Don't Chase New Business

April 29, 2025

Don't chase new business

Sounds insane for any founder doesn’t it? So, what do I mean?  Now that you’re up and running and sales are starting to come in, the next questions is where to focus? Winning new logos or focus on delivering a superior customer experience with your small group of existing customers. Remember you’re bootstrapping. Funds are limited. Further to that, you might have got product market fit but is your product even close to fully evolved? When you’re bootstrapping all these things are important but the most important goal for any bootstrapper is your renewal book.

You have to make sure that all or as many of your customers as possible renew their product subscription with you. The renewal book is what both underpins your growth and maintains your cash flow.  This has to be your focus. This is also the exact opposite to what almost all VCs will tell you. They will tell you to focus on winning new logos, on gaining market share and driving to scale. Ignore them!

You’ve got a basic product, probably an MVP ( Minimum Viable Product). The future success of your bootstrapped business depends on the amount of time you now invest in this. If you chase new logos two things happen. Firstly, if you’re lucky you win a bunch of new clients – what’s not to like? The issue is how do you service them and more importantly who do you get to service them? You have limited funds and limited resources. As a bootstrapper you are operating as lean and efficiently as possible. With new clients comes increased workload. You need to employ more people and invest in more resources. This increases your cost base while potentially jeopardising your QA. If you’re doing all this at hyper speed its easy to bring on the wrong person or invest in the wrong process. By the time you realise your mistake it can be too late.

The second issue is your cashflow. Fast new business growth when you’re a bootstrapping start up can cause you to implode. Let me explain: you’ve won a bunch of new clients. You now need to employ more people and resources to on board them, service them, etc. As you’re bootstrapping you're running lean and so you’re going to use the money generated by these new clients to fund this cost base growth. The problem is that there is a lag. You need to start on boarding and servicing them immediately but even if you have immediate payment terms, which is unlikely, especially in b2b, you have to invoice them, chase them and collect the cash. Only then do you have the funds to start employing all these new people and systems. By the time you’ve collected the cash, found the people and employed them, then you will have had all your new clients sitting there in limbo for quite some time- possibly too long. This is a workable if stressful situation with some smart cashflow management as long as you have a strong and reliable renewal book and you don’t win too many new logos too quickly. Counter-intuitive as it seems you don’t want to win too many new logos too quickly even with a strong and established renewal book.

On top of that if you’re a start up then you don’t even have a strong renewal book so establishing that has to be your focus. You have to make sure that your product is renewable and sustainable. You must avoid being a one hit wonder- here today, gone tomorrow.

By focusing your limited resources on delivering a superior customer service to your small initial group of clients you do a number of things. You ensure that your MVP develops to a point where it is truly sticky. There are all sorts of reason why clients might have bought it in the first place. You need to work with them to understand these and to make sure it continues to develop and to be a painkiller for them.

There is no greater sinking feeling than going back to a client who you’ve not worked closely with or have ignored for a while, as you’ve been so busy, only to discover that your product is either not delivering or worse is no longer necessary. Working closely to deliver a great UX ensures that this doesn’t not happen. It also allows you to make sure that your product is sustainable and I don’t mean made of recycled materials! I mean sustainable as in there is an ongoing need for it. It is not only relevant or useful for a passing moment in time.

Client pain evolves, develops and mutates and your product must be on top of this and keep up with the changing needs and requirements to make sure it stays relevant.

 Finally, by working with your existing clients to deliver a superior customer experience you are gathering a constant stream of direct feedback from the end user. This in turn will open the door to your next product line and to your next revenue stream with the least amount of business risk: the beauty of cross-sell, next weeks’ blog topic.