RVNU GTM Debt Assessment

  • Welcome to the GTM Debt Assessment

    The following 70 questions should take you about 20 minutes. Once finished & submitted, you will receive your scores across the 16 stages and 4 fits. The goal is to achieve a 75% or higher in each stage before moving to the next.
  • Number of Company Employees*
  • Total Capital Raised*
  • Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) today*
  • What are your major strategic goals over the coming 12-18 months?*
  • What top-line revenue growth are you forecasting over the next 12 months*

  • RVNU Phases of SaaS Startup Growth

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  • Pick the number that most accurately depicts the stage of growth.*

  • Lets Get Started!

  • Idea Market Fit: 1.Hypothesis

     This stage focuses on confirming that your concept has potential value and gathering insights to shape the MVP effectively.
  • The hypothesis of the problem we are trying to solve is clearly articulated and documented?*

  • Idea Market Fit: 2.Market Analysis

    This stage aims to build a strong case for the opportunity, ensuring all team members are aligned and confident in its potential.
  • Competitors: We have documented a category-by-category, feature-by-feature, and product-by-product comparison between us and our perceived competitive set.*
  • Unique Value Proposition: Our uniqueness is core to the effectiveness of our ICP’s business.*
  • Unique Value Proposition: Without us, or a competing product/service, our client’s business will find it harder to compete over time.*
  • Ideal Customer Profile: Our ideal customer profile is narrow, fully documented and socialized amongst the team.*
  • Ideal Customer Profile: Are your teams confident which prospects to say “no” to?*

  • Idea Market Fit: 3.Market Sizing

    This stage focuses on providing a clear, data-driven understanding of the opportunity’s scale and economic potential.
  • Total Addressable Market (TAM): What is your estimated TAM today?*
  • Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM): What portion of the TAM is serviceable today, in your opinion (assume unlimited sales & marketing resources)?*
  • Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): What is the size of the Serviceable Obtainable Market today, in your opinion (assume unlimited sales & marketing resources)?*

  • Idea Market Fit: 4.Minimal Viable Prototype

    This stage aims to demonstrate that your product can deliver real value and set the foundation for further development and growth.
  • Product/Service Critical Value: Our core offering that we deliver today, solves a pain point of our clients (ie: it measurably impacts company performance).*
  • Value Exchange Measurement: The value exchange can be measured from within the original product’s code base in $.*

  • Product Market Fit

    Identify and engage customers fitting your ICP. Validate they find your product indispensable and are willing to pay for it. Prove your product solves a significant problem, satisfies customers, and that your business model is repeatable and profitable. This phase is about confirming market demand and economic viability.

  • Product Market Fit: 5.Design Partner

    This stage focuses on securing early adopters who help validate, iterate, and improve your product and ICP hypothesis.
  • Design Partners: Our first batch of customers meet our hypothesized ideal customer profile (ICP), that we established in the idea market fit phase of growth.*
  • Measuring value exchange: Our first batch customers all proactively agreed to measure value exchange of our product/service as part of the agreement to work with us.*
  • Origin of foundational clients: Our first batch of customers were mostly from our network, versus running marketing or outbound campaigns.*
  • Top of funnel demand: The demand from the market is overwhelming, there is no sign of top of funnel saturation, rather you are struggling to keep up with the demand.*

  • Product Market Fit: 6.Prove Usage

    This stage demonstrates effective adoption and usage by critical decision-makers and helps further refine the ICP.
  • Proof of adoption: Using data you can prove all influencers on the client side have adopted the tool. (note: this means you have proof of usage to the point at which the influencer will have a grounded opinion on value exchange of using your product/service)*
  • Usage defined: You have internal alignment on the features of the product/service that provide the highest value to your clients.*
  • Proof of Usage: Using data you can prove usage of the features that deliver the highest value exchange to your customers.*

  • Product Market Fit: 7.Prove Value

    This stage is about proving significant, measurable value and further iterating on the ICP based on real-world outcomes.
  • Proof of value: Through real client conversations, you have been able to prove $ value of your product with 10+ clients.*
  • Client validation of value: The $ value assigned has been signed off by the economic buyer at your client.*
  • Value as an ICP iteration forcing function: You have used the feedback from your first customers to re-validate or iterate your hypothesis in the idea market fit phase of growth.*

  • Product Market Fit: 8.Realize Value

    This stage focuses on translating proven value into sustainable revenue, confirming the economic viability of the refined ICP and ensuring pricing strategies align with the value delivered.
  • Pricing iteration: You have used the value exchange data captured from your first customers to iterate your pricing.*
  • Fair pricing achievement: You can confidently state, with backup from clients, that your pricing sits in range between 10% and 20% of the value being exchanged.*
  • Understanding prospect nuance: You are now very confident which prospects to say “no” to, and which to say “yes” to?*

  • Phase 3: Go-to-Market Fit

    Develop efficient and scalable sales and marketing strategies. Build a predictable sales process, optimize marketing channels, and manage customer acquisition costs. Prove you can significantly grow revenue while maintaining good unit economics. This phase focuses on scalable growth and revenue multiplication.

  • GTM Fit: 9.Repeatability

    This stage confirms that your product and market strategies work beyond personal networks and can scale.
  • Documented sales playbook: You have developed a proprietary sales playbook that concisely documents how the founder won your first batch of customers, who were also able to clearly illustrate value exchange.*
  • 'Programmatic' acquisition of net new customers: You have used your proprietary sales playbook to successfully acquire net new ICP customers from outside of your network.*
  • Viable acquisition costs: Your pipeline conversion metrics (eg: lead to opp, discovery to close) have maintained a viable cost to acquire the customer (CAC) as volume has increased using new (non-network) acquisition channels (eg: email; outbound; events)*

  • GTM Fit: 10.Non-founder Led Sales

    This stage verifies that your sales process is transferable and executable by non-founders.
  • Sales: At least one non-founder has been able to replicate or exceed the founder's sales success.*
  • Marketing: The volume of qualified opportunities per seller has been maintained or increased with the addition of at least one non-founder seller.*
  • Reporting: Your CRM is the central source of truth, and illustrates inputs, outputs and efficiency metrics of your go-to-market org, spanning marketing, sales and customer success that enable you to manage your org by numbers?*

  • GTM Fit: 11.Build Sales Team

     This stage ensures your sales team is specialized for maximum efficiency and scalability.
  • Lead volume & quality: You have signal that proves the net new lead volume & quality available to you can support the sales reps you intend to hire.*
  • Opportunity volume: Your AEs (sales reps) are overwhelmed with qualified opportunties.*
  • Data validated resource decisioning: Your data pinpoints which activities, when specialized to a specific resource, would increase the yield per rep. (eg: every $1 spent in marketing will yield >$1 in net new sales)*
  • Burn rate calculation: You have calculated what forecasted burn rate you can sustain, and for how long while attempting to build your first sales pod(s), by documenting a bottoms-up forecast.*
  • GTM roles: You are confident what GTM roles you should specialize first, when and in what order, and what level of resource is required in each role, to maintain an optimal burn rate vs growth trajectory goals? (eg: (1 SDR, 2 AEs, 1 CS)*3)*
  • Hiring: You have a standardized hiring process & profiles with a scoring system that aligns with the competencies in each specalized role.*
  • Onboarding: You have a standardized onboarding process to ensure new hires will ramp quickly and hit targets as planned.*
  • Synchronised sales & finance revenue forecasts: You are confident your finance revenue forecasts match your sales revenue forecasts in your CRM.*
  • Inter-department SLAs: Agreed upon ‘Rules of Engagement’ across GTM teams and roles, that capture lead/opportunity/deal volume and quality, with feedback loops for iteration of both volume and quality.*
  • Sales Targets: You have set revenue targets (annually recurring revenue - ARR) doing a bottoms up calculation that backs into an expected yield on a per head basis.*

  • GTM Fit: 12.Control Churn

    This stage focuses on minimizing churn and maximizing customer lifetime value.
  • CS >> Product SLA: There is a service level agreement in place between CS and Product that ensures Product proactively considers adapting the roadmap in line with key client feedback.*
  • Renewal/Expansion evidence: Your customers have renewed past year 1 and/or expanded their footprint with your product/service due to continuing exchange of value.*
  • New client onboarding tracking: You have documented onboarding stages with exit criteria that are tracked in the CRM.*
  • Client retention tracking: You have documented the retention stages with exit criteria that are tracked in the CRM.*
  • Client expansion tracking: You have documented the expansion stages with exit criteria that are tracked in the CRM.*
  • Performance evaluation: You are evaluating performance of onboarding, retention and expansion using data and dashboards from the CRM.*

  • GTM Fit: 13.Scalability

     This stage confirms your business model and processes can scale to $100M ARR sustainably.
  • Opportunity volume: The data proves that the volume of opportunity at the top of the funnel sustains your growth goals for the next 12-24 months minimum.*
  • CAC Payback period: The data proves that payback period is consistently less than 12months quarter after quarter.*
  • Quota performance: Your quota-carrying roles are performing in aggregate at an average of 70%+ to target quarter after quarter.*
  • Forecast accuracy: The business can accurately forecast revenue targets within a +/- 10% variance to target quarter after quarter.*

  • Scale Fit 

    Strengthen product development, customer success, operations, and organizational structure to support large-scale growth. Ensure systems, processes, and teams can handle substantial increases in customers, revenue, and complexity. Focus on building a robust, scalable infrastructure for sustained rapid growth towards significant revenue milestones.

  • Scale: 14.Hire Leaders

     This stage ensures the leadership team can guide the company through rapid growth phases.
  • Executive leader functions: You are confident which functional leaders you need to hire or promote onto your executive team in order to achieve scale (eg: VP Marketing, VP Sales, VP CS + VP Product + VP Eng + VP Finance all reporting to CEO)*
  • GTM executive leader calibre: You have experience hiring leader(s), to manage and drive execution of the GTM playbook with performance to 80% participation QoQ and above at this stage of growth?*

  • Scale: 15.Expand GTM Org

    This stage emphasizes scaling operations without sacrificing efficiency or effectiveness.
  • New hire onboarding program: You have a new hire onboarding program in place across the GTM org built to actively reduce ramp time for each specalised role?*
  • Performance standards & criteria by role: The GTM org has prerformance standards & criteria in place to ensure proper management & tracking to role-specific metrics and expectations?*
  • Promotion pathing: The GTM org has promotion paths mapped for specalized roles in order to provide upward career paths and retain top talent within the GTM org.*

  • Scale: 16.New Lines of Business

    This stage focuses on diversifying revenue sources and broadening the market reach to sustain long-term growth.
  • Applicability of playbook to new opportunities: You can confidently use your GTM playbook to take your current product/service to a new geography, vertical, segment, etc. to expand new revenue?*
  • Access to capital: You have access to the capital required to fund your push to new lines of business*

  • Your GTM Debt Scores

  • Idea Market Fit

  • Product Market Fit

  • Go-to-Market Fit

  • Scale

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