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From VC Playbook to Founder Reality: Building SaaSGrid’s Go-to-Market Engine

Most VCs claim deep knowledge of startup building, but the view from the operator’s chair tells a different story. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ethan Ruby shared how his transition from VC to founding SaaSGrid revealed surprising blind spots in his understanding of early-stage company building.

Despite analyzing thousands of SaaS companies during his six years at Craft Ventures, Ethan discovered that the founder journey demanded far more than theoretical knowledge: “I felt at least that I understood startups and being a Founder pretty well, at least as well as you could without actually having done it. But I still got surprised by just the day to day how many things are on a founders plate that they have to take care of.”

The genesis of SaaSGrid emerged from solving an internal problem at Craft Ventures. What began as a Google Sheets template for SaaS due diligence evolved when portfolio companies started requesting access: “We ended up sharing that Google sheet with some of our founders after we invested, and they’re like, oh, this is helpful.” This organic validation led to the first MVP – a simple tool that converted spreadsheet uploads into analytics visualizations.

Rather than building a complex platform upfront, SaaSGrid’s early go-to-market strategy focused on solving one clear pain point for early-stage companies: making sense of their metrics. As Ethan explains, “When you look at the market, the reason why new, successful SaaS companies are created every day is that business users still have a lot of pain points that could be solved with software but aren’t.”

This focused approach yielded unexpected market insights. While initially targeting early-stage startups, SaaSGrid discovered strong demand from larger organizations: “We are also a very compelling platform for later stage startups, for relatively large growth stage. It turns out I’m drowning in data and don’t know what to do with it. Problem doesn’t magically go away as you scale.”

The expanding market created interesting go-to-market challenges, particularly around messaging to different personas. With seed-stage companies, Ethan interfaces with founders who understand their business intimately but may not be metrics experts. For enterprise customers, he works with operations and finance teams who “care a lot about process, they care about auditability. They understand these metrics really well, but they’re really focused on how they present them better.”

Four months after launching their paid product in October 2023, SaaSGrid has signed dozens of customers with an average contract value approaching $10,000. Their current growth strategy focuses on scaling the sales team while maintaining their high-touch approach. As Ethan notes, “Right now it’s really all about sales… We have a lot of companies coming to us and looking for help, basically saying like, hey, my company’s starting to take off. I have all this data spread across HubSpot, stripe, salesforce, QuickBooks, whatever platform they use.”

Looking ahead, SaaSGrid aims to expand beyond analytics into workflow automation: “Right now, SAS grid is the analytics layer for SaaS companies. I want Saskrit to be the all in one operating hub for SaaS companies.” This vision includes pushing data between systems and ensuring they stay synchronized, transforming SaaSGrid from an analytics platform into a comprehensive operating system for modern SaaS companies.

For founders building vertical SaaS platforms, Ethan emphasizes the importance of finding a clear wedge: “If you find a really amazing pain point, if you find a business user that’s being absolutely driven crazy by a problem and you could solve it elegantly and get them to pay even a little bit for it, I think you have the basis of being successful. Everything else around how much they pay and how big the market is and all these other things, everything else is secondary.”