Intro

You’ve already spent €30M, securing the time, team, and traction needed to build momentum. Now, the remaining €10M might feel like your final stretch, but don’t look at it as your last €10M ever. However, it might be your last chance to reassure your VCs that you deserve the next round.
While funds may be running low, this is far from the end of the road. It’s an opportunity to double down on what truly matters and show investors that your company is on the path to sustainable growth.
This article will guide you through the crucial steps to guarantee that every decision you make counts, helping you stay focused on the strategies that will drive growth, ROI, and ultimately secure your future rounds. The game isn’t over; it’s just getting started.

First, get brutally honest about where you are

Before you deploy a single euro of your remaining €10 million, take a hard look in the mirror. This isn’t about punishing yourself; it’s about finding clarity before accelerating. Ask yourself:

Do you truly have a product–market fit?
Before you spend a single cent, you need a rock-solid foundation: product–market fit. At its core, product–market fit means that you’ve built something real people want, and that they’re not just trying your product – they’re using it, recommending it, and paying for it. It’s the moment when demand overtakes effort. Rather than forcing users to choose you, they seek you out. Without this, every euro you pour into sales and marketing feels like throwing money into a black hole.

Clay’s journey illustrates this perfectly. They spent years iterating on a broad personal CRM – throwing spaghetti at every wall, pursuing vague use cases, and seeing traction fizzle. The breakthrough came when they honed in on outbound sales teams, a narrow segment with a concrete, recurring workflow. By committing to that specific “job to be done,” setting up a ruthless two-week sprint cadence, and learning to say “no” more often, they transformed trial users into loyal customers. Retentsame with ignited ion climbed, usage deepened, and real revenue growth finally triggered. This isn’t luck – it’s the payoff of focus, disciplined user interviews, and aligned product execution.

Is your go-to-market truly repeatable?
Can you invest €1 in marketing or sales and predict with confidence what you’ll earn back? If your acquisition channels flicker unpredictably, your runway will vanish far faster than you think.

Is your burn rate sustainable or suicidal?
Growth at all costs is a myth. If your monthly expenditure is outpacing your ability to plug revenue leaks, you’re on a path to a hard landing.

Are you managing by vanity metrics or real unit economics?
Revenue growth is sexy, but profitability per customer is sacred. Understand your true customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV) before you scale any further.
If you can’t answer these questions with unwavering confidence, hit the brakes. Pause hiring, freeze discretionary spend, and refocus your team on the fundamentals. This moment of brutal honesty isn’t a setback, it’s the springboard for your next phase of sustainable growth.

Here’s how I’d think about spending the last €10M

1. Double down on what’s working – not what’s loud

Hans Kunisch, SVP of Growth Marketing at Heights, calls this the “scale it or kill it” approach. If something is delivering ROI – whether it’s a paid channel, a segment, or a product feature – scale it up. If it’s not, cut it quickly and move on.

Even the largest companies, with massive global budgets, follow this principle. Take Google+ as an example. Despite the boom of social networks and the enormous success of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Google recognized that Google+ wasn’t gaining meaningful traction. Instead of pouring more resources into a product that wasn’t resonating, they made the call to shut it down. It was a clear acknowledgement that even tech giants can’t force product–market fit, especially in a crowded, fast-moving space.

2. Product: Solve for scale, not polish

Before you start building out new shiny widgets, make sure your product can handle the heat of real growth. At scale, reliability triumphs polish every time. Your priority should be shoring up the core flows that, when they break, will send users fleeing i.e., onboarding, performance, and activation. Only invest in new features if they directly unlock more revenue or deeper retention.

This should be your key focus areas:

• Onboarding –can a new user get value in under five minutes, even if your UI isn’t pixel-perfect?
• Performance –will your app hold up when 10× more people log in simultaneously?
• Activation –is there a moment of delight or “aha” that hooks users, and can you measure and improve it?
• No-feature zone –every “nice-to-have” feature you add distracts from the essentials. If it doesn’t move the needle on LTV or churn, shelve it.

How much money should you allocate to this stage? Around ~€2 million

• 40 % to engineering sprints dedicated exclusively to stability, monitoring, and load testing
• 30 % to optimizing onboarding flows, A/B testing key activation points
• 20 % to building and instrumenting real-time performance dashboards
• 10 % reserved for “emergency patches” in case any critical flow breaks in production

Example: Gong’s wake-up call

When Eilon Reshef was beta-testing Gong – a platform designed to record and analyze sales calls, he expected a few doubts. What he didn’t expect was a flood of complaints about missed recordings. His design partners, after months of usage, demanded, “How come you didn’t record this call?” even though the product was only meant to capture a sample of conversations.

Their frustration revealed a deeper truth: users were relying on Gong as their “eyes, ears, and notepad” for every call, not just a subset. That tidal wave of feedback (far from a failure) was the clearest signal that Gong was becoming mission-critical, not just a “nice-to-have.” By doubling down on complete call coverage and performance under load, the team transformed an imperfect prototype into an indispensable tool and all 12 design partners converted to paying customers.

Hey, I know what you’re thinking, back then, Gong was at the beginning of its journey, while I am at a scaling stage, and you’re right. But it still shows how vital it is to listen to customer feedback to be sure that your product truly aligns with their needs. Only when you’ve nailed the basics can you keep scaling and confidently invest in new features.

Now it’s your turn: audit your product through the lens of scale, not sparkle. Patch what breaks, measure obsessively, and say “no” to anything that doesn’t move your core metrics. Success lives in the details – make them bulletproof.

3. Go-to-Market: Build a sales engine, not a hype machine

As a scale up, it’s time to “professionalize” sales & marketing. You need to have a clear view of what’s working and create a structured process for it. For example:

• If sales is working → build a highly-qualified, accountable team
• If PLG is working → invest in conversion and upsell infrastructure.

Thinking of hiring a VP of Sales or Marketing? Do it only if your business is ready to grow in a structured, repeatable way. You should be able to say “yes” to the following points before doing so:

• You’ve found product–market fit
• You have some traction and proven channels
• You’re ready to build repeatable processes
• You want someone to lead and grow a team, not figure everything out from scratch.

Hiring too early can lead to misalignment and wasted time. A VP should be accelerating a machine; not building one from zero.

Estimated budget: ~€3–4M

Example: Tridium’s go-to-market engine

Tridium, a subsidiary of Honeywell, had a world-class technical product (the Niagara Framework) and clear product–market fit in the IoT and smart building automation space. Yet, they lacked a structured go-to-market engine to match their global SaaS and IaaS ambitions. Rather than rushing into hiring more sales reps or launching fragmented campaigns, they made a strategic move: bringing in a VP of Software Sales precisely when they were ready to scale.

What worked for Tridium, and why? Definitely, the timing. They didn’t expect a VP to solve foundational questions or build the motion from scratch. They had the product traction and internal alignment, but needed the right leader to structure and accelerate what was already working.

Under the VP’s leadership, Tridium’s SaaS and IaaS revenue surpassed €100 million globally. More importantly, the company built a scalable, repeatable sales model with trained enterprise teams, a global partner program, and regional go-to-market strategies. It’s a textbook example of hiring a VP not to “figure things out,” but to accelerate momentum with intention and structure.

4. People: Keep only A-players. No passengers.

Your team is your engine and every person must be driving you toward your goals, not coasting along. More bodies don’t equal more momentum; in fact, passengers weigh you down.

Key focus areas:

• Vet ruthlessly.Move beyond résumés: simulate real “day-in-the-life” scenarios, probe for grit under ambiguity, and lean on peer feedback from trusted founders.
• Lean on fractional experts.In-house hires aren’t your only path to top talent. Tap specialists or agencies like Clurgo for high-impact projects without the full-time overhead.
• Right-size to your runway.If your burn is outstripping results, re-evaluate every role. Proactively offboard underperformers – compassionately but decisively.
• Hire senior leaders judiciouslyOnly onboard VPs or heads of functions when you truly can’t scale without their domain expertise and strategic vision.

How much money should you allocate to this stage? I suggest around €2 million

• 30 % to high-impact hires (core product, GTM, customer success)
• 25 % to fractional or contract specialists for niche needs
• 25 % to leadership roles critical for scaling (e.g., head of engineering, VP of sales)
• 20 % reserved for recruiting, onboarding, and retention initiatives

Yes, it can feel counterintuitive to say “no” to hiring when you’ve got runway but cutting the dead weight and investing in true A-players is what turns your €10 million into a growth machine. Only a team of committed, high-caliber individuals can move at the speed and quality your scale-up needs.

5. Ops/Finance: Create real visibility

At this stage, visibility isn’t optional; it’s essential. You need reliable, up-to-date dashboards that track core metrics like CAC, LTV, burn rate, runway, and funnel velocity. Without them, you’re flying blind.

That means investing in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), a financial controller or CFO, and building the kind of operational discipline that allows you to make decisions based on data, not gut feel.

Another key area to tighten up? SaaS spend. In a piece I’ve recently read, Marina Stojanovski, Head of Product at Gradyent, flags a costly and often overlooked issue, i.e., tool and license sprawl. “Without a structured process for managing SaaS purchases, which is often the case in smaller and fast-growing companies, teams sign up for tools quickly but rarely review them,” she writes.

And she’s speaking from practice. Since securing EUR 28 million to develop their digital twin platform, Gradyent has had to get serious about financial and operational efficiency. Stojanovski’s experience shows how easily scale ups can accumulate a bloated tech stack: overlapping tools, inactive licenses, and subscriptions no one remembers owning.

Start by running an audit to weed out redundant tools and unused accounts, and do so every quarter. I also recommend putting together centralized procurement policies to avoid chaotic signups.

If possible, opt for usage-based licensing over flat per-seat models, and make it a habit to downgrade or cancel tools that are no longer delivering value.

Estimated budget: ~€500K–€1M

6. Plan for optionality: Extend runway to 18+ months

You may not get another round soon so engineer optionality now. Give yourself at least a year and a half of breathing room so you never have to fundraise from desperation.

• Get efficient today. Audit every line item, ops, marketing, tools, even headcount and cut or renegotiate anything that doesn’t drive immediate impact.
• Build in flex. Structure vendor contracts, hiring plans, and marketing spend to scale up or down at a moment’s notice.

I know it’s counterintuitive to tighten belts when you’ve got cash in the bank, but this buffer is your insurance policy. Better to have extra runway and not need it than to need it and not have it – wise, I know.

Final advice: Make your metrics your story

Your investors don’t care how much you spent, they care what you built. Here are a few tips to persuade your investors to keep investing in your scale-up:

• Revenue with healthy margins – show profitable unit economics, not just top-line growth.
• Repeatable growth motion – prove you can reinvest and scale acquisition predictably.
• Scalable infrastructure – demonstrate your platform won’t buckle under 10× more users.
• A battle-tested team – your crew must be ready for what comes next.

If €10 million can get you there – or even close – you’ll regain bargaining power. If not, start mapping out how to thrive without fresh capital.