There are two broad types of go-to-market strategies that SMB SaaS vendors employ that position them to make the upmarket ascent successfully:

1. Customer-pull SaaS: These SMB focused SaaS vendors tend to support many growth-oriented customers that invariably pull the vendor upmarket. This is most relevant in rapidly growing market segments such as e-commerce and online marketing (e.g. Shopify, Yotpo, Hubspot), a product category with high switching costs, such as finance, HR and payroll (e.g. Netsuite, Hibob, Papaya), or products applicable to both SMBs and enterprise departments (e.g. Tableau, Sisense, Gong). In each instance, the customers’ business growth creates a natural upward pull on the SaaS vendor’s product roadmap.
2. Bottoms-up SaaS: These SaaS vendors typically begin by targeting individual employees as entry points within an organization (e.g. Slack, Monday, SurveyMonkey, Notion), or targeting specific types of employees such as individual developers (e.g. Twilio, Zapier, Hashicorp) or salespeople. We’ve seen this especially in companies serving the developer ecosystem, where category leaders such as Pagerduty in DevOps, Cloudinary in media management, and LaunchDarkly in feature flagging employ a high-velocity bottoms-up sales motion to help the company gain momentum with specific teams or users and then expand within the organization.

I’ve invested in several startups that straddle the consumer, employee, and SMB divide, such as Wix (WIX), Fiverr (FVRR), Cloudinary, and Soluto (acquired by Asurion), and more recently I’ve invested in pure SMB product companies such as Yotpo, Hibob, and Melio. Watching what works and what does not has led me to put together a list of ten best practices to provide some guidance to the SMB-focused SaaS vendor:

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