How Do You Keep Customers From Outgrowing Your Product?

Customers don’t always leave because they aren’t getting value from your product. Sometimes the product has worked well for years, but they’ve just outgrown you. It happens! What matters is what you do about it.

As you can imagine, this is a problem that many SaaS companies face, especially if their customers are small-but-growing businesses. Small businesses turn into medium and large businesses, and that’s a good thing, all things considered.

The problem is that the software they needed when they had five employees isn’t necessarily the software they’ll need when they have 50 or 500. Their processes get more complicated, they use more tools, more people need access, and things they were perfectly happy doing manually suddenly need to happen automatically.

You can’t plan for every possible way a customer might grow, and you probably shouldn’t try. But you can give them enough flexibility that they don’t immediately have to start looking for a replacement once their needs get a little more complicated.

1. Add Workflow Automation

One of the easiest ways for a customer to outgrow your product is for their processes to become more complicated than your features allow.

You might have built a feature that sends an email when something happens, for example. That’s fine until a customer wants to wait two days before sending it, only send it when certain conditions are met, notify someone in Slack at the same time, and require approval if the value is over $10,000.

You could keep adding options to that feature, but then you’ll run into the same problem somewhere else in your product.

Workflow automation gives you a more general solution. Instead of trying to predict every process your customers will need, you give them triggers, actions, conditions, delays, approvals, and other pieces they can put together themselves.

This is particularly useful as customers grow because their workflows can grow with them. They can start with something as simple as “when this happens, send an email” and add more steps and logic later without needing you to build a new feature every time.

You can build this functionality yourself, or use an embedded workflow platform like Embed Workflow to add it directly to your existing product.

2. Support More Complex Use Cases

There’s usually a point where keeping your product simple starts working against you.

A customer might start out perfectly happy with the default way a feature works, but eventually they want another filter, a different rule, or more control over how it behaves. None of these requests is necessarily a big deal on its own, but together they can make the difference between a product that still works for the customer and one that feels increasingly limiting.

That doesn’t mean you should dump a hundred settings into every screen. You can keep the basic experience simple while adding advanced settings for customers who need them.

This is also worth keeping in mind when deciding whether a feature request is actually “too advanced.” If larger customers keep asking for the same additional control, it might simply be the next level of the feature rather than an edge case you can ignore.

3. Build for Teams, Not Just Individual Users

A product can work extremely well for one person and become a mess when 30 people are using it.

Once teams get larger, customers start caring much more about who can see what, who can change what, and who is responsible for what. They might need administrators, different permission levels, separate teams, approval processes, or a history of who changed something.

These aren’t particularly important when the founder and two employees all share the same account. They’re much more important when several departments are using the product every day.

If your customers are growing, it’s worth testing the product from that perspective. What starts becoming difficult when an account has 10 users instead of two? What about 50? What about 500?

You don’t necessarily need to build for the 500-user case today, but you should have some idea of what would stop a customer from getting there.

4. Let Customers Integrate Their Existing Stack

Companies tend to accumulate software as they grow. Your product might originally need to connect to two or three other tools, but a larger customer could have dozens of applications and internal systems that all need to exchange data.

Obviously, you aren’t going to build every possible integration yourself.

Native integrations make sense for the tools that a large percentage of your customers use. For everything else, a good API and webhooks can give customers a way to make the connection themselves.

This becomes especially important when your product is sitting in the middle of an important business process. If employees constantly have to export data, copy information between systems, or come up with strange workarounds because your product doesn’t talk to anything else, replacing it starts to look a lot more attractive.

You don’t need to integrate with everything. You do need to make sure customers aren’t trapped by the integrations you’ve decided to build.

5. Make the Product Customizable

The more customers you have, the harder it becomes to assume they’re all going to work the same way.

Take something as simple as statuses. You might decide that every record can be “New,” “In Progress,” or “Complete.” That could work perfectly well for most of your customers, while being completely wrong for a company that has built a six-step internal process around the same thing.

You could add more statuses yourself, but then you’re deciding which process everyone should use. Letting customers create their own statuses solves the problem much more cleanly.

The same idea applies to custom fields, views, templates, terminology, branding, and plenty of other parts of a SaaS product.

You don’t need to make every part of the product customizable. But when there isn’t really one correct way to do something, giving customers some control can save you from a lot of increasingly specific feature requests later.

6. Handle Increasing Data and Usage

Sometimes customers outgrow a product because they simply have too much of everything.

The interface that worked nicely with 500 records might be painful with 500,000. The API limits that nobody noticed at first might become a serious problem once a customer is processing millions of events. A feature designed for five projects might technically support 5,000 projects without actually being usable at that scale.

This is partly an infrastructure problem, of course, but it isn’t only about keeping the servers running.

Customers with larger amounts of data need better search, filters, bulk actions, imports, exports, and ways to organize or archive things. If they have to perform the same action 2,000 times because you never built a bulk option, the fact that your database can technically store all 2,000 records isn’t particularly helpful.

Look at how your largest customers actually use the product and where volume starts creating extra work for them. Those problems are often quite different from the ones you’ll notice while testing with a small demo account.

7. Introduce an Enterprise Layer Without Rebuilding the Product

Eventually, some of your customers will start asking for things that have almost nothing to do with the reason they originally bought your product.

They’ll want SSO, audit logs, more granular permissions, security documentation, different data controls, or support for whatever compliance requirements their company now has.

You probably don’t need most of this when you’re selling to companies with ten employees. There’s also no reason to build a giant enterprise feature set just because you hope to sell to a Fortune 500 company someday.

But these requirements become much harder to ignore when your existing customers grow into them.

A customer could be completely happy with your product, while their new security policy says they can’t use software without SSO. At that point, SSO isn’t really an optional enterprise feature anymore. It’s the thing determining whether you keep the customer.

Pay attention to which of these requests actually start blocking renewals, expansions, and larger deals, and build around the requirements you’re seeing rather than an abstract idea of what “enterprise” software is supposed to include.

8. Give Developers an Escape Hatch

You can’t build every feature or integration that every customer will ever need, especially once you’re dealing with larger companies that have their own internal systems and unusual requirements.

Fortunately, those companies are also more likely to have developers who can solve some of these problems themselves.

A good API lets them build integrations, internal tools, and processes around your product without waiting for you to add everything to your roadmap. Depending on what your product does, you can go further with webhooks, SDKs, custom actions, or even custom code.

This doesn’t mean developers should have to rebuild basic functionality that should already be in the product. It’s more about giving them somewhere to go when they have a requirement that’s specific to their company and probably doesn’t make sense for you to build for everyone.

If the answer to every unusual request is “we don’t support that,” you’re eventually going to lose customers over unusual requests. Giving developers a way to extend the product makes that happen a lot less often.

9. Learn Why Your Largest Customers Leave

If a customer signs up, barely uses the product, and cancels after a month, that’s one kind of churn. If they use the product successfully for four years and then move to a larger competitor, that’s something else entirely.

The second customer is worth paying particularly close attention to because they can show you where your product stops growing with them.

Find out what changed. Maybe they needed more control over permissions, or they reached your usage limits, or they were doing too much work manually. Maybe they needed to connect your product to systems you didn’t support. Maybe their processes simply became too complicated for the features you had.

You don’t have to respond to every one of these cases by adding another feature. Some customers will eventually become too large or specialized for the market you’re trying to serve, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that.

But if good customers keep leaving for the same competitor at roughly the same point in their growth, it’s probably worth figuring out why.

Give Customers Room to Grow

The goal isn’t to make sure that no customer can ever outgrow your product. You’d probably end up building an enormous, complicated piece of software that tries to do everything for everyone.

Instead, give customers more room before they reach that point.

A workflow builder can let them create processes you never thought to build. APIs can let them connect software you don’t support. Customization can make the same product work for companies with very different processes, while better permissions and enterprise features can keep it usable as those companies get larger.

Your customers are going to change over time. Ideally, using your product shouldn’t depend on them staying the same size forever.