I’m thrilled to share that Tabs had a banner year in 2024 and it’s largely thanks to our customers’ support. We began this year with zero customers and are closing it out with well over a hundred paying customers and strong seven figures in ARR. We’ve grown the team from under a dozen to 50+ and have raised and announced our Seed and Series A rounds from General Catalyst and Lightspeed to fund future growth.
Though many of our team have worked at startups with successful exits, few of us have participated quite this early in the journey, and I wanted to share with you some thoughts on our product strategy at such a nascent stage. I think a lot of the “best practices” at growth stage and public companies are unnecessarily limiting in the early days; instead, this is how we built our product with such velocity in 2024.
Don’t maintain a long-term roadmap
At the start of the year we wrote out a long list of features that were “showstoppers” holding back our H1 goal of getting to 50 customers. Nearly a year later, we haven’t built half of those features like email tracking or accepting partial payments on an invoice. Instead, the requests that are most mentioned in our surveys and conversations with users – like end-of-year 1099s and commission tracking – continue to surprise us and reinforce that we have a lot more to learn and do.
By keeping an open dialogue with customers and prospects, we continually shift the roadmap to the nexus of what people tell us they need most and where we think we can be most helpful. This approach has led us to build better prioritization among outstanding invoices and increased visibility of invoices to the sales and support teams. Let me know what’s most important to you, and we’ll be transparent about other customers who have asked for it, where it is on our current priorities list, and workarounds we have seen people use in the meantime.
Build what you need today, but sell what you’ll have tomorrow
In the B2C world we generally only market what we have available today. That approach is woefully inadequate in B2B where the sales cycle is relatively long and the exact implementation (which occurs after the sale) can have an impact on what the customer needs. Instead, we try to sell one to three months ahead of what is currently in the platform, which aligns with our implementation timeline and lets us approximate the price that new functionality may be worth. By bringing customers into the product development journey, we can offer substantial flexibility and better understand exactly what is expected. In turn, this reduces the need for our customers to engineer their own solutions and increases the chance that we’re building something people will actually want.
For example, when we first marketed our API integrations, prospective customers didn't know exactly what they would need and we didn’t know exactly what we would build. During implementation, however, it was much easier to get their CTOs on a call to ask specifically what they intended to do, to discuss multiple options, and to refine a plan. Now that we have done this a half dozen times, our internal teams have a much better understanding of what can be delivered “out of the box” as well as a talk track for how to coach a customer who has nonspecific needs but wants to be sure they can access everything they will eventually want.
Expect to rebuild everything
Paul Graham says an early inquiry he has for a company our age is whether they are default alive or default dead across the best and worst of potential situations. Though it’s undoubtedly an important analysis for the business, a similar question for the software team is how much of their code will stick around across the best and worst of situations. I think knowing that our code is not long for this world helps us find our fit faster.
In the early days we acknowledged that we didn’t understand the implications of design decisions that we made. By accepting that we would have to rewrite most of what we built, we could build faster and accept that edge cases were unlikely to be covered. Since then, we have gone back to fix many things, from how a user would interact with multiple invoices to how we compute revenue within an invoicing system with increasing functionality.
If we had instead insisted on getting it right the first time, we would have optimized for the wrong things and been more hesitant about ripping out the decisions as we learned more.
Conclusions
The theme of 2024 was embracing opportunities to learn across every aspect of the business. From how we ideate and sell to how we implement and support, Tabs has a much more informed perspective going into 2025. We expect that the result of that is going to be continued and accelerated growth with new features and better support for all of our merchants. So thank you for your support and believing in us. There’s much more to come!
