The RevUp Growth Platform
RevUp's high-impact model combines cash investment with hands-on support to help companies build a stronger, more scalable marketing and sales engine.
Building this engine quickly and efficiently is critical, especially as companies move from early traction to sustainable growth—a time when missed opportunities and market-facing errors can make the difference between success and failure.
The Growth Platform is an essential function of the RevUp Organization, led by senior team members. Our work has dual focus: align growth strategy with best-in-class technique WHILE building the infrastructure a company needs to support growth at scale.
Why? RevUp invests into companies as they strive to move from initial market traction to $10-20M in revenue. This curve is the great equalizer in business building. An abysmally small number of companies ever achieve $10M+ in revenue.
At the bottom of this curve companies must tackle the day-to-day demands of running a business while simultaneously deciding what add-on next. Holding steady simply isn’t enough to bend the curve. Injecting cash and capacity at this inflection point hits this problem head-on.
With the RevUp Growth Platform, companies don’t guess about what to do next or make unnecessary mistakes fumbling with new tools. They don’t squander resources with agencies or contractors who fail to move the needle.
Growth Platform Basics
The RevUp Growth Platform is delivered in tandem with each cash investment. The most significant phase of effort is delivered during a 12-month period beginning shortly after a company enters our portfolio.
In this first phase of effort, RevUp's full time, battle-tested team work intensively with each investee across four major pillars of growth:
1. Build a Multi-Cylinder Market Facing Engine
Getting to market is hard enough, but to grow, companies must layer in new customer segments, new marketing and sales approaches, and/or new ways to deliver value. Companies may get to market on a single cylinder, but getting up the growth curve requires a multi-cylinder growth engine that includes a dynamic mix of market-facing efforts. Building this engine by happenstance is a surefire way to waste money and time. To add cylinders as quickly and smartly as possible, we focus on:
Data-Driven Experimentation
Finding the Next/New Drivers of Growth
Roadmaps & Templates
2. Make it Last, Make it Scale
Oftentimes the people and organizational structures that get you to market aren't the right configuration to get a company to $10M+ in revenue and beyond. We designed the RevUp platform to help our companies get better at:
Moving from People to Process
Understanding Who to Hire and When
Choosing and Getting Quality Results from Service Providers
3. Map Your Company Adventure
We created RevUp after years of equity investing to break free from the constraints of the equity-only model. This flexibility means that we can support founders more broadly as they build the company they want to build. We optomize our platform to help founders with the critical moments and opportunities that go beyond day-to-day operations:
Building a Capital Strategy for Success
Strategic Partnerships that Work
Navigating the End Game: Mergers & Acquisitions
4. Strengthen the Core
Much of our investment approach is focused on driving market-facing growth. Those efforts are meaningless if the core of the business doesn't stay strong and evolve on pace with the bottom line. As experienced fund managers with 130+ investments under our belt, we've seen it all. It's our pleasure to support our companies with:
C-Suite Support and Coaching
Peer and Expert Advisories
Building Organizational Infrastucture for Long-Term Resiliency
What does this look like in real life, for real companies? Here are a few examples from our portfolio to bring to life each of the pillars outlined above:
1. Build a Multi-Cylinder Growth Engine
Who: D2C E-comm company with room to run in the market they serve
This direct-to-consumer beauty brand has a passionate following and a differentiated product line. But when entering the RevUp portfolio, it was hyper-reliant on facebook/instagram for the lion’s share of revenue. To surge toward their next growth goal of $5M, they needed to find other channels for growth, while also sharpening their brand voice to stay relevant in a highly competitive market.
To support these goals, the RevUp team began by refreshing buyer personas and value props to produce more dynamic and effective customer journey maps that the growing team could deploy at greater scale. Beyond bolstering core sales, this effort was time and cost-saving input for an agengy-led brand refresh. From that foundation, we worked with the company to strengthen their capacity to generate effective creative and link that to a more productive email strategy. Opportunities to significantly increase subscribers were created through better content and landing pages, while complementary email flows were added to engage and convert customers.
To further expand the company’s market facing effort, the team tested the addition of new social channels for unique personas and use cases, discovering a combination that could scale. All of the experiments and learnings were packaged to train current and future marketing team members and contractors and were used to scope the requirements and job description for a new creative director.
Result: The company was able to triple year-over-year revenue while launching new products and rising above the noise in a crowded landscape.
2. Make it Last, Make it Scale
Who: B2B SaaS with founders who needed to build operational skills beyond their rock-solid domain expertise
This B2B SaaS company found early traction for their lead product as an add-on to a large HR workflow platform. While this was an effective way to parlay their position as domain-experts into a cost-effective go-to-market strategy, it was insufficent to unlock the company’s full growth potential. To expand the boundaries of the company’s growth plan, the RevUp Growth team helped company leadership to reconfigure their market positioning and pricing strategy. This effort produced a doubling of contract values and 3-4X increase in customer LTV.
We also worked with the company to accelerate its transition away from founder-led sales, establishing more scalable processes for marketing, sales, and customer success. This work was critical to re-focusing founder time from lower value tasks to high return activities. This is a critical and often misnavigated step on a company’s journey to scale. By bringing in specialized team members and contracting with outside lead gen agencies, the founders were able to focus on product, strategic partnerships, and customer success.
Result: The company rapidly doubled ARR. This opened the door to a productive seed round and significant market expansion through multiple high value integrations and strategic partnerships.
3. Map your Adventure
Who: B2B SaaS platform led by first time founders who knew how to delight customers but had limited experience navigating major business milestones
Sometimes BIG opportunities present themselves quickly, and a company must respond without delay. For this B2B SaaS company, a channel partnership turned into an acquisition discussion faster than imagined. As first time founders who had never navigated an acquisition event (a reality that the acquirer was likely aware of), learning how to evaluate and respond to inbound offers was of paramount importance.
Our work with the company on market facing activities provided RevUp management with deep insight into business performance and opportunities. As experienced operators with two decades of M&A experience, we helped the founders determine whether this was the right time to sell and how to align deal structure with both business and personal goals.
We counseled the founders in analyzing the term sheet, focusing negotiations on subtle but important factors that maximized exit value. The work directly correlated to a 75% increase in purchase price.
Result: This work increased the company’s enterprise display value to potential acquirers while our M&A experience led to excellent financial outcomes and “soft landings” both for founders and key members of their team. Bonus brag: It was a full-circle moment when the founders of this company—once unsure how to pay all the bills—became LPs in RevUp’s 2022 Fund.
4. Strengthen the Core
Who: Enterprise SaaS moving from bespoke offering to a more scalable org structure
This enterprise SaaS company bootstrapped their business out of a consulting group. Despite deep domain expertise, the team’s next phase of growth hinged on leadership’s ability to move from people to process and establish operating patterns that could support growth at scale.
Working closely with the founders, we helped them transition the CEO role internally and establish a staffing matrix that redefined roles and responsibilities against a more cohesive plan for growth. Using portfolio best practices and peer examples, we widened the view of the founders on what was possible, and drove their discovery of the SaaS knowledge they needed for the next phase of growth. Through CEO coaching, we improved the positioning of the business and readied the company for an equity fundraise.
Result: Building on these stronger fundamentals, the company doubled in revenue while finding their way to the magical “negative churn” that makes a SaaS company bulletproof.
More About RevUp Capital
RevUp Capital invests in B2B and B2C companies that are revenue-driven and ready to double down on growth. We deploy cash and capacity to help companies grow from $1-3M to $10-20M, quickly and efficiently, using a revenue-based model. Since 2016, we have used our battle-tested cash and capacity model to move companies up the growth curve, and together, break free from the constraints of equity-only funding.
Companies enter our portfolio with $500K-$3M in revenue, a strong growth rate, and a team that’s ready to scale.
Our typical investment range is $300K-$500K. We invest into a company's market-facing activity using a cash and capacity model. We pair our cash investment with 12-months of dedicated support from the RevUp Growth Platform: a powerful resource to build a data-driven growth engine, delivered by people who get the work done. Rather than take equity, companies return investment through a small percentage of revenue over time.