How ChargeLab Broke Every B2B SaaS Rule and Still Hit $20M ARR

How ChargeLab Broke Every B2B SaaS Rule and Still Hit $20M ARR

The B2B SaaS playbook exists for a reason. Thousands of companies have followed it successfully. Hire sales at $500K ARR. Build out marketing at $2M. Bring on a VP of Sales at $5M. The pattern works because it’s been validated repeatedly across hundreds of successful companies.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Zak Lefevre, CEO of ChargeLab, explained why he ignored almost all of it. No sales team for years. Extreme focus on talent density over headcount growth. API-first architecture for a sales tool. Every major decision violated conventional wisdom—and that’s exactly why it worked.

The Playbook Exists Because Context Existed

Understanding why ChargeLab could break the rules requires understanding why the rules exist in the first place. The B2B SaaS playbook wasn’t invented arbitrarily—it emerged from specific market conditions and specific types of companies solving specific problems.

Most successful SaaS companies of the 2010s were selling to buyers who weren’t particularly technical, solving problems that required significant education, in markets where competitors were also following the same sales-led playbook. In that context, building a large sales organization made perfect sense.

But ChargeLab operated in a different context. “The people buying our product are often quite technical,” Zak notes. “They want to see APIs, they want to understand integrations, they want to build custom workflows.” This buyer profile changes everything about what go-to-market approach makes sense.

The lesson isn’t that the playbook is wrong—it’s that playbooks only work in the contexts they were designed for. Apply them blindly to a different context, and they become constraints rather than guides.

Rule Break #1: No Sales Team Until $20M ARR

The most dramatic departure from conventional wisdom was ChargeLab’s approach to sales hiring. While competitors were building sales teams at $1M ARR, ChargeLab deliberately stayed founder-led for years.

“We didn’t have any sales team for a while. It was really just me,” Zak explains. “I was doing all the sales and closing deals myself, and we had some customer success people that were helping out.” This approach persisted well past the point where every advisor, investor, and board member would have been pushing hard for sales hires.

The conventional wisdom says this approach doesn’t scale. Founders become bottlenecks. Revenue growth stalls. Competitors with larger sales teams capture market share. But this logic assumes that adding salespeople always accelerates growth, which is only true if you’ve already figured out what works.

Zak’s insight was recognizing that ChargeLab’s specific situation called for maximizing learning before maximizing scaling. “If we bring on salespeople, they’re just going to be another layer between us and the customer, and we’re going to learn slower,” he recalls thinking. “So let’s just keep doing it ourselves until we really feel like we have it nailed.”

By staying founder-led until they had complete clarity on what worked, ChargeLab avoided the expensive mistake of scaling an unproven sales motion. When they finally did hire salespeople, those reps could execute immediately rather than spending months figuring things out.

Rule Break #2: Talent Density Over Team Size

The second major departure was ChargeLab’s obsessive focus on talent density rather than meeting headcount benchmarks. Most SaaS companies optimize for building teams of a certain size at certain revenue milestones. ChargeLab optimized for having the smallest possible team of the highest possible quality.

“I’m a big believer in talent density,” Zak states. “I’d rather have one person who’s really excellent than three people who are mediocre.” This philosophy meant passing on good candidates who would have been solid contributors at most companies, holding out for exceptional people even when it meant living with pain points longer.

The conventional wisdom says you need certain team sizes to hit revenue targets. Five SDRs per AE. One CSM per $2M in ARR. Engineering teams of ten to ship at a certain velocity. These ratios exist because they work on average across many companies.

But averages obscure enormous variance. One exceptional engineer can genuinely be 10x more productive than an average engineer. One exceptional salesperson can close deals at 5x the average contract value. One exceptional CSM can manage twice the accounts while driving better expansion.

By optimizing for talent density, ChargeLab achieved the productivity of much larger teams without the coordination overhead. Decisions happened faster, communication stayed clearer, and the entire organization remained more adaptable.

Rule Break #3: Integration-First Over Sales-First

Perhaps the most strategic departure was ChargeLab’s decision to invest in integration infrastructure rather than sales capacity. While competitors hired account executives, ChargeLab hired engineers to build deep integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot.

“We spent a lot of time and energy building really good integrations with Salesforce, with HubSpot, with all these different systems,” Zak explains. This investment paid off through systematic inbound demand that scaled without scaling headcount.

The conventional wisdom says integrations are table stakes, but sales drives growth. Build good-enough integrations to avoid losing deals, then focus resources on scaling the sales team. Most companies following this advice end up with mediocre integrations and large sales teams.

ChargeLab inverted this completely. They made integration quality a core differentiator and growth driver, allowing sales to remain lean because the integrations generated qualified inbound demand automatically.

This approach only works in specific contexts. For ChargeLab, selling to technical buyers who evaluate integration quality carefully, in a market where buyers already use platforms they could integrate with, the integration-first approach created compounding advantages. For companies in different contexts, the conventional sales-first approach might be optimal.

Rule Break #4: Platform Openness in a Competitive Market

The fourth major rule break was building a robust, open API for a sales engagement tool. Most companies in competitive markets try to lock customers in with proprietary features and closed architectures. ChargeLab did the opposite.

“We have a pretty good API, so people can build their own stuff on top of it,” Zak notes. This openness seems risky—customers could build features ChargeLab planned to monetize, or partners could build competing solutions on ChargeLab’s infrastructure.

But the platform approach created powerful network effects. Technical buyers value openness and extensibility. Partners build solutions that expand ChargeLab’s footprint. Customers who invest in building on the platform face higher switching costs. The open architecture became a competitive advantage rather than a vulnerability.

The conventional wisdom warns against platform approaches until you’ve achieved market dominance. The logic is sound: why let others build on your platform when they could become competitors? But this logic assumes all markets and buyer profiles work the same way.

For technical buyers evaluating sales tools, platform openness signals technical credibility and reduces integration risk. The openness that seems risky in conventional contexts becomes a selling point in ChargeLab’s specific market.

The Framework: Know Your Context

The pattern across all these rule breaks is the same: Zak recognized which aspects of ChargeLab’s context made conventional wisdom inapplicable. Technical buyers changed what go-to-market approach worked best. Strong inbound demand from integrations reduced the need for large sales teams. High-quality talent markets in tech hubs made talent density viable.

None of these rule breaks would work universally. A company selling to non-technical buyers wouldn’t benefit from platform openness. A company without natural integration partners couldn’t build integration-led growth. A company in talent markets without exceptional candidates couldn’t optimize for talent density.

The lesson isn’t to copy ChargeLab’s specific tactics—it’s to think critically about which conventional wisdom applies to your specific context and which doesn’t. Ask yourself: why does this rule exist? What conditions make it true? Do those conditions apply to my company?

Most founders follow the playbook by default because it’s safer than breaking rules. If you follow conventional wisdom and fail, you can blame the market or execution. If you break the rules and fail, you blame yourself for being arrogant enough to think you knew better.

But the companies that achieve extraordinary outcomes often do so precisely because they break rules intelligently. They recognize when their context differs from the context that created the conventional wisdom, and they adapt accordingly.

Zak’s path to $20M ARR proves that breaking every major rule in the B2B SaaS playbook can work—if you break them for the right reasons, in the right context, with clear logic about why conventional wisdom doesn’t apply.

The hard part isn’t breaking rules. It’s knowing which rules to break, which to follow, and having the conviction to trust your judgment about your specific context even when everyone around you is citing the conventional playbook.