When founders pitch investors, they obsess over ARR, growth rate, and profit margins. But professional investors aren’t buying the number you’re showing them.
They’re buying the slope behind it.
That’s the core argument from Homam Karimi, CEO and founder of StudyTube, who has scaled the learning platform to over €25 million ARR and raised more than €50 million in funding from firms like Verdane.
In his fireside chat with Jannis, Homam unpacked how CEOs can treat their company like a product for investors – designing metrics, trendlines, and growth narratives that make valuation predictable, believable, and compounding.
A company isn’t just a product for customers—it’s a product for investors
Most CEOs are laser-focused on product-market fit. Few think about investor-market fit.
“Your company is also a product,” Homam said. “Your customers buy your solution. Investors buy your story—and the predictability behind your numbers.”
That means you’re building for two segments:
- Your end customers, who pay invoices.
- Your investors, who buy equity.
Both need to feel fit—a clear problem, a reliable solution, and metrics that prove the value over time.
For investors, this means translating your performance into a story that signals compounding: steady, explainable, and de-risked growth across key dimensions like retention, expansion, and efficiency.
Investors buy trendlines, not snapshots
Homam put it bluntly:
“If you drop below 30% growth, you’re not a scale-up anymore—you’re an SME. And then you’ll be valued on profit, not ARR.”
That’s the line CEOs can’t afford to cross.
Consistent 30–35% growth year over year compounds fast—but more importantly, it builds trust. Investors see a line they can underwrite.
To show that consistency, StudyTube started treating metrics like a design challenge. “You have to obsess over the structure of your metrics the same way you obsess over your product design,” Homam said.
Instead of showing topline ARR as one monolith, he decomposed growth into buckets that mirrored the business model:
- Customer segments: SME, mid-market, enterprise
- Regions: Benelux, DACH, Nordics
- Channels: direct vs partner
- Expansion: upsell, cross-sell, attach rates
- Retention: net revenue retention (NRR) and churn drivers
Each bucket had its own trendline, owner, and driver model. “If one bucket dips, the others carry the story forward,” he said. “But if you lose the slope across all of them, the story breaks.”
Net retention: the most powerful trendline in SaaS
Revenue may get the meeting. Retention closes the deal.
“Investors do pattern recognition,” Homam explained. “If they see 100%, then 102%, then 104%, then 106%, then 108%, and you’re guiding 110% next year—they believe you. That’s a story they can carry to their investment committee.”
This is how StudyTube approached NRR:
- Model the mechanics. Churn, contraction, upsell, cross-sell.
- Identify controllable levers. Attach rates, product adoption, pricing tiers.
- Set visible goals. Each year’s incremental gain becomes part of the narrative.
He shared one example: cross-sell. StudyTube knew its attach rate between core modules was 70% and 60%. To reach its 2030 NRR target, that needed to rise. The team mapped out product launches and potential acquisitions to fill that gap before investors asked about it.
“If you don’t have that answer in a fundraising process, it can destroy 20% of your company’s value,” he said.
The art of revenue storytelling
Every founder can recite ARR. Fewer can explain why it grows.
The smartest move, Homam said, is to present growth bottom-up:
“I’ll show you each bucket. This one grew from €1M to €1.6M to €1.8M to €2.2M. Do you believe it will reach €2.6M next year? If yes, great. Let’s go to the next one.”
When investors agree bucket by bucket, they’ve essentially validated the full forecast. “They might challenge one segment—but you’ve already built credibility across the rest.”
That approach turns fundraising into an engineering exercise, not a guessing game.
Common mistakes that break the story
- Selling totals, not trends. Investors buy the slope. Without multi-year lines, you’re asking them to imagine momentum that you should have proven.
- Letting growth buckets blur. One weak segment can erode confidence in the whole plan if you can’t isolate it.
- Ignoring narrative integrity. A broken slope—say, 106% NRR dropping to 102%—creates doubt even if the next year rebounds.
- Chasing round metrics. Clean numbers look staged. Patterned progress looks real.
- Optimizing for this year’s valuation instead of long-term credibility.
The CEO’s new job: value creation architect
CEOs often think of themselves as storytellers. In reality, they’re architects—designing value the market will believe in.
That means:
- Knowing which KPIs drive valuation in your category.
- Modeling five-year trendlines for each.
- Assigning ownership and non-negotiable slopes.
- Using product and GTM levers to defend those slopes.
- Communicating consistency above perfection.
“Once you know this,” Homam said, “the way you design features, structure go-to-market, and even choose acquisitions becomes strategic. You’re shaping the story investors will pay for.”
The single biggest lever: predictability
Asked what CEOs should focus on in the next 12–18 months, Homam didn’t hesitate.
“Predictability. Investors will pay a premium for a business that performs predictably at 35% growth over one that swings between 20% and 60%.”
That predictability comes from mastering your buckets, owning your retention story, and keeping your slope intact—even when markets shake.
Final takeaway
Growth isn’t just about the number you hit. It’s about the story behind the number—the pattern investors can trust.
If you can design your metrics like you design your product, break your ARR into believable buckets, and build trendlines that climb year after year, your company becomes more than a good business.
It becomes an investable product.
Watch the full session
👉 “Selling Trendlines, Not Just Revenue: A CEO’s Guide to Valuation” — watch the fireside chat with Homam and Jannis from SaaSiest Asmterdam 2025 here: https://saasiest.com/selling-trendlines-not-just-revenue-a-ceos-guide-to-valuation/
