Chapter 3 The Climb: How to Get to $10 Million more money to do the next round, you’ll want to know the answer to that question. When you were raising your seed round or A round, it was all hopes and dreams. But once you’re a real business, investors will focus more on how big this market really is. It’s okay to have a $500 million market, but then the amount of money that you raise and your exit strategy will both change depending on the ultimate size of that commercial audience. You want to have a great story and a bunch of statistics to prove the market. When we started, the general perception of Zuora was, “Okay, this billing thing might be interesting, but it’s really just for other SaaS companies, right?” Our background was Salesforce and WebEx, so it made sense that people just assumed we were strictly a product for the SaaS industry. But we said, “No, our vision is actually much broader. We think any company can use our solution, and that defines a multibillion-dollar market.” So, we set out to gather the proof points. Let’s go get a media company. Let’s go get a financial services company. Let’s go get a healthcare company. Let’s go get a public company so we can prove the thesis that this truly is a multibillion-dollar market. I’ve seen a lot of companies miss this. They adopt the “bowling alley” strategy famously laid out in the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, picking a single vertical to focus on. They figure to get to $10 million, it’s easier to just focus on a single set of homogenous customers. That may be true, but then they wind up boxing themselves into a small market. $10 Million Congratulations. At $10 million, your chances of survival increase. Before, you could die at any moment by running out of cash before you could raise any more money. At $10 million, you don’t have to go out of business, especially if you’re built on solid recurring revenue. You’re turning into a real company. Remember that El Capitan climb I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter? That effort was actually 7–10 years in the making. That was a story of patience, calculation, and many failures before those two climbers ultimately succeeded. They endured many switchbacks of their own. As you head toward $30 million and $100 million there will be new challenges to consider. But now, you’re on your way.