Field Guide Topic
Building and growing a SaaS company
These are the fundamentals that did not change when AI arrived. They just became easier to fake. Founder-led growth is the early motion where the founder's own credibility and conversations are the distribution. Product-market fit is the moment the market starts pulling instead of being pushed.
Outputs versus outcomes is the discipline that keeps both honest. AI makes it trivially easy to produce more of everything, which makes it more important, not less, to be clear about which of those things actually moved the business. I have made every one of these mistakes at least once, which is mostly why these entries exist.
Start with
Founder-led growth
Founder-led growth is a company-building approach in which a founder’s direct involvement in customer relationships, sales, storytelling, product feedback, community, partnerships, or recruiting materially drives growth. It is broader than founder-led sales and should eventually become a repeatable system rather than permanent dependence on one person.
Read the entry →Product-market fit
Product-market fit is the condition in which a specific product satisfies a meaningful need for a specific market strongly enough that customers adopt it, keep using it, recommend it, or pay for it with increasing consistency. It is better understood as accumulated evidence than as a single celebratory moment.
Read the entry →Outputs vs. outcomes
Outputs are the things a team produces: campaigns, pages, assets, meetings, leads, features, reports, or automations. Outcomes are the meaningful changes those outputs are intended to create: clearer market understanding, higher conversion, shorter sales cycles, stronger adoption, greater retention, better customer value, or revenue growth.
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