The $1M–$5M Growth Stall Self-Assessment

Does your acquisition cost for your last 20 customers sit below 30% of their first-year contract value?

Diagnostic note. Calculate blended CAC ÷ first-year ACV. If above 0.30, either your motion doesn't fit the product, or you're going after the wrong customer profile for that motion. Above 0.50, the unit economics will not survive scaling acquisition spend.

Looking at your last 10 closed deals, can you clearly name which came through founder relationship/warm intros vs. which went through a repeatable sales process?

Diagnostic note. A healthy motion is either clearly PLG, clearly SLG, or a documented hybrid with rules (deals below $X go PLG, above $X go SLG). If you can't articulate the pattern, you don't have a motion — you have chaos. Chaos cannot be scaled with hires.

If you run a self-serve trial motion, is your trial-to-paid conversion rate above 10%?

Diagnostic note. Below 10% signals either the wrong motion (product needs a demo or human touch) or wrong activation (onboarding path is broken). Do not assume it's activation — test the motion first. True PMF on PLG sits at 15–20% trial-to-paid (ForEntrepreneurs / David Skok).

Can you name in one sentence the specific action (not a login, not a session) that 80%+ of retained customers complete in their first week, that churned customers do not?

Diagnostic note. "Completes onboarding" is not an action. "Creates a dashboard with 3+ metrics configured" is an action. Pull a cohort of 90-day retained customers vs. churned customers and find the diverging behaviour. If the cohorts behave the same in the first week, your activation definition is too shallow.

Can you pull a query showing the % of trial users who completed that activation milestone, and do you track this metric weekly?

Diagnostic note. If you cannot answer this question with a number, you don't have the data infrastructure to optimise activation. This is itself a blocker — and one that's often more solvable than the founder thinks. Three days of event taxonomy work usually unlocks it.

When you changed your onboarding flow in the last quarter, did the activation rate move?

Diagnostic note. If onboarding changes don't move the activation metric, you're either optimising the wrong metric or the wrong flow. The activation definition is wrong. Go back to Q2.1 and re-cohort retained vs. churned users — the diverging action is somewhere else.

For your last 10 customers, what is the quantifiable outcome they achieved (time saved, headcount deferred, revenue generated, errors avoided)? And what % of that value does your price capture?

Diagnostic note. If a customer saves $100K/year and you charge $3K/year, you're capturing 3% of value. Room to move exists. This is not a signal of overpricing — it's a signal of under-capturing value. Most founders at $1M–$3M discover they have 2–5x pricing headroom.

Do your pricing tiers make the path from entry-level to full-value features clear and obvious? And are customers actually upgrading when they hit feature limits?

Diagnostic note. If 95% of customers are on your $99/mo plan and the features they need to stay are in the $299/mo plan, they're churning because they can't see or reach the upgrade path. Packaging is a structural fix, not a marketing fix.

Is your net revenue retention (existing customers + expansion − churn, as % of prior-year ARR) above 100%?

Diagnostic note. NRR below 100% means existing customers are shrinking on aggregate. Pricing, packaging, or value delivery is broken. This is a structural blocker to $5M+ — investors discount valuations heavily on sub-100% NRR. Industry benchmark for healthy SaaS is 110–120%.

What is your current monthly churn rate? If it's above 2%, have you calculated what that means for annual ARR loss?

Diagnostic note. 2% monthly churn = 22% annual ARR loss before expansion (ForEntrepreneurs benchmark). 3% monthly = ~35% annual loss. A founder reporting "we're growing 40% YoY" with 3% monthly churn is actually growing net ~5% — top-line growth is masking a leaking bucket.

Can you name the behavioural signals (not sentiment surveys) that predict which accounts will churn in the next 30 days?

Diagnostic note. Healthy teams track: login frequency drops, feature adoption drops, support ticket sentiment shift, expansion revenue stopping. These are early warnings. "We noticed they were at risk" arriving in the cancellation call is too late. Behavioural signals are leading; surveys are trailing.

Is your LTV:CAC ratio above 3x?

Diagnostic note. LTV ÷ CAC = (customer value × retention months) ÷ acquisition cost. If below 3x, either CAC is too high or churn is too fast. This blocks any scaling of acquisition spend — pouring money into a leaking bucket compounds the problem rather than solving it. Industry benchmark: 3x minimum, 5x+ healthy (ForEntrepreneurs).

If your best sales hire (or best-performing peer) were to close a deal in your absence, could they follow a documented process from trigger event to close without you on a single call?

Diagnostic note. This is the hard question. Most founders answer "no." That means you have a consulting practice with a SaaS price tag, not a scalable GTM. 80%+ of deals founder-closed at $3M+ ARR is a structural red flag — the GTM was never built for anyone but you.

Can you name the measurable trigger events and firmographic attributes that qualify a company into your ICP? (Not "we know it when we see it" — measurable.)

Diagnostic note. "Series A HealthTech with under 50 employees that posted for a Head of Product in the last 60 days" is qualified. "Growing fast, technical founder, values product quality" is not. The first you can hand to a list-builder; the second you can only hand to yourself.

If you hired your first AE, do they close at 60–70% of your personal close rate within their first 6 months?

Diagnostic note. If your first AE closes at 20% of your rate, the process was never documented. You cannot replicate founder talent — train an AE against a documented process instead. The fix is not a better hire; it's a written playbook.