The Slow Decay of Growth (and how to avoid it)

Executive summary

Growth rates in software have a nasty tendency to decay – and then to keep decaying.

The startups that manage to scale from $1 million to $100 million+ ARR are the ones who keep this decay in check. They find ways to compound year after year by improving average revenue per account, expansion revenue, gross revenue retention, and net revenue retention.

This is called growth endurance, which measures the current year’s growth rate divided by last year’s growth rate.

Growth endurance is highly predictive of valuation multiples since it makes investors more confident about future outcomes. Great public companies consistently achieve 80%+ revenue growth endurance for a long time; very few have seen 100%+ growth endurance (although Palantir is a notable exception).

I explored the reality of revenue growth endurance with data from ChartMogul, the SaaS metrics and growth platform where I’m an Analyst-in-Residence. The dataset covered more than 700 private software companies that had at least $10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR), had data going back to 2023 or earlier, and that grew at least 20% year-on-year in 2024.

The median growth endurance across these companies was 43%. Put differently, a software company that grew revenue 65% in 2024 (the median in the dataset) only grew 28% in 2025. Playing that forward, growth would stall to 12% in 2026 and flat-line to just 5% in 2027. If this company had $10M ARR in 2024, they’d end up at $15M ARR by the end of 2027. A top quartile growth endurance company, on the other hand, would reach $29M ARR.

A few other fascinating stats on growth endurance:

• Quartile growth endurance was 80% or higher – this is best-in-class for private software companies.
• Fewer than one-in-five startups (18%) maintained or improved their growth rate (equates to a growth endurance of 100% or higher).
• A startup growing by 25-49% in 2024 had a one-in-twenty five chance of accelerating to 100%+ growth in 2025.

The 2025 numbers are a wake-up call, and these numbers were notably worse than in 2024. But some startups seem to be aging in reverse.

ChartMogul CRO Sara Archer and I reached out to the exceptional startups that inflected their metrics, maintaining fast growth as they scaled. For each company, we found out exactly how they did it. Today’s piece unpacks our favorite examples.

Reset GTM velocity and increase the pace

Complacency creeps into just about every company. Teams get comfortable operating in a certain rhythm: annual planning, quarterly roadmaps, predictable sales cycles.

Perhaps the most immediate change you could make to inflect growth would be to accelerate velocity across every go-to-market function. Set the bar higher, compress timelines, force faster decisions, and treat speed as a competitive weapon (Amp It Up by Frank Slootman is a great resource.)

In Sara’s role as CRO, this looks like building a culture of “let’s do it now” instead of “let’s plan it”. ChartMogul removed planning-heavy collaboration meetings from the calendar. They set a one-hour SLA for lead follow-up. They also built an internal tool with Claude to review call transcripts twice a day and flag missed opportunities so sales can act in (near) real-time instead of waiting for a weekly forecast review.

This could mean adapting from quarterly to a weekly sprint cadence to better keep pace with how fast AI is moving, as creator data platform influencers.club did.

Along with the shift to weekly sprints, they invested in optimizing for AI search, which head of growth Alessandro Colombo says “is becoming a real acquisition channel.” They’ve also invested in a product-led growth motion to tap into demand from AI search. This includes free credits and unlimited team members, driving bottom-up adoption.

Benji Pays, an accounts receivable automation provider, increased velocity by systematically tightening each step in the buying process. There were two big changes that drove a subscriber inflection starting last December according to CEO and founder Adam Crandall:

1. Changed onboarding to remove reliance on a third party and give the company more control over speed-to-close
2. Restructured the sales motion to split functions into two roles, which added focus and tightened follow-ups.

Aesthetix CRM, vertical software for plastic surgeons and medical spas, sped up customer onboarding and adopted internal AI tools to manage larger customers without adding headcount. This helped Aesthetix close more upmarket, multi-location deals and increase average revenue per account (shown below).

Three things compounded at once: a revamped onboarding process that cut time-to-value, internal AI tooling that let our small team support 500+ locations without adding headcount, and a deliberate shift upmarket toward multi-location enterprise deals with significantly higher ACV.

Shifted from one-off marketing tactics to recurring campaigns

2025 was a year of near-endless channel experimentation. The average software company had 5 core GTM channels and another 5.5 GTM channel experiments. It feels like the volume of work keeps piling up just to achieve the same (or worse) results.

The startups who are winning say they’re getting more mileage out of their best channels by shifting from one-off tactics to recurring campaigns.

Every, an AI-focused media and software company, told us that growth accelerated when they shifted from treating launches as one-and-done announcements to bigger campaigns that keep generating momentum for months. They do this by “bundling” product announcements into a broader theme, as they recently did with their agent-native campaign. (You can see Every’s traction inflecting beginning in February.)

Instead of treating launches as one-and-done announcements, we bundle related releases and content around a broader theme. That gives us multiple touchpoints over several weeks, creates more ways for people to engage, and keeps the conversation alive beyond day one. Our Agent Native campaign is a good example: we defined the concept, hosted live streams, published guides, and even built public GitHub repos people could use to assess how agent native their own product is.

AskElephant, an AI workflow automation provider, accelerated through investing in a co-sell motion with accounting and RevOps partners. These firms introduce AskElephant to their clients, which generates repeatable pipeline.

The biggest growth lever this past quarter has been co-sell through accounting and RevOps partners. We built a lightweight referral program where partners actively introduce us to their clients, and those deals close significantly faster and retain better than anything from cold outbound.

The highest bang-for-your-buck places to double down right now are:

• <$1M ARR: LinkedIn, warm outbound, and founder brand
• $1-10M ARR: Warm outbound, LinkedIn, and intent-based outbound
• >$10M ARR: Large conferences, SEO, and paid ads

Took a big pricing and packaging swing

The vast majority of pricing and packaging changes I see are calculated, incremental bets. Most frequently these are modest price increases of 10-20%.

It’s not that small price increases don’t work. They still do (although we’ll see for how much longer). It’s that price increases are a one-time revenue boost. They increase growth rates immediately, possibly at the expense of longer-term growth.

More daring pricing changes, on the other hand, have a shot at reshaping growth rates over the course of multiple years. These types of changes might include a new pay-as-you-go offering, a new free tier, or revamped free trial mechanics.

Liveblocks, the maker of realtime infrastructure for multiplayer apps and agents, found traction with a revamped pay-as-you-go pricing offering according to head of GTM Stacy Schmitz. They also relaunched the pricing page to be more transparent. This led to a big spike in self-serve customers (as shown below).

Predis, the AI ad generator, took off when they moved from a free trial to a credit card-required trial. This change happened on September 10, 2025, and caused MRR growth to immediately spike. While growth has stabilized since then, it’s still at a higher level than before the change and overall MRR has tripled year-over-year. (Fyxer had a similar experience with free-to-paid conversion increasing from 5% to 35% after adding a credit card gate.)

We are a pure-play PLG product and moved from a free trial to credit card-based trial. The trial is still free; however, it requires a credit card to get it. Now we are able to offer more value to trial users (since we know they are serious) and hence are seeing a better conversion rate and growth rate.

Growth decay doesn’t have to be the default

Growth decay isn’t inevitable, although it can certainly feel that way.

Set ambitious goals, but realize that maintaining even 80% of last year’s growth rate requires a herculean effort. That already puts you in the top quartile.

The best companies reset the pace, shifting from quarterly to weekly planning sprints and cutting time out of their sales cycles. They invest in GTM channels that can be repeated or find ways to extend the shelf-life of their existing campaigns. And they’re willing to overhaul pricing through new plans, new business models, or new trial mechanics.