2024 was the best year ever for our team at AppSumo Originals.
This wasn’t just luck either. We launched our first product in 2018 (KingSumo), and we’ve grown our target metric by at least 35% every year — including the 57% growth this year.

No matter the pandemic and post-pandemic boom-and-bust periods, we’ve still grown.
And the strategy we use is repeatable.
We’ve built multiple $1+ million B2C and B2B SaaS products, and I’ve taught this strategy externally to my advising clients. It’s how they’ve grown their revenue 10x+ in three years (to $1+ million/year), tripled their customer base in a year, and more.
Today, I’m sharing the high-level method for growing your business — consistently and more easily.
Whether you have a small team (we only have 10 people growing and supporting nine products with 800,000+ registered users)…
Or a limited marketing budget (60% of our signups come from product-led growth/unpaid levers)…
Or you’re in a highly competitive market (we compete against Calendly, Mailchimp, and more)…
This strategy can work for you too.
Refined over the years, here’s our three-step process to grow your business.
Step #1 – Define the goal and KPIs
If you’re a CEO or executive, the MOST important question you can answer is…
“What’s your goal this year, and what’s your current progress?”
Startup success first starts with establishing a clear, actionable goal. The big mistake a lot of founders/CEOs make is they want “growth” — but they don’t articulate what it means. Even if you’re a day one startup with no traction yet, you need to be clear.
Using a framework like S.M.A.R.T. goals, define a goal that is objective and clear for the year. Something that’s exciting, and everyone can rally behind.
Some examples:
- Number of customers (or signups, or leads)
- Revenue
- NPS
- Traffic/visitors
- A certain middle of funnel (MoFU) usage-based metric, like emails sent, bookings, etc.
If you don’t clearly articulate the direction you’re going, you’re like a rudderless ship. You won’t have conviction, and you’ll constantly be changing direction and spinning in circles. And if you have a team, they’ll be left confused and frustrated.
As long as your goal is trackable and objective, it can work.
For example, in 2024, our goal for AppSumo Originals was the number of New Buyers (aka buyers who have never bought one of our products before). In 2025, our goal will be Gross Sales.
Once you have your goal, you need to regularly track and cascade the results to your team.
Every Monday, we update our metrics in a main spreadsheet so that I can see our pace.You should always know your pace, so you’re not too late to overcorrect (“whoops, we missed our goal last month, oh well”).
Here’s how our metric looks for December.

And every Tuesday, I share with the entire team our goal tracking so they know where we stand. You should be able to ask anyone on your team the #1 business goal this year and their team’s main KPI, and they should be able to tell you without looking.
If we’re off-track, I share with the team why and what we’re doing about it/what we’ve learned.
Here’s how that report looked for a week in November when we were off-track:

With the main goal established, we think of the cascading relationship of downstream actions — and those are our KPIs.
We assign KPIs to teams. Here are our main KPIs for Originals in 2024:
- Support: First reply time under six hours. We saw a correlation with the time it takes our support team members to answer the first message from customers and the growth of our customer base.
- Product: 80%+ of monthly projects delivered on time.
- Marketing: Average order value (AOV) for customer acquisition.
Next, we move onto the actions and projects that affect the goal.
Step #2 – Lay out the plan
First, we establish the goal. Second, we establish the team KPIs that impact the goal. Both of these are the metrics that tell us if we’re on track.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Once we have the metrics established, the next step is defining actions that impact the metrics — and get us closer to our numbers.
And when I think of actions, I think of two things:
- Product-led growth (PLG)
- Traditional marketing activities
It’s easy to default to marketing. 90% of founders and executives parrot what they see online, and they think they need Facebook Ads, social media posts, or SEO to grow.
Not true.
In our experience growing multiple million-dollar products over the past seven years, the best growth comes from PLG. This means making a great product, and building an in-product viral growth engine, so usage from your product leads to new customers.
For example, with our product TidyCal we have keep branding across our products (footer, emails, etc.). This makes it easy for people book with a TidyCal link to be motivated to create a TidyCal of their own.

Over years, we’ve seen that we PLG methods drive 60%+ of customers at a high sample size (i.e. 30,000+ customers). Growth isn’t just marketing, it’s about building great products.
Another example are the the old days of SumoMe. One of our mantras was “speed to success”, which meant helping the customer succeed as fast as possible to use the product. The faster they used our product, the faster they started sharing our brand and driving other users.
When we lay out our plan for PLG and product-driven projects, we start by doing research of internal opinions, competitors, and customer wants (if it’s a product that’s been around). For a more detailed breakdown, check out my recent blog post.
Once we complete the research, we organize the feedback into 5-15 monthly actions depending on the scope of each project. We organize the projects in a Google Doc, and link to corresponding GitHub tasks with more details.

On the marketing side, we take the remainder results (e.g., 40% vs. 60% driven from PLG) and establish a marketing plan with actions and target numbers.
We’re not picky about marketing channels at first.
We brainstorm a list of 10-20 marketing channels, and either pull expectations from past marketing channels, ask our friends, or even Google around for averages (e.g., “average conversion rate from blog posts” or “average CPC for Meta ads in the SaaS industry”).
We’re looking for ideas first, and then we systematically test them over 2-4 weeks to see what works (and then we double down on those) or what doesn’t work (and then we stop it for now, and move onto the next marketing channel). We’re looking for traction.
We put our projections put it into a spreadsheet that can be modified. Once we have actual data, we’ll update with the real results. Here’s a spreadsheet that I created for an advising client recently:

To learn more about marketing plans, check out my blog post on our KingSumo marketing launch plan.
With the project and marketing plans established, we’re ready to start movement. And to start moving, we need to next make sure we have the right team members in the right places to execute.
Strategy #3 – Build the team
So many entrepreneurs hire when they feel “stressed”. But they don’t have clear details on what the hire does.
Every hire we make has a clear KPI, or measurement of success. These KPIs typically equate to 5-10x ROI per year.
Often, when we make a bad hire, it started at the beginning — and we set them up to fail.
As the former NFL General Manager Michael Lombardi says, the problem is sports is either the players, coaches, or scheme. This is also true in business.
If a team member fails, the problem is just as likely as we didn’t set up clear, objective KPIs of success for them (coaches/leadership) or we gave them a bad strategy/projects to work on (scheme) as it is they’re just a bad team member (players).
But most leaders default to the bad team members route (and then keep wondering why their good hires only happen 20% of the time).
When we hire, we first create the job description (JD) written in simple terms — and share with your recruiter, hiring agency, or other hiring sources. This document has information about the business, the role responsibilities, KPIs, salary ranges, and technical and cultural fit requirements.

Next, we conduct interviews with candidates and evaluate based on our clearly-defined “wants” (which are a mix of cultural and technical).
To give an example, here are a few of the wants for our new hires this year:
Values alignment. We care most about ALIGNMENT: We are very clear on goals, and KPIs… but have flexibility on how we get there. We can disagree and have healthy conflict on our actions that best serve the KPI, but we don’t disagree on alignment/KPI direction (i.e. generating 2x New Buyers for SendFox and KingSumo).
Senior level
Full-stack experience (frontend and backend); dependent upon Designer (i.e. can be backend-only if Designer can do frontend)
Laravel: All our products are built using the Laravel framework
For our two open roles this year, we had 16 interviews with seven different candidates — and 52 pages of notes and grades based on the technical and cultural wants.

Once we find the right team member, and the offer is accepted, we put together a welcome packet.
This packet has all the high-level details they need to understand their role, their KPIs clearly outlined, logins, and all other relevant information to help them succeed in the first day, week, and month.

In the first month of hiring, we hand-hold heavily with daily meetings and constant check-ins. We want to make sure to build strong accountability of expectations and get the team members aligned with our processes as soon as possible.
Put another way, here’s our high-level process for hiring A-players:
Once you have the team members in the right seats — and clear on their actions — the full strategy is in place:
- Set goals and KPIs so you know the direction you’re going
- Lay out the plan and define the actions to get you to the goal and KPIs
- Make sure the right team members are on the team to execute the actions
It’s not complicated, but it requires being clear and direct with our actions (and ignoring the noise/outside responsibilities). This is the strategy we used to grow our business 57% this year — and have used consistently in the past for years of 35%+ growth.
Now, you can use this process for 2025 (and beyond). Go crush it.