Meraj Imani on Refounding: How Product Leaders Navigate the $10M ARR Inflection Point (Part 1)
Alright, folks. Welcome to Grown Up Product. So there's a bit of a dirty secret about scaling a b to b SaaS company. Getting to 10,000,000 in ARR is definitely hard, but it's a very different kind of hard than what comes after it. The playbook that got you to product market fit, the founder led sales, the custom implementations, the we'll build you whatever you need mentality is often not going to be very helpful as you go on the path towards a 100,000,000.
Brian Root:80% of venture backed SaaS companies actually never get past the 30,000,000 mark in ARR. They stall out somewhere around that messy middle, stuck between startup chaos and real scale. And when boards and investors go looking for answers, they usually look at product. My guest today has been one of the people they call. Miraj Amani is a product executive and a fractional CPO with fifteen years of experience scaling b to b SaaS organizations across North America and Europe in fintech, health tech, and industrial tech.
Brian Root:He's helped companies grow from early traction to over 80,000,000 in ARR through multiple acquisitions and into category leadership. At Enable, he was recruited by the cofounder as their first product leader with a mandate to reset product vision, strategy, and how product was built and delivered. He took them from bespoke services heavy implementations to a scalable SaaS model, introduced their first AI powered analytics capabilities, and scaled the product organization from a small team of business analysts into a global, multi disciplined team. Today, we're talking about that sequence, what a product leader stepping into a $10,000,000 ARR company should actually think about and in what order. Biraj, welcome to the grown up product.
Brian Root:Awesome.
Meraj Imani:It's great to be with you, Brian. Happy to try to share some of the lessons that I've learned over the years, and, you know, things that you go to school, you don't really learn about them. There's a lot of books on different topics, but definitely there's a ton of things that you kind of roll with the punches, and you sort of try to figure out, alright, how am I gonna do this at this company with this sort of group of people? So Yep. Yep.
Meraj Imani:Looking forward to it.
Brian Root:Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the reasons that I started this podcast, honestly, is it is hard to get the experience that you need from a book, right, or from a class. It just really has to be lived in a lot of ways. So my my first question for you, kind of, is you you proposed this topic around sequencing, you know, what a product leader should think about when when taking the home, know, the the the $10,000,000,000 ARR stage.
Brian Root:So before we get into kind of the the what, I'm really curious to hear from you. Like, what is it about that $10,000,000 mark specifically that makes it difficult? Like, is it an inflection point in the in the company's growth for a particular reason?
Meraj Imani:That's a great question. It's it's more of a kind of I've seen a lot of organizations, and I noticed a lot of organizations tend to go through that inflection of, alright, you know, the old ways are just not working out, and we need to change. There are certainly companies that go through this sort of scaling journey a bit earlier, there are certainly companies that go through it later as well, but it's usually at that sort of 10,000,000 annual recurring revenue that you start to see, hey, there's some product market fit, we have some traction, there's some markets that we serve well, we deliver value to some segments that actually love our products. Mhmm. But, yeah, it's definitely not a hard rule, but something that usually around that mark that you sort of start to see.
Brian Root:And are there particular challenges that are, you know, that that really start to crop up from a, you know, an operational standpoint, a personnel standpoint? Like, what are the kind of the the symptoms that you'd see? You know, even if it's not necessarily precisely at 10,000,000, like, what's the signs that you have hit that inflection point?
Meraj Imani:Yeah. Yeah. It's great question. And, you know, early in the intro, you were talking about, hey, you're kind of like sales led and you're somewhat implementation heavy and so on. So, some of the things to just look for is your cost of customers just starts to go higher and higher.
Meraj Imani:Every sort of new customer that you add, you start to see actually the pressure on all the supporting organizations, whether it's implementation, whether it's product, whether it's engineering, it just starts to amplify. So you used to be able to operate in the way of, hey, we'll sign a customer. We've been compelled by the value prop that we're offering them. That was okay because you were kind of scrappy and you're sort of trying to find your way through. But now you're at this stage where I like to say you're one of the things that you cared about as a founder pre this kind of moment that I've kind of called 10,000,000, but it could be a different moment.
Meraj Imani:You're the opportunity for you is one of the most important things. You're sort of trying to keep the lights on. But now opportunity cost actually starts to go way higher. Demands of one segment customer now starts to really put a ton of pressure into where you're going to be taking the product or which other customers that you already signed demands you're able to actually meet. So it really is for the founders, for the c suite, for the leaders to kind of take a look back and for them to say, here's how we're operating.
Meraj Imani:Here's who the type of customer that we're signing. How if I was to double this, change nothing else, but twice as many of everything. What does that look like? Three times, four times as many as as this? What would that look like?
Meraj Imani:And that was really the challenge that I was dealing with at Enable
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Meraj Imani:Which was growing very, very quickly roots into bespoke development. And there was product market fit, but there was a real heavy, aggressive sales push to whoever wants this kind of ancillary problem solved, we can solve it for them. And we were growing at like 400% year over year. So putting all of that together really more than anything needed a change in the culture of the organization, and first recognizing that there is a challenge, and then having the urgency and the sort of drive to continue to push through it. So, those are like some of the critical things that I would look for.
Brian Root:Yeah. You you mentioned something with which definitely struck a chord with me, my own experience at working at series a companies. I I often describe as kind of going through the existential crisis. You know, everything you're doing on a daily basis is is the company going to exist tomorrow, next week, next month, whatever it is. Right?
Brian Root:Which obviously, at companies at a larger scale, you you have certainly less of that pressure. It doesn't necessarily completely go away, but does lead to very different activities and experiences. I you you mentioned cultural change at the end of that. And, I mean, I'm I'm painted with a broad brush here, but culture certainly at a smaller stage company like that is often dictated as a, you know, strong word, but, you know, defined at least by the founder or the CEO. So how much of this cultural change is, you know, things that a product leader can, you know, enact without necessarily having to change the way the product or I'm sorry, the the founder thinks versus how much of this is really dependent on the founder embracing a new mental model or a new cultural model?
Meraj Imani:Yeah, that's a great question. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be curious about what your experiences have been. I have not seen as long as you have the founder as like a, let's say, CEO. If the CEO is not on board, it's not gonna happen. Now you can kind of work around and make alliances with the CRO, with the CFO, and chief operating officer, but you need the CEO to be on board.
Meraj Imani:And this cultural shift, that's why it's it's a lot of companies fail is the CEO is kind of in the mentality of a, hey, I'm the main salesperson. I'm in the, you know, at that stage of the organization. All I've known, all the success that I've known Mhmm. Has been possible because I was very invested, and I was in front of the customers and the prospects, and I know the market exceptionally well, and I'm trying to sell the software. All very, very valid things.
Meraj Imani:There was a phrase there was a term I heard from someone which really resonated with me. He told me it's really about refounding a company at that stage. So a lot of founders, they need to sort of shift their mentality that that they're and should really say, I'm refounding my own organization with new people, new processes, and so on, and that's that's a phrase that really sort of stuck with me over the years.
Brian Root:That's really interesting. That also dovetails to me one of the, you know, big, I I think applicable lessons that I learned from my past experience, particularly at Amazon, was you have to be willing to put yourself out of business is how I always, you know, kind of phrased it. I think you're saying a very similar thing. Right? This is not necessarily related to, you know, the competition of other companies are gonna come along and, you know, do what we're doing better, so we have to get ahead of them.
Brian Root:But rather, this is we're just playing a different ballgame now. Right? We're in a different scale. We have different pressures, different needs. I I love that concept of refounding.
Brian Root:Can we talk about a little bit how that played out in in your your personal experience? I mean, we talked a little bit about, you know, joining Enable. Maybe that's a good example for you. But, you know, what what does refounding look like in a real experience you've had?
Meraj Imani:Yeah. Refounding. So when I joined Enable, I'll sort of paint a little bit of a picture. As I mentioned, the company used to be a dev shop, and they built out this sort of niche finance, back office finance solution, which solved a legitimate problem, and then the founders realized there's a real market demand for this. This is a real, real market problem that it's solving.
Meraj Imani:Mhmm. So the company had really grown organically from going around to different manufacturers, distributors who were sort of the target market and offering up the solution, but because of the sort of like a dev shop background that the company had, that the founders had, it was always a, alright, at a high level, we know what we're solving for and what the market needs, but what is it that we build next? Where do we go from there from a product perspective was always kind of like in a customer by customer basis.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Meraj Imani:So the company always had a very robust and inspiring company vision, but the it didn't have it didn't translate into there was no product vision, there was no product strategy. So one of the things, one of the very early things that I started to focus on was really kind of bringing in some of the key leaders into a conversation and saying, we need to set a boundary around what this product is. We can't be everything for everybody.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Meraj Imani:So why don't we work together and figure out what this is? So I wrote a sub stack article about the steps involved in a framework involved in what I went through at enable and at fix, and really it starts off by as a product leader, do you have a view into what this should be? Right? Do you have a vision that is validated based on market feedback, based on what you're hearing from the customers and so on? And the second step is integrating leaders, like you mentioned as well.
Meraj Imani:So does the CEO see themselves in this vision? Does the CRO see themselves in this vision? Does the CFO see themselves in this vision? And what I'm advocating for here is not a pay. We're going to bring a committee together and sort of agree on something that really will end up looking like nothing.
Meraj Imani:No, it's it's as a focusing agent which product leadership always is supposed to be. Are you bringing in something that each of the departments can see how their roles and how their roles are supposed to evolve can support that so that the company can be successful? So integrating leaders is a key step in that process. Then, you know, through the, through different conversations, market feedback, and so on, you know, we came up with a product vision statement that actually was able to put like a box around, here's where we are, and everything outside of it Mhmm. Is out of our focus area, but and then you can sort of build a product strategy around it, but that's that's the easy part of the story.
Meraj Imani:How are you going to make sure that a large sales team and a growing sales team, if you're 10,000,000 growing rapidly, you have a lot of salespeople in b to b SaaS, especially if you're selling to enterprise. How do you make sure that they kind of maintain on message, and how do you make sure that it's it's not a destination that you just because you have a product vision statement doesn't mean it's, okay, we're done. No. It's an ongoing yeah. It's it's the the work is maintaining it, nurturing it, making sure that it changes.
Meraj Imani:Mhmm. And genuinely, that's the hardest part. That was the hardest part for me because we touched on cultural change. The organization that I had joined, there was a lot of people that had been there, like, fifteen years.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Meraj Imani:So how do you kind of come in as a bit of an outsider, no real view into the market, or kind of no background into the market, I should say. Yeah. And now you're telling them, hey, no, we're not gonna do all those other things, but we're gonna sort of focus on that, but showing some wins upfront early on really, really helped drive the message that, look, we said we're better for this segment to this problem statement, and look, our win rate is Yeah. Significantly higher for this problem and this segment, and this is a big problem and a big segment. So why don't we just focus on that?
Meraj Imani:And, yeah, again, it's not a destination. It's just an ongoing journey.
Brian Root:Yeah. Several things you said there that I'd love to dig more deeply into. But first off, I I talked to a lot of founders and CEOs, you know, who are looking to hire fractional CPOs or, you know, related roles, and often they articulate themselves in a way that's that's along the lines of, I know exactly what I want. Right? I just don't have the bandwidth, or I don't have the whatever it is, you know, the the the product skill to translate it into a document that my engineering team can actually implement, you know, some aspect of it, but they're coming at it with a perspective of they have relatively absolute clarity on what they want.
Brian Root:They're just looking for somebody to make it real. Right? What I'm hearing from you though is come up with your product vision first as a product leader, then, you know, bring the CEO on board, find ways to, you know, to meld your visions together, but, you know, create yours independently rather than viewing it as, you know, coming in and just implementing what they deem to be their product vision. Is there a tension there? And if so, like, how do you navigate that with, you know, with CEOs, with founders?
Meraj Imani:Yeah. Definitely. I think I think every product leader should have their own opinion grounded in real market feedback and market trajectory and customer feedback and so on. Mhmm. And there will be tension.
Meraj Imani:The the thing that changes for CEOs and founders in sort of like a early stage series a ish kind of moving to series b, and that's around the time that I actually joined Enable, is they used to be at least the closest to the market Mhmm. Sort of proximity to the problem statement, let's say. And as the company is growing, yeah, you were like 80 people. Sure. You were talking to twenty, thirty people a week that had this problem.
Meraj Imani:But as now that you're 300, 400 people, you're still talking to you might still be talking to twenty thirty, but where the rest of the organization was talking to 50, maybe, now the rest of the organization's talking to, like, 300, 400, 500.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Meraj Imani:So the proximity to the problem definitely becomes further for founders as the company is scaling. What I have found is founders who are product centric, at least, or they have an eye on the product. It's I would be surprised as a product leader to be to come into a situation like that, like we mentioned, which is, hey, here's what I'm thinking the product vision should be. After all, you you own the product vision as the chief product officer. Yep.
Meraj Imani:To come in and push something that is vastly different than what the CEO or the founders have thought in their mind. But really, the tension sort of that I had seen starts to come in from a when you sort of try to narrow the focus and why you try to narrow the focus. For example, the problem that we were solving at Enable was prevalent at every segment of the market, you know, whether you're an SMB or mid market, if you believe that mid market exists, and there's a lot of people that say it doesn't anymore. Mhmm. And then enterprise and sort of large enterprise and so on.
Meraj Imani:So as somebody who is putting yourself in the sort of founder's shoes, try the mindset which is grow revenue, grow revenue, grow revenue so that you can show more more ARR, and then you can have the next raise and kind of become like this big company Mhmm. Coming in and saying, listen, SMB is sure the problem is there. Yes, there's a ton of companies in this segment. However, the lifetime value of the customer is pretty low for us, because implementation, for example, is costly or cost of acquisition is higher. And these are metrics that a founder may at that stage may not have had to really think about.
Meraj Imani:So really kind of coming in from a position of facts and from a position of not opinions, really, because you're really talking to somebody. This is like their baby. Right? Like, if you're at that company, there is a reason you're there. They found some success.
Meraj Imani:They've solved problems that were real in the market. I think it's just being considerate on that that you're talking to another person, another human being who has a lot of opinions, and how do you steer those opinions and finding what it is that they that moves them. So for me, it was and I had degrees of success, you know, there was definitely things that I did incorrectly that are going back, I would fix. But for me, it was not just data, but the narrative. It's like, how can we tell the story?
Meraj Imani:So I would try to present data, but I had a very narrative focused leadership, and it's kinda coming in with a story as well. That certainly helped than just being numbers focused and so on.
Brian Root:Yeah. And you mentioned previously coming into a company where, you know, there's a rich history, probably some significant cultural norms that have, you know, been more or less baked in over, you know, fifteen years, as you said. I my experience coming into similar situations, I'd I'd love to hear if this was yours as well, but it's often not that difficult to identify, you know, what's going wrong at the company, what are the fundamental root causes of it, and often, you know, I think you could propose some some very plausible solutions to those root problems fairly quickly, you know, after a month or two of being able to dig into, you know, what's going on at the company. The hard part, which I think you alluded to as well, is is kind of the cultural aspect. Right?
Brian Root:How do you do that in a way that, you know, respects culture that they do have? That's not just coming in saying, I'm gonna rubber stamp, you know, tech culture or whatever worked for me last onto this company and try to, you know, force you into that mold figuring out, like, yes, I understand what the the issue is, but what's the almost bespoke solution look like at this company in a way that, you know, gets people on board rather than threatens them seems to be one of the the bigger challenges. Right? Particularly, when you're coming into a space where you may not have, you know, a ton of authority based on previous domain experience or whatever it may be. Right?
Brian Root:I I I'm curious to hear about kind of your your experiences there. You you mentioned also, you know, doing some things wrong that you'd wanna go back and correct. What what has been your experience around that of of, you know, being able to take what you know, apply it to, you know, a company, identify what should be, you know, addressed, what should be, you know, fixed largely speaking. How do you differentiate between, you know, oh, this is a unique cultural quirk versus this is truly a problem that needs to be solved for this company, and they need to operate differently?
Meraj Imani:Mhmm. Yeah. That's a that that's a good that's a great question. In any sort of cultural shift that you try to make, it's always there's a podcast I keep thinking about all the time. It's called it's it's this one, but there's another podcast that I think about all the time.
Meraj Imani:And in this scenario, which was really an episode on change management. Mhmm. And I cannot stress enough how critical it is for anybody in any sort of product leadership in general, but in this type of a scenario, especially how important it is to be familiar with change management. It's you can come in with your frameworks, and you can come in with your opinions and best practices and so on. Mhmm.
Meraj Imani:At the end of the day, you are dealing with people and humans, and people and humans as wonderful as they are, they are imperfect, whatever perfection might even mean. Mhmm. So it's how your success is tied to how well you can help them. Mhmm. Also see the challenges that you are seeing, and also come for the journey that you are take trying to take them on the journey of.
Meraj Imani:So a lot of time gets spent, and I thought the one of the mistakes that I made was I kind of looked at it from a position of authority. I'm like, well, you know, I'm the authority on product.
Brian Root:Yep.
Meraj Imani:Therefore, And while the destinations were correct, and, you know, we were learning and we were adjusting and so on, I underestimated how much sort of more talking and kind of thinking like a politician and going and kissing babies and shaking hands really you kind of need to do in order to get the agenda kind of moving forward. That's not to say that I hadn't done those, it's I didn't realize how much more I needed to do. So my advice here is when you think you're doing too much, double it. That's that's when you know you're actually trying to cover all the bases, and that you're really, really clear with your messaging. Every time, I don't know if you've heard this phrase seven times, seven different ways, that you get a message something seven times, seven different ways, and every time I hear sort of this message from somebody, it just numbers just keeps going higher.
Meraj Imani:So I heard 13 times, 13 different ways, 20 times. So it just it just varies kind of company by company. So when I early on when I was mentioning, hey, you need to so this is a journey and not a destination, and that you need to be evolving this. It's just kind of keeping it hand on the pulse of the organization, talking to as a product leader, how many times have you talked to the leading salespeople of the organization? What about implementation teams?
Meraj Imani:What about finance teams, for example? What are they seeing? And just sort of check and verify that the messaging, the problem you're looking to solve, the why behind the what and sort of the place that you're trying to get to make sense to them, that they understand it and that they see themselves as well in it. If you're sort of starting to propose something that a lot of people just don't see themselves, you know, it might be worthwhile to kind of think about, think about A, the am I going the wrong way potentially, or where is it in the chain that I'm kind of losing the people that I need to come on the journey with me?
Brian Root:Yeah. I I think you said a lot of really insightful things there, honestly. One of the things I think a lot of people don't appreciate necessarily about, you know, reaching a a CPO or, you know, executive level, certainly as a product leader, but is the amount of of of politicking of, you know, of of of kind of internal relationship that it does require. It it certainly, my experience at least, sounds like yours really stops being about, you know, what is your your product depth. I think, you know, once you reach a certain level of mastery there, you know, in in terms of being able to understand how to execute on building a product that I don't know how much deeper you can go without becoming, you know, the thing that will will bring you along.
Brian Root:It's the interpersonal relationship, the ability to advocate for a good idea even if it's not the best idea across your peers and make sure that you get that buy in. But I I think a lot of the the learnings for me personally have been in kind of reading the social cues almost. Right? Became able to come out of meeting and say, yeah. Everybody said they were on board, but the vibe was off.
Brian Root:Right? Like, we're not we're not moving forward with this. I need to go do more in a more alignment in order to to get this from a okay sure to a yes. Definitely. Right?
Brian Root:I think a lot of those things are are hard to learn, and they become harder, frankly, as we've become, you know, remote and don't really get together and be able to see each other's body language. So I think it's a double challenge for for a lot of people.
