Growth Levers to Pull at $1M+ ARR

You've hit $1M ARR. Now what? The growth tactics that got you to seven figures in ARR probably won't get you to eight. In this session, Asia Orangio will dig into the specific growth levers that matter most at this stage, and how to figure out which ones to pull for your business.

What we'll cover:

• How to identify your highest-leverage growth opportunities right now (not six months from now).
• The common growth bottlenecks that show up and how to troubleshoot them.
• How to think about your marketing engine at this stage so you're building something sustainable.

Asia Orangio is the founder of DemandMaven, a growth consultancy that helps SaaS companies find their best growth opportunities and generate their next $1M ARR. She's spent years in the trenches as a SaaS marketer and has helped founders at every stage figure out what's actually going to move the needle.

You've crossed $1M ARR. The hard part is supposed to be over, right?

Not quite. The growth tactics that got you here probably won't get you to the next level, and most founders don't realize that until they've been stuck at the same number for a year or two.

Asia Orangio, founder of DemandMaven, has spent eight years helping SaaS companies overcome exactly this kind of growth stall. She's worked with over 100 SaaS companies, served on the board of Moz, and helped founders at every stage figure out what's actually going to move the needle. In this session, she walked our $1M+ founders through the growth levers that actually matter at this stage — and why most teams are pulling the wrong ones.

Here's what she covered:

The Acquisition Trap

Most SaaS content, products, and founder conversations are obsessed with acquisition. Asia cited a ProfitWell analysis of over 1,000 SaaS blog posts: more than 70% focused on acquisition. Just 20% covered retention. Around 10% touched on monetization.

The irony? Acquisition is the least efficient growth lever you can pull.

According to research from Patrick Campbell's team at ProfitWell, you can get two to three times more growth by focusing on literally any other lever — retention, monetization, activation — than by doubling down on acquisition alone.

This doesn't mean acquisition doesn't matter. It means that if you're throwing everything at the top of the funnel while ignoring what happens after the signup, you're working harder than you need to for worse results.

So what are the other levers? Asia walked through four: activation, NRR, pricing, and product.

Lever 1: Activation

Asia defines activation as your free trial to paid conversion rate. It's the percentage of people who sign up and actually become paying customers.

Industry benchmarks, per Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter:

• Average: ~36%
• Median (what most companies actually see): ~30%
• Sub-$1M ARR: closer to 14%
• $1M–$5M ARR: typically around 33%

MicroConf's own State of Indie SaaS research found something similar: bootstrappers across the board were seeing about 15% free trial to paid conversion. Asia's take on this: those numbers are floors, not ceilings. She's worked with companies that hit 50–60% conversion without requiring a credit card upfront.

Why does it matter so much? Because if your activation rate is low, you have to compensate with a massive acquisition funnel. You're essentially betting on volume to make up for leakage. At a time when acquisition is getting more expensive and more competitive — and AI is making everything weirder — that's a bet you don't want to keep making.

How to improve it

Activation depends on two things: the actual experience of signing up and using your product, and your ability to understand the data behind how people activate.

On the data side, the most useful report is new user retention. Tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, or PostHog can show you what percentage of new users come back and take any action over time. Asia shared an example from a financial tracking product where baseline retention was 5% on day one (the target is at least 50%). But when they broke down retention by specific actions — connecting accounts, creating a chart, building a watchlist — retention jumped to 60–70% for users who completed those steps.

That's your activation blueprint: find the one or two actions that correlate with users sticking around, and make those as easy and obvious as possible.

Facebook's classic example is "10 friends in 10 minutes." What's yours?

If you don't have product analytics set up, the faster path is qualitative. Get three to five paying customers to share their screen and walk you through how they set up the product. Then do the same with three to five prospects — give them a mission ("sign up and configure this the way you'd need to before deciding to buy"), and watch what happens. It's uncomfortable as a founder, but you'll see exactly where people get stuck.

On the design side, audit every screen between "click start free trial" and "using the product." Asia showed an example from her current fractional CMO work where a 70% drop-off on the very first signup screen was traced back to visual overload and a busy reviews module that didn't match what their buyer cared about. A redesign focused on simplifying the experience, delaying the email request, and reducing cognitive load — not because the data proved it yet, but because the audit made the problem obvious.

Lever 2: NRR (Net Revenue Retention)

When Asia sees a growth stall, NRR is the first thing she looks at. "This is long-term sneaky churn," she said.

Most founders track monthly churn. NRR tells you something different: out of all the revenue you made in a given month, how much of it is still there 12 months later?

Benchmarks to know:

• 100%+ — Best in class. You're retaining everyone and expanding. Companies at this level have net negative churn.
• ~80% — Healthy. Growth feels relatively solid.
• 70% — Starting to feel slow. You're probably still growing, but it's not exciting.
• Below 60% — You're likely either contracting or running very hard just to stay flat.

Asia's worked with companies at 24% NRR at 12 months. The only way to survive that is to acquire an enormous number of new customers just to make up for what's churning out the bottom — which is unsustainable.

The insight that most founders miss: you might have perfectly acceptable monthly churn numbers and still have poor NRR, because NRR captures the slow leak that shows up at 10, 11, and 12 months. The problem often doesn't appear in your recent customers — it shows up in the cohorts that have been around a while.

What causes poor NRR?

Usually a combination of three things:

1. Weak product operations. Features are getting built without discovery or validation. The roadmap is driven by requests rather than by understanding what actually creates sustained value. Customers churn at month 10 not because your product is bad, but because you've been building the wrong things.
2. Bad go-to-market fit. You might be acquiring the wrong customers — people who aren't a strong match for what your product does. Positioning, messaging, or pricing may be misaligned in ways that attract unqualified buyers.
3. Pricing that doesn't support expansion. This is the one that holds a lot of $1M+ companies back from hitting 100%+ NRR. If pricing doesn't create natural expansion revenue, you're betting on retaining every single customer to hit 100% — which isn't realistic. Expansion revenue is what gets you there.

What to do

Pull your NRR cohort chart (ProfitWell and Stripe both have this). Look at where you are at 12 months. If it's below 80%, start by asking honest questions about your product process: how do features end up on the roadmap? When did you last talk to customers who churned — not just about "why'd you leave" but about what value they stopped getting? If it's at 80% and you want to get higher, the answer is usually pricing.

Lever 3: Pricing

Asia has seen more founders get burned by their own pricing than by almost anything else. The pattern: a company tries pricing changes two, three, four times, fails each time, exhausts themselves, and then decides pricing is just hard and stops thinking about it.

The problem isn't that pricing is hard. It's that most founders approach it without a process.

She walked through a detailed example from a client called GoReminders — appointment reminder software for service businesses. They had relaunched pricing five or six times over two years and were stuck in flat growth. When Asia looked at their NRR report, she could see the exact moments where each pricing change tanked retention.

The core issues:

• Their value metric (number of appointments) was structured as fixed tiers rather than a sliding scale. Customers who fell between tiers felt like they were paying for capacity they'd never use.
• There was almost no differentiation between the Business and Premium plans — literally the same appointment limit on both.
• Nobody was on the top-tier plan. It existed for optics.

After running pricing interviews and price sensitivity surveys (using the Van Westendorp methodology), they redesigned the model: simpler plan structure, better differentiation, and a sliding scale for appointments. The result tripled their annual growth rate.

How to approach pricing at $1M+

Pricing shouldn't be a one-time project. Asia recommends revisiting it at least once a year. The process:

Pricing interviews. Talk to both prospects and current customers. Get feedback on what works and what doesn't. When you have hypotheses, bring them to your target buyers before you build. Platforms like userinterviews.com or respondent.io can help you find buyers quickly.

Price sensitivity analysis. Run a survey with a subset of customers (not everyone — that'll freak people out) using the Van Westendorp method. You're not just looking for a number they'll pay — you're looking for the value metric they'd prefer.

Get clear on your value metric. Is how you're currently charging actually how customers think about value? GoReminders' customers didn't want to be locked into tiers. They wanted to pay proportionally to how much they used the product. If your pricing model creates resentment instead of a sense of fairness, it'll show up in your NRR.

Resources Asia recommends: The Guide to Street Pricing by Marcos Rivera, and Bill Wilson at Pace Pricing.

Lever 4: Product

Asia's take on product is probably the sharpest reframe in this session, and the one founders are most likely to push back on.

The default belief at $1M+: product isn't really a growth lever anymore. You've built the core thing. Now it's about marketing and sales.

Asia thinks that's wrong — at least until you're at $40M–$50M. The mistake isn't underinvesting in product features. It's building features based on what customers say they want instead of what they actually need.

"Customers are not good product designers and they're not good product managers. They have requests and they have desires — but it's far more important to observe what they're doing than to hear what they say."

She shared the example of SparkToro, where she did product discovery work two years ago. Customers weren't complaining about anything specific. But when she talked to them and watched how they used the product, a pattern emerged: agency users were doing queries in SparkToro, exporting the data, then manually building charts and graphs for client presentations.

Nobody asked for charts. Not a single person said "it would be great if SparkToro built these for me." But the behavior was clear. Asia's hypothesis: if the product just did that work for them, agencies would get dramatically more value.

SparkToro built it. And they overcame a growth stall they'd been stuck in for two years.

What to look for

The questions Asia asks when doing product discovery work:

• Where do customers get stuck?
• What desires do they have when using the product?
• What do they do after they use your product? (This is where you'll find the manual workarounds — the things your product should probably do for them.)

If your product process is currently "listen to feature requests, add the popular ones to the roadmap," that's product management for maintenance. Product management for growth means understanding who your best customers are, what would make them stay and expand, and building for that — even when they don't know to ask for it.

The Recap

Here's where to focus if you're at $1M+ and growth feels slower than it should:

Activation is probably below 30%. Find your "10 friends in 10 minutes" equivalent — the one or two actions that, when a new user takes them, actually predict retention. Make those as easy as possible.

NRR is probably below 100% at 12 months. Look at your cohort report. Understand whether you have a product problem, a go-to-market fit problem, or a pricing problem — and work it from there.

Pricing is what gets you from 80% NRR to 100%+. If you haven't done a real pricing process — interviews, sensitivity analysis, value metric review — you're leaving money on the table and probably churning customers who feel like the model doesn't fit how they work.

Product is still a growth lever. Watch what your customers do, not just what they say. The biggest opportunities often don't come from the feature request list.

Asia Orangio is the founder of DemandMaven, a growth consultancy that helps SaaS companies overcome growth stalls. She's worked with 100+ SaaS companies and advised hundreds more. If you want to connect with her, reach out to the SaaS Institute team and we'll make the intro.