The other day I was at a demo day and talked to a bunch of smart, young founders. A bunch of them were building products in categories I knew well, and I was very interested in what their new take was on existing categories.
I asked them why they would win. They often gave somewhat rambly, strategic answers about The Future of AI and How the Old Apps Were So Dated. OK. But then I pushed them. “What’s your 10x Feature? What’s the one thing that matters that you do 10x better than the top incumbent?”
Almost none could answer that question. But you have to. You have to know your 10x Features, especially as a new entrant. The one where you win. Without a 10x feature, it’s almost impossible to break in.
What’s a 10x Feature? It’s a feature that, for a material number of customers and prospects, wins the deal vs. the competition. Period. Not always, but often.
10x Features are real, though they often don’t last. The competition figures it out and copies your 10x feature. But still, that takes time in SaaS. And then later, once you are past say, $20m+ in ARR, often (but not always) you begin to achieve rough feature parity, brand takes over, and the 10x feature often doesn’t quite win a deal on its own. That doesn’t mean you don’t have feature gaps. Salesforce still has feature gaps. But it means many of the core features at least are enough built out in the core competitor group that there aren’t as many obvious 10x features. And it also means once you have a strong enough brand, that partners often can fill these gaps.
But for a while, as you are scaling, you can beat the competition in at least specific deals in specific segments with a 10x Feature.
I’ll give a few examples from the SaaStr Fund portfolio of what the 10x Feature was from a few SaaS companies in the early days:
- For Pipedive, at first, they were the easiest to use Trello for Sales. Easiest sometimes is enough for very small businesses. It just worked.
- For Algolia, it was being 10x faster than Elastic for small object search. Not for everything, but for one key use case.
- For Talkdesk, in the early days, it was being the first call center that really worked 100% in the browser. Today, that’s table stakes. But back then, they leveraged WebRTC and Twilio to do something no one else had quite done before. Not every company wanted to run their call center in the browser in 2014. But enough did to pick a scrappy new startup from Lisbon.
- For Salesloft, it was organizing your LinkedIn contacts. Everyone does this today, but when their first product, Prospector launched, no one had done this for SDRs.
- For Gorgias, it was one-click integration for your contact center into Shopify. Today, they have 13,000+ customers. But when I invested at $10k MRR, they were fairly feature-poor. But they were the easiest way to get a true contact center going in Shopify in 1 click.
Those 10x features created startups worth billions and doing collectively approaching one billion in ARR.
Actually, looking back, I see I made a video of our 10x Features in order of release. I got a little misty-eyed looking back:
Here was our rough list. Some are laughably dated, but some are still as relevant today as ever:
- 2006: Fax integration. Back then, the few other e-signature providers could not accommodate fax. I know, but this was when the market was just evolving. Many companies still wanted fax at this point. We could accommodate both in the same workflow, automatically, from Day 1. We won a lot of those deals. For almost 3 years we were alone with this 10x feature. It was surprisingly hard to do well, given all the exceptions and corner cases involved (crumbled document, torn cover sheet, upside down pages, etc).
- 2007: Salesforce integration. We launched in the first AppExchange class in late 2006 with the first true, deep Salesforce integration. We built the template that everyone else then copied. There were rougher approaches to Salesforce integration before us. But for about 2 years, we had the only native, seamless integration here. We won Dell, Comcast, Verizon, Qualcomm, and a ton of other leaders just because of this 10x Feature. We know this — because we sure were lacking a lot of other key features! It was truly a 10x feature for about 2 years. We were it.
- 2008: Cross-platform. We had basic mobile, Mac and Windows, whatever you wanted. As the web began to grow, just having Mobile Sign and Safari compatibility alone could win deals. “Do you want 80% of your customers to be able e-sign your contacts? Or 100%?” Today, table stakes. But back then, believe it or not, we had the only cross-platform solution.
- 2009: Fully localized platform. Boy, we won a lot of deals here with our “Global Edition”. Web sales went global and everyone wanted a product where the e-signature app worked in the native languages of signers and senders. If you haven’t localized an app before, and didn’t architect it that way from the beginning, it’s a big project. We won Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so many other deals just with this feature. The competition took 2+ years to catch up!
- 2010: Ease-of-Use. By 2010, we were finally started to get to basic feature parity. Phew, a long time! Because we’d started as freemium, we still surprisingly had a huge headstart in usability. We’d show prospects that cared about ease-of-use how much easier to sign it was on EchoSign. And it was. And we’d win. Again, again. And again. Want to sign in 1 click, not 10? On the iPad? Anywhere, in 1 step? We’re your vendor! We closed 4 of the 6 leading insurance companies because of this.
- 2011: Collaboration. In 2011, we built something about 5+ years ahead of the market: full on-line and off-line redlining and contract negotiation. That was crazy early in 2011. We were hacking Google Docs and Office to do things they really could not do then yet, and it was awesome. Adobe later ripped it out. But it was wicked awesome (if early). Any deal that wanted to negotiate contracts before signing, we’d win. Even if it wasn’t perfect. Because it was a 10x Feature only we had.
Later, brand and being #1 wins. It really does. As you leave the tail end of the early adopter phase, mainstream customers will begin to overlook even 10x features just to buy the trusted brand.
But it sure can work for a while. Talk to your team about what your 10x feature is. And make sure the sales team always has at least one killer 10x feature. I always did. I considered it my job.
Also, building 10x Features is simply awesome, when you really build them and it works. Everyone gets it. They make you a winner. At least for a while. Until you figure out and ship the next one.
(Note: an updated SaaStr Classic post)
