Jumping S-Curves
Why Good Companies Stall, and Great Operators Leap
We all know that bad data in = bad data out.
When contract data is unstructured, everything downstream suffers.
Manual billing and invoices, messy spreadsheets, and hours of reconciliation that never quite tie out.
Tabs fixes that.
We’re the AI-native revenue platform that automates the entire contract-to-cash cycle. Whether you're selling custom terms, usage-based pricing, or a mix of PLG and sales-led, Tabs turns month-end chaos into clean cash flow.
✅ Instantly generates invoices and revenue schedules from complex contracts
✅ Automates dunning, revenue recognition, and cash application
✅ Syncs clean, structured data across your ERP and reporting stack
Trusted by companies like Cortex, Statsig, and Cursor, Tabs powers the finance teams behind the next wave of category leaders.
Your ARR deserves better.
Just think about the shape of the letter S.
That’s the growth journey for most businesses: a slow start as you search for product-market fit, a steep climb as you scale and capture share, and then—like clockwork—a leveling off as you hit market saturation and competitive pressure.
Over time, all alpha gets competed away. Arbitrage doesn’t last forever. What was once a novel go-to-market motion or differentiated product becomes table stakes. Margins compress, growth decelerates, and your CAC payback starts looking like a cruel joke.
“One of the most important concepts for startup leadership teams to understand is the phenomenon of S-curves. An S-curve such as the one illustrated below represents the natural rhythm of growth, which follows a pattern of discovery, inflection, scaling, and inevitably decay.” - Parsa.vc
Think about DocuSign. It rode the pandemic wave like a rocket, embedding itself into every remote signature workflow. But as the world reopened and growth cooled, so did investor enthusiasm. Suddenly, the question wasn’t about TAM—it was, “Is this it?”
Or take RingCentral. It had a head start in VoIP and UCaaS, but it stuck to its lane too long. While Zoom and Microsoft Teams redefined the category, RingCentral got boxed in. The curve flattened—and the stock chart tells the story.
Spotting the Plateau Before You’re Standing On It
The S-Curve doesn’t shout. It whispers.
It starts with sales cycles getting a little longer. Win rates dipping. More discounting to get deals across the finish line. Marketing starts spinning harder to hit the same lead volume, and expansion revenue becomes more about renewals than real growth.
Some telltale signs you’re nearing the top of the curve:
Territory saturation: You can’t just throw more reps at the number anymore. Territories are overlapping, reps are stepping on each other’s toes, and overachievement rates are sliding. Your GTM engine is working harder for less.
CAC creep: Your once-efficient channels get crowded. What used to be cheap clicks or high-converting outbound now gets you half the ROI. The arbitrage is gone—everyone found the same playbook.
Feature factory syndrome: The roadmap turns into a list of incremental add-ons—requests from the field, not breakthroughs. You're building for checkboxes, not category leadership.
Internally, you’ll feel it before the numbers confirm it. And once the metrics catch up, the market already has.
That’s why timing is everything. The best operators don’t wait for a full-blown stall to start thinking about the next move—they’re already incubating their next S-Curve. They are seeding their next engine for growth.
You have to do this not once, but multiple times, over the lifecycle of a private equity owned company. The product and market that got you here likely won’t be enough to ride into the next chapter (or hold period).
What the Next S-Curve Looks Like
Not every S-Curve jump is a flashy new product launch or headline-grabbing M&A deal. Often, it starts with a quiet shift—testing a new ICP, launching a second SKU, or rethinking how you sell.
Here are a few common types of jumps:
New Product, Same Customer
You’ve built trust with a core buyer—now deepen the relationship. Think Datadog moving from infrastructure monitoring to security, APM, and RUM. The wedge expands into a full platform.
Same Product, New Customer
You’ve nailed the use case in one segment—now port it over. That might mean repackaging for mid-market, going upmarket to enterprise, or unlocking a new vertical.
New Distribution Channel
The product is solid, but the way you reach customers needs a refresh. Adding a self-serve motion, building a partner ecosystem, or layering in PLG can unlock new growth.
New Geography
Often underrated. A second region can be its own S-Curve if you get the timing and sequencing right. But it adds complexity fast. You have to figure out where and how this new customer would like to transact. And it likely will require you to put boots on the ground in a new place.
M&A as a Shortcut
Sometimes it makes sense to buy your way into a new curve—just make sure you're buying acceleration, not integration hell.
Not Just a New Product—A New Category (or a Bigger One)
Jumping to a new S-Curve isn’t always about launching a shiny new SKU. Sometimes, it’s about expanding the definition of the category you're in—or building a new one entirely.
This is where the best companies separate from the rest. They don’t just ride market tailwinds—they shape them.
ServiceNow didn’t stop at IT tickets. They turned workflow automation into an enterprise-wide category and created budget lines that didn’t exist before.
Datadog didn’t just expand into adjacent tools—they bundled a new category around observability and claimed the whole thing.
Category evolution is often the most powerful curve you can jump to—but it’s also the hardest to underwrite. It requires vision, patience, and a willingness to educate the market before it rewards you.
Ask yourself: Are we playing in a fixed TAM, or do we have a path to redefine the game?
Don’t Just Chase Revenue—Chase Better Margins
Public Service Announcement: Not every curve is worth jumping to.
Some are lower-quality revenue in disguise—high-churn, low-margin, support-heavy products that look good in ARR but ugly in the bottom line.
There have been too many “new S Curves” that were really just professional services or someone else’s data feed in disguise.
Before you leap, ask: Does this next curve improve our margin profile?
Can we price it higher?
Will it reduce churn?
Does it lower CAC by increasing customer stickiness?
Does it scale without ballooning services and support?
This is where Rippling shines. Their expansion into adjacent admin tools isn’t just cross-sell—it’s wallet share in the same workflow, with strong retention and a unified support model.
The goal isn’t more revenue. It’s better revenue.
TIME OUT — What Does “Extensibility” Actually Mean?
Extensibility is one of those terms that sounds good in a boardroom but rarely gets defined.
Put simply, it’s your ability to keep pulling the thread.
It’s how much mileage you can get out of the platform, product, or customer relationship you’ve already built. Can you layer on new products, use cases, or workflows without reinventing the wheel?
Datadog did it by stacking 20+ products on top of the same telemetry pipeline. Rippling is doing it by turning an HRIS into a full back-office operating system. It works because the foundation was built to stretch.
Extensibility is what turns a great product into a platform. It’s what fuels the next S-Curve.
Underwriting the Next S-Curve
Before you put that “next act” in your board plan, pressure-test it. Here's a five-question sniff test:
Are Customers Already Pulling You There?
Are you solving a problem they’re already trying to duct tape? Are sales and CS getting inbound requests—or are you pushing this from the top down?
Do You Have the Right to Win?
Where do you sit in the customer’s stack? If you're the system of record or the control plane, you’ve got leverage. If not, your TAM expansion might be aspirational.
Do You Have the Talent to Build It?
Does your team have the skillset and bandwidth to deliver this? Jumping curves is a team sport, not a side project.
Can You Build on What You’ve Already Got?
Will the new product or motion reuse existing infrastructure—codebase, GTM motion, customer base? If not, you’re starting from zero.
Why Now?
Is there a market catalyst, customer pain point, or timing tailwind? “We need growth” doesn’t count.
If you can’t confidently say yes to at least three of the five, it’s probably not your next S-Curve. Yet.
The Best Operators Are Already Plotting the Next Curve
Even if your business is crushing it today, the clock is ticking. Every curve flattens. Every channel saturates. Every edge dulls.
The best operators are already:
Incubating the next product while the current one’s still climbing
Testing new segments with lightweight GTM bets
Planting seeds early—without starving the core
If you wait until the curve flattens to figure out what’s next, you’re already late.
You don’t get paid for riding one S-Curve. You get paid for jumping to the next one—before anyone else sees it.
BONUS: How Institutional Investors Think About S-Curves
If you’re running a business backed by private equity—or planning to IPO—understand this: institutional investors aren’t just underwriting your current curve. They’re watching how well you build the machine that finds the next one.
From the outside looking in, here’s what the best investors want to see:
1. Control Points, Not Just Products
The most valuable companies don’t sit on the edge of a workflow—they own the middle. They become the system of record or the system of engagement. That positioning gives them the right to expand into new categories without starting from scratch.
2. Revenue That Ages Well
Durability matters more than speed. Institutional capital rewards companies with sticky, expanding revenue—especially if it's tied to critical workflows or usage-based models that scale with customers.
3. Category Leadership with Optionality
It’s not enough to be “in market.” The real compounding happens when you create or reshape categories. Think Nvidia with GPUs in AI, or ServiceNow turning workflow automation into an enterprise budget line. Category leaders have room to pull new curves forward—before the old ones even flatten.
4. Repeatable Curve-Jumping DNA
One jump is luck. Two jumps is strategy. Repeatable jumps mean the company has built a system—across product, GTM, and culture—to continually identify, test, and scale into new growth curves. That’s what durable compounding looks like.