How to get your SaaS to $1M ARR? ft. Sairam Krishnan (CMO, Atomicwork)
A 7 step approach that gets $$$
A few weeks back, I attended the content dinner with good folks Sajith & Rohit from BlumeVC. After a long time, I met the OG, Sairam (CMO, Atomicwork). Sai spent the last decade marketing for SaaS giants Freshworks, Wingify and as a Marketer in Residence at Accel VC.
I have always wanted to learn his process and write with him. That day has finally arrived. Sai breaks down the $1 million SaaS ARR playbook he has used repeatedly. He is open-sourcing it today with each one of us.
If you are figuring out the very early days of your SaaS, this article is a great starting point. Sai also writes a beautiful newsletter called the CMO Journal - read it here.
Sai’s framework to $1 mil SaaS ARR.
“ The $1 million ARR milestone is still, even in the age of AI, the first real victory as a SaaS startup. It doesn’t mean you will be successful from now on; it doesn’t mean you don’t have to work to keep that money and earn more. It just means you have validation, are on the map, and can keep going. As a founder, that number still remains the first step of the dream “ - Sairam Krishnan (CMO, Atomicwork)
But it is also challenging to achieve. You have to earn the right to it by providing enough value to customers so they want to pay you. It’s that simple, but also that hard. Atomicwork is my third 0 to 1 journey, and as the founding head of marketing, I had to draw deep from all my almost 15 years of startup experience to do it all over again.
Plus, I have been writing a newsletter over the last five years of my career, starting from my stint at global VC firm Accel. The attempt was to consolidate my learnings, primarily just for myself. But in doing so, I have also constructed many frameworks for the early-stage marketing/GTM playbook. This essay is a condensed version of many hard-won learnings over a decade and a half.
The framework breaks down the critical steps to take you from 0 to your 1st million in annual recurring revenue. I have tried to include examples in each step so the takeaways are easier and immediately memorable. I hope you enjoy it.
Step 1: What is your positioning?
This question is a stand-in for many basics that the product should answer. If you get positioning right, half of your marketing battle is won. It is that important. Get this wrong, and everything else becomes an uphill battle. In a nutshell, positioning is “what you are, and who you are for”. And as an early-stage startup, you have to be clear about this. For example,
One of Chargebee’s first positioning statements was “Subscription Billing and Revenue Operations for Fast Growth B2B SaaS.” See how clear that is—it’s subscription billing for B2B SaaS companies.
As a marketing team, when you have this clarity, you can sell it to the target audience, which is also clear to you. The most common mistake founders make in positioning is trying to be everything to everyone. Doing that will set your marketing and GTM motion up for failure. You can figure it out with three questions —
What specific problem are you solving?
For whom are you solving it?
How are you solving it differently?
Once you answer these, your positioning will become clear daily, acting as a decision-making filter for your customers and team. Let’s go to the next step.
Step 2: Who is your customer?
When your positioning is precise, your customer will be (mostly) clear. You know who the product is for. Take Chargebee’s example; they were building for fast-growth B2B SaaS companies. Once you know that, you now know two more things —
Are you going after SMB or Enterprise?
What is the exact ICP you need to go after?
Take the first question.
When you know you are going after an enterprise customer, for example, your marketing and GTM motion would have to prepare for that kind of selling. If it is an SMB, you can do it entirely differently.
Take Chargebee again.
Once they know they are targeting fast-growing B2B SaaS customers and selling them critical financial infrastructure, it is clear this is an enterprise game. Their marketing and GTM will correspond to that customer profile.
Second, as you know from the above, you will immediately see who you need to sell to. This is the precise role you need to type into LinkedIn to get a list of folks you can try to market to.
I have a mental model for this.
To know “Who is the exact person in the company you need to sell to”, ask yourself “Who will be able to present your product at their annual appraisal and ask for a raise?” - That is who you need to sell to.
However, as a startup, the temptation will be to chase any customer who will pay you. Resist it. Do the right thing, not the easier thing. And if this takes time, that’s fine. When we started at Atomicwork, we initially thought HR was our ICP. But after a few iterations, we quickly realised that IT was our true ICP.
To break this down further, look for these qualities in your initial target segment —
An acute pain point that your solution directly solves
Accessible decision-makers (can you reach them?)
Ability and willingness to pay
Potential to be vocal advocates
If you have the above and the clarity of positioning, you are off to the races.
Step 3: Which marketing channel should I build first?
Great. I know who I’m selling to and what I’m selling them, and I also have a general idea of how much. But now, how do I get them to talk to me? Most founders now ask which channel we should invest in: inbound, events, paid, or product-led.
I have learned that this is the wrong question to ask. You don’t pick the channel for your target audience; the target audience does.
Choose your initial channel based on your ICP's natural habitat. Ask yourself: Where does your ICP naturally go to learn about solutions like yours? What information formats do they trust? Who influences their decisions? Or ask yourself an even more straightforward question: Where are these people hanging out?
At Atomicwork, our ICPs are CIOs, IT Directors, and CXOs. These executives aren't typically scrolling through Twitter or reading blogs. They value peer insights and thought leadership that teaches them something they didn’t know. This intelligence shaped our channel strategy. And so we have —
A podcast interviewing senior IT leaders (Atomic Conversations)
High-value research reports (like our "State of AI in IT")
Strategic presence at major IT events
A thoughtful newsletter focusing on AI in IT
But we did not start with all of them.
We started with the podcast, the report, and a bunch of other content, then we moved to adding more channels. This is what I recommend as well: Start with one or two channels that hit your audience best, see if that’s working, iterate rapidly, scale, and then do the same with the next channel.
Step 4: How to build trust & equity within the org, and why do it at all?
First, let me answer the 2nd question: " Why should marketing (as a function and as individuals) build trust and equity?” Because marketing needs two things: repetition and time.
You need to repeat things a lot for them to start working, and for them to start working, you need time. Startups need their first few customers to trust them blindly, to believe that this upstart bunch of people will deliver. And obviously, most prospects won’t. For marketing to build that trust and confidence requires a lot of work. So, early wins are critical to build up confidence and get more time.
So the question becomes: what marketing activities can deliver measurable results fastest? The answer depends on your sales cycle and price point, but generally falls into two categories —
For shorter (SMB) sales cycles —
Targeted outbound campaigns to a highly specific ICP
High-quality, SEO-ized content and founder-led stories
Bottom-of-funnel paid search capturing existing demand
Strategic partnerships with complementary tools
For longer (mid-market/enterprise) sales cycles —
Case studies from beta customers
Authority-building content that solves immediate problems
Targeted event sponsorship where your exact ICP gathers
The key is to choose activities that produce tangible metrics within 60-90 days. At Wingify, we executed a design revamp, clarified our positioning, and got our landing pages optimised within four months. The two months after that, we aggressively executed on content, SEO, and SEM. Traffic started climbing, bringing leads, revenue, and growth. This helped me build confidence in marketing & gave me more time to show results.
Remember that your marketing might evolve, and the product strategy might also change. However, having those early wins will build credibility internally and give you the time and space to develop and succeed at long-term strategies.
Step 5: How to work with sales in the early days & win deals?
At this stage, I’m going to assume that most of the work will move to an early marketing hire or hires, with the founders being closely involved.
There is now some momentum, prospects are being talked to, and the sales hire (or team) is trying to close the early adopters. This is one point you should be very wary of, because at times, marketing sort of washes their hands off the process here.
The idea: Sales is now going to take over.
The problem is that this is enterprise behaviour, where the sales teams are already experienced enough and have the materials, knowledge, and confidence to go close the sale. At a startup, the sales org is likely as inexperienced or just getting to terms with what they are selling as you are.
That is why marketing has to be heavily involved and deeply embedded in the sales process. Join calls, read every email exchange, and understand objections first-hand. This isn't about micromanagement or not giving sales space; it’s about building a repeatable motion together that can be scaled. It's about getting the information necessary to create and do marketing that directly helps the sales team.
An easy win here is producing great sales enablement material that will help your sales team go and make the argument for your product. I've found the best approach is to observe what salespeople are already saying works, then formalise and enhance it rather than inventing from scratch.
For this, you have to be deeply involved in the process from the first touchpoint. The most effective marketers think like salespeople and create assets that directly address specific friction points in the sales process. Creating this for your sales team means you are making their job easier, helping them close the sale faster. This is what the company needs. Plus, the sales organisation will become indebted to you.
Step 6: How to measure your marketing at this stage?
Now that your marketing is ready and you are working with sales to close deals, you must also optimise. What parts of your marketing are working, and what are not? You need to know this so you can improve them.
Right? Wrong.
At an early-stage startup, the completely wrong thing to do is to get caught in the metrics trap. Though founders want to know what is happening, and marketing also intends to show impact as soon as possible, everyone starts obsessing over the numbers.
Don’t.
At this stage, you shouldn’t be measuring your marketing at all. At least not like larger companies do. You have to build up distribution and credibility before the numbers start to make sense, and you haven’t done that yet.
At Atomicwork, we did this over two years. We focused on three basics: getting our positioning right, creating content that truly resonated with our market, and consistently putting out great stuff at a decent volume.
This created a force field around our audience, CIOs, where they would keep seeing our content and activity, telling them again and again that we were relevant and that they should check us out.
Please note that doing all of this doesn’t mean that we abandoned measurement forever. We just started doing it where there were things worth measuring. This is what you should do too. Let your marketing compound. Please don’t throw a spanner in the works by measuring and making decisions to start or stop things even before they get the chance to start working.
Step 7: Building a perpetual motion machine of marketing.
And finally, as a marketer or a founder, you have to aim to build a marketing machine, a system greater than the sum of its parts and which keeps working as you sleep. The aim of doing everything above and tuning them is to build a sustainable, repeatable marketing system that doesn't depend on lucky breaks or superhuman effort. They rely on clarity, consistency, and compounding. Your marketing should work like a perpetual motion machine, improving with time.
At my current role, one of the systems we built early was a content mechanism that didn't rely on flash-in-the-pan tactics. Our content calendar knew precisely who it was for and what it wanted to achieve, ensuring that we consistently produced high-quality material.
Do we sometimes miss deadlines? Of course. But the system keeps us focused and clear on what next week's or next month's work entails. The simplicity is the genius. All we need to do after this is show up consistently.
And this is what has to extend to all the different channels. Every channel has to compound in itself, automatically keep running how the content calendar runs. Webinars, events that we put together, campaigns, thought leadership, and so on. Every single touchpoint is important and a part of the puzzle. As each piece keeps adding up, the momentum, and the targeting will make the whole marketing effort more than the sum of its parts.
Bringing it all together.
If there is an aim to this essay, it is that the road to $1M isn't about finding one magical tactic, though that’s what it could sometimes look like for an outsider. If it is about anything, it is about building systems that consistently tell strangers that what you have built is worth paying attention to.
Get your fundamentals right, find your marketing MVP, choose the right initial customers, select channels based on ICP behaviour, deliver quick wins, align tightly with sales, build compounding systems, and evolve your approach as you scale.
Remember that marketing is repetition.
The startups that win don't always have the cleverest campaigns, especially in B2B SaaS. The startups that win consistently show up with precise positioning, compelling messaging, and an unwavering focus on the customer problems they solve best. Start here, and remember that building to $1M is a marathon, not a sprint. When you win this one, it will be the first of many.
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See you in the next edition :)
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