BigCommerce Trying to Escape the Alabama Mud Like My Cousin Vinny
Anyone who watched Marissa Tomei (Mona Lisa Vito) in My Cousin Vinny knows what happens to cars (particularly those without positraction) when stuck in the Alabama mud.
You step on the gas, one tire spins the other tire does nothing.
BigCommerce management has concluded the spinning tire is the product/technology organization. And the "doing nothing" tire is the Sales and Marketing teams.
A synopsis of GTM issues I heard on the call:
* Low awareness causing them not to see enough deals.
* Not enough sales quota or enough reps, or both.
* Not enough pipeline, partricularly in B2C and SMB.
* Reps they do have were chasing some of the wrong deals due to misaligned comp.
* Can't upsell or cross-sell easily without a rep's involvement.
* Sales teams were too generalized and not specialized by segment.
* Not deep enough eCommerce expertise.
Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
That's not to say the product teams got off unscathed:
* Feedonomics and Makeswift were not well integrated.
* Feedonomics didn't have a self-service option.
* B2B probably took too long to get integrated (seeing as they just got a menu item a few months back).
New CEO Travis Hess is looking to install positraction on the vehicle. We will know when that happens when BigCommerce reaches its "Rule of 40" goal. What's the Rule of 40?
A popular SaaS founder metric which is the sum of revenue (or ARR) growth % and profit margin. I would estimate they somewhere around 20 (or a bit higher generously) at the moment, with 7 of that 20 coming from revenue growth. This means BigCommerce needs to grow probably 3x as fast as they are now while maintaining profitability levels in order to hit their desired number.
In short, this is at least a three-year journey.
If there was one thing that did pass the rule of 40 on this call, use of the word "Discerning". What's that now?
As in, BigCommerce is for discerning customers looking for optionality, flexibility, and growth.
You still hear echoes of "open SaaS" in the composability messaging.
What I did not hear strongly is what their most important buyers are prioritizing, why that is, and how BigCommerce was differentiated along those buyer priorities.
In short, we need to discern what discerning really means.... and if discerning is a shrinking niche or a truly expanding market opportunity. After all, it's complicated to be discerning. It's complicated to sell discerning.
Shopify is selling the "everything to all people" message - just get on the bus we will figure it out with you as we go.
In peanut butter terms, BigCommerce is preaching the "Choosy moms choose Jif" message.
Speaking of peanut butter, with a market focus of B2C, B2B and SMB here's hoping the company's precious resources aren't spread as thin as peanut butter.
My suspicion though is still some of these other segments are a kind of cover for their true focus: B2B.
