Software’s next growth problem: more customers or more from each customer?

Key takeaways

• Intuit is accepting slower near-term growth to attract and retain more customers.

• Zoom is trying to sell more products to customers already using its platform.

• For investors, where growth comes from can matter as much as how fast revenue grows.

Growing a software company used to look almost suspiciously simple. Add customers, raise prices and sell more licences.

Intuit and Zoom Communications show why the next stage is harder.

Intuit, which owns TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp, expects revenue growth to slow from 14% in fiscal 2026 to 9% to 10% in fiscal 2027. Management is deliberately prioritising customer growth, including through pricing and higher spending to attract customers.

Zoom is taking almost the opposite route. Its video-meeting business is mature, so it wants existing customers to buy more products.

For investors, the contrast offers a useful lesson. Revenue growth is only the final number. The interesting part is how a company creates it.

Intuit lowers the toll

Intuit has spent years benefiting from strong brands, recurring demand and pricing power. Now it is testing whether charging customers less today can create more value tomorrow.

Management says pricing has become an important reason some TurboTax customers leave. The company is responding by widening access and investing more in attracting customers.

That comes with a cost. TurboTax revenue is expected to grow just 2% to 3% in fiscal 2027, while Mailchimp revenue could be flat or fall slightly.

The key question is simple: is Intuit voluntarily lowering the toll to get more cars onto the bridge, or is competition forcing it to lower the toll?

The first can be smart investment. Lower prices can bring in customers who remain for years and later buy other services. The second is more concerning because it can signal weakening pricing power.

Investors therefore need to look beyond slower revenue growth. Customer growth, retention and future spending per customer will tell us whether the sacrifice is paying off.

Zoom builds more rooms

Zoom has a different problem. Finding another pandemic-sized wave of video-meeting users is unlikely to be a sensible business plan.

Instead, Zoom is expanding what existing business customers can buy. Beyond Meetings, it now offers products including Phone, Contact Center and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

This is called cross-selling: selling an existing customer another product.

There are signs of progress. Second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue grew 4.9%, while enterprise revenue rose 7.8%, its fastest growth in three years. Adoption of Zoom's AI virtual agent also more than tripled from a year earlier.

The equation is simple:

existing customer → more products → higher customer value → faster enterprise growth

Zoom does not necessarily need millions of new customers if each existing relationship becomes broader.

Four ways software can grow

Intuit and Zoom highlight a useful framework. Most mature software companies have four basic growth levers:

1. Add more customers.
2. Raise prices.
3. Sell more products to existing customers.
4. Increase how much customers use or spend on existing products.

These routes are not equally attractive.

Price increases can be highly profitable, but only while customers accept them. Customer acquisition can expand the market, but becomes expensive if new users quickly leave. Cross-selling can be powerful because the company already has the customer relationship, but only if the new products are genuinely useful.

The quality of growth therefore depends partly on what happens after the first sale.

What can go wrong

For Intuit, the warning sign would be lower prices without meaningfully better customer growth or retention. That would leave the company earning less without gaining enough scale.

For Zoom, watch whether newer products keep growing faster than Meetings. If they remain too small to lift overall growth, strong adoption headlines may have limited financial impact.

Competition matters for both. Software customers have more choices, while AI could make it easier for rivals to launch new products.

Investor playbook

• Look behind revenue growth: separate customer growth, pricing and additional product sales.
• Watch retention: attracting customers creates little value if they leave quickly.
• Follow spending per customer: rising customer value can support growth even in mature markets.
• Compare growth with margins: faster growth becomes less attractive if acquiring it gets increasingly expensive.

Not all growth is created equal

Software growth rarely disappears overnight. It usually changes shape.

Intuit is trying to widen the funnel by making its products easier to enter. Zoom is trying to make each customer relationship bigger. Both approaches can work, and both can fail. The harder question is which route creates lasting value.