Smart Alto, founded in 2017, currently has 14 employees.
Here's a Q&A with Hassan Riggs, CEO of the company.
What is the most important thing your company accomplished in 2022?
We experiment with customer cohorts regularly. We found a customer cohort growing 40% MoM since September.
What is a short-term and long-term goal for the company in 2023?
Today we have a sales-led growth model with 75% margins and an eight-month payback. But to take full advantage of the opportunities before us, we must evolve to a product-led sales growth model.
Our short-term goal is to rethink our growth model around activation, engagement and self-serve monetization. We’re running experiments to understand the leading indicators correlated with long-term customer retention in a few new market segments where we’re gaining traction.
Our long-term goal is to double down on the customer cohorts growing 40% MoM since September.
That requires a deeper understanding of how customers are using our product. So we need to establish a product-led sales tech stack with product instrumentation and warehousing, product analytics, product-led engagement and product-led revenue. We’re actively hiring a UX/UI researcher to join our engineering and data science team to tackle this opportunity.
What can Alabama do to better support startups?
Help startups think through when to scale and how to scale. Often startups prioritize growth over customer retention. They are encouraged to “Triple. Triple. Double. Double.” rather than build a sustainable business with healthy growth.
They scale haphazardly rather than scientifically. For example, they use “product-market fit” to make critical decisions about when to scale but lack a scientific, data-driven definition of the term. Instead, they rely on varied, non-rigorous definitions and subjective interpretations (e.g., Marc Andreessen’s description).
Alabama mentors and startups must embrace a more rigorous, mathematical and scientific approach to scaling.
