How do I know which growth stage my SaaS is in?
What draws the line between the 8 stages?
Hard gates: 20 real user interviews plus 5 pieces of valid feedback exit "validation"; first payment collected exits "pricing"; steady organic clicks exit "SEO". Do not advance before the gate is met.
What does stage mismatch cost?
Two classics: writing SEO posts with 3 users (nobody searches your category yet), or launching on Product Hunt with 20 users (traffic zeroes out in a day). Mismatch burns a non-renewable time window.
How to automate the judgment?
Turn the hard gates into rules fed into a diagnosis: users contacted, interviews, valid feedback, trials, revenue. The output is your current stage and bottleneck — same input, same verdict, every time.
Run the free growth diagnosis to get your current stage and biggest bottleneck: input product reality, get a stage verdict, a 30-day list, and an explicit do-not-do list.
Free growth diagnosis