Startups become what they hunt

Executive summary

Back in 2014, Christoph Janz from Point Nine Capital wrote what I’d consider to be a seminal piece, Five Ways To Build a $100 Million SaaS Business. His premise was simple, maybe even obvious in retrospect: your deal size is your destiny.

Christoph has refined his categories over the years, but four routes to $100 million remain evergreen:

• Hunting mice: Attract 1 million customers paying $100/year. To succeed here, your product needs to be inherently viral.
• Hunting rabbits: Attract 100,000 customers paying $1,000/year. Cost per signup needs to stay under $70, which means highly efficient inbound marketing and obsessive funnel optimization.
• Hunting deer: Attract 10,000 customers paying $10,000/yr. This unlocks real spend on inside sales, automated outbound campaigns, and channel partner commissions.
• Hunting elephants: Attract 1,000 customers paying $100,000/year. Many large public SaaS companies live here – but it demands substantial time and funding just to reach initial product-market fit (PMF) and build a repeatable enterprise sales cycle.

The framework is timeless (and worth reading in full). So how do these different paths actually hold up in the data?

To find out, I turned to ChartMogul, where I’m an Analyst-in-Residence. We looked at 1,043 SaaS and AI companies that reached at least $10k MRR and classified each by which animal they hunted based on their initial deal size.

The big insight: startups become what they hunt. Pursuing the wrong animal at the beginning exacts a hidden cost that sticks with startups for years to come.

Methodology notes:

• Based on data from 1,043 ChartMogul customers who reached $10k MRR at least 3 years ago (on or before May 1, 2023) and are still operating today. These companies may not be representative of all SaaS and AI companies.
• Bucketed by monthly average revenue per account (ARPA): Mouse hunters <$30/mo., Rabbit hunters $30-$299/mo., Deer hunters $300-$2,999/mo., Elephant hunters $3,000+/mo.
• Current data as of May 1, 2026. The median company in the dataset has grown ~20x and is now at $224k MRR. Gross revenue retention (GRR) and net revenue retention (NRR) were based on the applicable month and then annualized.

Takeaway 1: The most popular path to $10k MRR is 100 customers paying $100 per month.

53% of companies hunted rabbits on the way to $10k MRR – roughly 100 customers at $100/month.

This is what I expected. The $100 price point sits in a sweet spot: low enough for cash-strapped early adopters and SMBs, high enough that customers take the product seriously and give you real feedback. It also leaves just enough margin to fund early go-to-market (GTM) experiments — founder-led warm outbound, founder brand-building, Product Hunt, a few paid ad tests.

34% started as mouse hunters – closer to 1,000 customers at $10/month. That number feels high to me, and probably reflects ChartMogul's customer base more than the overall market. That said, I see this pattern a lot: early-stage companies lean into product-led growth (PLG) and low prices, then layer in sales once they've sharpened their ideal customer profile (ICP) on real usage data. The upside is a base of self-serve users who can be upsold to later.

Only 12% started as deer hunters — about 10 customers at $1,000/month. And just 1% hunted elephants from day one. Probably not shocking: closing an enterprise deal with an unproven product requires sales DNA that most early-stage founders haven't developed yet (and frankly don't want to develop when they're still figuring out the product).

Takeaway 2: You are what you hunt.

These decisions have consequences.

Mouse and rabbit hunters face brutal churn in the early days. The median annualized gross revenue retention (GRR) at $10k MRR is just 24.6% for mouse hunters and 31.6% for rabbit hunters. For deer hunters, it's 70.5%. For elephant hunters? 100%.

The early adopter crowd is quick to buy, but also quick to leave.

A positive spin for rabbit hunters: the customers who stick around more than double their spend. Annualized net revenue retention (NRR) at $10k MRR hits 68.1% for rabbit hunters, meaning meaningful expansion among survivors. Mouse hunters only see 40.4% NRR — a leaky bucket that's hard to refill no matter how fast you're adding new customers at the top.

What I didn’t expect: these early patterns don't fade with scale. Even 3+ years after reaching $10k MRR — with the median company having grown ~20x — the imprint of the original animal persists. Mouse hunters still show an NRR of 56.2%. Rabbit hunters: 76.7%. Deer hunters: 87.4%. Elephant hunters: 93.4%.

The animal you're hunting at $10k MRR is still shaping your retention profile years later.

Takeaway 3: 70% keep the same target customer 3+ years after their first $10k MRR.

When I mapped where companies started versus where they ended up, animal migrations turned out to be rare. 70% kept the same target customer even after at least three years had passed.

When companies did shift, they almost always moved upmarket — and by one animal at a time. The most common migration: rabbit to deer hunting, made by 13% of the dataset. Second most common: mouse to rabbit, at 9%.

Deer hunting is increasingly the destination. Nearly one-in-four companies in the dataset are currently deer hunters. That’s a 2x increase from where they started.

HubSpot is a great example. Their early pricing was a flat fee of $250 per month. Today they’re averaging almost exactly $1,000 per customer per month as a public company with >$3B in ARR – squarely in the deer hunting bucket. I actually expected HubSpot would’ve grown deal sizes by even more, though. After all, HubSpot has operated for 20 years, sells 7 major product hubs, and now has an enterprise motion. That goes to show just how hard it is to change from where you start.

Takeaway 4: Deer hunters are growing 3-5x faster than everyone else.

There’s a reason why deer hunting is a popular move. It’s better than the alternatives.

Companies that started as deer hunters and stayed there are growing revenue at an average of 22% year-over-year. That's dramatically faster than companies that stuck to mouse hunting (2%), rabbit hunting (4%), or elephant hunting (5%).

What makes this striking: growth rates at $10k MRR were nearly identical across all four groups. The divergence happened after, and the gap kept widening.

Deer seem to be the perfect prey. They have budget to spend and are less inclined to build vs. buy (unlike mice or rabbits). And there’s far less early investment required in compliance, complex contracts, and procurement (unlike elephants).

Migrating between animals doesn't reliably fix things. The worst-performing group in the dataset: companies that switched from rabbit to mouse hunting, now averaging -11% growth. (This is correlation, not causation.)

The only successful migration appears to be moving upmarket from rabbit to deer. Companies that made this shift saw roughly 9% average growth, significantly outpacing those that either stayed focused on rabbits or moved downmarket.

Deer hunting is (probably) the best ticket to $100M ARR.

Companies that go after deer from the start build a durable revenue base instead of a leaky bucket. Their deal sizes support real GTM investment. Their sales cycles are more repeatable than elephant hunts and more scalable than the high-volume, high-churn world of mouse and rabbit hunting.

The initial decision about which customer to target (and how much to charge them) can feel almost arbitrary when you're just trying to hit your first $10k MRR. It's not. The data shows that startups become what they hunt, and most never change.

Which animal are you hunting?