10X growth, and where it is hiding

The first time I was given the task, “Figure out how to grow a product’s revenue 10X in two years,” was in 2018. The request came from the founder of Semrush¹, together with a brilliantly simple explanation, one that only he could have come up with. I loved it then, and it still inspires me today.

If I ask you to grow the product 2X, it will be an ambitious target. But you’ll pour more money into marketing and probably get there.

If I ask for 3X, it will be harder. But you’ll improve conversion, add a few features, and somehow get there too.

But if the target is 10X, none of your standard tools will be enough. You’ll have to come up with something you have never done before. And that is exactly the point.

We didn’t quite hit 10X, but we came very close. And we had an unreasonable amount of fun along the way.

So here’s the good news: growing a product 10X is entirely possible. And you do not necessarily need to hire an obscenely expensive team of growth hackers or dozens of AI engineers vibe-coding their way through your roadmap at 3 a.m.

Here is the bad news, of course: there are two non-negotiable prerequisites for this kind of growth.

1. A strong, tightly aligned team.
2. The courage to act. Boom!

Unfortunately, plenty of companies have neither.

But enough with the inspirational part. Let’s get practical. In this article, I’ll show you three places to look for 10X growth for your IT product.

1. Explore closely related market niches

Your product may solve a problem that exists far beyond the market it was originally built for. Sometimes 10X growth does not require creating a new product. It requires finding another industry with a very similar workflow and adapting what you already have with relatively minor changes to the interface, terminology, pricing, or integrations.

Take restaurant reservation software. On the surface, it is designed for booking tables. But underneath, it is really a system for managing limited spaces, available time slots, confirmations, cancellations, reminders, and customer data. With a few adjustments, the same core product could potentially be used to book coworking desks, meeting rooms, beauty appointments, sports courts, or private studios.

The useful question is not, “Where else can we sell exactly the same product?”

The framework I usually use for this exercise is a market map. There are simpler versions for a quick strategic exercise and more advanced versions for deeper market research.

2. Move downmarket

This one has a slightly tricky part: a downmarket strategy does not work by simply taking your enterprise product, putting it into a cheaper pricing tier, and hoping that thousands of small customers will arrive.

Most likely, your entire business is designed around enterprise sales: long demos, implementation projects, account managers, custom integrations, procurement, and enough meetings to support a small national economy. Lowering the price without changing these processes usually gives you enterprise-level costs and small-business revenue. An inspiring business model, but not a particularly sustainable one.

At the same time, the lower end of the market can be an absolute gold mine. There are usually far more customers, they need fewer advanced features, and your core product already exists. The task is to isolate the part of it that solves their main problem, remove everything they do not need, and build a much simpler way to buy, activate, and use it.

There are several management frameworks for doing this. My personal favourite is disruptive innovation, which I studied at Harvard. It explains how companies can enter through the lower end of the market with a simpler, more accessible product, gradually move upmarket, capture larger segments, and eventually beat competitors who were too busy protecting their enterprise customers to notice what was happening.

3. Find new audience segments inside the same companies

This approach can look like another variation of market analysis or a search for closely related niches, but I prefer to treat it separately.

Here, you are not taking the product into a new industry or selling it to completely different companies. You are selling the same product to the same customer organisations — but to different roles inside them. The underlying Job To Be Done may stay almost identical, while the use case, value proposition, and buying motivation change depending on who is looking at the product.

For example, when I used this approach at SplitMetrics, our A/B testing product was primarily sold to ASO managers. But we discovered that the same product could also be valuable to product managers and marketers working in those exact same companies. The product was already there. The companies were already there. We simply had not been speaking to all the people who could benefit from it — which, in retrospect, was a rather generous growth opportunity to leave untouched. So we changed that and started selling to those roles as well.

Bonus: emergency 10X growth when you need to impress investors

And here is the emergency option. If you need to demonstrate by tomorrow that your IT product is growing, simply add AI to everything you do. Rename a few existing features, put “AI-powered” across the homepage and most features inside the product. Your company valuation may grow 10X before the product itself has had time to grow at all.

There is, of course, one tiny problem: your users probably do not need most of this AI. But that is a completely different story.

Final thoughts

Most founders are used to thinking about product growth in two ways: adding more features or pouring more money into marketing. Unfortunately, both are expensive, slow, and considerably less predictable than they appear in a strategy presentation.

Before hiring another product squad or doubling your acquisition budget, try the approaches above. Explore closely related market niches, move downmarket carefully, and find new buyers inside the companies you already serve.

Sometimes 10X growth is not hidden in the next feature. It is already sitting inside your existing product — you just need to package it differently and sell it to the right people.

Try it, and enjoy the aggressive growth. Preferably before someone suggests adding AI to absolutely everything.

Footnotes

1. Fine print: the founder of Semrush is a damn genius. Semrush went public years ago, was acquired by Adobe, and has generally launched itself into outer space. ↩