Chapter 2 Do the Time No, the year of hell comes later. It comes post-traction, usually. Sometimes post-scale, like with the CEO above, and sometimes before. It’s that one year when it’s just too darn hard on every level to keep slugging it out. You’re just under assault on too many fronts. This isn’t a particularly profound insight, other than to say, trust me, it’s part of the journey, and you’re not doing anything wrong. Hang in there. I’ve talked with a lot of SaaS CEOs and founders, and almost all of them who’ve done it long enough have had a year of hell. If you’re in your year of hell, you’ll get through it. We’ve all been there. My personal year of hell was 2008. The leads were there, the customer base was Make your there, but we started to spend a lot of world better by appreciating all money, and it just wasn’t clicking. It was a the tangible ways tough year. The strange thing to me isn’t you already help that almost everyone has a year of hell. the people you The strange thing is that when people work with, serve, or get through it (if they do), most times, the inspire. business does more than just improve — it reignites and grows faster than ever. That reignition can happen because the hell you go through forces you to reconfigure what was stuck. David Ulevitch of OpenDNS had two different years of hell. In 2010, just after returning as CEO, David had a year of culture hell, because people were rudderless after a year under the former CEO. In 2012, he had a year of growth hell because the company wasn’t growing fast enough, and they had to retool the entire sales and marketing system. In both cases, OpenDNS came out of the hell stronger. First with energized people, and then with predictable, scalable sales systems. If you keep at it during your year of hell, you’ll see reignition — a re- acceleration of growth. It may be a full year after the year of hell (what we saw at EchoSign), but it does happen. If you have good customers, decent product, a committed team, and you keep at it with 100% dedication, you’ll see reignition too. Patience plus dedication is the key here.