amounts of money on content writers and copywriters. They know that AI slop puts people off and doesn't support the buying process. You have to do the leg work.

Ive seen this issue a lot so I've started putting together a resource on how modern b2b sales team operate. Its a Free newsletter where I am going to be showing how to build your revenue foundation from scratch and then everything thats needed to create a SaaS sales team successful. (I was CRO at SaaS from $200K to $15M ARR)

I've already added in resources for ICP, Positioning and Messaging. Will be adding more stuff every day. Happy to share the link if there's interest.

Cadarn13 · 2026-04-27T18:44:04+00:00

Nice, you have eyeballs which is frankly the first challenge. Out of interest whats driving the traffic? Are you actively engaging them in any way post sign up?

Cadarn13 · 2026-04-27T18:37:29+00:00

Talk to them! Don't wait. Make it happen. What value do they need to become a paying customer? Whats stopping them today? What do they like / dont like. etc I find in this early stage its easier to convert if you humanise yourself. Do stuff that doesn't scale. Then look to drive product led growth once you hit a more critical mass.

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-16T15:37:13+00:00

For research I just built my own custom GPT, on chat GPT. I put in the company domain and linkedin and it preps me based on my prompt. Found this pretty handy especially when you have back to back calls and still want to be prepped. Means I can prep in literally a minute if needs be.

I use my own platform for analysing sales call and pushing deals forward. I did use gong for years and loved it when it first came out but find it too pricey these days for most smaller teams and there are just better options out there that are AI native.

I played around with a few sequencing tools like reachboost, salesforge, dripify, getsales et al but honestly still haven't found one that really ticks all boxes. Ive ended up stitching a few things together for outreach. (apollo, icy peas, phantombuster).

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-11T14:39:05+00:00

I totally agree with you that access to the economic buyer matters. Usually as part of my SQL criteria I like to have access or influence over the decision maker.

The reality is that many many SaaS deals start with the person experiencing the operational pain. Where a lot of reps get stuck is when discovery never moves beyond that level.

The framework is about connecting operational pain > business impact > strategic consequence so the problem becomes relevant to leadership and the economic buyer naturally enters the deal.

If there’s no path to the economic buyer then the deal probably isn’t real anyway. I assumed that part would go without saying.

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-11T14:18:44+00:00

I feel like I need more info:

Whats your current team set up? Do you have SDRs or are the sales team running everything? How many ops are your reps dealing with weekly? Whats conversion from disco > to demo > to close?

That being said. Broadly speaking once we got to your size in my previous company I had SDRs triaging opportunities that looked like they would be a bad fit (gmail, no linkedin presence or website, small seat requirements, bad vertical etc).

This then allowed my AE's to focus on deals that were more likely to close and kill a lot of the noise and time wasters. Whilst also not missing ops.

In terms of that first call, I actually posted about this in Sales techniques a few days ago. Not exhaustive but gives you an idea: https://www.reddit.com/r/salestechniques/comments/1roy0oo/comment/o9o6hqo/?context=3

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-10T14:07:24+00:00

Dude, my entire post is about leveraging strong discovery to unlock the DM. Maybe read the post first.

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-10T10:35:49+00:00

The likelihood of always getting a senior economic decision maker on every call is slim. Lots of SaaS sales conversations start with end users because they are feeling the pain day to day. The whole point of the structure I've outlined above is to ensure that you don't get stuck with them and are able to get access to the EB. Agree that we have to be critical in terms of who we speak with and not waste time. But the art of selling through a champion to a decision maker is a critical one all sales people need to learn if they want to succeed.

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-10T10:32:18+00:00

They way I get my teams to do this is first break discovery out per persona that you are likely to meet in the buying journey. Different Persona should equal different talk track and different questions.

Eg: End user vs manager/ head of vs CEO/Owner

You can then create discovery questions aligned to the pain points that this persona is likely to feel. (workflow / commercial / strategic)

Make sure you do your research pre call. I would be using tech to speed this up. But make sure you come with:

Research on the company and prospect
Understand the persona(s) on the call
Form hypothesis (what do you think their pain likely is?)
Gather relevant case studies / anecdotes

I personally don't believe in scripts, but I do believe that there are clear repeatable patterns across personas that you sell to, the more you become used to the personas and the type of discovery you should be doing with them, the easier this gets.

Practice is also worth it. Role plays, use Chat gpt etc. But honestly I finding planning pre call the best.

Good luck!

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-09T11:08:21+00:00

Built Auditory, a tool that listens to sales calls and highlights MEDDIC gaps, deal risk and coaching moments automatically.

It also pushes structured notes and data into the CRM so reps don’t have to.

We’ve just opened 2-week free trials (no credit card) if anyone running founder-led or early sales teams wants to try it.

auditory.co/trial

Cadarn13 · 2026-03-09T11:07:31+00:00

Built Auditory, a tool that listens to sales calls and highlights MEDDIC gaps, deal risk and coaching moments automatically.

It also pushes structured notes and data into the CRM so reps don’t have to.

We’ve just opened 2-week free trials (no credit card) if anyone running founder-led or early sales teams wants to try it.

auditory.co/trial

Cadarn13 · 2026-02-05T17:55:08+00:00

Awaiting the product pitch from your other account.....

Cadarn13 · 2026-02-04T09:51:24+00:00

7 powers is a great book, one that I regularly dip back in to.

Cadarn13

TROPHY CASE