Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

What is the main thing that made your business take off and start to see success that you're kicking yourself you didn't start doing it much earlier?

Thanks HN!

Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for –

Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will start eating your lunch unless you take that leap.

It doesn't matter how smart your engineers are and how fully featured and bug free your product is. Unless you have a stellar sales team with the right leads who are pushing it on people with all their might, it is going nowhere.

1. When we started to specialize in a vertical and created the narrative and the product for that vertical. This is esp. true in domains with many legacy players.

2. For some reason or the other, we have always had delays in announcing our fundraising rounds: both Seed and Series A announcements were delayed by 3-6 months. The moment we announced, we got a step magnitude more inbound customers. Lesson here is to not be a perfectionist and be willing to share the company/product publicly earlier, so you can incorporate customer feedback early.

PS: If it helps provide context for (1) above, our domain is fraud prevention; and we focused on payment fraud for Fintechs/Crypto instead of going after generalized fraud prevention across all categories like ecommerce.

There's no causal relationship between the extra 3-6 months per round and the revenue increase?