Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

by Rand Fishkin

This means that Salesforce has to acquire only 10 percent of its current customer base each year to maintain the same revenue. Any additional new customers, or any up-sell on current customers, means growth. At Moz, we need to add thousands of new customers each month just to keep up our existing revenue. Here’s where focus comes into play. Because we’re so dependent on new customer acquisition in order to stave off shrinking revenue, we have to substantially split the company’s priorities between product development that can attract new customers versus investments that improve retention of existing customers. Now multiply that by four different products and you can see how the organization struggled just to keep its head above water. Customer retention versus customer acquisition is a long-running debate in the subscription world, but if I were doing things over again, I’d limit any investment in marketing (of staff, expenses, or leadership attention) until we found a path to consistently grow subscription tenure.