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Building a SaaS community from scratch with Alex Theuma. SaaScribe: A global, intimate SaaS community How do you create a SaaS community from scratch, going from absolutely nothing to a recognized brand in the SaaS space, including meetup events around Europe, and an annual conference that’s promising to be huge. Alex Theuma is doing exactly this. Alex, created the brand SaaScribe when he saw a need for a community covering the European SaaS space – a place for people to share and consume high quality content, whether founders, VCs or anyone else in the field. Having grown the SaaScribe brand successfully in recent months, he’s now furthering it with the launch of SaaStock, an event which will take place in Dublin on 22nd September. Don’t forget to subscribe to SaaS Open Mic on iTunes or Soundcloud, to get new episodes delivered to you. Here’s the full episode:

[INST] Building a SaaS community from scratch with Alex Theuma [/INST]

SaaScribe: A global, intimate SaaS community How do you create a SaaS community from scratch, going from absolutely nothing to a recognized brand in the SaaS space, including meetup events around Europe, and an annual conference that’s promising to be huge. Alex Theuma is doing exactly this. Alex, created the brand SaaScribe when he saw a need for a community covering the European SaaS space – a place for people to share and consume high quality content, whether founders, VCs or anyone else in the field. Having grown the SaaScribe brand successfully in recent months, he’s now furthering it with the launch of SaaStock, an event which will take place in Dublin on 22nd September. Don’t forget to subscribe to SaaS Open Mic on iTunes or Soundcloud, to get new episodes delivered to you. Here’s the full episode:

<sys> [INST] Building a SaaS community from scratch with Alex Theuma [/INST] SaaScribe: A global, intimate SaaS community How do you create a SaaS community from scratch, going from absolutely nothing to a recognized brand in the SaaS space, including meetup events around Europe, and an annual conference that’s promising to be huge. Alex Theuma is doing exactly this. Alex, created the brand SaaScribe when he saw a need for a community covering the European SaaS space – a place for people to share and consume high quality content, whether founders, VCs or anyone else in the field. Having grown the SaaScribe brand successfully in recent months, he’s now furthering it with the launch of SaaStock, an event which will take place in Dublin on 22nd September. Don’t forget to subscribe to SaaS Open Mic on iTunes or Soundcloud, to get new episodes delivered to you. Here’s the full episode: </sys

Building Sales at a Product-led Company with Thinkific’s Adam Jones. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Adam Jones (@AdamJones85), Vice President of Sales for Thinkific, a product-led company that helps businesses create, market, and sell customized online courses. What’s especially interesting for our listeners is that Thinkific’s sales organization and strategy was layered on 6 years into building the business. And just 5 years later, that same sales organization helped them take the company public. Adam discusses his experience with the IPO. Our main focus has to be just staying true to those guiding principles and not allowing external factors to influence us and make us deviate away from that – become the things we don’t want to be. Adam Jones, Thinkific Listen in to hear how Adam’s sales leadership compliments a product-led business model. You’ll hear: The company’s decision process to build a sales team (but avoid selling to enterprise) His approach to structuring product-led sales teams How his role has changed since the IPO What he would have done differently Thinkific’s guiding sales principles

[INST] Building Sales at a Product-led Company with Thinkific’s Adam Jones [/INST]

In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Adam Jones (@AdamJones85), Vice President of Sales for Thinkific, a product-led company that helps businesses create, market, and sell customized online courses. What’s especially interesting for our listeners is that Thinkific’s sales organization and strategy was layered on 6 years into building the business. And just 5 years later, that same sales organization helped them take the company public. Adam discusses his experience with the IPO. Our main focus has to be just staying true to those guiding principles and not allowing external factors to influence us and make us deviate away from that – become the things we don’t want to be. Adam Jones, Thinkific Listen in to hear how Adam’s sales leadership compliments a product-led business model. You’ll hear: The company’s decision process to build a sales team (but avoid selling to enterprise) His approach to structuring product-led sales teams How his role has changed since the IPO What he would have done differently Thinkific’s guiding sales principles

<sys> [INST] Building Sales at a Product-led Company with Thinkific’s Adam Jones [/INST] In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I talk to Adam Jones (@AdamJones85), Vice President of Sales for Thinkific, a product-led company that helps businesses create, market, and sell customized online courses. What’s especially interesting for our listeners is that Thinkific’s sales organization and strategy was layered on 6 years into building the business. And just 5 years later, that same sales organization helped them take the company public. Adam discusses his experience with the IPO. Our main focus has to be just staying true to those guiding principles and not allowing external factors to influence us and make us deviate away from that – become the things we don’t want to be. Adam Jones, Thinkific Listen in to hear how Adam’s sales leadership compliments a product-led business model. You’ll hear: The company’s decision process to build a sales team (but avoid selling to enterprise) His approach to structuring product-led sales teams How his role has changed since the IPO What he would have done differently Thinkific’s guiding sales principles </sys

When SaaS Companies Acquire Communities with James Mayes of Mind the Product. Mind the Product is the world’s largest community of product managers. It recently announced its acquisition by Pendo. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I speak with James Mayes, the co-founder and CEO at Mind the Product. We talk about why Mind the Product decided to exit, why they sold to Pendo, and what’s next for the community. Also, James shares advice on what communities and SaaS companies should consider before merging. SaaS companies are acquiring communities Recently, we’ve seen many notable examples of software companies like Stripe, HubSpot, and Zapier acquiring communities. I think everybody’s seen a story here and there where a community has been acquired and suddenly that new owner just hits it non-stop with email, trying to sell a product. That’s not going to work. You’re just going to turn your community into a mailing list and then burn it down. That’s it. Next, James explains what software companies should understand when thinking of acquiring a community. I think the first thing is that people making acquisitions look for “How quickly will this contribute to my bottom line? Is it immediately going to contribute additional revenue or additional profit?” As anybody who’s running a community will happily tell you, it’s a slow burn. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, what you’re trying to provide to that community, or how you’re working with them. It’s a slow burn, pretty much always. Communities are based on the constant sharing of stories People learn the most when they are in a room with other people who have similar problems. Therefore, if you’re looking at building a community or acquiring one, ask yourself “What problem am I trying to solve?” Is that a problem that people actually care about? Whatever the answer might be, you need a really clear answer. To wrap up our conversation, James shares his advice for communities considering an exit. I think the first thing is to make sure that they’ve really understood what the potential acquirer wishes to do. Are they going to invest in the team? Do they see it as a sales engine? Is it a brand play? Is it a customer education Adventure? What, where specifically, does it fit within the organization? Why? How? Listen to the podcast to learn more about Mind the Product’s journey, its exit, and what’s on with the community after its sale. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic The story of Mind the Product, the world’s largest community of product managers How it sold to Pendo What software companies should consider before acquiring a community What community leaders should contemplate when considering an exit De-risking acquisitions Building audiences versus building communities The next steps for the acquirer and acquired after the sale Listen to the episode now and check out our past episodes.

[INST] When SaaS Companies Acquire Communities with James Mayes of Mind the Product [/INST]

Mind the Product is the world’s largest community of product managers. It recently announced its acquisition by Pendo. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I speak with James Mayes, the co-founder and CEO at Mind the Product. We talk about why Mind the Product decided to exit, why they sold to Pendo, and what’s next for the community. Also, James shares advice on what communities and SaaS companies should consider before merging. SaaS companies are acquiring communities Recently, we’ve seen many notable examples of software companies like Stripe, HubSpot, and Zapier acquiring communities. I think everybody’s seen a story here and there where a community has been acquired and suddenly that new owner just hits it non-stop with email, trying to sell a product. That’s not going to work. You’re just going to turn your community into a mailing list and then burn it down. That’s it. Next, James explains what software companies should understand when thinking of acquiring a community. I think the first thing is that people making acquisitions look for “How quickly will this contribute to my bottom line? Is it immediately going to contribute additional revenue or additional profit?” As anybody who’s running a community will happily tell you, it’s a slow burn. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, what you’re trying to provide to that community, or how you’re working with them. It’s a slow burn, pretty much always. Communities are based on the constant sharing of stories People learn the most when they are in a room with other people who have similar problems. Therefore, if you’re looking at building a community or acquiring one, ask yourself “What problem am I trying to solve?” Is that a problem that people actually care about? Whatever the answer might be, you need a really clear answer. To wrap up our conversation, James shares his advice for communities considering an exit. I think the first thing is to make sure that they’ve really understood what the potential acquirer wishes to do. Are they going to invest in the team? Do they see it as a sales engine? Is it a brand play? Is it a customer education Adventure? What, where specifically, does it fit within the organization? Why? How? Listen to the podcast to learn more about Mind the Product’s journey, its exit, and what’s on with the community after its sale. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic The story of Mind the Product, the world’s largest community of product managers How it sold to Pendo What software companies should consider before acquiring a community What community leaders should contemplate when considering an exit De-risking acquisitions Building audiences versus building communities The next steps for the acquirer and acquired after the sale Listen to the episode now and check out our past episodes.

<sys> [INST] When SaaS Companies Acquire Communities with James Mayes of Mind the Product [/INST] Mind the Product is the world’s largest community of product managers. It recently announced its acquisition by Pendo. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic, I speak with James Mayes, the co-founder and CEO at Mind the Product. We talk about why Mind the Product decided to exit, why they sold to Pendo, and what’s next for the community. Also, James shares advice on what communities and SaaS companies should consider before merging. SaaS companies are acquiring communities Recently, we’ve seen many notable examples of software companies like Stripe, HubSpot, and Zapier acquiring communities. I think everybody’s seen a story here and there where a community has been acquired and suddenly that new owner just hits it non-stop with email, trying to sell a product. That’s not going to work. You’re just going to turn your community into a mailing list and then burn it down. That’s it. Next, James explains what software companies should understand when thinking of acquiring a community. I think the first thing is that people making acquisitions look for “How quickly will this contribute to my bottom line? Is it immediately going to contribute additional revenue or additional profit?” As anybody who’s running a community will happily tell you, it’s a slow burn. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, what you’re trying to provide to that community, or how you’re working with them. It’s a slow burn, pretty much always. Communities are based on the constant sharing of stories People learn the most when they are in a room with other people who have similar problems. Therefore, if you’re looking at building a community or acquiring one, ask yourself “What problem am I trying to solve?” Is that a problem that people actually care about? Whatever the answer might be, you need a really clear answer. To wrap up our conversation, James shares his advice for communities considering an exit. I think the first thing is to make sure that they’ve really understood what the potential acquirer wishes to do. Are they going to invest in the team? Do they see it as a sales engine? Is it a brand play? Is it a customer education Adventure? What, where specifically, does it fit within the organization? Why? How? Listen to the podcast to learn more about Mind the Product’s journey, its exit, and what’s on with the community after its sale. In this episode of SaaS Open Mic The story of Mind the Product, the world’s largest community of product managers How it sold to Pendo What software companies should consider before acquiring a community What community leaders should contemplate when considering an exit De-risking acquisitions Building audiences versus building communities The next steps for the acquirer and acquired after the sale Listen to the episode now and check out our past episodes. </sys

What Is ARR In SaaS & How To Calculate It?. SaaS ARR is most commonly known as Annual Recurring Revenue. Subscription businesses track this metric to better understand their revenue and to predict the company’s growth. HOWEVER, there’s a ton of confusion out there surrounding annual recurring revenue and how to calculate it. Common questions are: What does ARR truly mean? Annualized Run Rate or Annual Recurring Revenue? Even some of the biggest SaaS businesses are treading water when it comes to ARR. This article will clear things up for you. Short on time? ➡️ If you’re new to all of this, read on. ➡️ If you’re charging your customer on a yearly basis, go here. ➡️If your business is based on both monthly and yearly contracts, go here. TL;DR ARR is an acronym for two SaaS metrics: Annualized Run Rate and Annual Recurring Revenue Annualized Run Rate = MRR X 12 Annual Recurring Revenue = Total contract value / number of years What does ARR actually mean in SaaS? Annual Recurring Revenue explained ARR stands for “Annual Recurring Revenue,” which has a rather strict definition of looking at recurring contracts with a service length of one year or more. It discards everything else. What’s important to note here is the word Annual: it’s there for a reason. Any contract less than 12 months in length should be excluded from this definition of Annual Recurring Revenue. In short, annual recurring revenue is: total contract value / number of years. Worse still, it’s also been used by transactional businesses who don’t sell subscriptions at all. These businesses use it to inflate their revenue number and sound more “SaaSy.” For example, by taking their most recent “best” month of sales and multiplying it by 12. 🤢 When I hear ARR: (note ARR = "Annual Recurring Revenue") pic.twitter.com/etalzXy87g — Chetan Puttagunta (@chetanp) June 19, 2020 Where does the Annual Recurring Revenue metric come from? Measuring yearly income initially made sense in the early years of subscription businesses. The first generation of SaaS companies (the millennials): Marketo, Pardot, Workday, for example, typically charged annually—or even multi-year. Their users didn’t have a choice; contracts were more rigid. It made sense for SaaS companies to measure this metric at face value. However, today things are a little more complicated. The second generation of SaaS businesses (The Gen Zs of SaaS): Zendesk, Codility, Intercom, MailChimp, and the current generation (Alphas—younger than 10-years-old): Notion, Zoom, and ChartMogul, embraced monthly billing as standard. This shift means your typical SaaS startup (launched in the last ~8 years) makes the majority of its revenues from month-to-month subscriptions. This “mostly-monthly” approach has rendered the traditional meaning of ARR, “Annual Recurring Revenue,” almost meaningless for these companies. Yet, many are still tracking it as it’s been part of our SaaS ecosystem since Salesforce started. Why is ARR important in a SaaS business? Annual Recurring Revenue is still a helpful metric if your business makes the vast majority of its revenue from annual or multi-year contracts. Annual Recurring Revenue is contracted revenue, so there is a high level of certainty that this money will be collected. If your new customers are happy paying yearly contracts then fantastic, and this metric is well worth using to help you track recurring revenue. However, for many modern SaaS companies, this isn’t a very relevant metric for many modern SaaS companies: if most of your revenue is from a monthly contract subscription model. There’s just not a whole lot of point in talking about Annual Recurring Revenue if only 20% or even 40% of your revenues are from annual contracts. How to calculate Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)? SaaS companies that run only on yearly and multi-year contracts calculate ARR with the below formula. ARR formula: ARR = Total contract value / number of years Example of ARR An example of ARR would be: Let’s say X company signs a multi-year contract of €6,000 for 4 years. The ARR for X company’s account = €6,000 / 4 ARR = 1,500 https://twitter.com/davidu/status/1387551909884485632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw There’s a large debate on whether this metric can be a prediction metric: anticipated, or an actual metric: happened. In my opinion, it’s an actual metric. However, this metric can help you predict your future recurring revenue, when combined with all subscribed accounts, should you continue at your current pace. The other side of the coin, is that people predict ARR going on their monthly recurring revenue (MRR). However, they can only do this when they’re considering ARR as Annualized Run Rate. Grab a cup of something hot, we’re going in deeper. ☕ What is ARR: Annualized Run Rate? Enter, Annualized Run Rate, a different metric, calculated in a different way, but with the same acronym 🤯. Bear with me. Annualized Run Rate, (or Annualised Run Rate for those who prefer British English) is a way of annualizing a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is generally done by taking the MRR and multiplying it by 12. Hence, Annualized Run Rate (ARR) = MRR * 12. It’s often also referred to as simply “Annual Run Rate,” or lengthened to “Annualized Revenue Run Rate.” For most modern SaaS companies whose revenue mix consists monthly subscriptions, this definition of ARR is much more meaningful. Why should you measure Annualized Run Rate (ARR)? Looking at your annualized revenue run rate is helpful for decision-making. It’s hard to think about $416,667 of MRR; what does that buy you? Convert that into ARR and you have $5M in forward-looking recurring revenues ($5M ARR), a much easier number to think about when planning and talking about your business, internally and externally. Annualized Run Rate provides a holistic view of your SaaS standing, it helps founders and C-suite assess the success of the company in the long term. However, relying on Annualized Run Rate has its negatives, which I’ll discuss further on. ARR vs MRR: what’s the difference? The two metrics are often used side by side, but not everyone knows when or how to use them together. ARR provides a holistic view of your SaaS business and its finances, while MRR dives in a level deeper. Understanding ARR will help you develop long-term growth strategies, whereas understanding MRR will help you develop short-term, month-on-month, even seasonal strategies to ensure a steady growth. ARR is the go-to for SaaS businesses that are still signing multi-year contracts. Whereas, MRR is a best-fit for newer startups with more flexible financing options—those billing monthly. ARR and MRR are both solid metrics to track, yet they may not both work for one SaaS model. When should you use Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)? You should be using monthly recurring revenuer (MRR) as a metric if 70% or more of your profits come from monthly subscriptions, i.e., you don’t sell contracts by the year. This should give you a clear idea of your company’s recurring revenue per month, and the expansion revenue you have to play with. To whomst so ever STILL needs to hear this: MRR = Monthly Recurring Revenue ARR = Annually Recurring Revenue ARR ≠ Annualized Run-Rate Sell monthly contracts? Use MRR Sell annual contacts? Use ARR If you take your best month, multiply it by 12 & call it ARR…thats a paddlin’ — Jay Kapoor (@JayKapoorNYC) November 10, 2019 Knowing the difference between ARR and MRR is one thing, but knowing when to track them is something else entirely. Identify which one your SaaS needs to track and stick to it. Note: You do not only need your MRR to figure out your ARR; MRR is a stand-alone metric in itself and can drastically support short-term SaaS growth strategies. Speaking of… What’s a good growth rate for SaaS? Although every SaaS company’s growth is different, let’s take a look a Ghost for a specific growth rate breakdown. Ghost actively uses open source technology and subscription analytics for business growth. Ghost’s public ChartMogul dashboard has helped the journalist’s blogging platform reach a 5.1m ARR through transparency and non-profit growth. It has resulted in an average YoY growth of 52%. Source: https://ghost.org/about/ “When you stop growing, you start dying.”—William S. Burroughs. True as much about life as it is for SaaS. So, let’s take a leaf out of our SaaS benchmark report to see how your growth compares to other SaaS companies out there. In the very first stages (<$10k MRR), startups grow by 69.5% on average each year. As the startup continues its march towards the $100k MRR mark, it grows at a median rate of 31%. Over time, as the company reaches a sizable revenue, growth slows down on average to 18.3%. Looking at percentiles, growth at the early stages of a startup’s journey is dispersed. The fastest-growing startups outgrow slower ones multiple times over. This is expected, some startups find product-market fit quickly and can start scaling, while others need more time to keep looking for it. Download the full report here. How can you increase ARR for a SaaS business? You can increase your SaaS ARR by analyzing your current revenue metrics and identifying the easiest route to increase those metrics. These routes could be: Increase new user count Increase ARPA (average revenue per account) Reduce churn There are more fantastic, underappreciated growth metrics. Buffer, the social media toolkit for small businesses, reached a $22m ARR by investing in new analytics tools (Ahem!) and growing their Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA). They did this from the time they raised their Series A funding to when they bought out their Series A investors. It’s important to note that certain strategies work at certain times on a company’s growth path. Buffer was not able to do one without the other. The social media management giant was struggling with its data analytics solutions for years, they required a huge time investment and as their MAU grew, their manual processes grew harder to maintain. Their analytics solutions, ChartMogul and MixPanel, highlighted that although their ARR was strong, it would be a huge lift to take it from $16M ARR to $50M in ARR by only increasing their customer count. Instead, they turned toward their current users and knuckled down on increasing their ARPA. They did this by: Updating their pricing and packaging structure Expanding their product offering You cannot increase the ARR of a subscription model business by telling your product or marketing team to increase ARR. You need actionable steps for your teams to implement, which will, in turn, increase ARR. These actionable steps come from looking at your revenue analytics. Annualized Run Rate is rightly winning the acronym battle Today, most SaaS companies have a big chunk of their revenues from monthly subscriptions. Annualized Run Rate has naturally become the more popular metric in recent years, and, therefore the more popular usage of ARR today. However, search engines are struggling to keep up and it’s throwing founders off track. Annualized Run Rate winning the acronym battle was probably helped by Subscription Analytics companies like ChartMogul baking that metric and definition of ARR into their products. You’re welcome. It’s not just startups doing this; Zendesk defines ARR this way in their investor reports: Zendesk determines the annual recurring revenue value of a contract by multiplying the monthly recurring revenue for such contract by twelve. The SaaS industry is moving in a different direction. I do think there is a twofold dislike developing in SaaS: (1) Many VCs came up when ARR only meant Annual Recurring Revenue. It now creates confusion for them when comparing companies to have two metrics sharing the same acronym. So, they end up comparing apples to oranges, so to speak. (2) The more legitimate reason for disliking Annualized Run Rate is because it’s started being abused. For example, it’s used by subscription companies with a high monthly churn, such that the declared ARR will never actually materialize, because the average customer will cancel before 12 months of fees will ever be collected. This can be obfuscated by the layering on of new customers down the line. I would argue that Annualized Run Rate should only be relied on when a company has net negative churn—Jason Lemkin seems to have concluded the same. Only then will a company actually collect the ‘claimed’ ARR. Anything below negative churn, and they won’t actually collect MRR x 12 from their existing customers. Matt Quinn says all we need to do is clarify what definition of ARR you’re using, and all will be fine: https://twitter.com/Mqsley/status/1403371831646642176 Wrapping up ARR for you In the ChartMogul app, ARR is defined as Annual(ized) Run Rate, MRR x 12. This is the most popular meaning of ARR and the most broadly useful one today. Two metrics, one acronym, and a heck of a lot of debate. 😰 I hope this article has helped clear things up, and no matter which way you’re using the acronym in the future, you’re aware of both. In my opinion, perhaps one of these acronyms needs to step aside and adopt another letter. Perhaps they both do? $83,334 MRR * 12 to the moon 🚀🌑 ;-) SaaS ARR FAQs What is ARR? ARR stands for Annualize Run Rate. ARR annualizes a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is done by taking your MRR and multiplying it by 12. Annualized Run Rate (ARR) = MRR * 12. What is the purpose of the ARR metric in the SaaS industry? Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) enables SaaS businesses to understand how much money they are making off of their annual contracts each year. This acronym is often confused with Annual(ized) Run Rate. ARR and MRR are both important growth metrics to track depending on your SaaS subscription model. Why track ARR as a SaaS business? When SaaS businesses track ARR, they are able to make better financial decisions, predict the company’s growth and build strategies to better ensure they hit their growth and revenue goals. ARR vs MRR? ARR stands for Annualized Run Rate and MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenue. Also, ARR is MRR multiplied by twelve. Both these metrics are crucial in SaaS to help make better business growth decisions. How long does it take a SaaS company to increase ARR? How much recurring revenue your SaaS makes per year can be increased in a matter of months if done well. You’ll need to lock on a go-to-market strategy and a product growth strategy in order to increase your ARR with confidence. What is a good growth rate? The ChartMogule SaaS Benchmark Report shows startups with less than $10k MRR grow by close to 70% on average each year. When startups reach around $100k MRR, they grow at a median rate of 31%. After that, growth tends to slow to an average of 18.3%.

[INST] What Is ARR In SaaS & How To Calculate It? [/INST]

SaaS ARR is most commonly known as Annual Recurring Revenue. Subscription businesses track this metric to better understand their revenue and to predict the company’s growth. HOWEVER, there’s a ton of confusion out there surrounding annual recurring revenue and how to calculate it. Common questions are: What does ARR truly mean? Annualized Run Rate or Annual Recurring Revenue? Even some of the biggest SaaS businesses are treading water when it comes to ARR. This article will clear things up for you. Short on time? ➡️ If you’re new to all of this, read on. ➡️ If you’re charging your customer on a yearly basis, go here. ➡️If your business is based on both monthly and yearly contracts, go here. TL;DR ARR is an acronym for two SaaS metrics: Annualized Run Rate and Annual Recurring Revenue Annualized Run Rate = MRR X 12 Annual Recurring Revenue = Total contract value / number of years What does ARR actually mean in SaaS? Annual Recurring Revenue explained ARR stands for “Annual Recurring Revenue,” which has a rather strict definition of looking at recurring contracts with a service length of one year or more. It discards everything else. What’s important to note here is the word Annual: it’s there for a reason. Any contract less than 12 months in length should be excluded from this definition of Annual Recurring Revenue. In short, annual recurring revenue is: total contract value / number of years. Worse still, it’s also been used by transactional businesses who don’t sell subscriptions at all. These businesses use it to inflate their revenue number and sound more “SaaSy.” For example, by taking their most recent “best” month of sales and multiplying it by 12. 🤢 When I hear ARR: (note ARR = "Annual Recurring Revenue") pic.twitter.com/etalzXy87g — Chetan Puttagunta (@chetanp) June 19, 2020 Where does the Annual Recurring Revenue metric come from? Measuring yearly income initially made sense in the early years of subscription businesses. The first generation of SaaS companies (the millennials): Marketo, Pardot, Workday, for example, typically charged annually—or even multi-year. Their users didn’t have a choice; contracts were more rigid. It made sense for SaaS companies to measure this metric at face value. However, today things are a little more complicated. The second generation of SaaS businesses (The Gen Zs of SaaS): Zendesk, Codility, Intercom, MailChimp, and the current generation (Alphas—younger than 10-years-old): Notion, Zoom, and ChartMogul, embraced monthly billing as standard. This shift means your typical SaaS startup (launched in the last ~8 years) makes the majority of its revenues from month-to-month subscriptions. This “mostly-monthly” approach has rendered the traditional meaning of ARR, “Annual Recurring Revenue,” almost meaningless for these companies. Yet, many are still tracking it as it’s been part of our SaaS ecosystem since Salesforce started. Why is ARR important in a SaaS business? Annual Recurring Revenue is still a helpful metric if your business makes the vast majority of its revenue from annual or multi-year contracts. Annual Recurring Revenue is contracted revenue, so there is a high level of certainty that this money will be collected. If your new customers are happy paying yearly contracts then fantastic, and this metric is well worth using to help you track recurring revenue. However, for many modern SaaS companies, this isn’t a very relevant metric for many modern SaaS companies: if most of your revenue is from a monthly contract subscription model. There’s just not a whole lot of point in talking about Annual Recurring Revenue if only 20% or even 40% of your revenues are from annual contracts. How to calculate Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)? SaaS companies that run only on yearly and multi-year contracts calculate ARR with the below formula. ARR formula: ARR = Total contract value / number of years Example of ARR An example of ARR would be: Let’s say X company signs a multi-year contract of €6,000 for 4 years. The ARR for X company’s account = €6,000 / 4 ARR = 1,500 https://twitter.com/davidu/status/1387551909884485632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw There’s a large debate on whether this metric can be a prediction metric: anticipated, or an actual metric: happened. In my opinion, it’s an actual metric. However, this metric can help you predict your future recurring revenue, when combined with all subscribed accounts, should you continue at your current pace. The other side of the coin, is that people predict ARR going on their monthly recurring revenue (MRR). However, they can only do this when they’re considering ARR as Annualized Run Rate. Grab a cup of something hot, we’re going in deeper. ☕ What is ARR: Annualized Run Rate? Enter, Annualized Run Rate, a different metric, calculated in a different way, but with the same acronym 🤯. Bear with me. Annualized Run Rate, (or Annualised Run Rate for those who prefer British English) is a way of annualizing a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is generally done by taking the MRR and multiplying it by 12. Hence, Annualized Run Rate (ARR) = MRR * 12. It’s often also referred to as simply “Annual Run Rate,” or lengthened to “Annualized Revenue Run Rate.” For most modern SaaS companies whose revenue mix consists monthly subscriptions, this definition of ARR is much more meaningful. Why should you measure Annualized Run Rate (ARR)? Looking at your annualized revenue run rate is helpful for decision-making. It’s hard to think about $416,667 of MRR; what does that buy you? Convert that into ARR and you have $5M in forward-looking recurring revenues ($5M ARR), a much easier number to think about when planning and talking about your business, internally and externally. Annualized Run Rate provides a holistic view of your SaaS standing, it helps founders and C-suite assess the success of the company in the long term. However, relying on Annualized Run Rate has its negatives, which I’ll discuss further on. ARR vs MRR: what’s the difference? The two metrics are often used side by side, but not everyone knows when or how to use them together. ARR provides a holistic view of your SaaS business and its finances, while MRR dives in a level deeper. Understanding ARR will help you develop long-term growth strategies, whereas understanding MRR will help you develop short-term, month-on-month, even seasonal strategies to ensure a steady growth. ARR is the go-to for SaaS businesses that are still signing multi-year contracts. Whereas, MRR is a best-fit for newer startups with more flexible financing options—those billing monthly. ARR and MRR are both solid metrics to track, yet they may not both work for one SaaS model. When should you use Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)? You should be using monthly recurring revenuer (MRR) as a metric if 70% or more of your profits come from monthly subscriptions, i.e., you don’t sell contracts by the year. This should give you a clear idea of your company’s recurring revenue per month, and the expansion revenue you have to play with. To whomst so ever STILL needs to hear this: MRR = Monthly Recurring Revenue ARR = Annually Recurring Revenue ARR ≠ Annualized Run-Rate Sell monthly contracts? Use MRR Sell annual contacts? Use ARR If you take your best month, multiply it by 12 & call it ARR…thats a paddlin’ — Jay Kapoor (@JayKapoorNYC) November 10, 2019 Knowing the difference between ARR and MRR is one thing, but knowing when to track them is something else entirely. Identify which one your SaaS needs to track and stick to it. Note: You do not only need your MRR to figure out your ARR; MRR is a stand-alone metric in itself and can drastically support short-term SaaS growth strategies. Speaking of… What’s a good growth rate for SaaS? Although every SaaS company’s growth is different, let’s take a look a Ghost for a specific growth rate breakdown. Ghost actively uses open source technology and subscription analytics for business growth. Ghost’s public ChartMogul dashboard has helped the journalist’s blogging platform reach a 5.1m ARR through transparency and non-profit growth. It has resulted in an average YoY growth of 52%. Source: https://ghost.org/about/ “When you stop growing, you start dying.”—William S. Burroughs. True as much about life as it is for SaaS. So, let’s take a leaf out of our SaaS benchmark report to see how your growth compares to other SaaS companies out there. In the very first stages (<$10k MRR), startups grow by 69.5% on average each year. As the startup continues its march towards the $100k MRR mark, it grows at a median rate of 31%. Over time, as the company reaches a sizable revenue, growth slows down on average to 18.3%. Looking at percentiles, growth at the early stages of a startup’s journey is dispersed. The fastest-growing startups outgrow slower ones multiple times over. This is expected, some startups find product-market fit quickly and can start scaling, while others need more time to keep looking for it. Download the full report here. How can you increase ARR for a SaaS business? You can increase your SaaS ARR by analyzing your current revenue metrics and identifying the easiest route to increase those metrics. These routes could be: Increase new user count Increase ARPA (average revenue per account) Reduce churn There are more fantastic, underappreciated growth metrics. Buffer, the social media toolkit for small businesses, reached a $22m ARR by investing in new analytics tools (Ahem!) and growing their Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA). They did this from the time they raised their Series A funding to when they bought out their Series A investors. It’s important to note that certain strategies work at certain times on a company’s growth path. Buffer was not able to do one without the other. The social media management giant was struggling with its data analytics solutions for years, they required a huge time investment and as their MAU grew, their manual processes grew harder to maintain. Their analytics solutions, ChartMogul and MixPanel, highlighted that although their ARR was strong, it would be a huge lift to take it from $16M ARR to $50M in ARR by only increasing their customer count. Instead, they turned toward their current users and knuckled down on increasing their ARPA. They did this by: Updating their pricing and packaging structure Expanding their product offering You cannot increase the ARR of a subscription model business by telling your product or marketing team to increase ARR. You need actionable steps for your teams to implement, which will, in turn, increase ARR. These actionable steps come from looking at your revenue analytics. Annualized Run Rate is rightly winning the acronym battle Today, most SaaS companies have a big chunk of their revenues from monthly subscriptions. Annualized Run Rate has naturally become the more popular metric in recent years, and, therefore the more popular usage of ARR today. However, search engines are struggling to keep up and it’s throwing founders off track. Annualized Run Rate winning the acronym battle was probably helped by Subscription Analytics companies like ChartMogul baking that metric and definition of ARR into their products. You’re welcome. It’s not just startups doing this; Zendesk defines ARR this way in their investor reports: Zendesk determines the annual recurring revenue value of a contract by multiplying the monthly recurring revenue for such contract by twelve. The SaaS industry is moving in a different direction. I do think there is a twofold dislike developing in SaaS: (1) Many VCs came up when ARR only meant Annual Recurring Revenue. It now creates confusion for them when comparing companies to have two metrics sharing the same acronym. So, they end up comparing apples to oranges, so to speak. (2) The more legitimate reason for disliking Annualized Run Rate is because it’s started being abused. For example, it’s used by subscription companies with a high monthly churn, such that the declared ARR will never actually materialize, because the average customer will cancel before 12 months of fees will ever be collected. This can be obfuscated by the layering on of new customers down the line. I would argue that Annualized Run Rate should only be relied on when a company has net negative churn—Jason Lemkin seems to have concluded the same. Only then will a company actually collect the ‘claimed’ ARR. Anything below negative churn, and they won’t actually collect MRR x 12 from their existing customers. Matt Quinn says all we need to do is clarify what definition of ARR you’re using, and all will be fine: https://twitter.com/Mqsley/status/1403371831646642176 Wrapping up ARR for you In the ChartMogul app, ARR is defined as Annual(ized) Run Rate, MRR x 12. This is the most popular meaning of ARR and the most broadly useful one today. Two metrics, one acronym, and a heck of a lot of debate. 😰 I hope this article has helped clear things up, and no matter which way you’re using the acronym in the future, you’re aware of both. In my opinion, perhaps one of these acronyms needs to step aside and adopt another letter. Perhaps they both do? $83,334 MRR * 12 to the moon 🚀🌑 ;-) SaaS ARR FAQs What is ARR? ARR stands for Annualize Run Rate. ARR annualizes a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is done by taking your MRR and multiplying it by 12. Annualized Run Rate (ARR) = MRR * 12. What is the purpose of the ARR metric in the SaaS industry? Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) enables SaaS businesses to understand how much money they are making off of their annual contracts each year. This acronym is often confused with Annual(ized) Run Rate. ARR and MRR are both important growth metrics to track depending on your SaaS subscription model. Why track ARR as a SaaS business? When SaaS businesses track ARR, they are able to make better financial decisions, predict the company’s growth and build strategies to better ensure they hit their growth and revenue goals. ARR vs MRR? ARR stands for Annualized Run Rate and MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenue. Also, ARR is MRR multiplied by twelve. Both these metrics are crucial in SaaS to help make better business growth decisions. How long does it take a SaaS company to increase ARR? How much recurring revenue your SaaS makes per year can be increased in a matter of months if done well. You’ll need to lock on a go-to-market strategy and a product growth strategy in order to increase your ARR with confidence. What is a good growth rate? The ChartMogule SaaS Benchmark Report shows startups with less than $10k MRR grow by close to 70% on average each year. When startups reach around $100k MRR, they grow at a median rate of 31%. After that, growth tends to slow to an average of 18.3%.

<sys> [INST] What Is ARR In SaaS & How To Calculate It? [/INST] SaaS ARR is most commonly known as Annual Recurring Revenue. Subscription businesses track this metric to better understand their revenue and to predict the company’s growth. HOWEVER, there’s a ton of confusion out there surrounding annual recurring revenue and how to calculate it. Common questions are: What does ARR truly mean? Annualized Run Rate or Annual Recurring Revenue? Even some of the biggest SaaS businesses are treading water when it comes to ARR. This article will clear things up for you. Short on time? ➡️ If you’re new to all of this, read on. ➡️ If you’re charging your customer on a yearly basis, go here. ➡️If your business is based on both monthly and yearly contracts, go here. TL;DR ARR is an acronym for two SaaS metrics: Annualized Run Rate and Annual Recurring Revenue Annualized Run Rate = MRR X 12 Annual Recurring Revenue = Total contract value / number of years What does ARR actually mean in SaaS? Annual Recurring Revenue explained ARR stands for “Annual Recurring Revenue,” which has a rather strict definition of looking at recurring contracts with a service length of one year or more. It discards everything else. What’s important to note here is the word Annual: it’s there for a reason. Any contract less than 12 months in length should be excluded from this definition of Annual Recurring Revenue. In short, annual recurring revenue is: total contract value / number of years. Worse still, it’s also been used by transactional businesses who don’t sell subscriptions at all. These businesses use it to inflate their revenue number and sound more “SaaSy.” For example, by taking their most recent “best” month of sales and multiplying it by 12. 🤢 When I hear ARR: (note ARR = "Annual Recurring Revenue") pic.twitter.com/etalzXy87g — Chetan Puttagunta (@chetanp) June 19, 2020 Where does the Annual Recurring Revenue metric come from? Measuring yearly income initially made sense in the early years of subscription businesses. The first generation of SaaS companies (the millennials): Marketo, Pardot, Workday, for example, typically charged annually—or even multi-year. Their users didn’t have a choice; contracts were more rigid. It made sense for SaaS companies to measure this metric at face value. However, today things are a little more complicated. The second generation of SaaS businesses (The Gen Zs of SaaS): Zendesk, Codility, Intercom, MailChimp, and the current generation (Alphas—younger than 10-years-old): Notion, Zoom, and ChartMogul, embraced monthly billing as standard. This shift means your typical SaaS startup (launched in the last ~8 years) makes the majority of its revenues from month-to-month subscriptions. This “mostly-monthly” approach has rendered the traditional meaning of ARR, “Annual Recurring Revenue,” almost meaningless for these companies. Yet, many are still tracking it as it’s been part of our SaaS ecosystem since Salesforce started. Why is ARR important in a SaaS business? Annual Recurring Revenue is still a helpful metric if your business makes the vast majority of its revenue from annual or multi-year contracts. Annual Recurring Revenue is contracted revenue, so there is a high level of certainty that this money will be collected. If your new customers are happy paying yearly contracts then fantastic, and this metric is well worth using to help you track recurring revenue. However, for many modern SaaS companies, this isn’t a very relevant metric for many modern SaaS companies: if most of your revenue is from a monthly contract subscription model. There’s just not a whole lot of point in talking about Annual Recurring Revenue if only 20% or even 40% of your revenues are from annual contracts. How to calculate Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)? SaaS companies that run only on yearly and multi-year contracts calculate ARR with the below formula. ARR formula: ARR = Total contract value / number of years Example of ARR An example of ARR would be: Let’s say X company signs a multi-year contract of €6,000 for 4 years. The ARR for X company’s account = €6,000 / 4 ARR = 1,500 https://twitter.com/davidu/status/1387551909884485632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw There’s a large debate on whether this metric can be a prediction metric: anticipated, or an actual metric: happened. In my opinion, it’s an actual metric. However, this metric can help you predict your future recurring revenue, when combined with all subscribed accounts, should you continue at your current pace. The other side of the coin, is that people predict ARR going on their monthly recurring revenue (MRR). However, they can only do this when they’re considering ARR as Annualized Run Rate. Grab a cup of something hot, we’re going in deeper. ☕ What is ARR: Annualized Run Rate? Enter, Annualized Run Rate, a different metric, calculated in a different way, but with the same acronym 🤯. Bear with me. Annualized Run Rate, (or Annualised Run Rate for those who prefer British English) is a way of annualizing a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is generally done by taking the MRR and multiplying it by 12. Hence, Annualized Run Rate (ARR) = MRR * 12. It’s often also referred to as simply “Annual Run Rate,” or lengthened to “Annualized Revenue Run Rate.” For most modern SaaS companies whose revenue mix consists monthly subscriptions, this definition of ARR is much more meaningful. Why should you measure Annualized Run Rate (ARR)? Looking at your annualized revenue run rate is helpful for decision-making. It’s hard to think about $416,667 of MRR; what does that buy you? Convert that into ARR and you have $5M in forward-looking recurring revenues ($5M ARR), a much easier number to think about when planning and talking about your business, internally and externally. Annualized Run Rate provides a holistic view of your SaaS standing, it helps founders and C-suite assess the success of the company in the long term. However, relying on Annualized Run Rate has its negatives, which I’ll discuss further on. ARR vs MRR: what’s the difference? The two metrics are often used side by side, but not everyone knows when or how to use them together. ARR provides a holistic view of your SaaS business and its finances, while MRR dives in a level deeper. Understanding ARR will help you develop long-term growth strategies, whereas understanding MRR will help you develop short-term, month-on-month, even seasonal strategies to ensure a steady growth. ARR is the go-to for SaaS businesses that are still signing multi-year contracts. Whereas, MRR is a best-fit for newer startups with more flexible financing options—those billing monthly. ARR and MRR are both solid metrics to track, yet they may not both work for one SaaS model. When should you use Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)? You should be using monthly recurring revenuer (MRR) as a metric if 70% or more of your profits come from monthly subscriptions, i.e., you don’t sell contracts by the year. This should give you a clear idea of your company’s recurring revenue per month, and the expansion revenue you have to play with. To whomst so ever STILL needs to hear this: MRR = Monthly Recurring Revenue ARR = Annually Recurring Revenue ARR ≠ Annualized Run-Rate Sell monthly contracts? Use MRR Sell annual contacts? Use ARR If you take your best month, multiply it by 12 & call it ARR…thats a paddlin’ — Jay Kapoor (@JayKapoorNYC) November 10, 2019 Knowing the difference between ARR and MRR is one thing, but knowing when to track them is something else entirely. Identify which one your SaaS needs to track and stick to it. Note: You do not only need your MRR to figure out your ARR; MRR is a stand-alone metric in itself and can drastically support short-term SaaS growth strategies. Speaking of… What’s a good growth rate for SaaS? Although every SaaS company’s growth is different, let’s take a look a Ghost for a specific growth rate breakdown. Ghost actively uses open source technology and subscription analytics for business growth. Ghost’s public ChartMogul dashboard has helped the journalist’s blogging platform reach a 5.1m ARR through transparency and non-profit growth. It has resulted in an average YoY growth of 52%. Source: https://ghost.org/about/ “When you stop growing, you start dying.”—William S. Burroughs. True as much about life as it is for SaaS. So, let’s take a leaf out of our SaaS benchmark report to see how your growth compares to other SaaS companies out there. In the very first stages (<$10k MRR), startups grow by 69.5% on average each year. As the startup continues its march towards the $100k MRR mark, it grows at a median rate of 31%. Over time, as the company reaches a sizable revenue, growth slows down on average to 18.3%. Looking at percentiles, growth at the early stages of a startup’s journey is dispersed. The fastest-growing startups outgrow slower ones multiple times over. This is expected, some startups find product-market fit quickly and can start scaling, while others need more time to keep looking for it. Download the full report here. How can you increase ARR for a SaaS business? You can increase your SaaS ARR by analyzing your current revenue metrics and identifying the easiest route to increase those metrics. These routes could be: Increase new user count Increase ARPA (average revenue per account) Reduce churn There are more fantastic, underappreciated growth metrics. Buffer, the social media toolkit for small businesses, reached a $22m ARR by investing in new analytics tools (Ahem!) and growing their Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA). They did this from the time they raised their Series A funding to when they bought out their Series A investors. It’s important to note that certain strategies work at certain times on a company’s growth path. Buffer was not able to do one without the other. The social media management giant was struggling with its data analytics solutions for years, they required a huge time investment and as their MAU grew, their manual processes grew harder to maintain. Their analytics solutions, ChartMogul and MixPanel, highlighted that although their ARR was strong, it would be a huge lift to take it from $16M ARR to $50M in ARR by only increasing their customer count. Instead, they turned toward their current users and knuckled down on increasing their ARPA. They did this by: Updating their pricing and packaging structure Expanding their product offering You cannot increase the ARR of a subscription model business by telling your product or marketing team to increase ARR. You need actionable steps for your teams to implement, which will, in turn, increase ARR. These actionable steps come from looking at your revenue analytics. Annualized Run Rate is rightly winning the acronym battle Today, most SaaS companies have a big chunk of their revenues from monthly subscriptions. Annualized Run Rate has naturally become the more popular metric in recent years, and, therefore the more popular usage of ARR today. However, search engines are struggling to keep up and it’s throwing founders off track. Annualized Run Rate winning the acronym battle was probably helped by Subscription Analytics companies like ChartMogul baking that metric and definition of ARR into their products. You’re welcome. It’s not just startups doing this; Zendesk defines ARR this way in their investor reports: Zendesk determines the annual recurring revenue value of a contract by multiplying the monthly recurring revenue for such contract by twelve. The SaaS industry is moving in a different direction. I do think there is a twofold dislike developing in SaaS: (1) Many VCs came up when ARR only meant Annual Recurring Revenue. It now creates confusion for them when comparing companies to have two metrics sharing the same acronym. So, they end up comparing apples to oranges, so to speak. (2) The more legitimate reason for disliking Annualized Run Rate is because it’s started being abused. For example, it’s used by subscription companies with a high monthly churn, such that the declared ARR will never actually materialize, because the average customer will cancel before 12 months of fees will ever be collected. This can be obfuscated by the layering on of new customers down the line. I would argue that Annualized Run Rate should only be relied on when a company has net negative churn—Jason Lemkin seems to have concluded the same. Only then will a company actually collect the ‘claimed’ ARR. Anything below negative churn, and they won’t actually collect MRR x 12 from their existing customers. Matt Quinn says all we need to do is clarify what definition of ARR you’re using, and all will be fine: https://twitter.com/Mqsley/status/1403371831646642176 Wrapping up ARR for you In the ChartMogul app, ARR is defined as Annual(ized) Run Rate, MRR x 12. This is the most popular meaning of ARR and the most broadly useful one today. Two metrics, one acronym, and a heck of a lot of debate. 😰 I hope this article has helped clear things up, and no matter which way you’re using the acronym in the future, you’re aware of both. In my opinion, perhaps one of these acronyms needs to step aside and adopt another letter. Perhaps they both do? $83,334 MRR * 12 to the moon 🚀🌑 ;-) SaaS ARR FAQs What is ARR? ARR stands for Annualize Run Rate. ARR annualizes a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is done by taking your MRR and multiplying it by 12. Annualized Run Rate (ARR) = MRR * 12. What is the purpose of the ARR metric in the SaaS industry? Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) enables SaaS businesses to understand how much money they are making off of their annual contracts each year. This acronym is often confused with Annual(ized) Run Rate. ARR and MRR are both important growth metrics to track depending on your SaaS subscription model. Why track ARR as a SaaS business? When SaaS businesses track ARR, they are able to make better financial decisions, predict the company’s growth and build strategies to better ensure they hit their growth and revenue goals. ARR vs MRR? ARR stands for Annualized Run Rate and MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenue. Also, ARR is MRR multiplied by twelve. Both these metrics are crucial in SaaS to help make better business growth decisions. How long does it take a SaaS company to increase ARR? How much recurring revenue your SaaS makes per year can be increased in a matter of months if done well. You’ll need to lock on a go-to-market strategy and a product growth strategy in order to increase your ARR with confidence. What is a good growth rate? The ChartMogule SaaS Benchmark Report shows startups with less than $10k MRR grow by close to 70% on average each year. When startups reach around $100k MRR, they grow at a median rate of 31%. After that, growth tends to slow to an average of 18.3%. </sys

New feature: Track leads and trial-to-paid conversion rates. Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about making trial-to-paid conversion rates meaningful using cohorts. Since publishing the post many of our customers emailed in asking when they’ll be able to do this analysis in ChartMogul. I’m excited to announce that it’s now possible to track trial-to-paid conversion rates, plus a bunch more trial and lead related metrics, within ChartMogul. What’s new? You’re going to see four new graphs when you log in. Leads – The number of new leads created over time. Free trials – The number of free trials started over time. Trial-to-paid conversion rate – The rate at which free trials convert to paying customers. Average sales cycle length – The average length of time from lead creation date until initial payment. Analyzing leads and trials with Segmentation One of the most exciting things about this feature is that all these new charts also work with ChartMogul Segmentation. This means customers on the MOGUL plan can pipe in relevant attributes, such as onboarding or marketing data, and then ask questions such as: What’s our conversion rate to paid for accounts that fully onboard during their trial vs. those that don’t? Which marketing channels produce the leads most likely to convert to customers? Example of segments you can select to compare on the same graph. New filters for leads and trials There are also three new filter attributes available: Lead started at – The time at which a lead was created. Trial started at – The time at which a free trial was started. Trial-to-paid in days – The number of days from the “Trial started at” time to the “Customer since” date. “Trial-to-paid in days” is a special attribute that gives you the power to make the Trial-to-paid conversion rate graph more meaningful. The method involves measuring the % of trials that convert into paid subscribers within a defined number of days. One useful analysis is to compare your 30-day trial-to-paid conversion rate against your 90-day trial-to-paid conversion rate to see what % of trials are converting long after a typical SaaS free trial has expired. If you’re a ChartMogul customer, learn more about this here. With the “Trial-to-paid in days” attribute, you can also find out if customers who took a long time to buy have a higher or lower churn rate. One way that we’re using this new feature At ChartMogul one of the things we like to track is the number of onboarded trials we get each month (in our case we see if there are any active subscribers uploaded to an account). Then we look at the trial-to-paid conversion rates for onboarded vs non-onboarded trials. Using the Enrichment API, we add custom attributes about onboarding and lead source to the trial records in our ChartMogul account. We then use these attributes to segment our Free trials and Trial-to-paid conversion rate graphs. Previously, to do the calculations and chart building, we were running reports in Intercom once a month and then copy/pasting the values into an Excel file. Now we track everything in real time directly in ChartMogul. Getting started We really hope you’re as excited about this new feature as we are. If you don’t use the trial features of Stripe, Braintree, Recurly or Chargify, setting up lead and trial tracking in ChartMogul requires a small amount of integration work using our API. Please start by reading this tutorial.

[INST] New feature: Track leads and trial-to-paid conversion rates [/INST]

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about making trial-to-paid conversion rates meaningful using cohorts. Since publishing the post many of our customers emailed in asking when they’ll be able to do this analysis in ChartMogul. I’m excited to announce that it’s now possible to track trial-to-paid conversion rates, plus a bunch more trial and lead related metrics, within ChartMogul. What’s new? You’re going to see four new graphs when you log in. Leads – The number of new leads created over time. Free trials – The number of free trials started over time. Trial-to-paid conversion rate – The rate at which free trials convert to paying customers. Average sales cycle length – The average length of time from lead creation date until initial payment. Analyzing leads and trials with Segmentation One of the most exciting things about this feature is that all these new charts also work with ChartMogul Segmentation. This means customers on the MOGUL plan can pipe in relevant attributes, such as onboarding or marketing data, and then ask questions such as: What’s our conversion rate to paid for accounts that fully onboard during their trial vs. those that don’t? Which marketing channels produce the leads most likely to convert to customers? Example of segments you can select to compare on the same graph. New filters for leads and trials There are also three new filter attributes available: Lead started at – The time at which a lead was created. Trial started at – The time at which a free trial was started. Trial-to-paid in days – The number of days from the “Trial started at” time to the “Customer since” date. “Trial-to-paid in days” is a special attribute that gives you the power to make the Trial-to-paid conversion rate graph more meaningful. The method involves measuring the % of trials that convert into paid subscribers within a defined number of days. One useful analysis is to compare your 30-day trial-to-paid conversion rate against your 90-day trial-to-paid conversion rate to see what % of trials are converting long after a typical SaaS free trial has expired. If you’re a ChartMogul customer, learn more about this here. With the “Trial-to-paid in days” attribute, you can also find out if customers who took a long time to buy have a higher or lower churn rate. One way that we’re using this new feature At ChartMogul one of the things we like to track is the number of onboarded trials we get each month (in our case we see if there are any active subscribers uploaded to an account). Then we look at the trial-to-paid conversion rates for onboarded vs non-onboarded trials. Using the Enrichment API, we add custom attributes about onboarding and lead source to the trial records in our ChartMogul account. We then use these attributes to segment our Free trials and Trial-to-paid conversion rate graphs. Previously, to do the calculations and chart building, we were running reports in Intercom once a month and then copy/pasting the values into an Excel file. Now we track everything in real time directly in ChartMogul. Getting started We really hope you’re as excited about this new feature as we are. If you don’t use the trial features of Stripe, Braintree, Recurly or Chargify, setting up lead and trial tracking in ChartMogul requires a small amount of integration work using our API. Please start by reading this tutorial.

<sys> [INST] New feature: Track leads and trial-to-paid conversion rates [/INST] Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about making trial-to-paid conversion rates meaningful using cohorts. Since publishing the post many of our customers emailed in asking when they’ll be able to do this analysis in ChartMogul. I’m excited to announce that it’s now possible to track trial-to-paid conversion rates, plus a bunch more trial and lead related metrics, within ChartMogul. What’s new? You’re going to see four new graphs when you log in. Leads – The number of new leads created over time. Free trials – The number of free trials started over time. Trial-to-paid conversion rate – The rate at which free trials convert to paying customers. Average sales cycle length – The average length of time from lead creation date until initial payment. Analyzing leads and trials with Segmentation One of the most exciting things about this feature is that all these new charts also work with ChartMogul Segmentation. This means customers on the MOGUL plan can pipe in relevant attributes, such as onboarding or marketing data, and then ask questions such as: What’s our conversion rate to paid for accounts that fully onboard during their trial vs. those that don’t? Which marketing channels produce the leads most likely to convert to customers? Example of segments you can select to compare on the same graph. New filters for leads and trials There are also three new filter attributes available: Lead started at – The time at which a lead was created. Trial started at – The time at which a free trial was started. Trial-to-paid in days – The number of days from the “Trial started at” time to the “Customer since” date. “Trial-to-paid in days” is a special attribute that gives you the power to make the Trial-to-paid conversion rate graph more meaningful. The method involves measuring the % of trials that convert into paid subscribers within a defined number of days. One useful analysis is to compare your 30-day trial-to-paid conversion rate against your 90-day trial-to-paid conversion rate to see what % of trials are converting long after a typical SaaS free trial has expired. If you’re a ChartMogul customer, learn more about this here. With the “Trial-to-paid in days” attribute, you can also find out if customers who took a long time to buy have a higher or lower churn rate. One way that we’re using this new feature At ChartMogul one of the things we like to track is the number of onboarded trials we get each month (in our case we see if there are any active subscribers uploaded to an account). Then we look at the trial-to-paid conversion rates for onboarded vs non-onboarded trials. Using the Enrichment API, we add custom attributes about onboarding and lead source to the trial records in our ChartMogul account. We then use these attributes to segment our Free trials and Trial-to-paid conversion rate graphs. Previously, to do the calculations and chart building, we were running reports in Intercom once a month and then copy/pasting the values into an Excel file. Now we track everything in real time directly in ChartMogul. Getting started We really hope you’re as excited about this new feature as we are. If you don’t use the trial features of Stripe, Braintree, Recurly or Chargify, setting up lead and trial tracking in ChartMogul requires a small amount of integration work using our API. Please start by reading this tutorial. </sys

1000 SaaS Metrics in Your Pocket!. OK, 1,000 isn’t quite true, but we couldn’t resist a homage to Jobs’s 1,000 Songs in Your Pocket iPod slogan. Last week, we dropped a hint in our 2020 roundup, and today we are happy to say it’s official — the ChartMogul iPhone app is live! Check out the ChartMogul app on the Apple App Store! Subscription businesses never sleep, you can’t always rely on being close to a desktop computer when you need to look at your up-to-date SaaS metrics. Now, thanks to this new app, you can check your metrics on the go! With this launch, we want to make your subscription analytics even more accessible, and it comes in the form of a beautiful app that’s always just a tap away. Help us bring the app to more people by upvoting it on ProductHunt! What’s in it? This is the first version of our app, which gives you an easy way to track your most important metrics: MRR, ARR, and Subscribers for the last 12 months or (up to) 12 years. Important: This initial version is tailored towards ChartMogul admin users, because it requires you to input your ChartMogul account token and secret key found under Admin > API. We plan on adding read-only and per user API keys in 2021, but for now, we recommend that you keep the number of users of this iPhone app to just a few admin users. Take it for a spin! Download it from the Apple App Store and connect your ChartMogul account by inputting the API keys. If you use a Mac, Apple’s near field copy/paste capability can help copying over the keys to your iPhone easier. We plan on adding QR code and/or oAuth based authentication in a future version of this app. Whether ARR is the first thing you check in the morning, or you just want to brag to friends & family at the dinner table, the ChartMogul app will be there for you! 😉

[INST] 1000 SaaS Metrics in Your Pocket! [/INST]

OK, 1,000 isn’t quite true, but we couldn’t resist a homage to Jobs’s 1,000 Songs in Your Pocket iPod slogan. Last week, we dropped a hint in our 2020 roundup, and today we are happy to say it’s official — the ChartMogul iPhone app is live! Check out the ChartMogul app on the Apple App Store! Subscription businesses never sleep, you can’t always rely on being close to a desktop computer when you need to look at your up-to-date SaaS metrics. Now, thanks to this new app, you can check your metrics on the go! With this launch, we want to make your subscription analytics even more accessible, and it comes in the form of a beautiful app that’s always just a tap away. Help us bring the app to more people by upvoting it on ProductHunt! What’s in it? This is the first version of our app, which gives you an easy way to track your most important metrics: MRR, ARR, and Subscribers for the last 12 months or (up to) 12 years. Important: This initial version is tailored towards ChartMogul admin users, because it requires you to input your ChartMogul account token and secret key found under Admin > API. We plan on adding read-only and per user API keys in 2021, but for now, we recommend that you keep the number of users of this iPhone app to just a few admin users. Take it for a spin! Download it from the Apple App Store and connect your ChartMogul account by inputting the API keys. If you use a Mac, Apple’s near field copy/paste capability can help copying over the keys to your iPhone easier. We plan on adding QR code and/or oAuth based authentication in a future version of this app. Whether ARR is the first thing you check in the morning, or you just want to brag to friends & family at the dinner table, the ChartMogul app will be there for you! 😉

<sys> [INST] 1000 SaaS Metrics in Your Pocket! [/INST] OK, 1,000 isn’t quite true, but we couldn’t resist a homage to Jobs’s 1,000 Songs in Your Pocket iPod slogan. Last week, we dropped a hint in our 2020 roundup, and today we are happy to say it’s official — the ChartMogul iPhone app is live! Check out the ChartMogul app on the Apple App Store! Subscription businesses never sleep, you can’t always rely on being close to a desktop computer when you need to look at your up-to-date SaaS metrics. Now, thanks to this new app, you can check your metrics on the go! With this launch, we want to make your subscription analytics even more accessible, and it comes in the form of a beautiful app that’s always just a tap away. Help us bring the app to more people by upvoting it on ProductHunt! What’s in it? This is the first version of our app, which gives you an easy way to track your most important metrics: MRR, ARR, and Subscribers for the last 12 months or (up to) 12 years. Important: This initial version is tailored towards ChartMogul admin users, because it requires you to input your ChartMogul account token and secret key found under Admin > API. We plan on adding read-only and per user API keys in 2021, but for now, we recommend that you keep the number of users of this iPhone app to just a few admin users. Take it for a spin! Download it from the Apple App Store and connect your ChartMogul account by inputting the API keys. If you use a Mac, Apple’s near field copy/paste capability can help copying over the keys to your iPhone easier. We plan on adding QR code and/or oAuth based authentication in a future version of this app. Whether ARR is the first thing you check in the morning, or you just want to brag to friends & family at the dinner table, the ChartMogul app will be there for you! 😉 </sys

Growing Your Company Requires a Process. Here’s How to Develop It. At the Product-Led Institute, we developed the “Triple-A” sprint, which focuses on rapidly identifying problems, building solutions, and measuring impact. The process follows a one-month sprint cycle and consists of three “A’s”: Analyze; Ask; Act. The Triple-A sprint gives you a way to build a sustainable growth process and can be used by any team in your business. Still, if you have a bad product, no optimization will deliver rocketship growth. Just because you put sprinkles on a turd does not transform it into a brownie. At the end of the day, it’s still shit. On the other hand, if you have a good product that customers love, you’ll see a monumental shift if you go through a Triple-A sprint each month. I’ve seen companies apply this same framework and go from $500,000 ARR to $1 million ARR in less than 12 months. It works. Tweet this quote Best of all, it’s not hard to implement. Start by analyzing your business. The first “A”: Analyze As Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias, states, “In order to build a growth machine for your business, you need to analyze your inputs and outputs.” Until you know the inputs (e.g. trade shows, advertising, email marketing) that drive desired outputs (e.g. ARR, customers, MRR), you won’t build a sustainable business. Tweet this quote If you’re not sure which inputs drive the outputs you want in your business, you need to start analyzing your business. To maximize outputs you first have to understand what inputs affect them. Where to start analyzing your business Create a recurring calendar notification to remind yourself to analyze your previous month’s results on the first workday of each new month. Block off one or two hours so that you’ll have the time to do a thorough job. You’ll get into a rhythm of analysis. Start measuring your outputs. Outputs are a reliable indicator of whether you’re doing the right thing — they don’t lie. Let’s dive into the right outputs to track. Which outputs should you track? One of the beautiful things about a SaaS business is that you can analyze almost anything. This amount of insight is incredible — until it isn’t. With access to countless metrics, it’s easy to obsess over email opens or bounce rates. Although these metrics can be tracked, they don’t tell you much. Did your high bounce rate lead customers to churn? Or did it hurt signups? Although a high bounce rate can absolutely contribute to those problems, we still don’t know the root cause. By looking at outputs, we can quickly analyze the area of our business that most requires our attention. That way, we know which areas to troubleshoot. In a product-led business, these are the macro outputs you need to track: Number of signups; Number of upgrades; Average Revenue Per User (ARPU); Customer Churn; ARR; MRR. These outputs don’t lie, and they’re easy to find. If you compare these outputs over the course of the last 12 months, you’ll quickly identify the area of your business that’s hurting the most. Once we know the outputs, we can ask questions to identify the inputs that get us closer to our dream business. The second “A”: Ask To optimize any business, you need to ask three questions: 1. Where do you want to go? Some businesses use a North Star Metric to symbolize this focus, while others pick a revenue number. How you break down your business’ goals is not what this article is about. If you really have no idea what your organization’s goals are, you should read Measure What Matters by John Doerr. It lays the foundation for how to prioritize the metrics that matter in your business and work to hit them across your entire team. As an example, let’s say we’re a $10 million ARR SaaS business that has a live-chat solution. Our numeric objective is to hit $15 million ARR in the next 12 months. I’m all for setting ambitious goals, but please do not just “wing it” when it comes to figuring out what to do next. To get your business closer to where you want to go, you need to know which levers to pull. 2. Which levers can you pull to get there? As I’m writing this article, I’m taking a motorbike course. As a newbie, I’m constantly making mistakes. I’ll shift down a gear when going fast, and my bike will screech and hiss in anger. I’ll hold down the clutch while accelerating only to hear my engine roar and feel my bike slow. I’ll use the front brake while slowing around a corner, toppling my bike onto me — an anti-climatic end that risks embarrassment more than injury. Knowing which levers to pull is important for business or motorbikes. What’s also true is that there are multiple ways to get the same output. To stop a motorbike, you can use the front, back, or engine brake. Or just drive into the nearest lake. Each of these braking systems achieves the desired output. There are only 3 levers you can pull for growth: 1. Churn; 2. Average revenue per user (ARPU); 3. Number of customers. Tweet this quote It’s the same when it comes to your business. According to Jay Abraham’s multiplier perspective, there are three levers you can pull for growth: Multiplier 1: Churn; Multiplier 2: Average revenue per user (ARPU); Multiplier 3: Number of customers. When I talk to executives at product-led businesses, most focus almost exclusively on increasing the number of customers; however, when it comes to increasing ARPU or decreasing churn, I hear crickets. This is a huge missed opportunity. “A healthy growing SaaS company with -5% churn has 73% higher revenue than one with 5% churn.” Tomasz Tunguz If our goal is to increase our revenue, why is everyone looking at the customer count? Drew Sanocki, former CMO at Teamwork.com, found that decreasing his churn rate by 30%, increasing ARPU by 30%, and increasing total customers by only 30% increased LTV by over 100%. Breaking down your business by three levers lets you quickly identify which levers will help you grow fastest. Unless you’re just starting out, reducing churn and increasing ARPU will almost always have the biggest impact. Once you nail your churn and ARPU, you can start multiplying your business with each additional customer. Here’s the multiplier formula you can use: Churn > ARPU > # Customers Want to see how it works? Fill in the graph below to see which lever will have the biggest impact on your business. For instance, if you reduce your annual churn rate by 100% in Scenario B, you’ll be able to increase your ARR by 10,000 and see a 12.5% uptick in your ARR from moving just focusing on one metric. Once you’ve identified the top lever, it’s time to brainstorm which inputs will kick your business into high gear. 3. Which inputs should we invest in? Once we’ve found where to focus our Triple-A sprint, we can figure out which inputs we should add to or subtract from the mix. If we use the right inputs, our business and outputs will grow. If we make a mistake and use the wrong inputs, our business will become stagnant or decline. To help you find the right inputs, recall the UCD framework and why companies fail: You don’t understand your value. You aren’t communicating your value well enough. You aren’t delivering on your value fast enough. That’s it. Just three potential issues. Ask yourself: Which part of your business is underperforming? Brainstorm potential inputs to run experiments. This is easier said than done, but don’t overthink it. If you’re struggling with low signups, do customer research to understand the value your buyer perceives. Then, communicate that value to them. If you’re struggling with low upgrade rates, work on delivering your value. Cut out every piece of onboarding that doesn’t deliver on your value. As Samuel Hullick cautioned, “People don’t use software simply because they have tons of spare time and find clicking buttons enjoyable.” To improve your buying experience, buy your product once a month. You’ll quickly spot easy improvements. Tweet this quote One way to find opportunities to improve the buying experience is to buy your product once a month. You’ll quickly spot easy improvements. Too often, we set up our onboarding and assume it works without a hitch. (It doesn’t.) I’ve done countless user onboarding audits and found embarrassing bugs that were cratering free-to-paid conversion rates. Anyone could’ve spotted these bugs. Compile a list of items that could improve your product experience. Filter these ideas. How you do it doesn’t matter as much as having a defined process. Have a consistent prioritization system, so you can compare the value of very different projects, force priority decisions out into the light, and pressure test assumptions. Scott Williamson, VP of Product at SendGrid I use an Input Log as a prioritization system. It helps you track and prioritize every idea that could help your business grow. Then, I use the ICE prioritization method, developed by Sean Ellis, to score each input on three elements: Impact.: How big of an impact could this input have on an output I want to improve? Confidence: How confident am I that this input will improve my output metrics? Ease: How easy is it to implement? Here’s an example of what this could look like: You can use any framework you want; however, if you don’t have an existing prioritization system, start with the ICE score framework. It’s easy to understand and implement. Once you’ve run through the ICE method to filter your ideas, find the one or two opportunities to implement that will have the biggest impact on your business. Now, put those ideas to good use. The third “A”: Act Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about? Henry David Thoreau Once you’ve chosen the one or two ideas you’re going to implement this month, all you need to do is launch the idea. Depending on the ease of each project, this could take you and your team a few hours or a few weeks. If this is your first time going through a Triple-A sprint, start small. Get some quick wins under your belt. Typically, this means choosing an input that is easy to implement and has a moderate-to-high estimated impact. Later, you can take bigger swings that require more resources and time. For now, take baby steps. Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing at HubSpot, took a similar approach when helping HubSpot transition from a sales-led to a product-led business. How HubSpot Experimented Its Way to Freemium Growth The first step in adding freemium to our go-to market strategy was setting the overarching vision of where we wanted to go. Then, our goal was to run experiments to iterate towards the vision or inform how we needed to evolve the vision. We set our sights on providing companies from big to small with the right tools to grow. We wanted customers to be able to get started with our marketing, sales, and customer success products for free, and upgrade to different packages as their needs grew. Navigating the associated shift to Product-Led Growth (while still growing 30-40% a year!), hasn’t been easy. But it has brought valuable learnings. Here’s the high-level process that worked for our growth team: 1. Get wins on the board to build trust with leadership and other teams, such as product and engineering. 2. Prioritize growth experiments you can execute quickly to demonstrate results. 3. Once you start to see a high-level of test failures or non-results, move on to tackle more complex growth opportunities (take big swings). Eventually, tell your CEO you want to test pricing ;-) (take even bigger swings) If you already work in growth, this process of getting quick wins and laddering up should be familiar. Kieran Flanegan, VP of Marketing at HubSpot Putting it all together: Analyze, Ask, Act Process beats tactics. Tweet this quote Following the Triple-A sprint framework puts you on track to grow your business consistently. In a market where, over the last five years, CACs have increased more than 50% while willingness to pay is down 30%, we need to instill a culture of optimization. If we can, we’ll pull the right levers and put our business in high gear. About the author: Wes Bush is the bestselling author of Product-Led Growth. He founded the Product-Led Institute to help SaaS leaders learn “how” to build a product-led business.

[INST] Growing Your Company Requires a Process [/INST]

Here’s How to Develop It. At the Product-Led Institute, we developed the “Triple-A” sprint, which focuses on rapidly identifying problems, building solutions, and measuring impact. The process follows a one-month sprint cycle and consists of three “A’s”: Analyze; Ask; Act. The Triple-A sprint gives you a way to build a sustainable growth process and can be used by any team in your business. Still, if you have a bad product, no optimization will deliver rocketship growth. Just because you put sprinkles on a turd does not transform it into a brownie. At the end of the day, it’s still shit. On the other hand, if you have a good product that customers love, you’ll see a monumental shift if you go through a Triple-A sprint each month. I’ve seen companies apply this same framework and go from $500,000 ARR to $1 million ARR in less than 12 months. It works. Tweet this quote Best of all, it’s not hard to implement. Start by analyzing your business. The first “A”: Analyze As Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias, states, “In order to build a growth machine for your business, you need to analyze your inputs and outputs.” Until you know the inputs (e.g. trade shows, advertising, email marketing) that drive desired outputs (e.g. ARR, customers, MRR), you won’t build a sustainable business. Tweet this quote If you’re not sure which inputs drive the outputs you want in your business, you need to start analyzing your business. To maximize outputs you first have to understand what inputs affect them. Where to start analyzing your business Create a recurring calendar notification to remind yourself to analyze your previous month’s results on the first workday of each new month. Block off one or two hours so that you’ll have the time to do a thorough job. You’ll get into a rhythm of analysis. Start measuring your outputs. Outputs are a reliable indicator of whether you’re doing the right thing — they don’t lie. Let’s dive into the right outputs to track. Which outputs should you track? One of the beautiful things about a SaaS business is that you can analyze almost anything. This amount of insight is incredible — until it isn’t. With access to countless metrics, it’s easy to obsess over email opens or bounce rates. Although these metrics can be tracked, they don’t tell you much. Did your high bounce rate lead customers to churn? Or did it hurt signups? Although a high bounce rate can absolutely contribute to those problems, we still don’t know the root cause. By looking at outputs, we can quickly analyze the area of our business that most requires our attention. That way, we know which areas to troubleshoot. In a product-led business, these are the macro outputs you need to track: Number of signups; Number of upgrades; Average Revenue Per User (ARPU); Customer Churn; ARR; MRR. These outputs don’t lie, and they’re easy to find. If you compare these outputs over the course of the last 12 months, you’ll quickly identify the area of your business that’s hurting the most. Once we know the outputs, we can ask questions to identify the inputs that get us closer to our dream business. The second “A”: Ask To optimize any business, you need to ask three questions: 1. Where do you want to go? Some businesses use a North Star Metric to symbolize this focus, while others pick a revenue number. How you break down your business’ goals is not what this article is about. If you really have no idea what your organization’s goals are, you should read Measure What Matters by John Doerr. It lays the foundation for how to prioritize the metrics that matter in your business and work to hit them across your entire team. As an example, let’s say we’re a $10 million ARR SaaS business that has a live-chat solution. Our numeric objective is to hit $15 million ARR in the next 12 months. I’m all for setting ambitious goals, but please do not just “wing it” when it comes to figuring out what to do next. To get your business closer to where you want to go, you need to know which levers to pull. 2. Which levers can you pull to get there? As I’m writing this article, I’m taking a motorbike course. As a newbie, I’m constantly making mistakes. I’ll shift down a gear when going fast, and my bike will screech and hiss in anger. I’ll hold down the clutch while accelerating only to hear my engine roar and feel my bike slow. I’ll use the front brake while slowing around a corner, toppling my bike onto me — an anti-climatic end that risks embarrassment more than injury. Knowing which levers to pull is important for business or motorbikes. What’s also true is that there are multiple ways to get the same output. To stop a motorbike, you can use the front, back, or engine brake. Or just drive into the nearest lake. Each of these braking systems achieves the desired output. There are only 3 levers you can pull for growth: 1. Churn; 2. Average revenue per user (ARPU); 3. Number of customers. Tweet this quote It’s the same when it comes to your business. According to Jay Abraham’s multiplier perspective, there are three levers you can pull for growth: Multiplier 1: Churn; Multiplier 2: Average revenue per user (ARPU); Multiplier 3: Number of customers. When I talk to executives at product-led businesses, most focus almost exclusively on increasing the number of customers; however, when it comes to increasing ARPU or decreasing churn, I hear crickets. This is a huge missed opportunity. “A healthy growing SaaS company with -5% churn has 73% higher revenue than one with 5% churn.” Tomasz Tunguz If our goal is to increase our revenue, why is everyone looking at the customer count? Drew Sanocki, former CMO at Teamwork.com, found that decreasing his churn rate by 30%, increasing ARPU by 30%, and increasing total customers by only 30% increased LTV by over 100%. Breaking down your business by three levers lets you quickly identify which levers will help you grow fastest. Unless you’re just starting out, reducing churn and increasing ARPU will almost always have the biggest impact. Once you nail your churn and ARPU, you can start multiplying your business with each additional customer. Here’s the multiplier formula you can use: Churn > ARPU > # Customers Want to see how it works? Fill in the graph below to see which lever will have the biggest impact on your business. For instance, if you reduce your annual churn rate by 100% in Scenario B, you’ll be able to increase your ARR by 10,000 and see a 12.5% uptick in your ARR from moving just focusing on one metric. Once you’ve identified the top lever, it’s time to brainstorm which inputs will kick your business into high gear. 3. Which inputs should we invest in? Once we’ve found where to focus our Triple-A sprint, we can figure out which inputs we should add to or subtract from the mix. If we use the right inputs, our business and outputs will grow. If we make a mistake and use the wrong inputs, our business will become stagnant or decline. To help you find the right inputs, recall the UCD framework and why companies fail: You don’t understand your value. You aren’t communicating your value well enough. You aren’t delivering on your value fast enough. That’s it. Just three potential issues. Ask yourself: Which part of your business is underperforming? Brainstorm potential inputs to run experiments. This is easier said than done, but don’t overthink it. If you’re struggling with low signups, do customer research to understand the value your buyer perceives. Then, communicate that value to them. If you’re struggling with low upgrade rates, work on delivering your value. Cut out every piece of onboarding that doesn’t deliver on your value. As Samuel Hullick cautioned, “People don’t use software simply because they have tons of spare time and find clicking buttons enjoyable.” To improve your buying experience, buy your product once a month. You’ll quickly spot easy improvements. Tweet this quote One way to find opportunities to improve the buying experience is to buy your product once a month. You’ll quickly spot easy improvements. Too often, we set up our onboarding and assume it works without a hitch. (It doesn’t.) I’ve done countless user onboarding audits and found embarrassing bugs that were cratering free-to-paid conversion rates. Anyone could’ve spotted these bugs. Compile a list of items that could improve your product experience. Filter these ideas. How you do it doesn’t matter as much as having a defined process. Have a consistent prioritization system, so you can compare the value of very different projects, force priority decisions out into the light, and pressure test assumptions. Scott Williamson, VP of Product at SendGrid I use an Input Log as a prioritization system. It helps you track and prioritize every idea that could help your business grow. Then, I use the ICE prioritization method, developed by Sean Ellis, to score each input on three elements: Impact.: How big of an impact could this input have on an output I want to improve? Confidence: How confident am I that this input will improve my output metrics? Ease: How easy is it to implement? Here’s an example of what this could look like: You can use any framework you want; however, if you don’t have an existing prioritization system, start with the ICE score framework. It’s easy to understand and implement. Once you’ve run through the ICE method to filter your ideas, find the one or two opportunities to implement that will have the biggest impact on your business. Now, put those ideas to good use. The third “A”: Act Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about? Henry David Thoreau Once you’ve chosen the one or two ideas you’re going to implement this month, all you need to do is launch the idea. Depending on the ease of each project, this could take you and your team a few hours or a few weeks. If this is your first time going through a Triple-A sprint, start small. Get some quick wins under your belt. Typically, this means choosing an input that is easy to implement and has a moderate-to-high estimated impact. Later, you can take bigger swings that require more resources and time. For now, take baby steps. Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing at HubSpot, took a similar approach when helping HubSpot transition from a sales-led to a product-led business. How HubSpot Experimented Its Way to Freemium Growth The first step in adding freemium to our go-to market strategy was setting the overarching vision of where we wanted to go. Then, our goal was to run experiments to iterate towards the vision or inform how we needed to evolve the vision. We set our sights on providing companies from big to small with the right tools to grow. We wanted customers to be able to get started with our marketing, sales, and customer success products for free, and upgrade to different packages as their needs grew. Navigating the associated shift to Product-Led Growth (while still growing 30-40% a year!), hasn’t been easy. But it has brought valuable learnings. Here’s the high-level process that worked for our growth team: 1. Get wins on the board to build trust with leadership and other teams, such as product and engineering. 2. Prioritize growth experiments you can execute quickly to demonstrate results. 3. Once you start to see a high-level of test failures or non-results, move on to tackle more complex growth opportunities (take big swings). Eventually, tell your CEO you want to test pricing ;-) (take even bigger swings) If you already work in growth, this process of getting quick wins and laddering up should be familiar. Kieran Flanegan, VP of Marketing at HubSpot Putting it all together: Analyze, Ask, Act Process beats tactics. Tweet this quote Following the Triple-A sprint framework puts you on track to grow your business consistently. In a market where, over the last five years, CACs have increased more than 50% while willingness to pay is down 30%, we need to instill a culture of optimization. If we can, we’ll pull the right levers and put our business in high gear. About the author: Wes Bush is the bestselling author of Product-Led Growth. He founded the Product-Led Institute to help SaaS leaders learn “how” to build a product-led business.

<sys> [INST] Growing Your Company Requires a Process [/INST] Here’s How to Develop It. At the Product-Led Institute, we developed the “Triple-A” sprint, which focuses on rapidly identifying problems, building solutions, and measuring impact. The process follows a one-month sprint cycle and consists of three “A’s”: Analyze; Ask; Act. The Triple-A sprint gives you a way to build a sustainable growth process and can be used by any team in your business. Still, if you have a bad product, no optimization will deliver rocketship growth. Just because you put sprinkles on a turd does not transform it into a brownie. At the end of the day, it’s still shit. On the other hand, if you have a good product that customers love, you’ll see a monumental shift if you go through a Triple-A sprint each month. I’ve seen companies apply this same framework and go from $500,000 ARR to $1 million ARR in less than 12 months. It works. Tweet this quote Best of all, it’s not hard to implement. Start by analyzing your business. The first “A”: Analyze As Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias, states, “In order to build a growth machine for your business, you need to analyze your inputs and outputs.” Until you know the inputs (e.g. trade shows, advertising, email marketing) that drive desired outputs (e.g. ARR, customers, MRR), you won’t build a sustainable business. Tweet this quote If you’re not sure which inputs drive the outputs you want in your business, you need to start analyzing your business. To maximize outputs you first have to understand what inputs affect them. Where to start analyzing your business Create a recurring calendar notification to remind yourself to analyze your previous month’s results on the first workday of each new month. Block off one or two hours so that you’ll have the time to do a thorough job. You’ll get into a rhythm of analysis. Start measuring your outputs. Outputs are a reliable indicator of whether you’re doing the right thing — they don’t lie. Let’s dive into the right outputs to track. Which outputs should you track? One of the beautiful things about a SaaS business is that you can analyze almost anything. This amount of insight is incredible — until it isn’t. With access to countless metrics, it’s easy to obsess over email opens or bounce rates. Although these metrics can be tracked, they don’t tell you much. Did your high bounce rate lead customers to churn? Or did it hurt signups? Although a high bounce rate can absolutely contribute to those problems, we still don’t know the root cause. By looking at outputs, we can quickly analyze the area of our business that most requires our attention. That way, we know which areas to troubleshoot. In a product-led business, these are the macro outputs you need to track: Number of signups; Number of upgrades; Average Revenue Per User (ARPU); Customer Churn; ARR; MRR. These outputs don’t lie, and they’re easy to find. If you compare these outputs over the course of the last 12 months, you’ll quickly identify the area of your business that’s hurting the most. Once we know the outputs, we can ask questions to identify the inputs that get us closer to our dream business. The second “A”: Ask To optimize any business, you need to ask three questions: 1. Where do you want to go? Some businesses use a North Star Metric to symbolize this focus, while others pick a revenue number. How you break down your business’ goals is not what this article is about. If you really have no idea what your organization’s goals are, you should read Measure What Matters by John Doerr. It lays the foundation for how to prioritize the metrics that matter in your business and work to hit them across your entire team. As an example, let’s say we’re a $10 million ARR SaaS business that has a live-chat solution. Our numeric objective is to hit $15 million ARR in the next 12 months. I’m all for setting ambitious goals, but please do not just “wing it” when it comes to figuring out what to do next. To get your business closer to where you want to go, you need to know which levers to pull. 2. Which levers can you pull to get there? As I’m writing this article, I’m taking a motorbike course. As a newbie, I’m constantly making mistakes. I’ll shift down a gear when going fast, and my bike will screech and hiss in anger. I’ll hold down the clutch while accelerating only to hear my engine roar and feel my bike slow. I’ll use the front brake while slowing around a corner, toppling my bike onto me — an anti-climatic end that risks embarrassment more than injury. Knowing which levers to pull is important for business or motorbikes. What’s also true is that there are multiple ways to get the same output. To stop a motorbike, you can use the front, back, or engine brake. Or just drive into the nearest lake. Each of these braking systems achieves the desired output. There are only 3 levers you can pull for growth: 1. Churn; 2. Average revenue per user (ARPU); 3. Number of customers. Tweet this quote It’s the same when it comes to your business. According to Jay Abraham’s multiplier perspective, there are three levers you can pull for growth: Multiplier 1: Churn; Multiplier 2: Average revenue per user (ARPU); Multiplier 3: Number of customers. When I talk to executives at product-led businesses, most focus almost exclusively on increasing the number of customers; however, when it comes to increasing ARPU or decreasing churn, I hear crickets. This is a huge missed opportunity. “A healthy growing SaaS company with -5% churn has 73% higher revenue than one with 5% churn.” Tomasz Tunguz If our goal is to increase our revenue, why is everyone looking at the customer count? Drew Sanocki, former CMO at Teamwork.com, found that decreasing his churn rate by 30%, increasing ARPU by 30%, and increasing total customers by only 30% increased LTV by over 100%. Breaking down your business by three levers lets you quickly identify which levers will help you grow fastest. Unless you’re just starting out, reducing churn and increasing ARPU will almost always have the biggest impact. Once you nail your churn and ARPU, you can start multiplying your business with each additional customer. Here’s the multiplier formula you can use: Churn > ARPU > # Customers Want to see how it works? Fill in the graph below to see which lever will have the biggest impact on your business. For instance, if you reduce your annual churn rate by 100% in Scenario B, you’ll be able to increase your ARR by 10,000 and see a 12.5% uptick in your ARR from moving just focusing on one metric. Once you’ve identified the top lever, it’s time to brainstorm which inputs will kick your business into high gear. 3. Which inputs should we invest in? Once we’ve found where to focus our Triple-A sprint, we can figure out which inputs we should add to or subtract from the mix. If we use the right inputs, our business and outputs will grow. If we make a mistake and use the wrong inputs, our business will become stagnant or decline. To help you find the right inputs, recall the UCD framework and why companies fail: You don’t understand your value. You aren’t communicating your value well enough. You aren’t delivering on your value fast enough. That’s it. Just three potential issues. Ask yourself: Which part of your business is underperforming? Brainstorm potential inputs to run experiments. This is easier said than done, but don’t overthink it. If you’re struggling with low signups, do customer research to understand the value your buyer perceives. Then, communicate that value to them. If you’re struggling with low upgrade rates, work on delivering your value. Cut out every piece of onboarding that doesn’t deliver on your value. As Samuel Hullick cautioned, “People don’t use software simply because they have tons of spare time and find clicking buttons enjoyable.” To improve your buying experience, buy your product once a month. You’ll quickly spot easy improvements. Tweet this quote One way to find opportunities to improve the buying experience is to buy your product once a month. You’ll quickly spot easy improvements. Too often, we set up our onboarding and assume it works without a hitch. (It doesn’t.) I’ve done countless user onboarding audits and found embarrassing bugs that were cratering free-to-paid conversion rates. Anyone could’ve spotted these bugs. Compile a list of items that could improve your product experience. Filter these ideas. How you do it doesn’t matter as much as having a defined process. Have a consistent prioritization system, so you can compare the value of very different projects, force priority decisions out into the light, and pressure test assumptions. Scott Williamson, VP of Product at SendGrid I use an Input Log as a prioritization system. It helps you track and prioritize every idea that could help your business grow. Then, I use the ICE prioritization method, developed by Sean Ellis, to score each input on three elements: Impact.: How big of an impact could this input have on an output I want to improve? Confidence: How confident am I that this input will improve my output metrics? Ease: How easy is it to implement? Here’s an example of what this could look like: You can use any framework you want; however, if you don’t have an existing prioritization system, start with the ICE score framework. It’s easy to understand and implement. Once you’ve run through the ICE method to filter your ideas, find the one or two opportunities to implement that will have the biggest impact on your business. Now, put those ideas to good use. The third “A”: Act Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about? Henry David Thoreau Once you’ve chosen the one or two ideas you’re going to implement this month, all you need to do is launch the idea. Depending on the ease of each project, this could take you and your team a few hours or a few weeks. If this is your first time going through a Triple-A sprint, start small. Get some quick wins under your belt. Typically, this means choosing an input that is easy to implement and has a moderate-to-high estimated impact. Later, you can take bigger swings that require more resources and time. For now, take baby steps. Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing at HubSpot, took a similar approach when helping HubSpot transition from a sales-led to a product-led business. How HubSpot Experimented Its Way to Freemium Growth The first step in adding freemium to our go-to market strategy was setting the overarching vision of where we wanted to go. Then, our goal was to run experiments to iterate towards the vision or inform how we needed to evolve the vision. We set our sights on providing companies from big to small with the right tools to grow. We wanted customers to be able to get started with our marketing, sales, and customer success products for free, and upgrade to different packages as their needs grew. Navigating the associated shift to Product-Led Growth (while still growing 30-40% a year!), hasn’t been easy. But it has brought valuable learnings. Here’s the high-level process that worked for our growth team: 1. Get wins on the board to build trust with leadership and other teams, such as product and engineering. 2. Prioritize growth experiments you can execute quickly to demonstrate results. 3. Once you start to see a high-level of test failures or non-results, move on to tackle more complex growth opportunities (take big swings). Eventually, tell your CEO you want to test pricing ;-) (take even bigger swings) If you already work in growth, this process of getting quick wins and laddering up should be familiar. Kieran Flanegan, VP of Marketing at HubSpot Putting it all together: Analyze, Ask, Act Process beats tactics. Tweet this quote Following the Triple-A sprint framework puts you on track to grow your business consistently. In a market where, over the last five years, CACs have increased more than 50% while willingness to pay is down 30%, we need to instill a culture of optimization. If we can, we’ll pull the right levers and put our business in high gear. About the author: Wes Bush is the bestselling author of Product-Led Growth. He founded the Product-Led Institute to help SaaS leaders learn “how” to build a product-led business. </sys

Which metrics validate a SaaS startup idea?. It’s the right instinct to want to measure something to validate your startup idea. This is before Product-Market Fit, at the point when you need to make sure there’s a market that can support a certain product. At such an early stage, though, the standard SaaS metrics aren’t really appropriate… or helpful. Instead of metrics, focus on other indicators. Some will be qualitative and will require your interpretation. Disclaimer: I’m not going to go deep into the differences between B2C and B2B. But everything below is applicable to both. Things that do help you validate your SaaS idea Pre-MVP Search term frequency. Check the statistics on how often people are searching (googling) for a solution to the problem you’re trying to solve. Select keywords and use a tool like Google Adwords. Site visits. Set up a landing page advertising your idea, a product that doesn’t exist yet. Observe visits and clicks. Also collect emails promising to release further information about the product. (If people are indeed interested in the solution you propose, then you are also building the beginning of a marketing base.) *The two items above do not validate a startup idea on their own, not even close. But they can be helpful in confirming or debunking a hunch that you have. Beta user signup rate. You can (and should) begin this process before you even launch. This will help you measure the inherent virality of your product, at the earliest stage. Products like Slack, Calendly, and Trello are inherently viral because they encourage collaboration and communication with others; users invite new people to the tool, in order to use the tool fully and effectively. But if your product isn’t like that, never fear. You can employ some virality tactics and measure their effectiveness. I discuss some viral marketing tactics as a form of nurturing B2B word-of-mouth. SaaS startup Groove recommends their own strategy for creating virality in beta user singups: “We sent visitors to a beta signup form that would put them on a waiting list, and then offer them a chance to advance by sharing the form. This increased our free beta signups at the time by nearly 30%.” – Alex Turnbull, CEO and Founder of Groove Post-MVP Retention. Or conversely, churn. It’s not enough to just measure how many people are signing up; you also need to know how many are sticking around. This measures the stickiness of your product. User engagement. Retention alone cannot validate your idea. Just because people haven’t canceled their account doesn’t mean they need your product. So you should also review how people are using the app. The first question is: are they? From there, you can look at user engagement from a few different angles: Ratio of active vs. inactive users # of log-ins per user Frequency of log-ins per user Length of log-in session per user Features most/least used Like retention, this measures the stickiness of your product, but it also goes beyond that. User behavior gives insight into what the users value most. It validates or falsifies your assumptions about your product. Is your product solving their problem? Does it satisfy their intent for using your product? Is it allowing them to do the “job to be done”? To answer all of these questions, and to fully validate your idea, you’ll need to take a step away from measuring various activity — and a step toward the people you are actually serving. You need to be proactive, inquisitive, and attentive. You need to interview your potential customers and existing users. Customer interviews These gauge customer intent. Why are customers coming to your product in the first place? The other metrics mentioned here can help measure how you’re succeeding with satisfying that customer intent. Personal interviews with your users are not scalable, and they don’t have to be. In fact, successful startups validated their product idea, gained initial traction, and secured their first 100 paying SaaS customers by doing things that aren’t scalable. Simply talk to your users. Phone call, email — see what works. Keep it brief. The growth marketing platform Gleam has some great advice and tactics about reaching out to your target market and getting in touch with customers. And when you do talk to them, make sure you understand what they are trying to achieve through your product. If it’s B2B, understand what their role or function is at their own company. Then you get a sense of the different kinds of users you are attracting. Things that don’t help you validate your SaaS idea Although we are fixated on subscription metrics and SaaS analytics at ChartMogul — particularly anything to do with revenue — we have to go against our own doctrine in this case. We don’t recommend the following metrics in this case, because they’re more suited for later stages of the company when revenue: (1) actually exists and (2) is a better indicator of growth. We’ve also listed some vanity metrics, which might look good — and feel good! — but don’t prove anything about the validity of your business. They’re just misleading. MRR CAC LTV Any absolute number, such as user/signup count, pageviews, etc. Especially used in isolation. If you are curious about the SaaS metrics that do matter after Product-Market Fit, check out the Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: Which metrics do you measure to prove that your startup idea is right?

[INST] Which metrics validate a SaaS startup idea? [/INST]

It’s the right instinct to want to measure something to validate your startup idea. This is before Product-Market Fit, at the point when you need to make sure there’s a market that can support a certain product. At such an early stage, though, the standard SaaS metrics aren’t really appropriate… or helpful. Instead of metrics, focus on other indicators. Some will be qualitative and will require your interpretation. Disclaimer: I’m not going to go deep into the differences between B2C and B2B. But everything below is applicable to both. Things that do help you validate your SaaS idea Pre-MVP Search term frequency. Check the statistics on how often people are searching (googling) for a solution to the problem you’re trying to solve. Select keywords and use a tool like Google Adwords. Site visits. Set up a landing page advertising your idea, a product that doesn’t exist yet. Observe visits and clicks. Also collect emails promising to release further information about the product. (If people are indeed interested in the solution you propose, then you are also building the beginning of a marketing base.) *The two items above do not validate a startup idea on their own, not even close. But they can be helpful in confirming or debunking a hunch that you have. Beta user signup rate. You can (and should) begin this process before you even launch. This will help you measure the inherent virality of your product, at the earliest stage. Products like Slack, Calendly, and Trello are inherently viral because they encourage collaboration and communication with others; users invite new people to the tool, in order to use the tool fully and effectively. But if your product isn’t like that, never fear. You can employ some virality tactics and measure their effectiveness. I discuss some viral marketing tactics as a form of nurturing B2B word-of-mouth. SaaS startup Groove recommends their own strategy for creating virality in beta user singups: “We sent visitors to a beta signup form that would put them on a waiting list, and then offer them a chance to advance by sharing the form. This increased our free beta signups at the time by nearly 30%.” – Alex Turnbull, CEO and Founder of Groove Post-MVP Retention. Or conversely, churn. It’s not enough to just measure how many people are signing up; you also need to know how many are sticking around. This measures the stickiness of your product. User engagement. Retention alone cannot validate your idea. Just because people haven’t canceled their account doesn’t mean they need your product. So you should also review how people are using the app. The first question is: are they? From there, you can look at user engagement from a few different angles: Ratio of active vs. inactive users # of log-ins per user Frequency of log-ins per user Length of log-in session per user Features most/least used Like retention, this measures the stickiness of your product, but it also goes beyond that. User behavior gives insight into what the users value most. It validates or falsifies your assumptions about your product. Is your product solving their problem? Does it satisfy their intent for using your product? Is it allowing them to do the “job to be done”? To answer all of these questions, and to fully validate your idea, you’ll need to take a step away from measuring various activity — and a step toward the people you are actually serving. You need to be proactive, inquisitive, and attentive. You need to interview your potential customers and existing users. Customer interviews These gauge customer intent. Why are customers coming to your product in the first place? The other metrics mentioned here can help measure how you’re succeeding with satisfying that customer intent. Personal interviews with your users are not scalable, and they don’t have to be. In fact, successful startups validated their product idea, gained initial traction, and secured their first 100 paying SaaS customers by doing things that aren’t scalable. Simply talk to your users. Phone call, email — see what works. Keep it brief. The growth marketing platform Gleam has some great advice and tactics about reaching out to your target market and getting in touch with customers. And when you do talk to them, make sure you understand what they are trying to achieve through your product. If it’s B2B, understand what their role or function is at their own company. Then you get a sense of the different kinds of users you are attracting. Things that don’t help you validate your SaaS idea Although we are fixated on subscription metrics and SaaS analytics at ChartMogul — particularly anything to do with revenue — we have to go against our own doctrine in this case. We don’t recommend the following metrics in this case, because they’re more suited for later stages of the company when revenue: (1) actually exists and (2) is a better indicator of growth. We’ve also listed some vanity metrics, which might look good — and feel good! — but don’t prove anything about the validity of your business. They’re just misleading. MRR CAC LTV Any absolute number, such as user/signup count, pageviews, etc. Especially used in isolation. If you are curious about the SaaS metrics that do matter after Product-Market Fit, check out the Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: Which metrics do you measure to prove that your startup idea is right?

<sys> [INST] Which metrics validate a SaaS startup idea? [/INST] It’s the right instinct to want to measure something to validate your startup idea. This is before Product-Market Fit, at the point when you need to make sure there’s a market that can support a certain product. At such an early stage, though, the standard SaaS metrics aren’t really appropriate… or helpful. Instead of metrics, focus on other indicators. Some will be qualitative and will require your interpretation. Disclaimer: I’m not going to go deep into the differences between B2C and B2B. But everything below is applicable to both. Things that do help you validate your SaaS idea Pre-MVP Search term frequency. Check the statistics on how often people are searching (googling) for a solution to the problem you’re trying to solve. Select keywords and use a tool like Google Adwords. Site visits. Set up a landing page advertising your idea, a product that doesn’t exist yet. Observe visits and clicks. Also collect emails promising to release further information about the product. (If people are indeed interested in the solution you propose, then you are also building the beginning of a marketing base.) *The two items above do not validate a startup idea on their own, not even close. But they can be helpful in confirming or debunking a hunch that you have. Beta user signup rate. You can (and should) begin this process before you even launch. This will help you measure the inherent virality of your product, at the earliest stage. Products like Slack, Calendly, and Trello are inherently viral because they encourage collaboration and communication with others; users invite new people to the tool, in order to use the tool fully and effectively. But if your product isn’t like that, never fear. You can employ some virality tactics and measure their effectiveness. I discuss some viral marketing tactics as a form of nurturing B2B word-of-mouth. SaaS startup Groove recommends their own strategy for creating virality in beta user singups: “We sent visitors to a beta signup form that would put them on a waiting list, and then offer them a chance to advance by sharing the form. This increased our free beta signups at the time by nearly 30%.” – Alex Turnbull, CEO and Founder of Groove Post-MVP Retention. Or conversely, churn. It’s not enough to just measure how many people are signing up; you also need to know how many are sticking around. This measures the stickiness of your product. User engagement. Retention alone cannot validate your idea. Just because people haven’t canceled their account doesn’t mean they need your product. So you should also review how people are using the app. The first question is: are they? From there, you can look at user engagement from a few different angles: Ratio of active vs. inactive users # of log-ins per user Frequency of log-ins per user Length of log-in session per user Features most/least used Like retention, this measures the stickiness of your product, but it also goes beyond that. User behavior gives insight into what the users value most. It validates or falsifies your assumptions about your product. Is your product solving their problem? Does it satisfy their intent for using your product? Is it allowing them to do the “job to be done”? To answer all of these questions, and to fully validate your idea, you’ll need to take a step away from measuring various activity — and a step toward the people you are actually serving. You need to be proactive, inquisitive, and attentive. You need to interview your potential customers and existing users. Customer interviews These gauge customer intent. Why are customers coming to your product in the first place? The other metrics mentioned here can help measure how you’re succeeding with satisfying that customer intent. Personal interviews with your users are not scalable, and they don’t have to be. In fact, successful startups validated their product idea, gained initial traction, and secured their first 100 paying SaaS customers by doing things that aren’t scalable. Simply talk to your users. Phone call, email — see what works. Keep it brief. The growth marketing platform Gleam has some great advice and tactics about reaching out to your target market and getting in touch with customers. And when you do talk to them, make sure you understand what they are trying to achieve through your product. If it’s B2B, understand what their role or function is at their own company. Then you get a sense of the different kinds of users you are attracting. Things that don’t help you validate your SaaS idea Although we are fixated on subscription metrics and SaaS analytics at ChartMogul — particularly anything to do with revenue — we have to go against our own doctrine in this case. We don’t recommend the following metrics in this case, because they’re more suited for later stages of the company when revenue: (1) actually exists and (2) is a better indicator of growth. We’ve also listed some vanity metrics, which might look good — and feel good! — but don’t prove anything about the validity of your business. They’re just misleading. MRR CAC LTV Any absolute number, such as user/signup count, pageviews, etc. Especially used in isolation. If you are curious about the SaaS metrics that do matter after Product-Market Fit, check out the Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: Which metrics do you measure to prove that your startup idea is right? </sys

The Ultimate SaaS Acronyms Cheat Sheet. We spend so much time discussing metrics and concepts, that we sometimes forget that not everyone is well-versed in the language of SaaS. The same way there’s power to making data transparent, we believe making the language we use easier to understand helps everyone in the industry — from those who are just making their first steps, to the most experienced practitioners in the field. That’s why we are happy to share with you our brand new SaaS Acronyms Cheat Sheet. The Basics of SaaS Acronyms SaaS: Software as a Service Software as a Service — of course. SaaS tools are attractive to users because it allows them to easily access applications over the cloud. SaaS companies are attractive to investors because their subscription business model makes the revenue predictable. PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a cloud service delivery model where the provider delivers hardware and software tools to customers via the internet. PaaS is similar to SaaS, but differs in the portion of the technology that is kept in-house. With SaaS, the vendor manages all the hardware and software. With PaaS, the data storage and management functions are often kept in-house. IaaS (Integration as a Service) is the third of the ‘as a Service’, in which the customer only leases the hardware. The entire software stack is maintained in-house, such as the operating system, middleware, data, and more. KPI: Key Performance Indicator KPIs are how SaaS companies track progress. It’s a quantifiable measure of performance over a certain period of time, and enables companies to make smart business decisions about the direction of active projects. An example of a KPI would be revenue growth or retention rate. B2B & B2C: Business to Business and Business to Consumer B2B refers to businesses that sell products or services to other businesses. For example, ChartMogul is a B2B SaaS company. B2C refers to businesses that provide products or services directly to individuals, who are the end customers. For example, Apple, Meta, and Nike are examples of B2C companies. Finance and Reporting MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue Monthly Recurring Revenue measures the total repeatable revenue your company generates each month. It’s a crucial metric for subscription-based revenue models—of which SaaS is one of the most common. ARR: Annual Run Rate and Annual Recurring Revenue Annual Run Rate is a way of annualizing a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is done by taking the MRR and multiplying it by 12. ARR provides a holistic view of your business and helps decision-makers assess the success of the company in the long term. Annual Recurring Revenue on the other hand, is calculated by dividing the total contract value by the number of years. SaaS companies that run only on yearly and multi-year contracts use this Annual Recurring Revenue. CMRR: Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue, is a projection of MRR in the future. It considers any committed new business, expansion, reactivation revenue, or scheduled churn/contraction. You might also see it written as Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue. Really important to track CMRR as well as MRR to present the full value of your subscription base when valuing SaaS companies. Shane Greenan, ActivePipe LTV: Customer Lifetime Value Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is an estimate of the average gross revenue that a customer will generate before they churn (cancel). Customer Lifetime Value is useful when considering how much to spend on customer acquisition. As a general rule of thumb, LTV should be at least 3x higher than your customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost Customer Acquisition Cost refers to the cost associated with bringing in a new customer. This includes marketing spend, sales spend, and more—including the salaries of the team members involved. Reducing customer acquisition costs is key to ensuring growth is sustainable and affordable, and enables businesses to make changes to their acquisition efforts where necessary. ASP: Average Selling Price ASP is the average price paid by a new customer at the moment they first convert to a paid subscription. Any follow-up expansion or contraction of the account is ignored. ASP can vary dramatically month by month and gives you a good idea of how effective your sales team is at driving up new customer deal sizes. ACV: Annual Contract Value Annual Contract Value looks at the average value of contracts over a one year period. It’s your total contract value over the amount of years the contract is/has been active. BR: Burn Rate Burn Rate is the amount of money spent in a SaaS business over a certain period of time. This is usually looked at on a month-by-month basis. It includes all spending, such as team salaries, advertising, marketing, and all other business-related expenses. ARPA: Average Revenue Per Account The Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA), or Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), or Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC) are used interchangeably in the industry. It is a measure of the amount of money a single customer generates for a company. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue of a business in a given period by the (average) number of customers in that same period. Sales and Marketing ICP: Ideal Customer Profile The Ideal Customer Profile is a generalized description of the type of customer who gets the maximum value from your product, and who you want to win every time. You can use qualitative, quantitative, and predictive data to identify the traits and characteristics of your most profitable accounts, in order to actively target similar clients. MQL, SQL, PQL A marketing qualified lead is someone who has interacted with your brand via marketing channels in a way that indicates they could be interested in your product or services e.g. downloaded an ebook. The vast majority of MQLs won’t end up converting, and it’s up to the team to identify the promising leads. A sales qualified lead is a lead that’s engaged with the sales team and is ready to make a purchase. SQLs are leads that have gone beyond engaging with your content, and have decided to find out more about how they can take the next step. Product qualified leads are leads who have derived meaningful value using your product through a free trial or on a freemium basis. PQLs are the users that SaaS businesses try to switch from free to paying. CR: Conversion Rate Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate is the percentage of customers who start a trial and subsequently subscribe. Conversion rate is an essential metric for measuring your success at convincing potential customers to buy once they’ve tried your product/service. The higher the conversion rate, the more efficient your customer acquisition is. Customer Success SaaS Acronyms NDR and GDR: Net and Gross Dollar Retention Net Dollar Retention (NDR) or Net MRR Retention (NRR) measures the MRR retained in a given report interval. It takes into account all activities such as revenue gained from expansion and losses due to contraction, and churn within the interval. It tells you how integral your product/service is to your customers. For SaaS businesses, NRR should ideally exceed 100%. Gross Dollar Retention (GDR), or Gross MRR Retention (GRR), measures the percentage of MRR retained in a given report interval (excluding expansion). It takes into account losses due to contraction and churn within the interval. It gives you an insight into how well you retain revenue (without expansion) from existing subscribers. For SaaS businesses, GRR ideally exceeds 90%. We really like this metric because it encapsulates both the business’s ability to retain — so minimizing churn — but also their ability to upsell. That’s super important, not just winning new logos in B2B software, but adding additional products, expanding your platform, cross-selling, and increasing usage. Negotiations and Contracts ROI: Return On Investment Return on investment is the monetary value of an investment in relation to its costs. A positive ROI means the investment brought in more than it cost, and a negative ROI means the opposite. ROI is usually displayed as a percentage, or as a monetary amount gained for every dollar spent. For example, this could be an ROI of $12 for every $1 spent. POC: Proof of Concept Proof of concept consists in validating an idea before going all in. The aim is to understand whether an idea for a product or service is worth further investment and effort. RFP/RFI: Request for Proposal/Information A request for proposal details a proposed project and its objectives, and invites service providers to bid to complete it. It speeds up the contractor selection process by giving you key information up front, such as professional services offered, deliverables, and costs. Technology CRM: Customer Relationship Management CRM is software that enables businesses to better track and manage customer relationships. It’s used to record and analyze interactions between a company and its clients.CRM systems enable businesses to build customer profiles that facilitate a better customer experience for users. API: Application Programming Interface Application programming interfaces are a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. They enable applications to interact and integrate without having to know how they’re implemented. CDP: Customer Data Platform A customer data platform is software that gathers customer data from multiple sources to build a single, coherent, complete view of each customer. This data includes behavioral data, transactional data, and demographic data. Security and Compliance SOC: Service Organization Control A service organization control report is a way to verify that an organization is following some industry-specific best practices before you begin working with that organization. They help instill trust in an organization, given they require a qualified third-party assessment by a certified public accountant. For many businesses, SOC 2 compliance is a requirement when considering a new SaaS provider. GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation GDPR is a legal framework that outlines the precautions companies must take when handling and managing personal information. It’s a data protection law implemented to give individuals more transparency over how data is collected and used by businesses. DPA: Data Processing Agreement A data processing agreement is an agreement between a company—the data controller—and a service provider—the data processor. It regulates any personal data processing conducted for business purposes.

[INST] The Ultimate SaaS Acronyms Cheat Sheet [/INST]

We spend so much time discussing metrics and concepts, that we sometimes forget that not everyone is well-versed in the language of SaaS. The same way there’s power to making data transparent, we believe making the language we use easier to understand helps everyone in the industry — from those who are just making their first steps, to the most experienced practitioners in the field. That’s why we are happy to share with you our brand new SaaS Acronyms Cheat Sheet. The Basics of SaaS Acronyms SaaS: Software as a Service Software as a Service — of course. SaaS tools are attractive to users because it allows them to easily access applications over the cloud. SaaS companies are attractive to investors because their subscription business model makes the revenue predictable. PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a cloud service delivery model where the provider delivers hardware and software tools to customers via the internet. PaaS is similar to SaaS, but differs in the portion of the technology that is kept in-house. With SaaS, the vendor manages all the hardware and software. With PaaS, the data storage and management functions are often kept in-house. IaaS (Integration as a Service) is the third of the ‘as a Service’, in which the customer only leases the hardware. The entire software stack is maintained in-house, such as the operating system, middleware, data, and more. KPI: Key Performance Indicator KPIs are how SaaS companies track progress. It’s a quantifiable measure of performance over a certain period of time, and enables companies to make smart business decisions about the direction of active projects. An example of a KPI would be revenue growth or retention rate. B2B & B2C: Business to Business and Business to Consumer B2B refers to businesses that sell products or services to other businesses. For example, ChartMogul is a B2B SaaS company. B2C refers to businesses that provide products or services directly to individuals, who are the end customers. For example, Apple, Meta, and Nike are examples of B2C companies. Finance and Reporting MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue Monthly Recurring Revenue measures the total repeatable revenue your company generates each month. It’s a crucial metric for subscription-based revenue models—of which SaaS is one of the most common. ARR: Annual Run Rate and Annual Recurring Revenue Annual Run Rate is a way of annualizing a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is done by taking the MRR and multiplying it by 12. ARR provides a holistic view of your business and helps decision-makers assess the success of the company in the long term. Annual Recurring Revenue on the other hand, is calculated by dividing the total contract value by the number of years. SaaS companies that run only on yearly and multi-year contracts use this Annual Recurring Revenue. CMRR: Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue, is a projection of MRR in the future. It considers any committed new business, expansion, reactivation revenue, or scheduled churn/contraction. You might also see it written as Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue. Really important to track CMRR as well as MRR to present the full value of your subscription base when valuing SaaS companies. Shane Greenan, ActivePipe LTV: Customer Lifetime Value Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is an estimate of the average gross revenue that a customer will generate before they churn (cancel). Customer Lifetime Value is useful when considering how much to spend on customer acquisition. As a general rule of thumb, LTV should be at least 3x higher than your customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost Customer Acquisition Cost refers to the cost associated with bringing in a new customer. This includes marketing spend, sales spend, and more—including the salaries of the team members involved. Reducing customer acquisition costs is key to ensuring growth is sustainable and affordable, and enables businesses to make changes to their acquisition efforts where necessary. ASP: Average Selling Price ASP is the average price paid by a new customer at the moment they first convert to a paid subscription. Any follow-up expansion or contraction of the account is ignored. ASP can vary dramatically month by month and gives you a good idea of how effective your sales team is at driving up new customer deal sizes. ACV: Annual Contract Value Annual Contract Value looks at the average value of contracts over a one year period. It’s your total contract value over the amount of years the contract is/has been active. BR: Burn Rate Burn Rate is the amount of money spent in a SaaS business over a certain period of time. This is usually looked at on a month-by-month basis. It includes all spending, such as team salaries, advertising, marketing, and all other business-related expenses. ARPA: Average Revenue Per Account The Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA), or Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), or Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC) are used interchangeably in the industry. It is a measure of the amount of money a single customer generates for a company. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue of a business in a given period by the (average) number of customers in that same period. Sales and Marketing ICP: Ideal Customer Profile The Ideal Customer Profile is a generalized description of the type of customer who gets the maximum value from your product, and who you want to win every time. You can use qualitative, quantitative, and predictive data to identify the traits and characteristics of your most profitable accounts, in order to actively target similar clients. MQL, SQL, PQL A marketing qualified lead is someone who has interacted with your brand via marketing channels in a way that indicates they could be interested in your product or services e.g. downloaded an ebook. The vast majority of MQLs won’t end up converting, and it’s up to the team to identify the promising leads. A sales qualified lead is a lead that’s engaged with the sales team and is ready to make a purchase. SQLs are leads that have gone beyond engaging with your content, and have decided to find out more about how they can take the next step. Product qualified leads are leads who have derived meaningful value using your product through a free trial or on a freemium basis. PQLs are the users that SaaS businesses try to switch from free to paying. CR: Conversion Rate Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate is the percentage of customers who start a trial and subsequently subscribe. Conversion rate is an essential metric for measuring your success at convincing potential customers to buy once they’ve tried your product/service. The higher the conversion rate, the more efficient your customer acquisition is. Customer Success SaaS Acronyms NDR and GDR: Net and Gross Dollar Retention Net Dollar Retention (NDR) or Net MRR Retention (NRR) measures the MRR retained in a given report interval. It takes into account all activities such as revenue gained from expansion and losses due to contraction, and churn within the interval. It tells you how integral your product/service is to your customers. For SaaS businesses, NRR should ideally exceed 100%. Gross Dollar Retention (GDR), or Gross MRR Retention (GRR), measures the percentage of MRR retained in a given report interval (excluding expansion). It takes into account losses due to contraction and churn within the interval. It gives you an insight into how well you retain revenue (without expansion) from existing subscribers. For SaaS businesses, GRR ideally exceeds 90%. We really like this metric because it encapsulates both the business’s ability to retain — so minimizing churn — but also their ability to upsell. That’s super important, not just winning new logos in B2B software, but adding additional products, expanding your platform, cross-selling, and increasing usage. Negotiations and Contracts ROI: Return On Investment Return on investment is the monetary value of an investment in relation to its costs. A positive ROI means the investment brought in more than it cost, and a negative ROI means the opposite. ROI is usually displayed as a percentage, or as a monetary amount gained for every dollar spent. For example, this could be an ROI of $12 for every $1 spent. POC: Proof of Concept Proof of concept consists in validating an idea before going all in. The aim is to understand whether an idea for a product or service is worth further investment and effort. RFP/RFI: Request for Proposal/Information A request for proposal details a proposed project and its objectives, and invites service providers to bid to complete it. It speeds up the contractor selection process by giving you key information up front, such as professional services offered, deliverables, and costs. Technology CRM: Customer Relationship Management CRM is software that enables businesses to better track and manage customer relationships. It’s used to record and analyze interactions between a company and its clients.CRM systems enable businesses to build customer profiles that facilitate a better customer experience for users. API: Application Programming Interface Application programming interfaces are a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. They enable applications to interact and integrate without having to know how they’re implemented. CDP: Customer Data Platform A customer data platform is software that gathers customer data from multiple sources to build a single, coherent, complete view of each customer. This data includes behavioral data, transactional data, and demographic data. Security and Compliance SOC: Service Organization Control A service organization control report is a way to verify that an organization is following some industry-specific best practices before you begin working with that organization. They help instill trust in an organization, given they require a qualified third-party assessment by a certified public accountant. For many businesses, SOC 2 compliance is a requirement when considering a new SaaS provider. GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation GDPR is a legal framework that outlines the precautions companies must take when handling and managing personal information. It’s a data protection law implemented to give individuals more transparency over how data is collected and used by businesses. DPA: Data Processing Agreement A data processing agreement is an agreement between a company—the data controller—and a service provider—the data processor. It regulates any personal data processing conducted for business purposes.

<sys> [INST] The Ultimate SaaS Acronyms Cheat Sheet [/INST] We spend so much time discussing metrics and concepts, that we sometimes forget that not everyone is well-versed in the language of SaaS. The same way there’s power to making data transparent, we believe making the language we use easier to understand helps everyone in the industry — from those who are just making their first steps, to the most experienced practitioners in the field. That’s why we are happy to share with you our brand new SaaS Acronyms Cheat Sheet. The Basics of SaaS Acronyms SaaS: Software as a Service Software as a Service — of course. SaaS tools are attractive to users because it allows them to easily access applications over the cloud. SaaS companies are attractive to investors because their subscription business model makes the revenue predictable. PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a cloud service delivery model where the provider delivers hardware and software tools to customers via the internet. PaaS is similar to SaaS, but differs in the portion of the technology that is kept in-house. With SaaS, the vendor manages all the hardware and software. With PaaS, the data storage and management functions are often kept in-house. IaaS (Integration as a Service) is the third of the ‘as a Service’, in which the customer only leases the hardware. The entire software stack is maintained in-house, such as the operating system, middleware, data, and more. KPI: Key Performance Indicator KPIs are how SaaS companies track progress. It’s a quantifiable measure of performance over a certain period of time, and enables companies to make smart business decisions about the direction of active projects. An example of a KPI would be revenue growth or retention rate. B2B & B2C: Business to Business and Business to Consumer B2B refers to businesses that sell products or services to other businesses. For example, ChartMogul is a B2B SaaS company. B2C refers to businesses that provide products or services directly to individuals, who are the end customers. For example, Apple, Meta, and Nike are examples of B2C companies. Finance and Reporting MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue Monthly Recurring Revenue measures the total repeatable revenue your company generates each month. It’s a crucial metric for subscription-based revenue models—of which SaaS is one of the most common. ARR: Annual Run Rate and Annual Recurring Revenue Annual Run Rate is a way of annualizing a company’s revenue run rate. In SaaS, this is done by taking the MRR and multiplying it by 12. ARR provides a holistic view of your business and helps decision-makers assess the success of the company in the long term. Annual Recurring Revenue on the other hand, is calculated by dividing the total contract value by the number of years. SaaS companies that run only on yearly and multi-year contracts use this Annual Recurring Revenue. CMRR: Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue, is a projection of MRR in the future. It considers any committed new business, expansion, reactivation revenue, or scheduled churn/contraction. You might also see it written as Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue. Really important to track CMRR as well as MRR to present the full value of your subscription base when valuing SaaS companies. Shane Greenan, ActivePipe LTV: Customer Lifetime Value Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is an estimate of the average gross revenue that a customer will generate before they churn (cancel). Customer Lifetime Value is useful when considering how much to spend on customer acquisition. As a general rule of thumb, LTV should be at least 3x higher than your customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost Customer Acquisition Cost refers to the cost associated with bringing in a new customer. This includes marketing spend, sales spend, and more—including the salaries of the team members involved. Reducing customer acquisition costs is key to ensuring growth is sustainable and affordable, and enables businesses to make changes to their acquisition efforts where necessary. ASP: Average Selling Price ASP is the average price paid by a new customer at the moment they first convert to a paid subscription. Any follow-up expansion or contraction of the account is ignored. ASP can vary dramatically month by month and gives you a good idea of how effective your sales team is at driving up new customer deal sizes. ACV: Annual Contract Value Annual Contract Value looks at the average value of contracts over a one year period. It’s your total contract value over the amount of years the contract is/has been active. BR: Burn Rate Burn Rate is the amount of money spent in a SaaS business over a certain period of time. This is usually looked at on a month-by-month basis. It includes all spending, such as team salaries, advertising, marketing, and all other business-related expenses. ARPA: Average Revenue Per Account The Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA), or Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), or Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC) are used interchangeably in the industry. It is a measure of the amount of money a single customer generates for a company. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue of a business in a given period by the (average) number of customers in that same period. Sales and Marketing ICP: Ideal Customer Profile The Ideal Customer Profile is a generalized description of the type of customer who gets the maximum value from your product, and who you want to win every time. You can use qualitative, quantitative, and predictive data to identify the traits and characteristics of your most profitable accounts, in order to actively target similar clients. MQL, SQL, PQL A marketing qualified lead is someone who has interacted with your brand via marketing channels in a way that indicates they could be interested in your product or services e.g. downloaded an ebook. The vast majority of MQLs won’t end up converting, and it’s up to the team to identify the promising leads. A sales qualified lead is a lead that’s engaged with the sales team and is ready to make a purchase. SQLs are leads that have gone beyond engaging with your content, and have decided to find out more about how they can take the next step. Product qualified leads are leads who have derived meaningful value using your product through a free trial or on a freemium basis. PQLs are the users that SaaS businesses try to switch from free to paying. CR: Conversion Rate Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate is the percentage of customers who start a trial and subsequently subscribe. Conversion rate is an essential metric for measuring your success at convincing potential customers to buy once they’ve tried your product/service. The higher the conversion rate, the more efficient your customer acquisition is. Customer Success SaaS Acronyms NDR and GDR: Net and Gross Dollar Retention Net Dollar Retention (NDR) or Net MRR Retention (NRR) measures the MRR retained in a given report interval. It takes into account all activities such as revenue gained from expansion and losses due to contraction, and churn within the interval. It tells you how integral your product/service is to your customers. For SaaS businesses, NRR should ideally exceed 100%. Gross Dollar Retention (GDR), or Gross MRR Retention (GRR), measures the percentage of MRR retained in a given report interval (excluding expansion). It takes into account losses due to contraction and churn within the interval. It gives you an insight into how well you retain revenue (without expansion) from existing subscribers. For SaaS businesses, GRR ideally exceeds 90%. We really like this metric because it encapsulates both the business’s ability to retain — so minimizing churn — but also their ability to upsell. That’s super important, not just winning new logos in B2B software, but adding additional products, expanding your platform, cross-selling, and increasing usage. Negotiations and Contracts ROI: Return On Investment Return on investment is the monetary value of an investment in relation to its costs. A positive ROI means the investment brought in more than it cost, and a negative ROI means the opposite. ROI is usually displayed as a percentage, or as a monetary amount gained for every dollar spent. For example, this could be an ROI of $12 for every $1 spent. POC: Proof of Concept Proof of concept consists in validating an idea before going all in. The aim is to understand whether an idea for a product or service is worth further investment and effort. RFP/RFI: Request for Proposal/Information A request for proposal details a proposed project and its objectives, and invites service providers to bid to complete it. It speeds up the contractor selection process by giving you key information up front, such as professional services offered, deliverables, and costs. Technology CRM: Customer Relationship Management CRM is software that enables businesses to better track and manage customer relationships. It’s used to record and analyze interactions between a company and its clients.CRM systems enable businesses to build customer profiles that facilitate a better customer experience for users. API: Application Programming Interface Application programming interfaces are a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. They enable applications to interact and integrate without having to know how they’re implemented. CDP: Customer Data Platform A customer data platform is software that gathers customer data from multiple sources to build a single, coherent, complete view of each customer. This data includes behavioral data, transactional data, and demographic data. Security and Compliance SOC: Service Organization Control A service organization control report is a way to verify that an organization is following some industry-specific best practices before you begin working with that organization. They help instill trust in an organization, given they require a qualified third-party assessment by a certified public accountant. For many businesses, SOC 2 compliance is a requirement when considering a new SaaS provider. GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation GDPR is a legal framework that outlines the precautions companies must take when handling and managing personal information. It’s a data protection law implemented to give individuals more transparency over how data is collected and used by businesses. DPA: Data Processing Agreement A data processing agreement is an agreement between a company—the data controller—and a service provider—the data processor. It regulates any personal data processing conducted for business purposes. </sys

How Ulysses pulled off a controversial pivot to subscription. “For us as developers, it’s important that we have the freedom to experiment and try things out. Recurring payments give us planning security and enable deep thought. We are less rushed to release features, and we are more inclined to iterate on them, if we do so on a sound financial basis.” When Max Seelemann and his team at Ulyssess announced their pivot to a subscription model in August 2017, they knew it would cause some controversy among users and the wider tech industry. In fact, Max wanted to create a wave in the industry and the operation was poised to make the most of any resulting publicity. Sitting down with Max at the team’s headquarters in Leipzig, Germany, it would be easy for him to look back on the period and say everything went as planned — there were certainly some surprises — but it’s hard to argue that shifting Ulysses to a subscription-based product wasn’t a big success overall. Topics covered This chat with Max is a must listen for anyone evaluating the subscription model for their own business. In this conversation, we discuss: The carefully planned process of announcing subscriptions, and the following media buzz How Max and his team finally made the decision to go ahead with the move The economics of perpetual licensing vs. subscriptions Some unexpected impact from the move Finding optimal pricing for the subscription plans How the team plans to measure success in the subscription world Listen to the episode I’d like to extend a huge thanks to Max and the Ulysses team for hosting me at their beautiful office in Leipzig! (and for letting me drool over that 2016 Apple Design Award trophy…)

[INST] How Ulysses pulled off a controversial pivot to subscription [/INST]

“For us as developers, it’s important that we have the freedom to experiment and try things out. Recurring payments give us planning security and enable deep thought. We are less rushed to release features, and we are more inclined to iterate on them, if we do so on a sound financial basis.” When Max Seelemann and his team at Ulyssess announced their pivot to a subscription model in August 2017, they knew it would cause some controversy among users and the wider tech industry. In fact, Max wanted to create a wave in the industry and the operation was poised to make the most of any resulting publicity. Sitting down with Max at the team’s headquarters in Leipzig, Germany, it would be easy for him to look back on the period and say everything went as planned — there were certainly some surprises — but it’s hard to argue that shifting Ulysses to a subscription-based product wasn’t a big success overall. Topics covered This chat with Max is a must listen for anyone evaluating the subscription model for their own business. In this conversation, we discuss: The carefully planned process of announcing subscriptions, and the following media buzz How Max and his team finally made the decision to go ahead with the move The economics of perpetual licensing vs. subscriptions Some unexpected impact from the move Finding optimal pricing for the subscription plans How the team plans to measure success in the subscription world Listen to the episode I’d like to extend a huge thanks to Max and the Ulysses team for hosting me at their beautiful office in Leipzig! (and for letting me drool over that 2016 Apple Design Award trophy…)

<sys> [INST] How Ulysses pulled off a controversial pivot to subscription [/INST] “For us as developers, it’s important that we have the freedom to experiment and try things out. Recurring payments give us planning security and enable deep thought. We are less rushed to release features, and we are more inclined to iterate on them, if we do so on a sound financial basis.” When Max Seelemann and his team at Ulyssess announced their pivot to a subscription model in August 2017, they knew it would cause some controversy among users and the wider tech industry. In fact, Max wanted to create a wave in the industry and the operation was poised to make the most of any resulting publicity. Sitting down with Max at the team’s headquarters in Leipzig, Germany, it would be easy for him to look back on the period and say everything went as planned — there were certainly some surprises — but it’s hard to argue that shifting Ulysses to a subscription-based product wasn’t a big success overall. Topics covered This chat with Max is a must listen for anyone evaluating the subscription model for their own business. In this conversation, we discuss: The carefully planned process of announcing subscriptions, and the following media buzz How Max and his team finally made the decision to go ahead with the move The economics of perpetual licensing vs. subscriptions Some unexpected impact from the move Finding optimal pricing for the subscription plans How the team plans to measure success in the subscription world Listen to the episode I’d like to extend a huge thanks to Max and the Ulysses team for hosting me at their beautiful office in Leipzig! (and for letting me drool over that 2016 Apple Design Award trophy…) </sys

SaaS Q&A: How do you deal with Happy Churn?. View the original question here on Quora: How do you deal with Happy Churn in SaaS (the user finished using your product for the purpose they intended)? Happy Churn is an interesting one, and is in some ways a double-edged sword. Here’s our definition from The Ultimate SaaS Churn Rate Cheat Sheet: Happy churn: A subset of pro-active churn, happy churners are common in certain types of businesses. These are customers who finished using your product for their campaign (or similar short term use case), so cancel with a positive experience. One way to identify happy churners is to look at what % of cancelled accounts reactivate at a later date – or to simply ask your customers why they cancelled. On the one hand, it’s great that the customer has had a good experience with your product, and received some value from it. You’re clearly doing a good job at acquiring them, onboarding them, and guiding them to the point of value. Conversely, the fact that they no longer need your service suggests some flaws with the product on a more fundamental level. They don’t need it any more. And when all is said and done, churn is still… well, churn. They’re no longer paying you. How to identify Happy Churn Interview customers BEFORE they cancel, and know ahead of time if they’re continuing to see value from the product. Aim to know about every single case of churn by the time it happens. In turn, you’ll also know exactly why it happens. Add a tiny survey on the cancel page, so you can catch a reason for those customers whom you haven’t spoken to. Look at your reactivation MRR (see below). What causes Happy Churn? There are a few common product traits that lend themselves to a high rate of Happy Churn: Seasonal products These is more common than you’d think. If the very nature of your business is isolated to a specific part of the year or a point in a business’s lifecycle, you can expect that people only need your product at this time. Examples: A SaaS tool for managing your tax returns (only useful when it’s tax return time). HRM tool for managing hiring (only useful when you’re actually hiring). An events tool for handling event publicity & ticketing (only useful when you’re putting on an event). ‘One-shot’ products This is where the product really only needs to be used once to receive all of its value. After that, you just don’t have a need for it any more. In this case, it’s not really a suitable fit for a SaaS model in the first place. Examples: A tool for finding out your credit score. There’s no predictable pattern for when you’d need this after the first use (therefore it’s not even seasonal). A tool for managing and distributing wedding photos. Most people don’t plan to get married more than once in their life… A tool for finding and leasing enterprise office space. A narrow value band If your product caters to a highly specific target customer and use case combination, you could find that customers, once signed up, may fall outside of that narrow value band very easily. When this happens, they’ll find that they received value from your product but it’s just not really relevant to them any more. To combat this, you’d need to change your product, designing for a slightly wider set of use cases. Example: A weight-loss/health app which doesn’t offer any more value after you’ve lost weight. (Hint: In this case you could quite easily expand the use case and target audience by positioning it more as a general health & fitness app.) The flip side: High Reactivation MRR One characteristic that goes hand-in-hand with high Happy Churn is increased Reactivation MRR. This is especially prominent with seasonal businesses, when the customer comes back (reactivates) the next time they need your product. Make sure you identify this correctly in your analytics – you don’t want to attribute reactivation MRR to new business MRR. So how do you deal with Happy Churn? I interviewed Nikos, CEO of Workable (a SaaS HRM solution) about exactly this. As an HRM solution often does, they see a large proportion of Happy Churn and Reactivation MRR. When asked “so how do you tackle that?”, Nikos’ take on it was that it’s not such a huge problem when you’re growing so quickly. Having said that, they are looking at ways to enhance the product to be less seasonal in nature. You can listen to the entire interview with Nikos here: If significantly changing your product is not something you’re able to do right now, there are a number of things you can do to make sure your Happy Churn doesn’t turn into ‘Churn Churn’: Keep talking. Don’t close down dialog with customers who cancel. Make sure it’s YOUR solution they think of when they need it again. Ask what would make them stick around. Perhaps having a very cheap plan with some ongoing value is better than having them cancel altogether (you’re then just dealing with downgrade MRR). Move to an annual plan only. I’ve seen this as a common strategy against the problems with seasonal SaaS products. Just make them buy a year up-front – this way, there’s really no option to churn each time they don’t need your product for a while. Don’t forget to go and download our Churn Rate Cheat Sheet, which has a wealth of information on classifying churn, as well as other handy references.

[INST] SaaS Q&A: How do you deal with Happy Churn? [/INST]

View the original question here on Quora: How do you deal with Happy Churn in SaaS (the user finished using your product for the purpose they intended)? Happy Churn is an interesting one, and is in some ways a double-edged sword. Here’s our definition from The Ultimate SaaS Churn Rate Cheat Sheet: Happy churn: A subset of pro-active churn, happy churners are common in certain types of businesses. These are customers who finished using your product for their campaign (or similar short term use case), so cancel with a positive experience. One way to identify happy churners is to look at what % of cancelled accounts reactivate at a later date – or to simply ask your customers why they cancelled. On the one hand, it’s great that the customer has had a good experience with your product, and received some value from it. You’re clearly doing a good job at acquiring them, onboarding them, and guiding them to the point of value. Conversely, the fact that they no longer need your service suggests some flaws with the product on a more fundamental level. They don’t need it any more. And when all is said and done, churn is still… well, churn. They’re no longer paying you. How to identify Happy Churn Interview customers BEFORE they cancel, and know ahead of time if they’re continuing to see value from the product. Aim to know about every single case of churn by the time it happens. In turn, you’ll also know exactly why it happens. Add a tiny survey on the cancel page, so you can catch a reason for those customers whom you haven’t spoken to. Look at your reactivation MRR (see below). What causes Happy Churn? There are a few common product traits that lend themselves to a high rate of Happy Churn: Seasonal products These is more common than you’d think. If the very nature of your business is isolated to a specific part of the year or a point in a business’s lifecycle, you can expect that people only need your product at this time. Examples: A SaaS tool for managing your tax returns (only useful when it’s tax return time). HRM tool for managing hiring (only useful when you’re actually hiring). An events tool for handling event publicity & ticketing (only useful when you’re putting on an event). ‘One-shot’ products This is where the product really only needs to be used once to receive all of its value. After that, you just don’t have a need for it any more. In this case, it’s not really a suitable fit for a SaaS model in the first place. Examples: A tool for finding out your credit score. There’s no predictable pattern for when you’d need this after the first use (therefore it’s not even seasonal). A tool for managing and distributing wedding photos. Most people don’t plan to get married more than once in their life… A tool for finding and leasing enterprise office space. A narrow value band If your product caters to a highly specific target customer and use case combination, you could find that customers, once signed up, may fall outside of that narrow value band very easily. When this happens, they’ll find that they received value from your product but it’s just not really relevant to them any more. To combat this, you’d need to change your product, designing for a slightly wider set of use cases. Example: A weight-loss/health app which doesn’t offer any more value after you’ve lost weight. (Hint: In this case you could quite easily expand the use case and target audience by positioning it more as a general health & fitness app.) The flip side: High Reactivation MRR One characteristic that goes hand-in-hand with high Happy Churn is increased Reactivation MRR. This is especially prominent with seasonal businesses, when the customer comes back (reactivates) the next time they need your product. Make sure you identify this correctly in your analytics – you don’t want to attribute reactivation MRR to new business MRR. So how do you deal with Happy Churn? I interviewed Nikos, CEO of Workable (a SaaS HRM solution) about exactly this. As an HRM solution often does, they see a large proportion of Happy Churn and Reactivation MRR. When asked “so how do you tackle that?”, Nikos’ take on it was that it’s not such a huge problem when you’re growing so quickly. Having said that, they are looking at ways to enhance the product to be less seasonal in nature. You can listen to the entire interview with Nikos here: If significantly changing your product is not something you’re able to do right now, there are a number of things you can do to make sure your Happy Churn doesn’t turn into ‘Churn Churn’: Keep talking. Don’t close down dialog with customers who cancel. Make sure it’s YOUR solution they think of when they need it again. Ask what would make them stick around. Perhaps having a very cheap plan with some ongoing value is better than having them cancel altogether (you’re then just dealing with downgrade MRR). Move to an annual plan only. I’ve seen this as a common strategy against the problems with seasonal SaaS products. Just make them buy a year up-front – this way, there’s really no option to churn each time they don’t need your product for a while. Don’t forget to go and download our Churn Rate Cheat Sheet, which has a wealth of information on classifying churn, as well as other handy references.

<sys> [INST] SaaS Q&A: How do you deal with Happy Churn? [/INST] View the original question here on Quora: How do you deal with Happy Churn in SaaS (the user finished using your product for the purpose they intended)? Happy Churn is an interesting one, and is in some ways a double-edged sword. Here’s our definition from The Ultimate SaaS Churn Rate Cheat Sheet: Happy churn: A subset of pro-active churn, happy churners are common in certain types of businesses. These are customers who finished using your product for their campaign (or similar short term use case), so cancel with a positive experience. One way to identify happy churners is to look at what % of cancelled accounts reactivate at a later date – or to simply ask your customers why they cancelled. On the one hand, it’s great that the customer has had a good experience with your product, and received some value from it. You’re clearly doing a good job at acquiring them, onboarding them, and guiding them to the point of value. Conversely, the fact that they no longer need your service suggests some flaws with the product on a more fundamental level. They don’t need it any more. And when all is said and done, churn is still… well, churn. They’re no longer paying you. How to identify Happy Churn Interview customers BEFORE they cancel, and know ahead of time if they’re continuing to see value from the product. Aim to know about every single case of churn by the time it happens. In turn, you’ll also know exactly why it happens. Add a tiny survey on the cancel page, so you can catch a reason for those customers whom you haven’t spoken to. Look at your reactivation MRR (see below). What causes Happy Churn? There are a few common product traits that lend themselves to a high rate of Happy Churn: Seasonal products These is more common than you’d think. If the very nature of your business is isolated to a specific part of the year or a point in a business’s lifecycle, you can expect that people only need your product at this time. Examples: A SaaS tool for managing your tax returns (only useful when it’s tax return time). HRM tool for managing hiring (only useful when you’re actually hiring). An events tool for handling event publicity & ticketing (only useful when you’re putting on an event). ‘One-shot’ products This is where the product really only needs to be used once to receive all of its value. After that, you just don’t have a need for it any more. In this case, it’s not really a suitable fit for a SaaS model in the first place. Examples: A tool for finding out your credit score. There’s no predictable pattern for when you’d need this after the first use (therefore it’s not even seasonal). A tool for managing and distributing wedding photos. Most people don’t plan to get married more than once in their life… A tool for finding and leasing enterprise office space. A narrow value band If your product caters to a highly specific target customer and use case combination, you could find that customers, once signed up, may fall outside of that narrow value band very easily. When this happens, they’ll find that they received value from your product but it’s just not really relevant to them any more. To combat this, you’d need to change your product, designing for a slightly wider set of use cases. Example: A weight-loss/health app which doesn’t offer any more value after you’ve lost weight. (Hint: In this case you could quite easily expand the use case and target audience by positioning it more as a general health & fitness app.) The flip side: High Reactivation MRR One characteristic that goes hand-in-hand with high Happy Churn is increased Reactivation MRR. This is especially prominent with seasonal businesses, when the customer comes back (reactivates) the next time they need your product. Make sure you identify this correctly in your analytics – you don’t want to attribute reactivation MRR to new business MRR. So how do you deal with Happy Churn? I interviewed Nikos, CEO of Workable (a SaaS HRM solution) about exactly this. As an HRM solution often does, they see a large proportion of Happy Churn and Reactivation MRR. When asked “so how do you tackle that?”, Nikos’ take on it was that it’s not such a huge problem when you’re growing so quickly. Having said that, they are looking at ways to enhance the product to be less seasonal in nature. You can listen to the entire interview with Nikos here: If significantly changing your product is not something you’re able to do right now, there are a number of things you can do to make sure your Happy Churn doesn’t turn into ‘Churn Churn’: Keep talking. Don’t close down dialog with customers who cancel. Make sure it’s YOUR solution they think of when they need it again. Ask what would make them stick around. Perhaps having a very cheap plan with some ongoing value is better than having them cancel altogether (you’re then just dealing with downgrade MRR). Move to an annual plan only. I’ve seen this as a common strategy against the problems with seasonal SaaS products. Just make them buy a year up-front – this way, there’s really no option to churn each time they don’t need your product for a while. Don’t forget to go and download our Churn Rate Cheat Sheet, which has a wealth of information on classifying churn, as well as other handy references. </sys

Subscriptions rule our world; Amazon wants to rule our subscriptions. Amazon is making waves in the business of consumer subscriptions, and we should all take notice. The launch of Subscribe With Amazon (SWA) is poised to change the way consumers discover, onboard and manage subscription-based services — from mobile apps to video on demand (VOD) platforms, newspapers and magazines. But to understand why SWA is such a significant launch, we first need to understand the problems with consumer subscriptions. We actually covered this topic in “How subscriptions conquered our world” some months back. In summary, the promise of subscription services is that they give more control to consumers. Lower upfront commitment puts a focus on delivering ongoing customer value across the lifetime of their use of the product. The reality, however, is often different. With the rapidly growing number of subscription products, certain aspects of the often-hyped “everything-as-a-service” lifestyle are becoming increasingly difficult: Discovery Where do I find the best services to subscribe to? While the mobile app stores are optimised for app discovery and eCommerce does a great job of surfacing the best products to impulsively buy next, where do I go to find the latest and greatest subscriptions? Currently, it’s likely to be word of mouth or some form of internet marketing. But I can’t compare products all in one place, or see reviews to understand which meditation app is most suited to my needs, for example. Comparing and evaluating different subscription products often falls back to this. Payments Even with consumer billing products like PayPal, Apple Pay et al., payments are a pain for all involved. With no aggregated marketplace to buy subscriptions, I’m left entering my credit card details time after time on different websites and trusting them to handle my transaction securely. Additionally, as it’s subscription billing we’re talking about, we’re trusting these platforms to hold and continue to bill my card on an ongoing basis. Not to mention when my card expires, I have to go back to all these sites and update my card details! The problem here is clear, and painful. Management As with payments, the problem of subscription management increases with the number of subscriptions in my life. How many times have you checked your bank statement, only to realise you’ve been passively paying for a service for several months that you weren’t even using? Proof of the reality of this problem exists in the form of several “subscription management” apps now on the market. Some of these apps connect to your bank account and scan for subscription payments for your to review, giving you a simplified list. But they can’t go any further than telling you what you’re currently subscribed to — and leaving it to you to figure out the job of dealing with them. As Annie wrote in How subscriptions conquered our world, the increased control of a subscription lifestyle is at best, flawed, and quite possibly an illusion. Enter Amazon — probably one of the only businesses in a position to address all of these problems in one gut-punch of an announcement. Why Amazon is best-positioned to save us from subscription hell As you might guess, the problems listed above are not easily solved. Other startups have tried (and failed) to make any headway to date. So what were they missing? A healthy platform ecosystem: Adding partners to such a platform, with the functionality to manage billing and product features requires deep integration with each partner. As I recently wrote in How to turn a product into a platform, the sheer effort required to kick-start and nurture a healthy ecosystem with good support for developers is huge. A strong subscription offering of their own: Amazon’s “Retail subscription services” segment — dominated by Amazon Prime — grew to nearly $2B last quarter. Clearly the company understands the power of the recurring revenue model. Amazon Prime is one of the biggest consumer subscriptions on the market. Partnerships: Whoever wants to succeeds with this solution needs the power and leverage to bring onboard enough of the services on the market to make the platform worthwhile. A subscription management platform with support for a tiny subset of the subscriptions I use is really no use to me. To become a vendor on such a platform means giving up a great deal of control, particularly for management features. This is a product which makes it far easier for customers to cancel (churn). So in a world where many services require you to jump through a series of confusing dark patterns to even get to the cancel screen, how do you think that deal sounds to them? Amazon ticks all of the boxes here: They have pre-existing relationships with many vendors. They’re big enough to hit the required partner coverage for the product to be valuable for users. They have a big enough market share such that the benefits of partnering with them (access to new customers) outweigh the downsides (giving up control). Amazon’s offering Subscribe With Amazon (still not sure about the name…) is a full-featured marketplace for consumers to discover, sign up for and manage subscriptions to different services. It’s comprised of: Subscription marketplace (discovery) Yep, it’s an app store. Regular users of Amazon.com won’t be surprised here. The storefront for Subscribe With Amazon relies on the tried-and-tested visual framework Amazon has optimized over recent years. Brand partnerships The launch of Subscribe With Amazon includes a number of existing popular subscriptions, such as: Dropbox The Wall Street Journal The New Yorker The New York Times Disney Story Central Sling TV Headspace Jukely Subscription management Amazon introduces a new section called Your Membership & Subscriptions under the Your Account menu. Mine looks a little empty right now: Your active subscriptions will show up here, giving you the option to cancel / upgrade / downgrade etc. Although it seems incredibly simple, this part of the release is key: For the first time, users are being given a single place to view and manage the subscriptions in their life. (Yes, arguably Apple has done this with the App Store, but it’s horrible to access and vendors are not yet making use of the recently-introduced changes to subscription support. Vendor signup While the launch includes a set of pre-selected vendors, Amazon is clearly pushing for a reasonably open signup for new vendors, with their “Sell a subscription” call to action, and the promise to “Reach millions of highly qualified Amazon shoppers.” Amazon’s SWA Seller Integration Guide (PDF) is a good starting point when it comes to the detailed technical integration with the store. Vendors have the opportunity to: Customize the design for their subscription page on Amazon Define their pricing, including support for different tiers Offer a free trial through the page Set an introductory price for the subscription Promote their subscription through the usual Amazon marketing tools And here’s the revenue share, which is inline with Apple’s new App Store subscription model: “For a customer’s first year as a subscriber, you receive 70% of each transactional amount.” “After a subscriber’s first year, your revenue increases to 85% of each transactional amount.” Why should we care about Subscribe With Amazon? In many ways, Subscribe With Amazon is a fairly typical display of platform engineering from a company who’s speciality is building platforms. It bares many of the hallmarks present in the launch of other Amazon platforms like Alexa (and the Amazon Echo product) which was launched in 2015 — namely a focus on quantity through “opening the flood gates” to developers. As a result of this, Amazon’s app stores have a problem with low quality, “spammy” or even malicious apps, which they combat through improved discovery and personal recommendations. This is a very different approach to Apple, which focuses on curation and a heavy vetting process throughout App Store submissions. So if Amazon’s existing platform launches are anything to go by, we should expect an aggressive and open-armed push for vendor adoption on the Subscribe With Amazon store. The success of the platform relies on a healthy selection of popular services, and while some will inevitably hold out, Amazon is well-placed to hit a critical mass. So is this good for consumers? Well, on the surface, yes. Giving people a single place to view and manage the subscriptions in their life is a compelling reason — as well as the ability to discover new and useful services on the platform. Of course, the flip side of this is that while you’re gaining control over your subscriptions, you’re giving up a greater amount of control to the all-encompassing Amazon eCommerce platform. Whether this leads to decreased competition, increased prices or anti-competitive behavior down the road remains to be seen.

[INST] Subscriptions rule our world; Amazon wants to rule our subscriptions [/INST]

Amazon is making waves in the business of consumer subscriptions, and we should all take notice. The launch of Subscribe With Amazon (SWA) is poised to change the way consumers discover, onboard and manage subscription-based services — from mobile apps to video on demand (VOD) platforms, newspapers and magazines. But to understand why SWA is such a significant launch, we first need to understand the problems with consumer subscriptions. We actually covered this topic in “How subscriptions conquered our world” some months back. In summary, the promise of subscription services is that they give more control to consumers. Lower upfront commitment puts a focus on delivering ongoing customer value across the lifetime of their use of the product. The reality, however, is often different. With the rapidly growing number of subscription products, certain aspects of the often-hyped “everything-as-a-service” lifestyle are becoming increasingly difficult: Discovery Where do I find the best services to subscribe to? While the mobile app stores are optimised for app discovery and eCommerce does a great job of surfacing the best products to impulsively buy next, where do I go to find the latest and greatest subscriptions? Currently, it’s likely to be word of mouth or some form of internet marketing. But I can’t compare products all in one place, or see reviews to understand which meditation app is most suited to my needs, for example. Comparing and evaluating different subscription products often falls back to this. Payments Even with consumer billing products like PayPal, Apple Pay et al., payments are a pain for all involved. With no aggregated marketplace to buy subscriptions, I’m left entering my credit card details time after time on different websites and trusting them to handle my transaction securely. Additionally, as it’s subscription billing we’re talking about, we’re trusting these platforms to hold and continue to bill my card on an ongoing basis. Not to mention when my card expires, I have to go back to all these sites and update my card details! The problem here is clear, and painful. Management As with payments, the problem of subscription management increases with the number of subscriptions in my life. How many times have you checked your bank statement, only to realise you’ve been passively paying for a service for several months that you weren’t even using? Proof of the reality of this problem exists in the form of several “subscription management” apps now on the market. Some of these apps connect to your bank account and scan for subscription payments for your to review, giving you a simplified list. But they can’t go any further than telling you what you’re currently subscribed to — and leaving it to you to figure out the job of dealing with them. As Annie wrote in How subscriptions conquered our world, the increased control of a subscription lifestyle is at best, flawed, and quite possibly an illusion. Enter Amazon — probably one of the only businesses in a position to address all of these problems in one gut-punch of an announcement. Why Amazon is best-positioned to save us from subscription hell As you might guess, the problems listed above are not easily solved. Other startups have tried (and failed) to make any headway to date. So what were they missing? A healthy platform ecosystem: Adding partners to such a platform, with the functionality to manage billing and product features requires deep integration with each partner. As I recently wrote in How to turn a product into a platform, the sheer effort required to kick-start and nurture a healthy ecosystem with good support for developers is huge. A strong subscription offering of their own: Amazon’s “Retail subscription services” segment — dominated by Amazon Prime — grew to nearly $2B last quarter. Clearly the company understands the power of the recurring revenue model. Amazon Prime is one of the biggest consumer subscriptions on the market. Partnerships: Whoever wants to succeeds with this solution needs the power and leverage to bring onboard enough of the services on the market to make the platform worthwhile. A subscription management platform with support for a tiny subset of the subscriptions I use is really no use to me. To become a vendor on such a platform means giving up a great deal of control, particularly for management features. This is a product which makes it far easier for customers to cancel (churn). So in a world where many services require you to jump through a series of confusing dark patterns to even get to the cancel screen, how do you think that deal sounds to them? Amazon ticks all of the boxes here: They have pre-existing relationships with many vendors. They’re big enough to hit the required partner coverage for the product to be valuable for users. They have a big enough market share such that the benefits of partnering with them (access to new customers) outweigh the downsides (giving up control). Amazon’s offering Subscribe With Amazon (still not sure about the name…) is a full-featured marketplace for consumers to discover, sign up for and manage subscriptions to different services. It’s comprised of: Subscription marketplace (discovery) Yep, it’s an app store. Regular users of Amazon.com won’t be surprised here. The storefront for Subscribe With Amazon relies on the tried-and-tested visual framework Amazon has optimized over recent years. Brand partnerships The launch of Subscribe With Amazon includes a number of existing popular subscriptions, such as: Dropbox The Wall Street Journal The New Yorker The New York Times Disney Story Central Sling TV Headspace Jukely Subscription management Amazon introduces a new section called Your Membership & Subscriptions under the Your Account menu. Mine looks a little empty right now: Your active subscriptions will show up here, giving you the option to cancel / upgrade / downgrade etc. Although it seems incredibly simple, this part of the release is key: For the first time, users are being given a single place to view and manage the subscriptions in their life. (Yes, arguably Apple has done this with the App Store, but it’s horrible to access and vendors are not yet making use of the recently-introduced changes to subscription support. Vendor signup While the launch includes a set of pre-selected vendors, Amazon is clearly pushing for a reasonably open signup for new vendors, with their “Sell a subscription” call to action, and the promise to “Reach millions of highly qualified Amazon shoppers.” Amazon’s SWA Seller Integration Guide (PDF) is a good starting point when it comes to the detailed technical integration with the store. Vendors have the opportunity to: Customize the design for their subscription page on Amazon Define their pricing, including support for different tiers Offer a free trial through the page Set an introductory price for the subscription Promote their subscription through the usual Amazon marketing tools And here’s the revenue share, which is inline with Apple’s new App Store subscription model: “For a customer’s first year as a subscriber, you receive 70% of each transactional amount.” “After a subscriber’s first year, your revenue increases to 85% of each transactional amount.” Why should we care about Subscribe With Amazon? In many ways, Subscribe With Amazon is a fairly typical display of platform engineering from a company who’s speciality is building platforms. It bares many of the hallmarks present in the launch of other Amazon platforms like Alexa (and the Amazon Echo product) which was launched in 2015 — namely a focus on quantity through “opening the flood gates” to developers. As a result of this, Amazon’s app stores have a problem with low quality, “spammy” or even malicious apps, which they combat through improved discovery and personal recommendations. This is a very different approach to Apple, which focuses on curation and a heavy vetting process throughout App Store submissions. So if Amazon’s existing platform launches are anything to go by, we should expect an aggressive and open-armed push for vendor adoption on the Subscribe With Amazon store. The success of the platform relies on a healthy selection of popular services, and while some will inevitably hold out, Amazon is well-placed to hit a critical mass. So is this good for consumers? Well, on the surface, yes. Giving people a single place to view and manage the subscriptions in their life is a compelling reason — as well as the ability to discover new and useful services on the platform. Of course, the flip side of this is that while you’re gaining control over your subscriptions, you’re giving up a greater amount of control to the all-encompassing Amazon eCommerce platform. Whether this leads to decreased competition, increased prices or anti-competitive behavior down the road remains to be seen.

<sys> [INST] Subscriptions rule our world; Amazon wants to rule our subscriptions [/INST] Amazon is making waves in the business of consumer subscriptions, and we should all take notice. The launch of Subscribe With Amazon (SWA) is poised to change the way consumers discover, onboard and manage subscription-based services — from mobile apps to video on demand (VOD) platforms, newspapers and magazines. But to understand why SWA is such a significant launch, we first need to understand the problems with consumer subscriptions. We actually covered this topic in “How subscriptions conquered our world” some months back. In summary, the promise of subscription services is that they give more control to consumers. Lower upfront commitment puts a focus on delivering ongoing customer value across the lifetime of their use of the product. The reality, however, is often different. With the rapidly growing number of subscription products, certain aspects of the often-hyped “everything-as-a-service” lifestyle are becoming increasingly difficult: Discovery Where do I find the best services to subscribe to? While the mobile app stores are optimised for app discovery and eCommerce does a great job of surfacing the best products to impulsively buy next, where do I go to find the latest and greatest subscriptions? Currently, it’s likely to be word of mouth or some form of internet marketing. But I can’t compare products all in one place, or see reviews to understand which meditation app is most suited to my needs, for example. Comparing and evaluating different subscription products often falls back to this. Payments Even with consumer billing products like PayPal, Apple Pay et al., payments are a pain for all involved. With no aggregated marketplace to buy subscriptions, I’m left entering my credit card details time after time on different websites and trusting them to handle my transaction securely. Additionally, as it’s subscription billing we’re talking about, we’re trusting these platforms to hold and continue to bill my card on an ongoing basis. Not to mention when my card expires, I have to go back to all these sites and update my card details! The problem here is clear, and painful. Management As with payments, the problem of subscription management increases with the number of subscriptions in my life. How many times have you checked your bank statement, only to realise you’ve been passively paying for a service for several months that you weren’t even using? Proof of the reality of this problem exists in the form of several “subscription management” apps now on the market. Some of these apps connect to your bank account and scan for subscription payments for your to review, giving you a simplified list. But they can’t go any further than telling you what you’re currently subscribed to — and leaving it to you to figure out the job of dealing with them. As Annie wrote in How subscriptions conquered our world, the increased control of a subscription lifestyle is at best, flawed, and quite possibly an illusion. Enter Amazon — probably one of the only businesses in a position to address all of these problems in one gut-punch of an announcement. Why Amazon is best-positioned to save us from subscription hell As you might guess, the problems listed above are not easily solved. Other startups have tried (and failed) to make any headway to date. So what were they missing? A healthy platform ecosystem: Adding partners to such a platform, with the functionality to manage billing and product features requires deep integration with each partner. As I recently wrote in How to turn a product into a platform, the sheer effort required to kick-start and nurture a healthy ecosystem with good support for developers is huge. A strong subscription offering of their own: Amazon’s “Retail subscription services” segment — dominated by Amazon Prime — grew to nearly $2B last quarter. Clearly the company understands the power of the recurring revenue model. Amazon Prime is one of the biggest consumer subscriptions on the market. Partnerships: Whoever wants to succeeds with this solution needs the power and leverage to bring onboard enough of the services on the market to make the platform worthwhile. A subscription management platform with support for a tiny subset of the subscriptions I use is really no use to me. To become a vendor on such a platform means giving up a great deal of control, particularly for management features. This is a product which makes it far easier for customers to cancel (churn). So in a world where many services require you to jump through a series of confusing dark patterns to even get to the cancel screen, how do you think that deal sounds to them? Amazon ticks all of the boxes here: They have pre-existing relationships with many vendors. They’re big enough to hit the required partner coverage for the product to be valuable for users. They have a big enough market share such that the benefits of partnering with them (access to new customers) outweigh the downsides (giving up control). Amazon’s offering Subscribe With Amazon (still not sure about the name…) is a full-featured marketplace for consumers to discover, sign up for and manage subscriptions to different services. It’s comprised of: Subscription marketplace (discovery) Yep, it’s an app store. Regular users of Amazon.com won’t be surprised here. The storefront for Subscribe With Amazon relies on the tried-and-tested visual framework Amazon has optimized over recent years. Brand partnerships The launch of Subscribe With Amazon includes a number of existing popular subscriptions, such as: Dropbox The Wall Street Journal The New Yorker The New York Times Disney Story Central Sling TV Headspace Jukely Subscription management Amazon introduces a new section called Your Membership & Subscriptions under the Your Account menu. Mine looks a little empty right now: Your active subscriptions will show up here, giving you the option to cancel / upgrade / downgrade etc. Although it seems incredibly simple, this part of the release is key: For the first time, users are being given a single place to view and manage the subscriptions in their life. (Yes, arguably Apple has done this with the App Store, but it’s horrible to access and vendors are not yet making use of the recently-introduced changes to subscription support. Vendor signup While the launch includes a set of pre-selected vendors, Amazon is clearly pushing for a reasonably open signup for new vendors, with their “Sell a subscription” call to action, and the promise to “Reach millions of highly qualified Amazon shoppers.” Amazon’s SWA Seller Integration Guide (PDF) is a good starting point when it comes to the detailed technical integration with the store. Vendors have the opportunity to: Customize the design for their subscription page on Amazon Define their pricing, including support for different tiers Offer a free trial through the page Set an introductory price for the subscription Promote their subscription through the usual Amazon marketing tools And here’s the revenue share, which is inline with Apple’s new App Store subscription model: “For a customer’s first year as a subscriber, you receive 70% of each transactional amount.” “After a subscriber’s first year, your revenue increases to 85% of each transactional amount.” Why should we care about Subscribe With Amazon? In many ways, Subscribe With Amazon is a fairly typical display of platform engineering from a company who’s speciality is building platforms. It bares many of the hallmarks present in the launch of other Amazon platforms like Alexa (and the Amazon Echo product) which was launched in 2015 — namely a focus on quantity through “opening the flood gates” to developers. As a result of this, Amazon’s app stores have a problem with low quality, “spammy” or even malicious apps, which they combat through improved discovery and personal recommendations. This is a very different approach to Apple, which focuses on curation and a heavy vetting process throughout App Store submissions. So if Amazon’s existing platform launches are anything to go by, we should expect an aggressive and open-armed push for vendor adoption on the Subscribe With Amazon store. The success of the platform relies on a healthy selection of popular services, and while some will inevitably hold out, Amazon is well-placed to hit a critical mass. So is this good for consumers? Well, on the surface, yes. Giving people a single place to view and manage the subscriptions in their life is a compelling reason — as well as the ability to discover new and useful services on the platform. Of course, the flip side of this is that while you’re gaining control over your subscriptions, you’re giving up a greater amount of control to the all-encompassing Amazon eCommerce platform. Whether this leads to decreased competition, increased prices or anti-competitive behavior down the road remains to be seen. </sys

ChartMogul is 5!. Today is the 5th anniversary of ChartMogul’s incorporation! Putting fatherhood aside for a few minutes, building this business has definitely been the most rewarding experience of my life. Rewarding, because every day for the past five years I get to do something I love — build great software with amazing people. Also rewarding, because we get to serve thousands of the best subscription businesses from all over the world who are all doing incredible things, and hopefully make a positive difference to their daily lives and their success! And finally, it’s rewarding, because we get to provide (what I hope are) good jobs to over 30 people. It’s amazing to work with people for many years, grow alongside them, see them build families, travel the world, learn new skills, buy their first home, or even leave to start their own startups. It certainly feels lucky to be working in SaaS! From myself and the whole team at ChartMogul, we’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to all of our amazing customers, readers, investors, partners, and even our competitors who keep us on our toes. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without all of you! 🙇 Some fun facts (AKA vanity metrics 😅), over the last 5 years we’ve… Analyzed over 200M subscriptions and over a billion customer transactions 😱😱 Sent 183 weekly SaaS roundup emails 📬 Published 356 blog posts ✍️ Sent over 45M MRR notifications emails 😱 Spent over $10M building ChartMogul 💸💸 Incorporated 3 operating subsidiaries in Berlin 🇩🇪, Toronto 🇨🇦, and Seoul 🇰🇷 Attended every SaaStr Annual and every SaaStock conference since their founding ✈️ Last year we all met up in Split, Croatia for our annual offsite. Next month our remote team will convene once again, this time on the Spanish island of Mallorca to celebrate our 5th anniversary together and have our 2020 kickoff. I couldn’t be more excited to see everyone! Do you want to join us? Did I mention we’re hiring: https://jobs.chartmogul.com/ 😉 If you’d like to meet us… We’re a Gold Sponsor at SaaStock (Dublin, 14-16 October) — come meet us at booth G10. We’ll also be a Gold Sponsor at SaaStr Annual in March — we’ll be sharing more information in the coming months. The future We’re 100% committed to continue building the best Subscription Analytics and Reporting product on the market. The pursuit of excellence is what drives us and makes us passionate to do our best work. I’ve personally never been more excited about our product roadmap than I am now. We’re going to be launching some truly amazing things in the coming months that we can’t wait to show you. The vast majority of our spending will continue to go towards product development, our existing customers can expect us to continue pushing the envelope on what’s possible and lead our category into the future. Many thanks! And here’s to the next 5 years 🥂🎉

[INST] ChartMogul is 5! [/INST]

Today is the 5th anniversary of ChartMogul’s incorporation! Putting fatherhood aside for a few minutes, building this business has definitely been the most rewarding experience of my life. Rewarding, because every day for the past five years I get to do something I love — build great software with amazing people. Also rewarding, because we get to serve thousands of the best subscription businesses from all over the world who are all doing incredible things, and hopefully make a positive difference to their daily lives and their success! And finally, it’s rewarding, because we get to provide (what I hope are) good jobs to over 30 people. It’s amazing to work with people for many years, grow alongside them, see them build families, travel the world, learn new skills, buy their first home, or even leave to start their own startups. It certainly feels lucky to be working in SaaS! From myself and the whole team at ChartMogul, we’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to all of our amazing customers, readers, investors, partners, and even our competitors who keep us on our toes. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without all of you! 🙇 Some fun facts (AKA vanity metrics 😅), over the last 5 years we’ve… Analyzed over 200M subscriptions and over a billion customer transactions 😱😱 Sent 183 weekly SaaS roundup emails 📬 Published 356 blog posts ✍️ Sent over 45M MRR notifications emails 😱 Spent over $10M building ChartMogul 💸💸 Incorporated 3 operating subsidiaries in Berlin 🇩🇪, Toronto 🇨🇦, and Seoul 🇰🇷 Attended every SaaStr Annual and every SaaStock conference since their founding ✈️ Last year we all met up in Split, Croatia for our annual offsite. Next month our remote team will convene once again, this time on the Spanish island of Mallorca to celebrate our 5th anniversary together and have our 2020 kickoff. I couldn’t be more excited to see everyone! Do you want to join us? Did I mention we’re hiring: https://jobs.chartmogul.com/ 😉 If you’d like to meet us… We’re a Gold Sponsor at SaaStock (Dublin, 14-16 October) — come meet us at booth G10. We’ll also be a Gold Sponsor at SaaStr Annual in March — we’ll be sharing more information in the coming months. The future We’re 100% committed to continue building the best Subscription Analytics and Reporting product on the market. The pursuit of excellence is what drives us and makes us passionate to do our best work. I’ve personally never been more excited about our product roadmap than I am now. We’re going to be launching some truly amazing things in the coming months that we can’t wait to show you. The vast majority of our spending will continue to go towards product development, our existing customers can expect us to continue pushing the envelope on what’s possible and lead our category into the future. Many thanks! And here’s to the next 5 years 🥂🎉

<sys> [INST] ChartMogul is 5! [/INST] Today is the 5th anniversary of ChartMogul’s incorporation! Putting fatherhood aside for a few minutes, building this business has definitely been the most rewarding experience of my life. Rewarding, because every day for the past five years I get to do something I love — build great software with amazing people. Also rewarding, because we get to serve thousands of the best subscription businesses from all over the world who are all doing incredible things, and hopefully make a positive difference to their daily lives and their success! And finally, it’s rewarding, because we get to provide (what I hope are) good jobs to over 30 people. It’s amazing to work with people for many years, grow alongside them, see them build families, travel the world, learn new skills, buy their first home, or even leave to start their own startups. It certainly feels lucky to be working in SaaS! From myself and the whole team at ChartMogul, we’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to all of our amazing customers, readers, investors, partners, and even our competitors who keep us on our toes. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without all of you! 🙇 Some fun facts (AKA vanity metrics 😅), over the last 5 years we’ve… Analyzed over 200M subscriptions and over a billion customer transactions 😱😱 Sent 183 weekly SaaS roundup emails 📬 Published 356 blog posts ✍️ Sent over 45M MRR notifications emails 😱 Spent over $10M building ChartMogul 💸💸 Incorporated 3 operating subsidiaries in Berlin 🇩🇪, Toronto 🇨🇦, and Seoul 🇰🇷 Attended every SaaStr Annual and every SaaStock conference since their founding ✈️ Last year we all met up in Split, Croatia for our annual offsite. Next month our remote team will convene once again, this time on the Spanish island of Mallorca to celebrate our 5th anniversary together and have our 2020 kickoff. I couldn’t be more excited to see everyone! Do you want to join us? Did I mention we’re hiring: https://jobs.chartmogul.com/ 😉 If you’d like to meet us… We’re a Gold Sponsor at SaaStock (Dublin, 14-16 October) — come meet us at booth G10. We’ll also be a Gold Sponsor at SaaStr Annual in March — we’ll be sharing more information in the coming months. The future We’re 100% committed to continue building the best Subscription Analytics and Reporting product on the market. The pursuit of excellence is what drives us and makes us passionate to do our best work. I’ve personally never been more excited about our product roadmap than I am now. We’re going to be launching some truly amazing things in the coming months that we can’t wait to show you. The vast majority of our spending will continue to go towards product development, our existing customers can expect us to continue pushing the envelope on what’s possible and lead our category into the future. Many thanks! And here’s to the next 5 years 🥂🎉 </sys

ChartMogul team moves into new Berlin HQ. Home to the likes of Soundcloud, 6Wunderkinder and Twitter, Factory is a 16000 square meter tech campus in the city’s central Mitte district, offering founders and innovators an environment to build successful businesses, surrounded by like-minded entrepreneurs and creators. Factory opened its doors in June 2014 with a keynote speech from Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google), and now plays host to a number of conferences and events, seeing visitors from businesses across Europe. The venue even saw Michelin Starred chef Tim Raue recently open his latest restaurant, Studio, offering a range of extravagant dishes (10-course tasting menu, anyone?!). Interestingly, the campus is built on the site of the Berlin wall’s infamous “death-strip”, the plot of no-man’s land between each side of the wall’s boundary. Nick Franklin (CEO) noted: “It’s pretty incredible to be working in an area steeped in history, where every day you can see reminders of the city’s unique past. And to be surrounded by so many young startups working on great things.” Nick kicks back at his new desk, with a view over the Factory campus. Other former sites of the Berlin wall have since been converted into parks (such as the aptly-named Mauerpark) and other new developments – just a small part of the city’s aggressive regeneration and redevelopment program. With all of the basics sorted out – desks, whiteboards and subscription coffee – we’re knuckling down to bring you some exciting features and updates to the ChartMogul product in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements, and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter if you want to be the first to be notified, and get exclusive content in your inbox. Those of you in the Berlin area: Feel free to drop by and say hi! Drop us a line on Twitter. As you can see, we don’t bite: Welcome to ChartMogul HQ! We're proud to welcome you to our new #Berlin Office :) https://t.co/Zb8IE11SGv — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 2, 2015

[INST] ChartMogul team moves into new Berlin HQ [/INST]

Home to the likes of Soundcloud, 6Wunderkinder and Twitter, Factory is a 16000 square meter tech campus in the city’s central Mitte district, offering founders and innovators an environment to build successful businesses, surrounded by like-minded entrepreneurs and creators. Factory opened its doors in June 2014 with a keynote speech from Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google), and now plays host to a number of conferences and events, seeing visitors from businesses across Europe. The venue even saw Michelin Starred chef Tim Raue recently open his latest restaurant, Studio, offering a range of extravagant dishes (10-course tasting menu, anyone?!). Interestingly, the campus is built on the site of the Berlin wall’s infamous “death-strip”, the plot of no-man’s land between each side of the wall’s boundary. Nick Franklin (CEO) noted: “It’s pretty incredible to be working in an area steeped in history, where every day you can see reminders of the city’s unique past. And to be surrounded by so many young startups working on great things.” Nick kicks back at his new desk, with a view over the Factory campus. Other former sites of the Berlin wall have since been converted into parks (such as the aptly-named Mauerpark) and other new developments – just a small part of the city’s aggressive regeneration and redevelopment program. With all of the basics sorted out – desks, whiteboards and subscription coffee – we’re knuckling down to bring you some exciting features and updates to the ChartMogul product in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements, and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter if you want to be the first to be notified, and get exclusive content in your inbox. Those of you in the Berlin area: Feel free to drop by and say hi! Drop us a line on Twitter. As you can see, we don’t bite: Welcome to ChartMogul HQ! We're proud to welcome you to our new #Berlin Office :) https://t.co/Zb8IE11SGv — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 2, 2015

<sys> [INST] ChartMogul team moves into new Berlin HQ [/INST] Home to the likes of Soundcloud, 6Wunderkinder and Twitter, Factory is a 16000 square meter tech campus in the city’s central Mitte district, offering founders and innovators an environment to build successful businesses, surrounded by like-minded entrepreneurs and creators. Factory opened its doors in June 2014 with a keynote speech from Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google), and now plays host to a number of conferences and events, seeing visitors from businesses across Europe. The venue even saw Michelin Starred chef Tim Raue recently open his latest restaurant, Studio, offering a range of extravagant dishes (10-course tasting menu, anyone?!). Interestingly, the campus is built on the site of the Berlin wall’s infamous “death-strip”, the plot of no-man’s land between each side of the wall’s boundary. Nick Franklin (CEO) noted: “It’s pretty incredible to be working in an area steeped in history, where every day you can see reminders of the city’s unique past. And to be surrounded by so many young startups working on great things.” Nick kicks back at his new desk, with a view over the Factory campus. Other former sites of the Berlin wall have since been converted into parks (such as the aptly-named Mauerpark) and other new developments – just a small part of the city’s aggressive regeneration and redevelopment program. With all of the basics sorted out – desks, whiteboards and subscription coffee – we’re knuckling down to bring you some exciting features and updates to the ChartMogul product in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements, and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter if you want to be the first to be notified, and get exclusive content in your inbox. Those of you in the Berlin area: Feel free to drop by and say hi! Drop us a line on Twitter. As you can see, we don’t bite: Welcome to ChartMogul HQ! We're proud to welcome you to our new #Berlin Office :) https://t.co/Zb8IE11SGv — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 2, 2015 </sys

5 Ways to Prepare a New Salesperson for Cold Calling. Nobody likes cold calling. But just because it isn’t fun doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. A study conducted by the RAIN Group in 2018 found that “69% of buyers have accepted phone calls from new providers in the last 12 months.” Simply put? If your new salespeople want to be effective, they need to master the art of getting on the phone and connecting with prospects. Whether you’ve got a new salesperson joining your team or you’re a new sales rep looking to boost your team, the following cold calling training tips will help you hit the ground running when it comes to building your cold calling skills. 1. Give them a script The most successful sales organizations work off a time-tested sales cadence that guarantees a certain number of touches, while also giving salespeople the flexibility needed to customize their messages for individual contacts. When a new salesperson starts out, giving them access to your existing scripts can cut their learning curve significantly. If you don’t have scripts to share, either write some up using existing cold calling templates or make it your new salesperson’s first job to create their own. One tip: make sure your cadence or set of scripts includes voicemail message templates. According to data from RingLead, sales reps spend as much as 15% of their time leaving voicemails. Trying to condense a phone or email sales script into the recommended 18-30 seconds on the fly is a recipe for poor performance. 2. Give them a list The next thing you’ll need to give your new salesperson to prepare them for cold calling is a list of names and numbers to call on. This might mean: Passing on the list that belonged to the salesperson they’re replacing. Adding their name to your CRM or marketing automation program’s round-robin lead assignment mechanism. Assigning them a new vertical and sharing buyer personas so that they can do their own lead research. If your new hire represents added headcount to your sales team, you may need to reconfigure your sales territories or lead assignment protocols. If possible, try to avoid alienating your top performers by allowing your new rep to inadvertently cut into their contact pools. 3. Set behavior goals Generally speaking, good salespeople tend to be achievement-oriented. You can leverage this instinct by holding them accountable to predetermined goals, but you have to be smart about how you set these initial goals. Even if your more established reps are responsible for performance-based goals, such as closed-won deals or new revenue, new salespeople tend to do better with behavior-based goals. These goals focus on completing a certain number of specific behaviors in order to build up cold calling muscles and create a foundation for success. Possible behavior-based goals to track include the number of: Cold calls made New prospects identified Voicemails left Meetings booked New sales reps aren’t going to close million-dollar sales on their first day. But they can build the confidence needed to perform at that level in the future by successfully completing a series of smaller, behavior-based goals early on. 4. Set expectations on rejection Nobody likes cold calling — mostly because nobody likes hearing “no” over and over again. When you’re working with a new salesperson, address that fear head-on by helping them to anticipate and prepare for rejection. For example, you could make a game out of it. Measure how long it takes your new sales reps to get their first 100 “no’s,” and track team members’ performance on a leaderboard. Whoever gets to 100 the fastest gets a prize – above and beyond the benefit of having numbed themselves to the negative impacts of rejection. You could also adapt the “fear setting” exercise from Tim Ferriss’s classic book The Four Hour Workweek to cold calling. Ask sales reps to define exactly what they’re afraid of when it comes to cold calling. Encourage them to realize that the worst possible outcome in a cold call gone wrong is usually nothing more serious than having frustrated a prospect or missing a sale. 5. Assign them a mentor One of the fastest ways new salespeople can get better at cold calling is by having a more experienced mentor they can lean on for advice. For instance, a mentor might: Listen in on a new rep’s first cold calls (either live or via recordings) to offer suggestions for improvement. Explain their existing sales process and what they learned in the course of developing it. Answer questions new salespeople have about the company, its products/services, and its position in the marketplace. If you’ve built a deliberately competitive environment, your top sales reps may be resistant to sharing their hard-won wisdom with new hires. In this case, a mentor from marketing, leadership, or product may be more appropriate. Bonus tip: sign them up for cold calling training Take a close look at the training resources you have internally. Are you really going to be capable of preparing your new sales hire for success with cold calling? The “Salesperson’s Perspective on the Impact of Sales Training” report from Training Industry found that more than one in four (26%) surveyed sales reps say their sales training is ineffective. Training Industry may not be the most impartial source, but ask any established salesperson about the training they received throughout their careers, and anecdotal evidence is likely to back that up. There’s no shame in acknowledging that you may not be able to provide the kind of cold calling training your new reps need to be successful. But if this is the case, make sure you sign them up for some kind of vetted sales training program. We like John Barrows’s sales trainings at Mailshake, but there are plenty of great options out there to choose from. About the Author Sujan Patel is a partner at Ramp Ventures & co-founder Mailshake. He has over 15 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit, and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

[INST] 5 Ways to Prepare a New Salesperson for Cold Calling [/INST]

Nobody likes cold calling. But just because it isn’t fun doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. A study conducted by the RAIN Group in 2018 found that “69% of buyers have accepted phone calls from new providers in the last 12 months.” Simply put? If your new salespeople want to be effective, they need to master the art of getting on the phone and connecting with prospects. Whether you’ve got a new salesperson joining your team or you’re a new sales rep looking to boost your team, the following cold calling training tips will help you hit the ground running when it comes to building your cold calling skills. 1. Give them a script The most successful sales organizations work off a time-tested sales cadence that guarantees a certain number of touches, while also giving salespeople the flexibility needed to customize their messages for individual contacts. When a new salesperson starts out, giving them access to your existing scripts can cut their learning curve significantly. If you don’t have scripts to share, either write some up using existing cold calling templates or make it your new salesperson’s first job to create their own. One tip: make sure your cadence or set of scripts includes voicemail message templates. According to data from RingLead, sales reps spend as much as 15% of their time leaving voicemails. Trying to condense a phone or email sales script into the recommended 18-30 seconds on the fly is a recipe for poor performance. 2. Give them a list The next thing you’ll need to give your new salesperson to prepare them for cold calling is a list of names and numbers to call on. This might mean: Passing on the list that belonged to the salesperson they’re replacing. Adding their name to your CRM or marketing automation program’s round-robin lead assignment mechanism. Assigning them a new vertical and sharing buyer personas so that they can do their own lead research. If your new hire represents added headcount to your sales team, you may need to reconfigure your sales territories or lead assignment protocols. If possible, try to avoid alienating your top performers by allowing your new rep to inadvertently cut into their contact pools. 3. Set behavior goals Generally speaking, good salespeople tend to be achievement-oriented. You can leverage this instinct by holding them accountable to predetermined goals, but you have to be smart about how you set these initial goals. Even if your more established reps are responsible for performance-based goals, such as closed-won deals or new revenue, new salespeople tend to do better with behavior-based goals. These goals focus on completing a certain number of specific behaviors in order to build up cold calling muscles and create a foundation for success. Possible behavior-based goals to track include the number of: Cold calls made New prospects identified Voicemails left Meetings booked New sales reps aren’t going to close million-dollar sales on their first day. But they can build the confidence needed to perform at that level in the future by successfully completing a series of smaller, behavior-based goals early on. 4. Set expectations on rejection Nobody likes cold calling — mostly because nobody likes hearing “no” over and over again. When you’re working with a new salesperson, address that fear head-on by helping them to anticipate and prepare for rejection. For example, you could make a game out of it. Measure how long it takes your new sales reps to get their first 100 “no’s,” and track team members’ performance on a leaderboard. Whoever gets to 100 the fastest gets a prize – above and beyond the benefit of having numbed themselves to the negative impacts of rejection. You could also adapt the “fear setting” exercise from Tim Ferriss’s classic book The Four Hour Workweek to cold calling. Ask sales reps to define exactly what they’re afraid of when it comes to cold calling. Encourage them to realize that the worst possible outcome in a cold call gone wrong is usually nothing more serious than having frustrated a prospect or missing a sale. 5. Assign them a mentor One of the fastest ways new salespeople can get better at cold calling is by having a more experienced mentor they can lean on for advice. For instance, a mentor might: Listen in on a new rep’s first cold calls (either live or via recordings) to offer suggestions for improvement. Explain their existing sales process and what they learned in the course of developing it. Answer questions new salespeople have about the company, its products/services, and its position in the marketplace. If you’ve built a deliberately competitive environment, your top sales reps may be resistant to sharing their hard-won wisdom with new hires. In this case, a mentor from marketing, leadership, or product may be more appropriate. Bonus tip: sign them up for cold calling training Take a close look at the training resources you have internally. Are you really going to be capable of preparing your new sales hire for success with cold calling? The “Salesperson’s Perspective on the Impact of Sales Training” report from Training Industry found that more than one in four (26%) surveyed sales reps say their sales training is ineffective. Training Industry may not be the most impartial source, but ask any established salesperson about the training they received throughout their careers, and anecdotal evidence is likely to back that up. There’s no shame in acknowledging that you may not be able to provide the kind of cold calling training your new reps need to be successful. But if this is the case, make sure you sign them up for some kind of vetted sales training program. We like John Barrows’s sales trainings at Mailshake, but there are plenty of great options out there to choose from. About the Author Sujan Patel is a partner at Ramp Ventures & co-founder Mailshake. He has over 15 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit, and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

<sys> [INST] 5 Ways to Prepare a New Salesperson for Cold Calling [/INST] Nobody likes cold calling. But just because it isn’t fun doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. A study conducted by the RAIN Group in 2018 found that “69% of buyers have accepted phone calls from new providers in the last 12 months.” Simply put? If your new salespeople want to be effective, they need to master the art of getting on the phone and connecting with prospects. Whether you’ve got a new salesperson joining your team or you’re a new sales rep looking to boost your team, the following cold calling training tips will help you hit the ground running when it comes to building your cold calling skills. 1. Give them a script The most successful sales organizations work off a time-tested sales cadence that guarantees a certain number of touches, while also giving salespeople the flexibility needed to customize their messages for individual contacts. When a new salesperson starts out, giving them access to your existing scripts can cut their learning curve significantly. If you don’t have scripts to share, either write some up using existing cold calling templates or make it your new salesperson’s first job to create their own. One tip: make sure your cadence or set of scripts includes voicemail message templates. According to data from RingLead, sales reps spend as much as 15% of their time leaving voicemails. Trying to condense a phone or email sales script into the recommended 18-30 seconds on the fly is a recipe for poor performance. 2. Give them a list The next thing you’ll need to give your new salesperson to prepare them for cold calling is a list of names and numbers to call on. This might mean: Passing on the list that belonged to the salesperson they’re replacing. Adding their name to your CRM or marketing automation program’s round-robin lead assignment mechanism. Assigning them a new vertical and sharing buyer personas so that they can do their own lead research. If your new hire represents added headcount to your sales team, you may need to reconfigure your sales territories or lead assignment protocols. If possible, try to avoid alienating your top performers by allowing your new rep to inadvertently cut into their contact pools. 3. Set behavior goals Generally speaking, good salespeople tend to be achievement-oriented. You can leverage this instinct by holding them accountable to predetermined goals, but you have to be smart about how you set these initial goals. Even if your more established reps are responsible for performance-based goals, such as closed-won deals or new revenue, new salespeople tend to do better with behavior-based goals. These goals focus on completing a certain number of specific behaviors in order to build up cold calling muscles and create a foundation for success. Possible behavior-based goals to track include the number of: Cold calls made New prospects identified Voicemails left Meetings booked New sales reps aren’t going to close million-dollar sales on their first day. But they can build the confidence needed to perform at that level in the future by successfully completing a series of smaller, behavior-based goals early on. 4. Set expectations on rejection Nobody likes cold calling — mostly because nobody likes hearing “no” over and over again. When you’re working with a new salesperson, address that fear head-on by helping them to anticipate and prepare for rejection. For example, you could make a game out of it. Measure how long it takes your new sales reps to get their first 100 “no’s,” and track team members’ performance on a leaderboard. Whoever gets to 100 the fastest gets a prize – above and beyond the benefit of having numbed themselves to the negative impacts of rejection. You could also adapt the “fear setting” exercise from Tim Ferriss’s classic book The Four Hour Workweek to cold calling. Ask sales reps to define exactly what they’re afraid of when it comes to cold calling. Encourage them to realize that the worst possible outcome in a cold call gone wrong is usually nothing more serious than having frustrated a prospect or missing a sale. 5. Assign them a mentor One of the fastest ways new salespeople can get better at cold calling is by having a more experienced mentor they can lean on for advice. For instance, a mentor might: Listen in on a new rep’s first cold calls (either live or via recordings) to offer suggestions for improvement. Explain their existing sales process and what they learned in the course of developing it. Answer questions new salespeople have about the company, its products/services, and its position in the marketplace. If you’ve built a deliberately competitive environment, your top sales reps may be resistant to sharing their hard-won wisdom with new hires. In this case, a mentor from marketing, leadership, or product may be more appropriate. Bonus tip: sign them up for cold calling training Take a close look at the training resources you have internally. Are you really going to be capable of preparing your new sales hire for success with cold calling? The “Salesperson’s Perspective on the Impact of Sales Training” report from Training Industry found that more than one in four (26%) surveyed sales reps say their sales training is ineffective. Training Industry may not be the most impartial source, but ask any established salesperson about the training they received throughout their careers, and anecdotal evidence is likely to back that up. There’s no shame in acknowledging that you may not be able to provide the kind of cold calling training your new reps need to be successful. But if this is the case, make sure you sign them up for some kind of vetted sales training program. We like John Barrows’s sales trainings at Mailshake, but there are plenty of great options out there to choose from. About the Author Sujan Patel is a partner at Ramp Ventures & co-founder Mailshake. He has over 15 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit, and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies. </sys

The Quantified SaaS. I got 86% sleep quality last night. How about you? I walk around most days with a fitness tracker on my wrist, which tells me how good I am at burning calories, sleeping, even standing up every day. My banking app logs and categorizes all of my spending, whilst I track every meal I eat using MyFitnessPal. We live in an age of the so-called “Quantified Self”, in which almost everything we do is seen to be augmented by gathering data — data which we can use to benchmark ourselves and measure improvement. In business, we’ve been measuring and tracking metrics since time immemorial. Perhaps for this reason, there isn’t a similar buzz word and movement surrounding it. We’ve been measuring income, profit and loss — the core measurements of any business’ performance — since day one. We have to if we want to stay alive. But it feels to me like we’re entering a new age of data gathering and decision making in business.. One that’s driven by the ability to measure nearly every input and output in almost every area of a web-based technology business. The subscription business model lends itself to measurement from every possible angle, and the success of such a business is in no small part attributed to careful balancing and refining of a set of measurements. Metrics. The result of this, when applied to a SaaS business, is a clearly-definable set of criteria for success, failure and everything in between. Where every input variable and output is measured without question. A Quantified SaaS. The passage that follows is a day in the life of a (fictional) SaaS business leader, highlighting the use of metrics in each scenario that occurs throughout the day. Hover over any of the Metrics mentioned in this post to get a definition of each one. Monday, 7:30AM Woke up early this morning, and took a glance at the company’s dashboard for the week before, to see what was what. Nothing crazy, pretty much as expected – apart for the nice spike in New Trials the week before, due to that article which hit the front page of Hacker News. Nice. Having said that, the spike in Sessions (and therefore less-qualified visitors) did cause a significant drop in Visitor-to-trial conversion rate, which I expected of course. Time to head to the office… Monday, 10:15AM Arrived at the office after a frustrating commute. Still, at least I had a bunch of podcasts queued up to listen to. Feels like my brain isn’t totally inactive, at least. Just sent out our monthly investor update. It’s pretty hard to condense all of our performance into something that’s easily digestible, but I think I got there. Things are looking fairly good this month, MRR growth is up from the previous month, and we have a have a good pipeline of QLs that we can hopefully convert in the coming weeks. We’ll have to fix that growing Customer Churn Rate issue though, otherwise it’s really going to bite us further down the line. Monday, 11:30AM My Marketing Director just grabbed me in the corridor — we have a problem. Apparently our LTV has been declining over the last couple of months (we don’t include LTV in monthly updates, our investors aren’t fans of it). Currently it’s at the stage where our CAC:LTV ratio is far from efficient. Looks like we’ll need to find some new ways to get the CAC down, whilst the customer success team look into the growing churn rate problem. Monday, 1:00PM Okay, so the Churn problem isn’t quite as bad as we initially thought. When we looked into the data, it turned out that the MRR Churn Rate — that is, the value of churned MRR each month — is pretty much unchanged. What we’re seeing is that customers on the starter plan (and therefore representing a small amount of revenue) are churning, hence the increased Customer Churn Rate. Still a problem, just not a disaster as we might have thought. I’ll ask someone in Customer Success to glance over a Cohort Analysis chart and really understand where the problems in Customer Churn Rate are occurring. My suspicion is that there’s a spike around month 3. Also check out: SaaS Metrics: The Secret to Subscription Success from Ed Shelley Monday, 3:40PM Just got out of a meeting where we walked through some of our product on-boarding changes, intended to nudge the Trial-to-paid conversion rate a little bit higher. At this stage, nothing is going to make a drastic difference, we’re really just looking at small-scale optimization. Monday, 5:20 Last call of the day. This time, with a VC who’s interested in getting on board with our upcoming funding round. She completely caught me unawares when she asked what our Quick Ratio was. I don’t have a clue! She said it was important to understand our potential to grow the business efficiently. Guess I’ll have to go away and do some homework… ARPA is all good though. She liked our ARPA. Monday, 6:50PM Exhausted. Finished up a few bits and I’m out of here. Is it Friday yet?

[INST] The Quantified SaaS [/INST]

I got 86% sleep quality last night. How about you? I walk around most days with a fitness tracker on my wrist, which tells me how good I am at burning calories, sleeping, even standing up every day. My banking app logs and categorizes all of my spending, whilst I track every meal I eat using MyFitnessPal. We live in an age of the so-called “Quantified Self”, in which almost everything we do is seen to be augmented by gathering data — data which we can use to benchmark ourselves and measure improvement. In business, we’ve been measuring and tracking metrics since time immemorial. Perhaps for this reason, there isn’t a similar buzz word and movement surrounding it. We’ve been measuring income, profit and loss — the core measurements of any business’ performance — since day one. We have to if we want to stay alive. But it feels to me like we’re entering a new age of data gathering and decision making in business.. One that’s driven by the ability to measure nearly every input and output in almost every area of a web-based technology business. The subscription business model lends itself to measurement from every possible angle, and the success of such a business is in no small part attributed to careful balancing and refining of a set of measurements. Metrics. The result of this, when applied to a SaaS business, is a clearly-definable set of criteria for success, failure and everything in between. Where every input variable and output is measured without question. A Quantified SaaS. The passage that follows is a day in the life of a (fictional) SaaS business leader, highlighting the use of metrics in each scenario that occurs throughout the day. Hover over any of the Metrics mentioned in this post to get a definition of each one. Monday, 7:30AM Woke up early this morning, and took a glance at the company’s dashboard for the week before, to see what was what. Nothing crazy, pretty much as expected – apart for the nice spike in New Trials the week before, due to that article which hit the front page of Hacker News. Nice. Having said that, the spike in Sessions (and therefore less-qualified visitors) did cause a significant drop in Visitor-to-trial conversion rate, which I expected of course. Time to head to the office… Monday, 10:15AM Arrived at the office after a frustrating commute. Still, at least I had a bunch of podcasts queued up to listen to. Feels like my brain isn’t totally inactive, at least. Just sent out our monthly investor update. It’s pretty hard to condense all of our performance into something that’s easily digestible, but I think I got there. Things are looking fairly good this month, MRR growth is up from the previous month, and we have a have a good pipeline of QLs that we can hopefully convert in the coming weeks. We’ll have to fix that growing Customer Churn Rate issue though, otherwise it’s really going to bite us further down the line. Monday, 11:30AM My Marketing Director just grabbed me in the corridor — we have a problem. Apparently our LTV has been declining over the last couple of months (we don’t include LTV in monthly updates, our investors aren’t fans of it). Currently it’s at the stage where our CAC:LTV ratio is far from efficient. Looks like we’ll need to find some new ways to get the CAC down, whilst the customer success team look into the growing churn rate problem. Monday, 1:00PM Okay, so the Churn problem isn’t quite as bad as we initially thought. When we looked into the data, it turned out that the MRR Churn Rate — that is, the value of churned MRR each month — is pretty much unchanged. What we’re seeing is that customers on the starter plan (and therefore representing a small amount of revenue) are churning, hence the increased Customer Churn Rate. Still a problem, just not a disaster as we might have thought. I’ll ask someone in Customer Success to glance over a Cohort Analysis chart and really understand where the problems in Customer Churn Rate are occurring. My suspicion is that there’s a spike around month 3. Also check out: SaaS Metrics: The Secret to Subscription Success from Ed Shelley Monday, 3:40PM Just got out of a meeting where we walked through some of our product on-boarding changes, intended to nudge the Trial-to-paid conversion rate a little bit higher. At this stage, nothing is going to make a drastic difference, we’re really just looking at small-scale optimization. Monday, 5:20 Last call of the day. This time, with a VC who’s interested in getting on board with our upcoming funding round. She completely caught me unawares when she asked what our Quick Ratio was. I don’t have a clue! She said it was important to understand our potential to grow the business efficiently. Guess I’ll have to go away and do some homework… ARPA is all good though. She liked our ARPA. Monday, 6:50PM Exhausted. Finished up a few bits and I’m out of here. Is it Friday yet?

<sys> [INST] The Quantified SaaS [/INST] I got 86% sleep quality last night. How about you? I walk around most days with a fitness tracker on my wrist, which tells me how good I am at burning calories, sleeping, even standing up every day. My banking app logs and categorizes all of my spending, whilst I track every meal I eat using MyFitnessPal. We live in an age of the so-called “Quantified Self”, in which almost everything we do is seen to be augmented by gathering data — data which we can use to benchmark ourselves and measure improvement. In business, we’ve been measuring and tracking metrics since time immemorial. Perhaps for this reason, there isn’t a similar buzz word and movement surrounding it. We’ve been measuring income, profit and loss — the core measurements of any business’ performance — since day one. We have to if we want to stay alive. But it feels to me like we’re entering a new age of data gathering and decision making in business.. One that’s driven by the ability to measure nearly every input and output in almost every area of a web-based technology business. The subscription business model lends itself to measurement from every possible angle, and the success of such a business is in no small part attributed to careful balancing and refining of a set of measurements. Metrics. The result of this, when applied to a SaaS business, is a clearly-definable set of criteria for success, failure and everything in between. Where every input variable and output is measured without question. A Quantified SaaS. The passage that follows is a day in the life of a (fictional) SaaS business leader, highlighting the use of metrics in each scenario that occurs throughout the day. Hover over any of the Metrics mentioned in this post to get a definition of each one. Monday, 7:30AM Woke up early this morning, and took a glance at the company’s dashboard for the week before, to see what was what. Nothing crazy, pretty much as expected – apart for the nice spike in New Trials the week before, due to that article which hit the front page of Hacker News. Nice. Having said that, the spike in Sessions (and therefore less-qualified visitors) did cause a significant drop in Visitor-to-trial conversion rate, which I expected of course. Time to head to the office… Monday, 10:15AM Arrived at the office after a frustrating commute. Still, at least I had a bunch of podcasts queued up to listen to. Feels like my brain isn’t totally inactive, at least. Just sent out our monthly investor update. It’s pretty hard to condense all of our performance into something that’s easily digestible, but I think I got there. Things are looking fairly good this month, MRR growth is up from the previous month, and we have a have a good pipeline of QLs that we can hopefully convert in the coming weeks. We’ll have to fix that growing Customer Churn Rate issue though, otherwise it’s really going to bite us further down the line. Monday, 11:30AM My Marketing Director just grabbed me in the corridor — we have a problem. Apparently our LTV has been declining over the last couple of months (we don’t include LTV in monthly updates, our investors aren’t fans of it). Currently it’s at the stage where our CAC:LTV ratio is far from efficient. Looks like we’ll need to find some new ways to get the CAC down, whilst the customer success team look into the growing churn rate problem. Monday, 1:00PM Okay, so the Churn problem isn’t quite as bad as we initially thought. When we looked into the data, it turned out that the MRR Churn Rate — that is, the value of churned MRR each month — is pretty much unchanged. What we’re seeing is that customers on the starter plan (and therefore representing a small amount of revenue) are churning, hence the increased Customer Churn Rate. Still a problem, just not a disaster as we might have thought. I’ll ask someone in Customer Success to glance over a Cohort Analysis chart and really understand where the problems in Customer Churn Rate are occurring. My suspicion is that there’s a spike around month 3. Also check out: SaaS Metrics: The Secret to Subscription Success from Ed Shelley Monday, 3:40PM Just got out of a meeting where we walked through some of our product on-boarding changes, intended to nudge the Trial-to-paid conversion rate a little bit higher. At this stage, nothing is going to make a drastic difference, we’re really just looking at small-scale optimization. Monday, 5:20 Last call of the day. This time, with a VC who’s interested in getting on board with our upcoming funding round. She completely caught me unawares when she asked what our Quick Ratio was. I don’t have a clue! She said it was important to understand our potential to grow the business efficiently. Guess I’ll have to go away and do some homework… ARPA is all good though. She liked our ARPA. Monday, 6:50PM Exhausted. Finished up a few bits and I’m out of here. Is it Friday yet? </sys

The Dollar Shave Club formula: Building a $1B subscription box business. So we have our first big subscription box business exit. Huge congratulations to the Dollar Shave Club team, who have no doubt been on an absolute rollercoaster since launching in 2011. Before subscription box entrepreneurs across the world rejoice and start pitching themselves for a sale, it’s worth sitting down and looking at some of the components of the Dollar Shave Club product and business, that no doubt contributed to the formula that led to their success. Create original products that solve a real problem The first thing that’s important to remember here is that Dollar Shave Club is not a simple “source and sell” subscription box. They’re solving a real problem with their own original products. Attacking many of the “novelty” features often marketed in other consumer razors nowadays, the product is built on a foundation of simple, get-the-job-done quality. This, to the consumer, is a refreshing change. “Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back scratcher and 10 blades?! Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade. And polio.” In sticking to this formula whilst maintaining a narrow focus on solving the problem, Dollar Shave Club has grown to more than 1.7M subscribers, with exponentially-growing revenue and a forecast of $200M in sales this year, according to Unilever. Bring content marketing expertise from the start The above video now has 22 million views. twenty two million. CEO Michael Dubin comes from a background of heavy-hitting marketing and creative work. Having worked on branded content for companies like Nike and Gatorade, he’s no stranger to strong branding and messaging for consumer products. Add to that some performing arts education at the renowned Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and you can see where the ingredients for such viral videos as the one above come from. But it’s not just Michael’s inherent talent that drives DSC’s presence. From the beginning, the team has taken a strategic approach to content marketing and social media that leads to world-beating levels of engagement online: They publish different content across each social channel, catered to the audience and constraints of each one. To get the full DSC experience, you really have to follow them everywhere! They engage with followers across all social channels, whether customer service related or simple banter. They use real team members in content to give the company a friendly face. Build launch hype & exclusivity 12,000 people signed up for Dollar Shave Club during the 48-hour launch period after the above video went live. This was not achieved by chance. Interestingly, founder Mike Dubin doesn’t like the term “Subscription Business”, and instead refers to the company as a “Membership Business”. This is reinforced by the word “club” in the company name. The effect of this is that subscribers feel part of something personal — almost a movement. “Do you want to be in my club?” Leverage the subscription model in a vertical that makes sense Shaving is an activity that most people do, on a regular basis, fairly predictably. Because of this, it’s a prime candidate for the application of a subscription model. As a consumer I can easily calculate how much I’ll spend each month on blades, and how much I could save with a subscription. Furthermore, it takes away the trouble of having to remember to buy new ones at the right time (or keep a huge stock of them). It’s convenient. The other thing DSC does expertly is offer flexibility through 3 different subscriptions, varying in price: Good, better, best. The Dollar Shave Club pricing page. It’s like SaaS, with razors. Source: dollarshaveclub.com Invest heavily in engineering talent Much of the high-speed growth of Dollar Shave Club is enabled by a foundation of strong tech talent. Where incumbents in the industry may rely on large-scale enterprise software to run their business, the engineering team at DSC built much of the backend systems in-house, after the early days of trying to run subscriptions on a platform which didn’t support subscription (Magento). According to an interview for ZDNet, the initial e-commerce platform was built in just 3 months, and was then scaled to different areas of the business — CRM, order fulfilment, marketing automation, and more. The engineering team also leveraged Amazon AWS to scale its platform to handle the influx of traffic caused by their Superbowl ad in 2015. “From a customer point of view, the marketing differentiates us… But there’s also the fact that we have the technology to make all of this work. What we are doing with data collection, data science, and with operations — all of this has to come together. It really boils down to the core technology, because that makes it possible.” – Kevin Datoo, COO of Dollar Shave Club Add some mojo (no, really) Mojo. So difficult to define, yet so critical. Probably the most important ingredient to Dollar Shave Club’s success is the hardest to break down (and certainly the hardest to emulate). It’s a little bit of branding, a bit of personality, definitely some genius marketing. But there’s also a “secret sauce” that makes the company what it is. They’ve defined their identity and communicated it to the wider world, in a way that’s unique to them.

[INST] The Dollar Shave Club formula: Building a $1B subscription box business [/INST]

So we have our first big subscription box business exit. Huge congratulations to the Dollar Shave Club team, who have no doubt been on an absolute rollercoaster since launching in 2011. Before subscription box entrepreneurs across the world rejoice and start pitching themselves for a sale, it’s worth sitting down and looking at some of the components of the Dollar Shave Club product and business, that no doubt contributed to the formula that led to their success. Create original products that solve a real problem The first thing that’s important to remember here is that Dollar Shave Club is not a simple “source and sell” subscription box. They’re solving a real problem with their own original products. Attacking many of the “novelty” features often marketed in other consumer razors nowadays, the product is built on a foundation of simple, get-the-job-done quality. This, to the consumer, is a refreshing change. “Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back scratcher and 10 blades?! Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade. And polio.” In sticking to this formula whilst maintaining a narrow focus on solving the problem, Dollar Shave Club has grown to more than 1.7M subscribers, with exponentially-growing revenue and a forecast of $200M in sales this year, according to Unilever. Bring content marketing expertise from the start The above video now has 22 million views. twenty two million. CEO Michael Dubin comes from a background of heavy-hitting marketing and creative work. Having worked on branded content for companies like Nike and Gatorade, he’s no stranger to strong branding and messaging for consumer products. Add to that some performing arts education at the renowned Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and you can see where the ingredients for such viral videos as the one above come from. But it’s not just Michael’s inherent talent that drives DSC’s presence. From the beginning, the team has taken a strategic approach to content marketing and social media that leads to world-beating levels of engagement online: They publish different content across each social channel, catered to the audience and constraints of each one. To get the full DSC experience, you really have to follow them everywhere! They engage with followers across all social channels, whether customer service related or simple banter. They use real team members in content to give the company a friendly face. Build launch hype & exclusivity 12,000 people signed up for Dollar Shave Club during the 48-hour launch period after the above video went live. This was not achieved by chance. Interestingly, founder Mike Dubin doesn’t like the term “Subscription Business”, and instead refers to the company as a “Membership Business”. This is reinforced by the word “club” in the company name. The effect of this is that subscribers feel part of something personal — almost a movement. “Do you want to be in my club?” Leverage the subscription model in a vertical that makes sense Shaving is an activity that most people do, on a regular basis, fairly predictably. Because of this, it’s a prime candidate for the application of a subscription model. As a consumer I can easily calculate how much I’ll spend each month on blades, and how much I could save with a subscription. Furthermore, it takes away the trouble of having to remember to buy new ones at the right time (or keep a huge stock of them). It’s convenient. The other thing DSC does expertly is offer flexibility through 3 different subscriptions, varying in price: Good, better, best. The Dollar Shave Club pricing page. It’s like SaaS, with razors. Source: dollarshaveclub.com Invest heavily in engineering talent Much of the high-speed growth of Dollar Shave Club is enabled by a foundation of strong tech talent. Where incumbents in the industry may rely on large-scale enterprise software to run their business, the engineering team at DSC built much of the backend systems in-house, after the early days of trying to run subscriptions on a platform which didn’t support subscription (Magento). According to an interview for ZDNet, the initial e-commerce platform was built in just 3 months, and was then scaled to different areas of the business — CRM, order fulfilment, marketing automation, and more. The engineering team also leveraged Amazon AWS to scale its platform to handle the influx of traffic caused by their Superbowl ad in 2015. “From a customer point of view, the marketing differentiates us… But there’s also the fact that we have the technology to make all of this work. What we are doing with data collection, data science, and with operations — all of this has to come together. It really boils down to the core technology, because that makes it possible.” – Kevin Datoo, COO of Dollar Shave Club Add some mojo (no, really) Mojo. So difficult to define, yet so critical. Probably the most important ingredient to Dollar Shave Club’s success is the hardest to break down (and certainly the hardest to emulate). It’s a little bit of branding, a bit of personality, definitely some genius marketing. But there’s also a “secret sauce” that makes the company what it is. They’ve defined their identity and communicated it to the wider world, in a way that’s unique to them.

<sys> [INST] The Dollar Shave Club formula: Building a $1B subscription box business [/INST] So we have our first big subscription box business exit. Huge congratulations to the Dollar Shave Club team, who have no doubt been on an absolute rollercoaster since launching in 2011. Before subscription box entrepreneurs across the world rejoice and start pitching themselves for a sale, it’s worth sitting down and looking at some of the components of the Dollar Shave Club product and business, that no doubt contributed to the formula that led to their success. Create original products that solve a real problem The first thing that’s important to remember here is that Dollar Shave Club is not a simple “source and sell” subscription box. They’re solving a real problem with their own original products. Attacking many of the “novelty” features often marketed in other consumer razors nowadays, the product is built on a foundation of simple, get-the-job-done quality. This, to the consumer, is a refreshing change. “Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back scratcher and 10 blades?! Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade. And polio.” In sticking to this formula whilst maintaining a narrow focus on solving the problem, Dollar Shave Club has grown to more than 1.7M subscribers, with exponentially-growing revenue and a forecast of $200M in sales this year, according to Unilever. Bring content marketing expertise from the start The above video now has 22 million views. twenty two million. CEO Michael Dubin comes from a background of heavy-hitting marketing and creative work. Having worked on branded content for companies like Nike and Gatorade, he’s no stranger to strong branding and messaging for consumer products. Add to that some performing arts education at the renowned Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and you can see where the ingredients for such viral videos as the one above come from. But it’s not just Michael’s inherent talent that drives DSC’s presence. From the beginning, the team has taken a strategic approach to content marketing and social media that leads to world-beating levels of engagement online: They publish different content across each social channel, catered to the audience and constraints of each one. To get the full DSC experience, you really have to follow them everywhere! They engage with followers across all social channels, whether customer service related or simple banter. They use real team members in content to give the company a friendly face. Build launch hype & exclusivity 12,000 people signed up for Dollar Shave Club during the 48-hour launch period after the above video went live. This was not achieved by chance. Interestingly, founder Mike Dubin doesn’t like the term “Subscription Business”, and instead refers to the company as a “Membership Business”. This is reinforced by the word “club” in the company name. The effect of this is that subscribers feel part of something personal — almost a movement. “Do you want to be in my club?” Leverage the subscription model in a vertical that makes sense Shaving is an activity that most people do, on a regular basis, fairly predictably. Because of this, it’s a prime candidate for the application of a subscription model. As a consumer I can easily calculate how much I’ll spend each month on blades, and how much I could save with a subscription. Furthermore, it takes away the trouble of having to remember to buy new ones at the right time (or keep a huge stock of them). It’s convenient. The other thing DSC does expertly is offer flexibility through 3 different subscriptions, varying in price: Good, better, best. The Dollar Shave Club pricing page. It’s like SaaS, with razors. Source: dollarshaveclub.com Invest heavily in engineering talent Much of the high-speed growth of Dollar Shave Club is enabled by a foundation of strong tech talent. Where incumbents in the industry may rely on large-scale enterprise software to run their business, the engineering team at DSC built much of the backend systems in-house, after the early days of trying to run subscriptions on a platform which didn’t support subscription (Magento). According to an interview for ZDNet, the initial e-commerce platform was built in just 3 months, and was then scaled to different areas of the business — CRM, order fulfilment, marketing automation, and more. The engineering team also leveraged Amazon AWS to scale its platform to handle the influx of traffic caused by their Superbowl ad in 2015. “From a customer point of view, the marketing differentiates us… But there’s also the fact that we have the technology to make all of this work. What we are doing with data collection, data science, and with operations — all of this has to come together. It really boils down to the core technology, because that makes it possible.” – Kevin Datoo, COO of Dollar Shave Club Add some mojo (no, really) Mojo. So difficult to define, yet so critical. Probably the most important ingredient to Dollar Shave Club’s success is the hardest to break down (and certainly the hardest to emulate). It’s a little bit of branding, a bit of personality, definitely some genius marketing. But there’s also a “secret sauce” that makes the company what it is. They’ve defined their identity and communicated it to the wider world, in a way that’s unique to them. </sys

ChartMogul Launches Beta. Right now you need to be using Stripe or Braintree to use ChartMogul and we’re working on support for Chargify and Recurly. You can signup for an invite on ChartMogul.com, we’ll be sending out batches of invites daily. We won’t be running a completely open beta, this is so we can keep performance stable for existing users and scale the system in a controlled way. If you want to get access right away just tweet something @ChartMogul and we’ll be sure to oblige you. Please send any feedback or questions to support@chartmogul.com

[INST] ChartMogul Launches Beta [/INST]

Right now you need to be using Stripe or Braintree to use ChartMogul and we’re working on support for Chargify and Recurly. You can signup for an invite on ChartMogul.com, we’ll be sending out batches of invites daily. We won’t be running a completely open beta, this is so we can keep performance stable for existing users and scale the system in a controlled way. If you want to get access right away just tweet something @ChartMogul and we’ll be sure to oblige you. Please send any feedback or questions to support@chartmogul.com

<sys> [INST] ChartMogul Launches Beta [/INST] Right now you need to be using Stripe or Braintree to use ChartMogul and we’re working on support for Chargify and Recurly. You can signup for an invite on ChartMogul.com, we’ll be sending out batches of invites daily. We won’t be running a completely open beta, this is so we can keep performance stable for existing users and scale the system in a controlled way. If you want to get access right away just tweet something @ChartMogul and we’ll be sure to oblige you. Please send any feedback or questions to support@chartmogul.com </sys

What Medium’s paid subscriptions tell us about the future of publishing. Medium’s subscriptions are here — and with it, a vote of confidence in the future of paid content and publishing online. After Ev Williams’ rather large hint back in January, Medium has this week unveiled more details on their proposed future for monetization. This is important because, given Medium’s (and Ev’s) position in the industry, it tells us not only how Medium plans to monetize itself as a company, but it also discloses the bet that it’s making on the future of written content as a business. In the aftermath of the digital revolution, (written) content has arguably been the hardest to monetize, compared to other mediums: Audio content saw stubbornness from publishers, a battle with piracy, and was eventually saved by the iTunes Music Store and subsequently online streaming services. (Sure, the model has some problems to iron out, but publishers are making money today). Video content saw even more stubbornness from publishers, another fight against piracy, and the rise of paid online streaming services. In the U.S., cable bundles are still highly profitable — but it’s quite clear that revenue is shifting slowly away from these services. Meanwhile, YouTube has found a sustainable way to monetize its vast library of user-generated video content with ads. Written content on the web virtually killed newspapers (you guessed it, they were stubborn), who are still scrambling to find some form of sustainable model for the future. Traditional display advertising is dying a slow death — the majority of content today is consumed through social platforms like Facebook, pulling traffic away from the publishers. Remember when building a personal blog and slapping some display ads on the page was a viable strategy? How times have changed. Understanding the announcement This looks to be the first version of something much bigger for the Medium product, and the features advertised today suggest a move towards Ev’s high level vision for the future of publishing on the web. The language on the landing page even reinforces this, playing to the notion that people subscribing today are not so much purchasing features, but rather “showing their support” for the future of the platform. Medium, after all, does a great job as positioning themselves as a platform, even a movement — something more than a product, a group of people working together to advance their future. Just in the way that Airbnb, Slack and other such startups have done. Membership features $5/monthly cost. This is important. The price point needs to be right, for consumers to effectively fit the subscription into their life, alongside the increasing number of existing subscriptions. $5 is the price point chosen by newspapers such as the Guardian. By aligning with this, they’re occupying the same headspace, rather than positioning themselves on the level of a Netflix or Spotify. In this regard, the difference between $5 and $10 is huge. $5 is a coffee. $10 is more than a coffee. Ad-free. The key thing here is the inverse — the fact that non-subscribers are going to have an ad-supported experience on Medium. While the ad-supported model hasn’t been working for the company, it obviously brings in significant-enough revenue for them to still pursue it for the vast majority of users. Of course, if they’ve spent the last year or more building ad-serving functionality into the platform, it may just make sense to not throw it away. Exclusive stories. Probably the biggest hinted change to the platform is the intention to support “paid content” — stories that are only available to paid subscribers. What this means is that Medium will have support for paying out a chunk of their subscription revenue to publishers on the platform. Tons of unanswered questions here (see the section below), but this potential to allow publishers to monetize their own content on Medium is huge. Early access to new features. The first of these new features is slated to be a redesigned homepage with better content discovery. It’s always nice to feel part of an “exclusive” group as Ev is outlining here, particularly with the promise of more of a say in the direction of feature development (as is stated). Upgraded reading list. This could have been part of the new features outlined above, but is considered a large-enough addition that it stands well on its own. What does the upgrade actually involve? Sounds like a change to the UX, as well as the ability to read offline on mobile. This is nice, and will likely keep more people inside the Medium app, rather than saving content out to a read-it-later app like Pocket (which is what I do today — it already has the offline functionality for free). The additional features (or the ones we can see right now) may not change the world, but the continual refinement of the reading and publishing experience on Medium is what’s led to the platform becoming my (and many others’) preferred place to read, write and share ideas. The team has clearly sweated every single detail when it comes to UX. Whether typography, editing or the more recent addition of interactive ‘Series’, the overall experience alone counts as a stand-out feature for many users. Can content subscriptions work? And more importantly in this case, can they work at scale? Those who follow the media and tech industry closely will be aware of at least one success story in monetizing content through subscriptions. Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, a one-man operation, offers free weekly content plus expanded additional analysis and exclusive daily articles through a $10 monthly subscription. Stratechery’s subscription is clearly tailored for the tech & media business niche — a niche for which Thompon has seemingly hit the sweet spot. In 2014 he announced that he already had 1,000 subscribers (implying a run-rate of $100K). Fast forward 3 years, and… well Ben hasn’t shared recent numbers. But the site appears to be going from success to success. The rise of curation The literal “rise” of curation in recent years, as illustrated by Google Trends The Stratechery example proves that people are willing to pay for a subscription to exclusive content, if you provide them with enough value. Targeting a highly-specific niche allows you to constantly refine and double down on the value you provide for that niche. The challenge, then, is cracking content subscriptions at a larger scale. But it might just work for Medium. Having reached a tipping point of content fatigue, people are starting to look for alternative ways to consume media that’s valuable to them. The rise of content curation has spawned directly from this — the idea of a human element of careful selection and pre-approval becomes increasingly attractive when everywhere you go online, brands are competing for attention. What I believe people will pay for, is clarity and the removal of noise from their lives. In the form of a single “go-to” platform for reading intelligent articles on relevant topics, Medium could fill this space. On journalism I spoke to Ghost.org founder John O’Nolan recently (you can listen to the full interview here). John’s overriding mission with Ghost (a hosted publishing platform) is to solve the problem of a sustainable business model for Journalism — which he believes is currently fundamentally broken. In many ways he’s right — the go-to model for monetizing content since the web 2.0 days has been advertising. On the surface there’s nothing wrong with ads on a web page. But when a business relies on such a model for the vast majority of revenue, it’s going to shape the way that business approaches creating and steering their content strategy in a big way. Simply put, display ads are usually paid per impression. More impressions = more money. This, in many ways, is at odds with the principles of “good” journalism — to remain neutral, and inform people. Given the choice of writing about the latest government policy change, or the gorilla in the local zoo who’s learned to style his own hair… well, you get the idea. In 2017, the goal is to provoke an instant, strong reaction in as-broad an audience as possible, regardless of the topic. “It’s time for thoughtfulness to prevail. That means transforming not just the experience around reading and writing, but also the economic model that determines which stories are told, clicked on, and compensated.” – Ev Williams, Founder of Medium John O’Nolan certainly believes there’s a better model for monetizing journalism — and content on a wider scale. And his solution matches this latest move from Ev and the team at Medium: Paid subscriptions. With subscriptions, the company can rely on a fixed, predictable flow of revenue and can focus their efforts on delivering ongoing value for subscribers. The biggest remaining questions “One thing I’m a little unclear on is whether I’m paying for Medium to hire new writers and publish new material, or whether my money is going towards the authors of the articles I’m reading (like a micro-transaction system).” – Daniel Samuels (on ProductHunt) There are a lot of things we simply don’t know at this point about Medium’s subscription model, the largest of those things being how they actually plan to reward writers for publishing premium content, and who that will be available to. Until the details are fleshed out, it’s unclear how big a bet the company is taking on shaking up the way we consume written media online. Who is allowed to write “premium” content? (Almost certainly a small pre-selected group at first, but will they open it up?) Will the improved discovery tools fix the “tech bubble” problem faced by Medium today, and allow it to break into a more mainstream audience? Will they be able to convince enough people to invest $5 per month in the platform, with so many other subscriptions cluttering consumers’ lives? Can they convince even more publishers to move over to their platform, and give up their owned web properties? If anyone can make these bold moves to drive the written content space forwards, it’s Ev Williams and his team at Medium. Armed with his product foresight, I’m welcoming this move away from the de facto revenue model and the changes that would bring. “We invite you to join us as a paid member and to help support an ad-free platform that delivers the right type of content: the type that can only be created when independent writers and publishers are rewarded based on value rather than clicks.” (The Medium Membership page) Further reading Memberships (Medium’s landing page) Medium releases Memberships (Hacker News discussion thread) Medium launches memberships for $5 per month (The Verge article) Medium Membership (ProductHunt discussion thread)

[INST] What Medium’s paid subscriptions tell us about the future of publishing [/INST]

Medium’s subscriptions are here — and with it, a vote of confidence in the future of paid content and publishing online. After Ev Williams’ rather large hint back in January, Medium has this week unveiled more details on their proposed future for monetization. This is important because, given Medium’s (and Ev’s) position in the industry, it tells us not only how Medium plans to monetize itself as a company, but it also discloses the bet that it’s making on the future of written content as a business. In the aftermath of the digital revolution, (written) content has arguably been the hardest to monetize, compared to other mediums: Audio content saw stubbornness from publishers, a battle with piracy, and was eventually saved by the iTunes Music Store and subsequently online streaming services. (Sure, the model has some problems to iron out, but publishers are making money today). Video content saw even more stubbornness from publishers, another fight against piracy, and the rise of paid online streaming services. In the U.S., cable bundles are still highly profitable — but it’s quite clear that revenue is shifting slowly away from these services. Meanwhile, YouTube has found a sustainable way to monetize its vast library of user-generated video content with ads. Written content on the web virtually killed newspapers (you guessed it, they were stubborn), who are still scrambling to find some form of sustainable model for the future. Traditional display advertising is dying a slow death — the majority of content today is consumed through social platforms like Facebook, pulling traffic away from the publishers. Remember when building a personal blog and slapping some display ads on the page was a viable strategy? How times have changed. Understanding the announcement This looks to be the first version of something much bigger for the Medium product, and the features advertised today suggest a move towards Ev’s high level vision for the future of publishing on the web. The language on the landing page even reinforces this, playing to the notion that people subscribing today are not so much purchasing features, but rather “showing their support” for the future of the platform. Medium, after all, does a great job as positioning themselves as a platform, even a movement — something more than a product, a group of people working together to advance their future. Just in the way that Airbnb, Slack and other such startups have done. Membership features $5/monthly cost. This is important. The price point needs to be right, for consumers to effectively fit the subscription into their life, alongside the increasing number of existing subscriptions. $5 is the price point chosen by newspapers such as the Guardian. By aligning with this, they’re occupying the same headspace, rather than positioning themselves on the level of a Netflix or Spotify. In this regard, the difference between $5 and $10 is huge. $5 is a coffee. $10 is more than a coffee. Ad-free. The key thing here is the inverse — the fact that non-subscribers are going to have an ad-supported experience on Medium. While the ad-supported model hasn’t been working for the company, it obviously brings in significant-enough revenue for them to still pursue it for the vast majority of users. Of course, if they’ve spent the last year or more building ad-serving functionality into the platform, it may just make sense to not throw it away. Exclusive stories. Probably the biggest hinted change to the platform is the intention to support “paid content” — stories that are only available to paid subscribers. What this means is that Medium will have support for paying out a chunk of their subscription revenue to publishers on the platform. Tons of unanswered questions here (see the section below), but this potential to allow publishers to monetize their own content on Medium is huge. Early access to new features. The first of these new features is slated to be a redesigned homepage with better content discovery. It’s always nice to feel part of an “exclusive” group as Ev is outlining here, particularly with the promise of more of a say in the direction of feature development (as is stated). Upgraded reading list. This could have been part of the new features outlined above, but is considered a large-enough addition that it stands well on its own. What does the upgrade actually involve? Sounds like a change to the UX, as well as the ability to read offline on mobile. This is nice, and will likely keep more people inside the Medium app, rather than saving content out to a read-it-later app like Pocket (which is what I do today — it already has the offline functionality for free). The additional features (or the ones we can see right now) may not change the world, but the continual refinement of the reading and publishing experience on Medium is what’s led to the platform becoming my (and many others’) preferred place to read, write and share ideas. The team has clearly sweated every single detail when it comes to UX. Whether typography, editing or the more recent addition of interactive ‘Series’, the overall experience alone counts as a stand-out feature for many users. Can content subscriptions work? And more importantly in this case, can they work at scale? Those who follow the media and tech industry closely will be aware of at least one success story in monetizing content through subscriptions. Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, a one-man operation, offers free weekly content plus expanded additional analysis and exclusive daily articles through a $10 monthly subscription. Stratechery’s subscription is clearly tailored for the tech & media business niche — a niche for which Thompon has seemingly hit the sweet spot. In 2014 he announced that he already had 1,000 subscribers (implying a run-rate of $100K). Fast forward 3 years, and… well Ben hasn’t shared recent numbers. But the site appears to be going from success to success. The rise of curation The literal “rise” of curation in recent years, as illustrated by Google Trends The Stratechery example proves that people are willing to pay for a subscription to exclusive content, if you provide them with enough value. Targeting a highly-specific niche allows you to constantly refine and double down on the value you provide for that niche. The challenge, then, is cracking content subscriptions at a larger scale. But it might just work for Medium. Having reached a tipping point of content fatigue, people are starting to look for alternative ways to consume media that’s valuable to them. The rise of content curation has spawned directly from this — the idea of a human element of careful selection and pre-approval becomes increasingly attractive when everywhere you go online, brands are competing for attention. What I believe people will pay for, is clarity and the removal of noise from their lives. In the form of a single “go-to” platform for reading intelligent articles on relevant topics, Medium could fill this space. On journalism I spoke to Ghost.org founder John O’Nolan recently (you can listen to the full interview here). John’s overriding mission with Ghost (a hosted publishing platform) is to solve the problem of a sustainable business model for Journalism — which he believes is currently fundamentally broken. In many ways he’s right — the go-to model for monetizing content since the web 2.0 days has been advertising. On the surface there’s nothing wrong with ads on a web page. But when a business relies on such a model for the vast majority of revenue, it’s going to shape the way that business approaches creating and steering their content strategy in a big way. Simply put, display ads are usually paid per impression. More impressions = more money. This, in many ways, is at odds with the principles of “good” journalism — to remain neutral, and inform people. Given the choice of writing about the latest government policy change, or the gorilla in the local zoo who’s learned to style his own hair… well, you get the idea. In 2017, the goal is to provoke an instant, strong reaction in as-broad an audience as possible, regardless of the topic. “It’s time for thoughtfulness to prevail. That means transforming not just the experience around reading and writing, but also the economic model that determines which stories are told, clicked on, and compensated.” – Ev Williams, Founder of Medium John O’Nolan certainly believes there’s a better model for monetizing journalism — and content on a wider scale. And his solution matches this latest move from Ev and the team at Medium: Paid subscriptions. With subscriptions, the company can rely on a fixed, predictable flow of revenue and can focus their efforts on delivering ongoing value for subscribers. The biggest remaining questions “One thing I’m a little unclear on is whether I’m paying for Medium to hire new writers and publish new material, or whether my money is going towards the authors of the articles I’m reading (like a micro-transaction system).” – Daniel Samuels (on ProductHunt) There are a lot of things we simply don’t know at this point about Medium’s subscription model, the largest of those things being how they actually plan to reward writers for publishing premium content, and who that will be available to. Until the details are fleshed out, it’s unclear how big a bet the company is taking on shaking up the way we consume written media online. Who is allowed to write “premium” content? (Almost certainly a small pre-selected group at first, but will they open it up?) Will the improved discovery tools fix the “tech bubble” problem faced by Medium today, and allow it to break into a more mainstream audience? Will they be able to convince enough people to invest $5 per month in the platform, with so many other subscriptions cluttering consumers’ lives? Can they convince even more publishers to move over to their platform, and give up their owned web properties? If anyone can make these bold moves to drive the written content space forwards, it’s Ev Williams and his team at Medium. Armed with his product foresight, I’m welcoming this move away from the de facto revenue model and the changes that would bring. “We invite you to join us as a paid member and to help support an ad-free platform that delivers the right type of content: the type that can only be created when independent writers and publishers are rewarded based on value rather than clicks.” (The Medium Membership page) Further reading Memberships (Medium’s landing page) Medium releases Memberships (Hacker News discussion thread) Medium launches memberships for $5 per month (The Verge article) Medium Membership (ProductHunt discussion thread)

<sys> [INST] What Medium’s paid subscriptions tell us about the future of publishing [/INST] Medium’s subscriptions are here — and with it, a vote of confidence in the future of paid content and publishing online. After Ev Williams’ rather large hint back in January, Medium has this week unveiled more details on their proposed future for monetization. This is important because, given Medium’s (and Ev’s) position in the industry, it tells us not only how Medium plans to monetize itself as a company, but it also discloses the bet that it’s making on the future of written content as a business. In the aftermath of the digital revolution, (written) content has arguably been the hardest to monetize, compared to other mediums: Audio content saw stubbornness from publishers, a battle with piracy, and was eventually saved by the iTunes Music Store and subsequently online streaming services. (Sure, the model has some problems to iron out, but publishers are making money today). Video content saw even more stubbornness from publishers, another fight against piracy, and the rise of paid online streaming services. In the U.S., cable bundles are still highly profitable — but it’s quite clear that revenue is shifting slowly away from these services. Meanwhile, YouTube has found a sustainable way to monetize its vast library of user-generated video content with ads. Written content on the web virtually killed newspapers (you guessed it, they were stubborn), who are still scrambling to find some form of sustainable model for the future. Traditional display advertising is dying a slow death — the majority of content today is consumed through social platforms like Facebook, pulling traffic away from the publishers. Remember when building a personal blog and slapping some display ads on the page was a viable strategy? How times have changed. Understanding the announcement This looks to be the first version of something much bigger for the Medium product, and the features advertised today suggest a move towards Ev’s high level vision for the future of publishing on the web. The language on the landing page even reinforces this, playing to the notion that people subscribing today are not so much purchasing features, but rather “showing their support” for the future of the platform. Medium, after all, does a great job as positioning themselves as a platform, even a movement — something more than a product, a group of people working together to advance their future. Just in the way that Airbnb, Slack and other such startups have done. Membership features $5/monthly cost. This is important. The price point needs to be right, for consumers to effectively fit the subscription into their life, alongside the increasing number of existing subscriptions. $5 is the price point chosen by newspapers such as the Guardian. By aligning with this, they’re occupying the same headspace, rather than positioning themselves on the level of a Netflix or Spotify. In this regard, the difference between $5 and $10 is huge. $5 is a coffee. $10 is more than a coffee. Ad-free. The key thing here is the inverse — the fact that non-subscribers are going to have an ad-supported experience on Medium. While the ad-supported model hasn’t been working for the company, it obviously brings in significant-enough revenue for them to still pursue it for the vast majority of users. Of course, if they’ve spent the last year or more building ad-serving functionality into the platform, it may just make sense to not throw it away. Exclusive stories. Probably the biggest hinted change to the platform is the intention to support “paid content” — stories that are only available to paid subscribers. What this means is that Medium will have support for paying out a chunk of their subscription revenue to publishers on the platform. Tons of unanswered questions here (see the section below), but this potential to allow publishers to monetize their own content on Medium is huge. Early access to new features. The first of these new features is slated to be a redesigned homepage with better content discovery. It’s always nice to feel part of an “exclusive” group as Ev is outlining here, particularly with the promise of more of a say in the direction of feature development (as is stated). Upgraded reading list. This could have been part of the new features outlined above, but is considered a large-enough addition that it stands well on its own. What does the upgrade actually involve? Sounds like a change to the UX, as well as the ability to read offline on mobile. This is nice, and will likely keep more people inside the Medium app, rather than saving content out to a read-it-later app like Pocket (which is what I do today — it already has the offline functionality for free). The additional features (or the ones we can see right now) may not change the world, but the continual refinement of the reading and publishing experience on Medium is what’s led to the platform becoming my (and many others’) preferred place to read, write and share ideas. The team has clearly sweated every single detail when it comes to UX. Whether typography, editing or the more recent addition of interactive ‘Series’, the overall experience alone counts as a stand-out feature for many users. Can content subscriptions work? And more importantly in this case, can they work at scale? Those who follow the media and tech industry closely will be aware of at least one success story in monetizing content through subscriptions. Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, a one-man operation, offers free weekly content plus expanded additional analysis and exclusive daily articles through a $10 monthly subscription. Stratechery’s subscription is clearly tailored for the tech & media business niche — a niche for which Thompon has seemingly hit the sweet spot. In 2014 he announced that he already had 1,000 subscribers (implying a run-rate of $100K). Fast forward 3 years, and… well Ben hasn’t shared recent numbers. But the site appears to be going from success to success. The rise of curation The literal “rise” of curation in recent years, as illustrated by Google Trends The Stratechery example proves that people are willing to pay for a subscription to exclusive content, if you provide them with enough value. Targeting a highly-specific niche allows you to constantly refine and double down on the value you provide for that niche. The challenge, then, is cracking content subscriptions at a larger scale. But it might just work for Medium. Having reached a tipping point of content fatigue, people are starting to look for alternative ways to consume media that’s valuable to them. The rise of content curation has spawned directly from this — the idea of a human element of careful selection and pre-approval becomes increasingly attractive when everywhere you go online, brands are competing for attention. What I believe people will pay for, is clarity and the removal of noise from their lives. In the form of a single “go-to” platform for reading intelligent articles on relevant topics, Medium could fill this space. On journalism I spoke to Ghost.org founder John O’Nolan recently (you can listen to the full interview here). John’s overriding mission with Ghost (a hosted publishing platform) is to solve the problem of a sustainable business model for Journalism — which he believes is currently fundamentally broken. In many ways he’s right — the go-to model for monetizing content since the web 2.0 days has been advertising. On the surface there’s nothing wrong with ads on a web page. But when a business relies on such a model for the vast majority of revenue, it’s going to shape the way that business approaches creating and steering their content strategy in a big way. Simply put, display ads are usually paid per impression. More impressions = more money. This, in many ways, is at odds with the principles of “good” journalism — to remain neutral, and inform people. Given the choice of writing about the latest government policy change, or the gorilla in the local zoo who’s learned to style his own hair… well, you get the idea. In 2017, the goal is to provoke an instant, strong reaction in as-broad an audience as possible, regardless of the topic. “It’s time for thoughtfulness to prevail. That means transforming not just the experience around reading and writing, but also the economic model that determines which stories are told, clicked on, and compensated.” – Ev Williams, Founder of Medium John O’Nolan certainly believes there’s a better model for monetizing journalism — and content on a wider scale. And his solution matches this latest move from Ev and the team at Medium: Paid subscriptions. With subscriptions, the company can rely on a fixed, predictable flow of revenue and can focus their efforts on delivering ongoing value for subscribers. The biggest remaining questions “One thing I’m a little unclear on is whether I’m paying for Medium to hire new writers and publish new material, or whether my money is going towards the authors of the articles I’m reading (like a micro-transaction system).” – Daniel Samuels (on ProductHunt) There are a lot of things we simply don’t know at this point about Medium’s subscription model, the largest of those things being how they actually plan to reward writers for publishing premium content, and who that will be available to. Until the details are fleshed out, it’s unclear how big a bet the company is taking on shaking up the way we consume written media online. Who is allowed to write “premium” content? (Almost certainly a small pre-selected group at first, but will they open it up?) Will the improved discovery tools fix the “tech bubble” problem faced by Medium today, and allow it to break into a more mainstream audience? Will they be able to convince enough people to invest $5 per month in the platform, with so many other subscriptions cluttering consumers’ lives? Can they convince even more publishers to move over to their platform, and give up their owned web properties? If anyone can make these bold moves to drive the written content space forwards, it’s Ev Williams and his team at Medium. Armed with his product foresight, I’m welcoming this move away from the de facto revenue model and the changes that would bring. “We invite you to join us as a paid member and to help support an ad-free platform that delivers the right type of content: the type that can only be created when independent writers and publishers are rewarded based on value rather than clicks.” (The Medium Membership page) Further reading Memberships (Medium’s landing page) Medium releases Memberships (Hacker News discussion thread) Medium launches memberships for $5 per month (The Verge article) Medium Membership (ProductHunt discussion thread) </sys

Why do we still attend conferences?. The way we do business is changing, rapidly. Methods for building technology-based products, selling and marketing them are nothing like they used to be 20 years ago. Nowadays, relationships are often built through email and instant message, or video call (for that extra “personal” touch). Deals are done and signed off with packets of encrypted data travelling thousands of miles in mere milliseconds between our computers. But one aspect of doing business seems to buck that trend: The tech conference. Why is it that, given all of our advancements in technology and trade, we still spend thousands of dollars on travelling to a single location with thousands of others, to take part in activities we call “networking”, “keynotes” and “queueing for the buffet”? I took a look at what entrepreneurs and founders in the SaaS space are saying, to try and answer this question. Alex Theuma, Founder of SaaScribe and SaaStock conference Alex is pioneering the B2B SaaS events space this year by kicking off the inaugural SaaStock conference in Dublin. For some time, Europe has been without a “flagship” SaaS conference as such, and Alex’s main goal is to fill this void. But to say it’s not easy building a B2B conference from scratch in 2016 is a massive understatement. So why does Alex believe that it’s the right opportunity to pursue, and why does he think businesses should invest in attending such an event? “There are so many conferences these days and I understand that some people suffer from Conference fatigue, but the ROI for attending the right conferences with the RIGHT strategy is still so high. I’ve attended 4 conferences this year: 3 for business, 1 for more research purposes. Those that I attended for business, I had a plan of whom I wanted to meet, meetings lined up in advance and many great impromptu conversations during networking breaks. Each have given a 5-10x return on the cost of attending, and this doesn’t include the learning. I strongly believe you need both an online and offline sales strategy. You can’t go for tapas, share a cab and end up in a nightclub in Barcelona until 3am with a CEO you’ve just met at a conference and connect to the level that you win a new customer — by simply being at your desk emailing or writing a great blog post.” What Alex says echoes a lot of the feedback from other founders and entrepreneurs. There is still huge (and potentially growing) value in the “offline” element of sales — something that simply can’t be achieved through content marketing or other inbound activities. Listen to our interview with Alex for the SaaS Open Mic podcast here. I also recently spoke to Alex Delivet, founder of the B2B Rocks conference in Europe — listen to that interview here. Hayes Davis, CEO of UnionMetrics on SaaStr Annual “For me, the best thing about SaaStr Annual was realizing that every SaaS company out there has the same set of challenges we do. We’re all fighting to acquire customers and keep them, to keep our CACs in check and increase our LTVs. I was impressed with how many other CEOs would actually talk metrics and challenges; a refreshing change from the usual Silicon Valley exchange of ‘we’re killing it’.” I wanted to include Hayes’ impressions of SaaStr Annual because it really highlights the sense of community offered by such events, in a world of insecurity and doubt amongst lone founders. This type of vulnerability and connection is another aspect you’d really struggle to find in the online world. Nick Franklin, Founder & CEO of ChartMogul on SaaStr Annual If you look back at Nick’s write-up of his first SaaStr Annual event, the value of the experience at such an early stage of building a business is instantly clear: “I’m now convinced that the more specific an event is, the more valuable, engaging and ultimately more fun it is. At ChartMogul we’re building SaaS metrics software for SaaS companies so there couldn’t be a more perfect event for us. Just to highlight how relevant SaaStr was, we’ve only been selling ChartMogul for one month (therefore don’t have huge numbers of customers yet), yet we bumped into two of our paying customers and several of our very active trial-ers.” One aspect this really highlights is the specificity of events. Over recent years we’ve seen more and more events targeted towards specific segments of industry, or particular disciplines within a business. Whether it’s MarTech, FinTech or B2B Sales, the attraction of such an event is clear and simple: Being surrounded by like-minded individuals, not only in the same industry but even the same industry segment or discipline. The ongoing value of the tech conference The human connection It’s possible the value of human connection has increased in today’s world, where we’re battling an increasing amount of digital noise, and it’s actually becoming even harder to make meaningful connections digitally. In the “old days”, business was done face to face, and today it’s refreshing to get away from our laptop screens and make these arguably more meaningful connections. It’s almost a novelty. Think about that for a second. The best damn sales opportunity of the whole year As Alex Theuma mentioned above, taking an ROI-focused approach towards events really shows how you can turn the whole thing into a lead generation machine. And once you’ve run the numbers on this, it usually more than pays for itself once the first couple of deals roll in. There’s one caveat to this: For the sales approach to work, you need to be attending events that are highly-specific to your target customer base. It’s no use selling to a room full of people who simply don’t experience the problem your product is solving. Learning from the best of the best There’s still no better place to learn from influencers with the kind of experience that’s invaluable to your own success as a business leader. Yes, you can read things on blogs — or even watch videos on YouTube. But there’s still something different when it comes to sitting in the same room as your peers, and learning from the best in the game. A sense of community Jason Lemkin underlined this point as he kicked off the SaaStr Annual event in San Francisco back in February this year. What he’s building is not a “show”, for one-way consumption. It’s a community, through which entrepreneurs come together and help each other succeed, through the sharing of experiences and advice. This isn’t something you can find easily on the internet, where any sense of community is typically abandoned in favor of shouting as loudly as possible to try and get attention or exposure. Luckily, this practice still isn’t acceptable in the physical world… A dash of showmanship, and the love of the spectacle Let’s not kid ourselves here, entrepreneurs love to put on a good show, or to let off some steam. For the average SaaS founder, it’s quite likely that conferences are some of the only times during the year where you can change things up, and let your hair down in an environment surrounded by others who truly understand how it feels to be on the grind. Any good conference founder understands this, working it into the fabric of the event. Yes, those indoor fireworks and flame throwers on the stage may lack a little taste, but who cares?!

[INST] Why do we still attend conferences? [/INST]

The way we do business is changing, rapidly. Methods for building technology-based products, selling and marketing them are nothing like they used to be 20 years ago. Nowadays, relationships are often built through email and instant message, or video call (for that extra “personal” touch). Deals are done and signed off with packets of encrypted data travelling thousands of miles in mere milliseconds between our computers. But one aspect of doing business seems to buck that trend: The tech conference. Why is it that, given all of our advancements in technology and trade, we still spend thousands of dollars on travelling to a single location with thousands of others, to take part in activities we call “networking”, “keynotes” and “queueing for the buffet”? I took a look at what entrepreneurs and founders in the SaaS space are saying, to try and answer this question. Alex Theuma, Founder of SaaScribe and SaaStock conference Alex is pioneering the B2B SaaS events space this year by kicking off the inaugural SaaStock conference in Dublin. For some time, Europe has been without a “flagship” SaaS conference as such, and Alex’s main goal is to fill this void. But to say it’s not easy building a B2B conference from scratch in 2016 is a massive understatement. So why does Alex believe that it’s the right opportunity to pursue, and why does he think businesses should invest in attending such an event? “There are so many conferences these days and I understand that some people suffer from Conference fatigue, but the ROI for attending the right conferences with the RIGHT strategy is still so high. I’ve attended 4 conferences this year: 3 for business, 1 for more research purposes. Those that I attended for business, I had a plan of whom I wanted to meet, meetings lined up in advance and many great impromptu conversations during networking breaks. Each have given a 5-10x return on the cost of attending, and this doesn’t include the learning. I strongly believe you need both an online and offline sales strategy. You can’t go for tapas, share a cab and end up in a nightclub in Barcelona until 3am with a CEO you’ve just met at a conference and connect to the level that you win a new customer — by simply being at your desk emailing or writing a great blog post.” What Alex says echoes a lot of the feedback from other founders and entrepreneurs. There is still huge (and potentially growing) value in the “offline” element of sales — something that simply can’t be achieved through content marketing or other inbound activities. Listen to our interview with Alex for the SaaS Open Mic podcast here. I also recently spoke to Alex Delivet, founder of the B2B Rocks conference in Europe — listen to that interview here. Hayes Davis, CEO of UnionMetrics on SaaStr Annual “For me, the best thing about SaaStr Annual was realizing that every SaaS company out there has the same set of challenges we do. We’re all fighting to acquire customers and keep them, to keep our CACs in check and increase our LTVs. I was impressed with how many other CEOs would actually talk metrics and challenges; a refreshing change from the usual Silicon Valley exchange of ‘we’re killing it’.” I wanted to include Hayes’ impressions of SaaStr Annual because it really highlights the sense of community offered by such events, in a world of insecurity and doubt amongst lone founders. This type of vulnerability and connection is another aspect you’d really struggle to find in the online world. Nick Franklin, Founder & CEO of ChartMogul on SaaStr Annual If you look back at Nick’s write-up of his first SaaStr Annual event, the value of the experience at such an early stage of building a business is instantly clear: “I’m now convinced that the more specific an event is, the more valuable, engaging and ultimately more fun it is. At ChartMogul we’re building SaaS metrics software for SaaS companies so there couldn’t be a more perfect event for us. Just to highlight how relevant SaaStr was, we’ve only been selling ChartMogul for one month (therefore don’t have huge numbers of customers yet), yet we bumped into two of our paying customers and several of our very active trial-ers.” One aspect this really highlights is the specificity of events. Over recent years we’ve seen more and more events targeted towards specific segments of industry, or particular disciplines within a business. Whether it’s MarTech, FinTech or B2B Sales, the attraction of such an event is clear and simple: Being surrounded by like-minded individuals, not only in the same industry but even the same industry segment or discipline. The ongoing value of the tech conference The human connection It’s possible the value of human connection has increased in today’s world, where we’re battling an increasing amount of digital noise, and it’s actually becoming even harder to make meaningful connections digitally. In the “old days”, business was done face to face, and today it’s refreshing to get away from our laptop screens and make these arguably more meaningful connections. It’s almost a novelty. Think about that for a second. The best damn sales opportunity of the whole year As Alex Theuma mentioned above, taking an ROI-focused approach towards events really shows how you can turn the whole thing into a lead generation machine. And once you’ve run the numbers on this, it usually more than pays for itself once the first couple of deals roll in. There’s one caveat to this: For the sales approach to work, you need to be attending events that are highly-specific to your target customer base. It’s no use selling to a room full of people who simply don’t experience the problem your product is solving. Learning from the best of the best There’s still no better place to learn from influencers with the kind of experience that’s invaluable to your own success as a business leader. Yes, you can read things on blogs — or even watch videos on YouTube. But there’s still something different when it comes to sitting in the same room as your peers, and learning from the best in the game. A sense of community Jason Lemkin underlined this point as he kicked off the SaaStr Annual event in San Francisco back in February this year. What he’s building is not a “show”, for one-way consumption. It’s a community, through which entrepreneurs come together and help each other succeed, through the sharing of experiences and advice. This isn’t something you can find easily on the internet, where any sense of community is typically abandoned in favor of shouting as loudly as possible to try and get attention or exposure. Luckily, this practice still isn’t acceptable in the physical world… A dash of showmanship, and the love of the spectacle Let’s not kid ourselves here, entrepreneurs love to put on a good show, or to let off some steam. For the average SaaS founder, it’s quite likely that conferences are some of the only times during the year where you can change things up, and let your hair down in an environment surrounded by others who truly understand how it feels to be on the grind. Any good conference founder understands this, working it into the fabric of the event. Yes, those indoor fireworks and flame throwers on the stage may lack a little taste, but who cares?!

<sys> [INST] Why do we still attend conferences? [/INST] The way we do business is changing, rapidly. Methods for building technology-based products, selling and marketing them are nothing like they used to be 20 years ago. Nowadays, relationships are often built through email and instant message, or video call (for that extra “personal” touch). Deals are done and signed off with packets of encrypted data travelling thousands of miles in mere milliseconds between our computers. But one aspect of doing business seems to buck that trend: The tech conference. Why is it that, given all of our advancements in technology and trade, we still spend thousands of dollars on travelling to a single location with thousands of others, to take part in activities we call “networking”, “keynotes” and “queueing for the buffet”? I took a look at what entrepreneurs and founders in the SaaS space are saying, to try and answer this question. Alex Theuma, Founder of SaaScribe and SaaStock conference Alex is pioneering the B2B SaaS events space this year by kicking off the inaugural SaaStock conference in Dublin. For some time, Europe has been without a “flagship” SaaS conference as such, and Alex’s main goal is to fill this void. But to say it’s not easy building a B2B conference from scratch in 2016 is a massive understatement. So why does Alex believe that it’s the right opportunity to pursue, and why does he think businesses should invest in attending such an event? “There are so many conferences these days and I understand that some people suffer from Conference fatigue, but the ROI for attending the right conferences with the RIGHT strategy is still so high. I’ve attended 4 conferences this year: 3 for business, 1 for more research purposes. Those that I attended for business, I had a plan of whom I wanted to meet, meetings lined up in advance and many great impromptu conversations during networking breaks. Each have given a 5-10x return on the cost of attending, and this doesn’t include the learning. I strongly believe you need both an online and offline sales strategy. You can’t go for tapas, share a cab and end up in a nightclub in Barcelona until 3am with a CEO you’ve just met at a conference and connect to the level that you win a new customer — by simply being at your desk emailing or writing a great blog post.” What Alex says echoes a lot of the feedback from other founders and entrepreneurs. There is still huge (and potentially growing) value in the “offline” element of sales — something that simply can’t be achieved through content marketing or other inbound activities. Listen to our interview with Alex for the SaaS Open Mic podcast here. I also recently spoke to Alex Delivet, founder of the B2B Rocks conference in Europe — listen to that interview here. Hayes Davis, CEO of UnionMetrics on SaaStr Annual “For me, the best thing about SaaStr Annual was realizing that every SaaS company out there has the same set of challenges we do. We’re all fighting to acquire customers and keep them, to keep our CACs in check and increase our LTVs. I was impressed with how many other CEOs would actually talk metrics and challenges; a refreshing change from the usual Silicon Valley exchange of ‘we’re killing it’.” I wanted to include Hayes’ impressions of SaaStr Annual because it really highlights the sense of community offered by such events, in a world of insecurity and doubt amongst lone founders. This type of vulnerability and connection is another aspect you’d really struggle to find in the online world. Nick Franklin, Founder & CEO of ChartMogul on SaaStr Annual If you look back at Nick’s write-up of his first SaaStr Annual event, the value of the experience at such an early stage of building a business is instantly clear: “I’m now convinced that the more specific an event is, the more valuable, engaging and ultimately more fun it is. At ChartMogul we’re building SaaS metrics software for SaaS companies so there couldn’t be a more perfect event for us. Just to highlight how relevant SaaStr was, we’ve only been selling ChartMogul for one month (therefore don’t have huge numbers of customers yet), yet we bumped into two of our paying customers and several of our very active trial-ers.” One aspect this really highlights is the specificity of events. Over recent years we’ve seen more and more events targeted towards specific segments of industry, or particular disciplines within a business. Whether it’s MarTech, FinTech or B2B Sales, the attraction of such an event is clear and simple: Being surrounded by like-minded individuals, not only in the same industry but even the same industry segment or discipline. The ongoing value of the tech conference The human connection It’s possible the value of human connection has increased in today’s world, where we’re battling an increasing amount of digital noise, and it’s actually becoming even harder to make meaningful connections digitally. In the “old days”, business was done face to face, and today it’s refreshing to get away from our laptop screens and make these arguably more meaningful connections. It’s almost a novelty. Think about that for a second. The best damn sales opportunity of the whole year As Alex Theuma mentioned above, taking an ROI-focused approach towards events really shows how you can turn the whole thing into a lead generation machine. And once you’ve run the numbers on this, it usually more than pays for itself once the first couple of deals roll in. There’s one caveat to this: For the sales approach to work, you need to be attending events that are highly-specific to your target customer base. It’s no use selling to a room full of people who simply don’t experience the problem your product is solving. Learning from the best of the best There’s still no better place to learn from influencers with the kind of experience that’s invaluable to your own success as a business leader. Yes, you can read things on blogs — or even watch videos on YouTube. But there’s still something different when it comes to sitting in the same room as your peers, and learning from the best in the game. A sense of community Jason Lemkin underlined this point as he kicked off the SaaStr Annual event in San Francisco back in February this year. What he’s building is not a “show”, for one-way consumption. It’s a community, through which entrepreneurs come together and help each other succeed, through the sharing of experiences and advice. This isn’t something you can find easily on the internet, where any sense of community is typically abandoned in favor of shouting as loudly as possible to try and get attention or exposure. Luckily, this practice still isn’t acceptable in the physical world… A dash of showmanship, and the love of the spectacle Let’s not kid ourselves here, entrepreneurs love to put on a good show, or to let off some steam. For the average SaaS founder, it’s quite likely that conferences are some of the only times during the year where you can change things up, and let your hair down in an environment surrounded by others who truly understand how it feels to be on the grind. Any good conference founder understands this, working it into the fabric of the event. Yes, those indoor fireworks and flame throwers on the stage may lack a little taste, but who cares?! </sys

Navigating Choppy SaaS Waters. “May you live in interesting times” is a rough translation of a traditional Chinese proverb that is bearing more meaning today than ever in the history of SaaS. After a brilliant run up to 2022, SaaS valuations got hammered in the public markets lately. Source: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-61722 And with rising interest rates and weakening global demand, it seems like choppy waters are here to stay. It may sound like doom and gloom but periods like this flesh out what is best in our industry. So let’s talk about what you as a founder or a SaaS operator can do to position yourself for a weaker growth environment. So Where Are We? And What’s Ahead of Us? If you tuned into the All-In podcast you would’ve heard a ton of sentiment analysis and commentary from influential VC voices. “As soon as survival risk’s on the table… you really have to act differently – it’s kinda like the difference between a poker tournament and a cash game… In a poker tournament players are much more conservative – because once you’re out – you’re out… Whereas in a cash game you can just re-buy.” David Sacks, Craft Ventures If we pause and think about the term sheets offered in the last 2 years, the valuation run-up was nothing short of impressive. But things have started to turn. Some investors are even pulling out of term sheets altogether. I’ve seen more term sheets pulled in the last month than in the last decade. Just sayin. — Josh Kopelman (@joshk) May 18, 2022 Rising inflation, a high-interest rate environment, and the cooling down of the pandemic-driven demand have all hammered SaaS valuations in the past few months. SaaS startup growth has taken a hit as well as we noted. And the outlook from here on doesn’t inspire much confidence considering the economy outside of tech has issues too. What was last year’s “inventory shortage” is quickly turning to be an “inventory glut” as companies that double-ordered inventory hoping to get more stuff through and satisfy consumer demand suddenly face less robust consumer spending. In the SaaS world, that means the consumer-facing apps & marketplace SaaS have a tougher time ahead. B2B is in a similar bind — a conservative spending approach and a tougher financing environment will affect SaaS spending as well, meaning that we might see things get worse before they get better. What Should You Do? The question on every CFO’s mind will be — what can we rip and replace and what is mission-critical? Here are a few thoughts: 1. You Should Double Down on Your Core Product Offering This is a perfect time to invest in your user base & core product offering because playing to your strengths will pay off. So forward-looking PMs and dev teams here should prioritize stickiness of the product more and try to create the conditions where you’re dealing with real value add product features instead of “nice to haves”. In short, the product-market fit needs to be strong to the point where the cost of rip & replace outstrips the savings from cutting the service. If you think about your DevOps, moving from one cloud infrastructure setup to another is quite a demanding task that requires resources and manpower. Trust us, we did it recently and you can read more about our migration here. You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. Although, you might drop the training wheels pretty fast. 2. Dig Deep Into Your Financials Given the choppy growth environment, how should you position your financials? It depends on a few things — your size, burn rate, the time elapsed from the last raise, and the general ability to weather the storm. No one can know how much of your bottom line will be affected as well as what the future financing prospects look like. So a defensive posturing might give you more leeway. One thing is definitely true — stakeholders will require more information about your KPIs. You will want to know more about it, too — growth might be skewing towards industries where you achieve better product-market fit, and doubling down on them might be a good idea. The pace of change will matter more than the headline number and focusing on rate change will help you spot inflection points, and improve your forecasting and overall trend better. If you’re finding yourselves thinking “I’m not sure if we can 100% trust our metrics” — happy to get you set up with ChartMogul for comparison & data audit. Book your ChartMogul demo now. 3. Rethink How You Sell Going Forward The last 2 years of SaaS twitter summed up sales into two simplistic formulas for achieving growth: PLG & raising prices While I don’t expect the PLG trend to slow down, the lower cost overhead of “burden-less” no-freemium and bespoke enterprise software might do better here — especially for companies that can leverage the duration of their multi-year contract offerings compared to those relying on shorter-term subscriptions. Just looking at Netflix and its monthly user decline, as well as market reaction to it, tells the tale of missed expectations and rapidly shifting sentiment. In times like these, emotions are high and churn hurts more emotionally and materially, and after 2 years of upwards price adjustments, we might be seeing some price concessions in exchange for duration and predictability. The trick, here again, is not to panic and keep a close eye on your ARPA in all user segments. Sales teams will be incentivized to sell longer duration and nurture their best deals even more in an effort to keep growing. While we probably won’t see heavy discounting, the best SaaS companies out there will be able to keep their bottom line and expand in their competitors’ customer base but it will require top-notch, responsive, and proactive Customer Service and Sales teams to onboard & retain your customer base. I’m getting a fair bit of inbound recently from B2C SaaS companies, offering me significant discounts to switch to annual billing. This is one of the tactics SaaS companies use to shore up churn. — Travis.web1 (@coloradotravis) May 22, 2022 4. Seek Out Advice We’ve had eleven straight years of SaaS expansion with one of the best bull markets in tech ever. No one is calling for an end to it but if the times get tough — there are niche communities that help contextualize the situation and let you hear the street talk. If you’re a salesperson like me, Bravado’s War Room is an online sales forum that recently discussed some of the layoffs in tech people are seeing. The Mogul.io community founded by ChartMogul is a great place to chat with other founders and get some advice from your peers. Lastly, we’re here to help as well. If you’re our customer, reach out to us if you need some perspective on your metrics. If the choppy SaaS waters are here to stay, that’s usually a good time to be curious, data-driven, and strategize the next steps. Further Reading Yes, SaaS Startup Growth Is Slowing Down by Sid Jain, ChartMogul Operating During a Downturn by David Sacks, Craft Ventures What Is a Recession & Are We in One Now? by Eric Basmajian, EPB Macro Forecasting and Scenario Planning by Ravi Gupta, Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

[INST] Navigating Choppy SaaS Waters [/INST]

“May you live in interesting times” is a rough translation of a traditional Chinese proverb that is bearing more meaning today than ever in the history of SaaS. After a brilliant run up to 2022, SaaS valuations got hammered in the public markets lately. Source: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-61722 And with rising interest rates and weakening global demand, it seems like choppy waters are here to stay. It may sound like doom and gloom but periods like this flesh out what is best in our industry. So let’s talk about what you as a founder or a SaaS operator can do to position yourself for a weaker growth environment. So Where Are We? And What’s Ahead of Us? If you tuned into the All-In podcast you would’ve heard a ton of sentiment analysis and commentary from influential VC voices. “As soon as survival risk’s on the table… you really have to act differently – it’s kinda like the difference between a poker tournament and a cash game… In a poker tournament players are much more conservative – because once you’re out – you’re out… Whereas in a cash game you can just re-buy.” David Sacks, Craft Ventures If we pause and think about the term sheets offered in the last 2 years, the valuation run-up was nothing short of impressive. But things have started to turn. Some investors are even pulling out of term sheets altogether. I’ve seen more term sheets pulled in the last month than in the last decade. Just sayin. — Josh Kopelman (@joshk) May 18, 2022 Rising inflation, a high-interest rate environment, and the cooling down of the pandemic-driven demand have all hammered SaaS valuations in the past few months. SaaS startup growth has taken a hit as well as we noted. And the outlook from here on doesn’t inspire much confidence considering the economy outside of tech has issues too. What was last year’s “inventory shortage” is quickly turning to be an “inventory glut” as companies that double-ordered inventory hoping to get more stuff through and satisfy consumer demand suddenly face less robust consumer spending. In the SaaS world, that means the consumer-facing apps & marketplace SaaS have a tougher time ahead. B2B is in a similar bind — a conservative spending approach and a tougher financing environment will affect SaaS spending as well, meaning that we might see things get worse before they get better. What Should You Do? The question on every CFO’s mind will be — what can we rip and replace and what is mission-critical? Here are a few thoughts: 1. You Should Double Down on Your Core Product Offering This is a perfect time to invest in your user base & core product offering because playing to your strengths will pay off. So forward-looking PMs and dev teams here should prioritize stickiness of the product more and try to create the conditions where you’re dealing with real value add product features instead of “nice to haves”. In short, the product-market fit needs to be strong to the point where the cost of rip & replace outstrips the savings from cutting the service. If you think about your DevOps, moving from one cloud infrastructure setup to another is quite a demanding task that requires resources and manpower. Trust us, we did it recently and you can read more about our migration here. You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. Although, you might drop the training wheels pretty fast. 2. Dig Deep Into Your Financials Given the choppy growth environment, how should you position your financials? It depends on a few things — your size, burn rate, the time elapsed from the last raise, and the general ability to weather the storm. No one can know how much of your bottom line will be affected as well as what the future financing prospects look like. So a defensive posturing might give you more leeway. One thing is definitely true — stakeholders will require more information about your KPIs. You will want to know more about it, too — growth might be skewing towards industries where you achieve better product-market fit, and doubling down on them might be a good idea. The pace of change will matter more than the headline number and focusing on rate change will help you spot inflection points, and improve your forecasting and overall trend better. If you’re finding yourselves thinking “I’m not sure if we can 100% trust our metrics” — happy to get you set up with ChartMogul for comparison & data audit. Book your ChartMogul demo now. 3. Rethink How You Sell Going Forward The last 2 years of SaaS twitter summed up sales into two simplistic formulas for achieving growth: PLG & raising prices While I don’t expect the PLG trend to slow down, the lower cost overhead of “burden-less” no-freemium and bespoke enterprise software might do better here — especially for companies that can leverage the duration of their multi-year contract offerings compared to those relying on shorter-term subscriptions. Just looking at Netflix and its monthly user decline, as well as market reaction to it, tells the tale of missed expectations and rapidly shifting sentiment. In times like these, emotions are high and churn hurts more emotionally and materially, and after 2 years of upwards price adjustments, we might be seeing some price concessions in exchange for duration and predictability. The trick, here again, is not to panic and keep a close eye on your ARPA in all user segments. Sales teams will be incentivized to sell longer duration and nurture their best deals even more in an effort to keep growing. While we probably won’t see heavy discounting, the best SaaS companies out there will be able to keep their bottom line and expand in their competitors’ customer base but it will require top-notch, responsive, and proactive Customer Service and Sales teams to onboard & retain your customer base. I’m getting a fair bit of inbound recently from B2C SaaS companies, offering me significant discounts to switch to annual billing. This is one of the tactics SaaS companies use to shore up churn. — Travis.web1 (@coloradotravis) May 22, 2022 4. Seek Out Advice We’ve had eleven straight years of SaaS expansion with one of the best bull markets in tech ever. No one is calling for an end to it but if the times get tough — there are niche communities that help contextualize the situation and let you hear the street talk. If you’re a salesperson like me, Bravado’s War Room is an online sales forum that recently discussed some of the layoffs in tech people are seeing. The Mogul.io community founded by ChartMogul is a great place to chat with other founders and get some advice from your peers. Lastly, we’re here to help as well. If you’re our customer, reach out to us if you need some perspective on your metrics. If the choppy SaaS waters are here to stay, that’s usually a good time to be curious, data-driven, and strategize the next steps. Further Reading Yes, SaaS Startup Growth Is Slowing Down by Sid Jain, ChartMogul Operating During a Downturn by David Sacks, Craft Ventures What Is a Recession & Are We in One Now? by Eric Basmajian, EPB Macro Forecasting and Scenario Planning by Ravi Gupta, Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

<sys> [INST] Navigating Choppy SaaS Waters [/INST] “May you live in interesting times” is a rough translation of a traditional Chinese proverb that is bearing more meaning today than ever in the history of SaaS. After a brilliant run up to 2022, SaaS valuations got hammered in the public markets lately. Source: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-61722 And with rising interest rates and weakening global demand, it seems like choppy waters are here to stay. It may sound like doom and gloom but periods like this flesh out what is best in our industry. So let’s talk about what you as a founder or a SaaS operator can do to position yourself for a weaker growth environment. So Where Are We? And What’s Ahead of Us? If you tuned into the All-In podcast you would’ve heard a ton of sentiment analysis and commentary from influential VC voices. “As soon as survival risk’s on the table… you really have to act differently – it’s kinda like the difference between a poker tournament and a cash game… In a poker tournament players are much more conservative – because once you’re out – you’re out… Whereas in a cash game you can just re-buy.” David Sacks, Craft Ventures If we pause and think about the term sheets offered in the last 2 years, the valuation run-up was nothing short of impressive. But things have started to turn. Some investors are even pulling out of term sheets altogether. I’ve seen more term sheets pulled in the last month than in the last decade. Just sayin. — Josh Kopelman (@joshk) May 18, 2022 Rising inflation, a high-interest rate environment, and the cooling down of the pandemic-driven demand have all hammered SaaS valuations in the past few months. SaaS startup growth has taken a hit as well as we noted. And the outlook from here on doesn’t inspire much confidence considering the economy outside of tech has issues too. What was last year’s “inventory shortage” is quickly turning to be an “inventory glut” as companies that double-ordered inventory hoping to get more stuff through and satisfy consumer demand suddenly face less robust consumer spending. In the SaaS world, that means the consumer-facing apps & marketplace SaaS have a tougher time ahead. B2B is in a similar bind — a conservative spending approach and a tougher financing environment will affect SaaS spending as well, meaning that we might see things get worse before they get better. What Should You Do? The question on every CFO’s mind will be — what can we rip and replace and what is mission-critical? Here are a few thoughts: 1. You Should Double Down on Your Core Product Offering This is a perfect time to invest in your user base & core product offering because playing to your strengths will pay off. So forward-looking PMs and dev teams here should prioritize stickiness of the product more and try to create the conditions where you’re dealing with real value add product features instead of “nice to haves”. In short, the product-market fit needs to be strong to the point where the cost of rip & replace outstrips the savings from cutting the service. If you think about your DevOps, moving from one cloud infrastructure setup to another is quite a demanding task that requires resources and manpower. Trust us, we did it recently and you can read more about our migration here. You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. Although, you might drop the training wheels pretty fast. 2. Dig Deep Into Your Financials Given the choppy growth environment, how should you position your financials? It depends on a few things — your size, burn rate, the time elapsed from the last raise, and the general ability to weather the storm. No one can know how much of your bottom line will be affected as well as what the future financing prospects look like. So a defensive posturing might give you more leeway. One thing is definitely true — stakeholders will require more information about your KPIs. You will want to know more about it, too — growth might be skewing towards industries where you achieve better product-market fit, and doubling down on them might be a good idea. The pace of change will matter more than the headline number and focusing on rate change will help you spot inflection points, and improve your forecasting and overall trend better. If you’re finding yourselves thinking “I’m not sure if we can 100% trust our metrics” — happy to get you set up with ChartMogul for comparison & data audit. Book your ChartMogul demo now. 3. Rethink How You Sell Going Forward The last 2 years of SaaS twitter summed up sales into two simplistic formulas for achieving growth: PLG & raising prices While I don’t expect the PLG trend to slow down, the lower cost overhead of “burden-less” no-freemium and bespoke enterprise software might do better here — especially for companies that can leverage the duration of their multi-year contract offerings compared to those relying on shorter-term subscriptions. Just looking at Netflix and its monthly user decline, as well as market reaction to it, tells the tale of missed expectations and rapidly shifting sentiment. In times like these, emotions are high and churn hurts more emotionally and materially, and after 2 years of upwards price adjustments, we might be seeing some price concessions in exchange for duration and predictability. The trick, here again, is not to panic and keep a close eye on your ARPA in all user segments. Sales teams will be incentivized to sell longer duration and nurture their best deals even more in an effort to keep growing. While we probably won’t see heavy discounting, the best SaaS companies out there will be able to keep their bottom line and expand in their competitors’ customer base but it will require top-notch, responsive, and proactive Customer Service and Sales teams to onboard & retain your customer base. I’m getting a fair bit of inbound recently from B2C SaaS companies, offering me significant discounts to switch to annual billing. This is one of the tactics SaaS companies use to shore up churn. — Travis.web1 (@coloradotravis) May 22, 2022 4. Seek Out Advice We’ve had eleven straight years of SaaS expansion with one of the best bull markets in tech ever. No one is calling for an end to it but if the times get tough — there are niche communities that help contextualize the situation and let you hear the street talk. If you’re a salesperson like me, Bravado’s War Room is an online sales forum that recently discussed some of the layoffs in tech people are seeing. The Mogul.io community founded by ChartMogul is a great place to chat with other founders and get some advice from your peers. Lastly, we’re here to help as well. If you’re our customer, reach out to us if you need some perspective on your metrics. If the choppy SaaS waters are here to stay, that’s usually a good time to be curious, data-driven, and strategize the next steps. Further Reading Yes, SaaS Startup Growth Is Slowing Down by Sid Jain, ChartMogul Operating During a Downturn by David Sacks, Craft Ventures What Is a Recession & Are We in One Now? by Eric Basmajian, EPB Macro Forecasting and Scenario Planning by Ravi Gupta, Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital </sys

How SaaS is Like Monty Python and 6 Other Things I Learned at SaaStock 2019. It’s not every day that you can hear a Monty Python reference at a conference like this. I have just used it to describe one of the largest and most impressive booths at SaaStock 2019 — a 2-storey giant with an observation deck and a cafeteria on top. I couldn’t get past the fact that it would be perfect for recreating an iconic scene from the 1975 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Thankfully, SaaStock attendees at large are past the taunting stage British comedy has matured a lot in the last few decades, so people now don’t have to resort to a film that’s over 40 years old for entertainment. The view from the top of the castle Oddly, after 3 days packed with new connections, great talks, and a lot of wisdom, I feel like a similar trend is happening in SaaS too. When I started thinking about this roundup of SaaStock 2019, I was worried about fitting so much into a single blog post. Now I am actually surprised that I can fit it one word. Maturity. SaaS is getting more mature as an industry and you can see that everywhere — there are more attendees at conferences like SaaStock, every company has multiple competitors, the stakes are getting higher, the conversations more sophisticated, and so on. Maturity (in all aspects of the word) is what binds all the main messages from SaaStock. We’re still the same people who can gather at a conference that’s named after Woodstock. But the community is also getting much smarter (and mature) about the challenges and the problems we should be talking about. For proof, just look at some of the main points from this year: What does it mean to be in the Golden Age of SaaS How to think about (and do) marketing as you grow Why small improvements are more important than big bets And also… why we have to take care of ours and our teams’ mental health. Here’s a rundown of some of the best insight I gained from attending SaaStock 2019. The Golden Age of SaaS: From attention to value When we’re talking about SaaS becoming more mature, it doesn’t mean the industry is past its prime. Claire Hughes Johnson, the COO of Stripe, nailed down the point in her SaaStock 2019 talk, arguing that we’re just entering the Golden Age of the industry. So far, a lot of the value creation of the internet has happened from either moving commerce to digital channels or from monetizing attention (i.e. advertising). Claire argues that the real potential of the internet is the creation of entirely new businesses. To power this shift, we need infrastructure, which supports the easy establishment and distribution of the new internet-enabled products and services. This is already at play — services like AWS, Stripe, and others have brought down the cost of starting and running a business to a fraction of what they used to be just a decade ago. Consumerizing even more parts of the activities of a typical business (logistics-as-a-service, etc.) will create an opportunity for even more companies to disrupt large incumbents in traditional industries such as automotive and others. Marginal gains are the new rule As the industry matures and becomes more competitive, it becomes natural to focus on making small improvements that have the potential to move the needle. This was the main point in Jacco van der Kooij’s keynote Sales as a Science. The typical funnel/loop in SaaS looks like a system: A # of new Leads comes into the funnel A certain % of those leads is nurtured into becoming Sales qualified leads The sales team works to turn a certain % of the SQLs into Paying customers. (Sometimes they have to offer discounts that have a certain $/% effect on the overall price/ACV that customers pay.) This can be shown as a simple equation: Leads x % SQLs x % Sales Closed x % Discount = $ new Revenue. According to Jacco, working to improve each link of the chain (through improving conversion rates for example) would have a higher impact on your business, than a large change in one step (e.g. doubling the number of leads). The same applies to every part of your business — product, marketing, even your business model. Improve your ARPA and your retention and your LTV (and ultimately the bottom line) will follow. The simple LTV formula In a market with many competitors and saturated marketing channels, this type of gradual improvement will be more effective in finding ways to grow. To succeed in a crowded market you have to know your business One of the panel discussions included Guillaume Cabane, who is the Founder of Growth Ex Machina, Jason VandeBoom, Founder & CEO of ActiveCampaign, Alonso Bustamante, Special Projects at Cloudflare and Briehan Burke, who’s one of the investors at Keen Venture Partners. They shared their thoughts on why founders shouldn’t give up on a market just because it is dominated by a large incumbent. Nimble entrants have a number of advantages in such cases: They don’t need to educate their users about a new category but can rely on the work done by the established player(s). They can stay close to a well-defined group of customers and move quickly to solve their pains. They don’t need to fight the war across a full front, but can instead focus on a small area (specific segment, use case, or geography) where they are best positioned to get a small win and expand from there. Marketing starts from the inside out Des Traynor from Intercom caught the attention of everyone at SaaStock 2019 by claiming we obsess too much over Product/Market Fit. WATCH: Des Traynor, Intercom LIVE @ #SaaStock19 #Dublin https://t.co/arboSJr5eX — SaaStock (@SaaStock) October 15, 2019 He identified the 3 main stages that startups go through: The Early stage which ends when a startup becomes a breakout success. The Growing Up stage, which finishes with the company becoming an established player. And the Standard stage, in which the startup turns into a mainstream company. Once a company is out of its early stage of development, it really needs to start thinking about how it markets the product. Unfortunately, that’s where most founders get it wrong. A lot of you have probably said to investors something like “We have a 100 customers, and we haven’t even marketed yet!” That’s not necessarily a good thing because adding marketing is a really hard challenge and most people will make a massive mistake doing it. All you’re saying “There’s a ****load of risk yet to be realized!” Des Traynor, Intercom To maximize your chances for success, Des suggests that you start by looking at the bottom of your funnel and move your way up. That requires a really hard look at how people use your product and who they are and then using that to move one level up in the chain and figure out what makes people move from it to the next one. This process is slower and harder to crack but ultimately yields better results. Take care of your (and your team’s) mental health When we talk about maturity in SaaS, we have to acknowledge it comes in different forms. In a panel discussion titled How to address tech’s ongoing mental health catastrophe, Amy Lewin from Sifted, Joe Krancki, Venture Partner at Instanda, Nicola McClafferty, Investment Director at Draper Esprit, and James Ski, who’s the Founder & CEO at Sales Confidence talked about creating a culture that doesn’t put mental wellbeing on the back burner. One of the highlights of the discussion was the idea that mental health should be a top-down priority: with investors advocating for their founders, who in turn make it a focus for their employees as well. “Taking time off isn’t a red flag. I value self awareness in a founder. It shows me this person is thinking about their busines in a proactive way.” @amyrlewin @Siftedeu, @JoeKrancki, @NikkiMcClaff, @jamesas address tech’s ongoing mental health problem @saastock #saastock19. pic.twitter.com/0EBZPocF35 — HUCKLETREE (@huckletree) October 16, 2019 Our secret to success: a relentless focus Our CEO Nick did a live recording for the Inside Intercom podcast. The episode is yet to be published, but I’m giving you a sneak peek of details about ChartMogul’s journey that he shared. The silent disco concept applied to podcasting: only those wearing headphones could listen to the interview. In line with the main theme of the conference (and this article), Nick shared the 2 pillars of ChartMogul’s strategy: Improving retention to maximize the value of each relationship. Maintaining focus on our core product and making sure it’s the best tool on the market. When you lose a customer, it’s not just the monthly subscription that’s gone, but also any future natural upsell value from that customer’s growth and possibly even word-of-mouth. We believe that the secret to success in a highly-competitive market is to focus on forging strong relationships with our customers, developing the product around their core needs, and growing alongside them. Conclusion: Looking forward to SaaStock 2020! My personal highlight from SaaStock 2019 can also be summarized in one word: people. It is impossible to meet and talk to customers, practitioners, and investors outside an event like this — and SaaStock has the scale and the clout to collect the best in the field. I am already looking forward to next year, but if you want to connect, you don’t have to wait until then — just get in touch on Twitter. Hope to see you there!

[INST] How SaaS is Like Monty Python and 6 Other Things I Learned at SaaStock 2019 [/INST]

It’s not every day that you can hear a Monty Python reference at a conference like this. I have just used it to describe one of the largest and most impressive booths at SaaStock 2019 — a 2-storey giant with an observation deck and a cafeteria on top. I couldn’t get past the fact that it would be perfect for recreating an iconic scene from the 1975 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Thankfully, SaaStock attendees at large are past the taunting stage British comedy has matured a lot in the last few decades, so people now don’t have to resort to a film that’s over 40 years old for entertainment. The view from the top of the castle Oddly, after 3 days packed with new connections, great talks, and a lot of wisdom, I feel like a similar trend is happening in SaaS too. When I started thinking about this roundup of SaaStock 2019, I was worried about fitting so much into a single blog post. Now I am actually surprised that I can fit it one word. Maturity. SaaS is getting more mature as an industry and you can see that everywhere — there are more attendees at conferences like SaaStock, every company has multiple competitors, the stakes are getting higher, the conversations more sophisticated, and so on. Maturity (in all aspects of the word) is what binds all the main messages from SaaStock. We’re still the same people who can gather at a conference that’s named after Woodstock. But the community is also getting much smarter (and mature) about the challenges and the problems we should be talking about. For proof, just look at some of the main points from this year: What does it mean to be in the Golden Age of SaaS How to think about (and do) marketing as you grow Why small improvements are more important than big bets And also… why we have to take care of ours and our teams’ mental health. Here’s a rundown of some of the best insight I gained from attending SaaStock 2019. The Golden Age of SaaS: From attention to value When we’re talking about SaaS becoming more mature, it doesn’t mean the industry is past its prime. Claire Hughes Johnson, the COO of Stripe, nailed down the point in her SaaStock 2019 talk, arguing that we’re just entering the Golden Age of the industry. So far, a lot of the value creation of the internet has happened from either moving commerce to digital channels or from monetizing attention (i.e. advertising). Claire argues that the real potential of the internet is the creation of entirely new businesses. To power this shift, we need infrastructure, which supports the easy establishment and distribution of the new internet-enabled products and services. This is already at play — services like AWS, Stripe, and others have brought down the cost of starting and running a business to a fraction of what they used to be just a decade ago. Consumerizing even more parts of the activities of a typical business (logistics-as-a-service, etc.) will create an opportunity for even more companies to disrupt large incumbents in traditional industries such as automotive and others. Marginal gains are the new rule As the industry matures and becomes more competitive, it becomes natural to focus on making small improvements that have the potential to move the needle. This was the main point in Jacco van der Kooij’s keynote Sales as a Science. The typical funnel/loop in SaaS looks like a system: A # of new Leads comes into the funnel A certain % of those leads is nurtured into becoming Sales qualified leads The sales team works to turn a certain % of the SQLs into Paying customers. (Sometimes they have to offer discounts that have a certain $/% effect on the overall price/ACV that customers pay.) This can be shown as a simple equation: Leads x % SQLs x % Sales Closed x % Discount = $ new Revenue. According to Jacco, working to improve each link of the chain (through improving conversion rates for example) would have a higher impact on your business, than a large change in one step (e.g. doubling the number of leads). The same applies to every part of your business — product, marketing, even your business model. Improve your ARPA and your retention and your LTV (and ultimately the bottom line) will follow. The simple LTV formula In a market with many competitors and saturated marketing channels, this type of gradual improvement will be more effective in finding ways to grow. To succeed in a crowded market you have to know your business One of the panel discussions included Guillaume Cabane, who is the Founder of Growth Ex Machina, Jason VandeBoom, Founder & CEO of ActiveCampaign, Alonso Bustamante, Special Projects at Cloudflare and Briehan Burke, who’s one of the investors at Keen Venture Partners. They shared their thoughts on why founders shouldn’t give up on a market just because it is dominated by a large incumbent. Nimble entrants have a number of advantages in such cases: They don’t need to educate their users about a new category but can rely on the work done by the established player(s). They can stay close to a well-defined group of customers and move quickly to solve their pains. They don’t need to fight the war across a full front, but can instead focus on a small area (specific segment, use case, or geography) where they are best positioned to get a small win and expand from there. Marketing starts from the inside out Des Traynor from Intercom caught the attention of everyone at SaaStock 2019 by claiming we obsess too much over Product/Market Fit. WATCH: Des Traynor, Intercom LIVE @ #SaaStock19 #Dublin https://t.co/arboSJr5eX — SaaStock (@SaaStock) October 15, 2019 He identified the 3 main stages that startups go through: The Early stage which ends when a startup becomes a breakout success. The Growing Up stage, which finishes with the company becoming an established player. And the Standard stage, in which the startup turns into a mainstream company. Once a company is out of its early stage of development, it really needs to start thinking about how it markets the product. Unfortunately, that’s where most founders get it wrong. A lot of you have probably said to investors something like “We have a 100 customers, and we haven’t even marketed yet!” That’s not necessarily a good thing because adding marketing is a really hard challenge and most people will make a massive mistake doing it. All you’re saying “There’s a ****load of risk yet to be realized!” Des Traynor, Intercom To maximize your chances for success, Des suggests that you start by looking at the bottom of your funnel and move your way up. That requires a really hard look at how people use your product and who they are and then using that to move one level up in the chain and figure out what makes people move from it to the next one. This process is slower and harder to crack but ultimately yields better results. Take care of your (and your team’s) mental health When we talk about maturity in SaaS, we have to acknowledge it comes in different forms. In a panel discussion titled How to address tech’s ongoing mental health catastrophe, Amy Lewin from Sifted, Joe Krancki, Venture Partner at Instanda, Nicola McClafferty, Investment Director at Draper Esprit, and James Ski, who’s the Founder & CEO at Sales Confidence talked about creating a culture that doesn’t put mental wellbeing on the back burner. One of the highlights of the discussion was the idea that mental health should be a top-down priority: with investors advocating for their founders, who in turn make it a focus for their employees as well. “Taking time off isn’t a red flag. I value self awareness in a founder. It shows me this person is thinking about their busines in a proactive way.” @amyrlewin @Siftedeu, @JoeKrancki, @NikkiMcClaff, @jamesas address tech’s ongoing mental health problem @saastock #saastock19. pic.twitter.com/0EBZPocF35 — HUCKLETREE (@huckletree) October 16, 2019 Our secret to success: a relentless focus Our CEO Nick did a live recording for the Inside Intercom podcast. The episode is yet to be published, but I’m giving you a sneak peek of details about ChartMogul’s journey that he shared. The silent disco concept applied to podcasting: only those wearing headphones could listen to the interview. In line with the main theme of the conference (and this article), Nick shared the 2 pillars of ChartMogul’s strategy: Improving retention to maximize the value of each relationship. Maintaining focus on our core product and making sure it’s the best tool on the market. When you lose a customer, it’s not just the monthly subscription that’s gone, but also any future natural upsell value from that customer’s growth and possibly even word-of-mouth. We believe that the secret to success in a highly-competitive market is to focus on forging strong relationships with our customers, developing the product around their core needs, and growing alongside them. Conclusion: Looking forward to SaaStock 2020! My personal highlight from SaaStock 2019 can also be summarized in one word: people. It is impossible to meet and talk to customers, practitioners, and investors outside an event like this — and SaaStock has the scale and the clout to collect the best in the field. I am already looking forward to next year, but if you want to connect, you don’t have to wait until then — just get in touch on Twitter. Hope to see you there!

<sys> [INST] How SaaS is Like Monty Python and 6 Other Things I Learned at SaaStock 2019 [/INST] It’s not every day that you can hear a Monty Python reference at a conference like this. I have just used it to describe one of the largest and most impressive booths at SaaStock 2019 — a 2-storey giant with an observation deck and a cafeteria on top. I couldn’t get past the fact that it would be perfect for recreating an iconic scene from the 1975 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Thankfully, SaaStock attendees at large are past the taunting stage British comedy has matured a lot in the last few decades, so people now don’t have to resort to a film that’s over 40 years old for entertainment. The view from the top of the castle Oddly, after 3 days packed with new connections, great talks, and a lot of wisdom, I feel like a similar trend is happening in SaaS too. When I started thinking about this roundup of SaaStock 2019, I was worried about fitting so much into a single blog post. Now I am actually surprised that I can fit it one word. Maturity. SaaS is getting more mature as an industry and you can see that everywhere — there are more attendees at conferences like SaaStock, every company has multiple competitors, the stakes are getting higher, the conversations more sophisticated, and so on. Maturity (in all aspects of the word) is what binds all the main messages from SaaStock. We’re still the same people who can gather at a conference that’s named after Woodstock. But the community is also getting much smarter (and mature) about the challenges and the problems we should be talking about. For proof, just look at some of the main points from this year: What does it mean to be in the Golden Age of SaaS How to think about (and do) marketing as you grow Why small improvements are more important than big bets And also… why we have to take care of ours and our teams’ mental health. Here’s a rundown of some of the best insight I gained from attending SaaStock 2019. The Golden Age of SaaS: From attention to value When we’re talking about SaaS becoming more mature, it doesn’t mean the industry is past its prime. Claire Hughes Johnson, the COO of Stripe, nailed down the point in her SaaStock 2019 talk, arguing that we’re just entering the Golden Age of the industry. So far, a lot of the value creation of the internet has happened from either moving commerce to digital channels or from monetizing attention (i.e. advertising). Claire argues that the real potential of the internet is the creation of entirely new businesses. To power this shift, we need infrastructure, which supports the easy establishment and distribution of the new internet-enabled products and services. This is already at play — services like AWS, Stripe, and others have brought down the cost of starting and running a business to a fraction of what they used to be just a decade ago. Consumerizing even more parts of the activities of a typical business (logistics-as-a-service, etc.) will create an opportunity for even more companies to disrupt large incumbents in traditional industries such as automotive and others. Marginal gains are the new rule As the industry matures and becomes more competitive, it becomes natural to focus on making small improvements that have the potential to move the needle. This was the main point in Jacco van der Kooij’s keynote Sales as a Science. The typical funnel/loop in SaaS looks like a system: A # of new Leads comes into the funnel A certain % of those leads is nurtured into becoming Sales qualified leads The sales team works to turn a certain % of the SQLs into Paying customers. (Sometimes they have to offer discounts that have a certain $/% effect on the overall price/ACV that customers pay.) This can be shown as a simple equation: Leads x % SQLs x % Sales Closed x % Discount = $ new Revenue. According to Jacco, working to improve each link of the chain (through improving conversion rates for example) would have a higher impact on your business, than a large change in one step (e.g. doubling the number of leads). The same applies to every part of your business — product, marketing, even your business model. Improve your ARPA and your retention and your LTV (and ultimately the bottom line) will follow. The simple LTV formula In a market with many competitors and saturated marketing channels, this type of gradual improvement will be more effective in finding ways to grow. To succeed in a crowded market you have to know your business One of the panel discussions included Guillaume Cabane, who is the Founder of Growth Ex Machina, Jason VandeBoom, Founder & CEO of ActiveCampaign, Alonso Bustamante, Special Projects at Cloudflare and Briehan Burke, who’s one of the investors at Keen Venture Partners. They shared their thoughts on why founders shouldn’t give up on a market just because it is dominated by a large incumbent. Nimble entrants have a number of advantages in such cases: They don’t need to educate their users about a new category but can rely on the work done by the established player(s). They can stay close to a well-defined group of customers and move quickly to solve their pains. They don’t need to fight the war across a full front, but can instead focus on a small area (specific segment, use case, or geography) where they are best positioned to get a small win and expand from there. Marketing starts from the inside out Des Traynor from Intercom caught the attention of everyone at SaaStock 2019 by claiming we obsess too much over Product/Market Fit. WATCH: Des Traynor, Intercom LIVE @ #SaaStock19 #Dublin https://t.co/arboSJr5eX — SaaStock (@SaaStock) October 15, 2019 He identified the 3 main stages that startups go through: The Early stage which ends when a startup becomes a breakout success. The Growing Up stage, which finishes with the company becoming an established player. And the Standard stage, in which the startup turns into a mainstream company. Once a company is out of its early stage of development, it really needs to start thinking about how it markets the product. Unfortunately, that’s where most founders get it wrong. A lot of you have probably said to investors something like “We have a 100 customers, and we haven’t even marketed yet!” That’s not necessarily a good thing because adding marketing is a really hard challenge and most people will make a massive mistake doing it. All you’re saying “There’s a ****load of risk yet to be realized!” Des Traynor, Intercom To maximize your chances for success, Des suggests that you start by looking at the bottom of your funnel and move your way up. That requires a really hard look at how people use your product and who they are and then using that to move one level up in the chain and figure out what makes people move from it to the next one. This process is slower and harder to crack but ultimately yields better results. Take care of your (and your team’s) mental health When we talk about maturity in SaaS, we have to acknowledge it comes in different forms. In a panel discussion titled How to address tech’s ongoing mental health catastrophe, Amy Lewin from Sifted, Joe Krancki, Venture Partner at Instanda, Nicola McClafferty, Investment Director at Draper Esprit, and James Ski, who’s the Founder & CEO at Sales Confidence talked about creating a culture that doesn’t put mental wellbeing on the back burner. One of the highlights of the discussion was the idea that mental health should be a top-down priority: with investors advocating for their founders, who in turn make it a focus for their employees as well. “Taking time off isn’t a red flag. I value self awareness in a founder. It shows me this person is thinking about their busines in a proactive way.” @amyrlewin @Siftedeu, @JoeKrancki, @NikkiMcClaff, @jamesas address tech’s ongoing mental health problem @saastock #saastock19. pic.twitter.com/0EBZPocF35 — HUCKLETREE (@huckletree) October 16, 2019 Our secret to success: a relentless focus Our CEO Nick did a live recording for the Inside Intercom podcast. The episode is yet to be published, but I’m giving you a sneak peek of details about ChartMogul’s journey that he shared. The silent disco concept applied to podcasting: only those wearing headphones could listen to the interview. In line with the main theme of the conference (and this article), Nick shared the 2 pillars of ChartMogul’s strategy: Improving retention to maximize the value of each relationship. Maintaining focus on our core product and making sure it’s the best tool on the market. When you lose a customer, it’s not just the monthly subscription that’s gone, but also any future natural upsell value from that customer’s growth and possibly even word-of-mouth. We believe that the secret to success in a highly-competitive market is to focus on forging strong relationships with our customers, developing the product around their core needs, and growing alongside them. Conclusion: Looking forward to SaaStock 2020! My personal highlight from SaaStock 2019 can also be summarized in one word: people. It is impossible to meet and talk to customers, practitioners, and investors outside an event like this — and SaaStock has the scale and the clout to collect the best in the field. I am already looking forward to next year, but if you want to connect, you don’t have to wait until then — just get in touch on Twitter. Hope to see you there! </sys

It’s F***ing ChartMogul. Two very cool things happened to ChartMogul in March. The first happened on March 10th, when longtime ChartMogul customer Slidebean published a video titled The Ultimate Guide to SaaS KPIs. We knew this was coming, as a few weeks earlier had agreed to sponsor the video. But what we didn’t anticipate was the reaction. The video had over 10,000 views in the first four days and, as of writing this, over 15,000 views (which is a lot considering this is a video about SaaS metrics). Slidebean has put in the work over the past years building a large and engaged audience of over 270 thousand subscribers. I highly recommend checking out the video (embedded below) — we’re now using it as part of our own internal onboarding for new employees to help get them up to speed on SaaS metrics faster. For more awesome content from Slidebean be sure to subscribe to their channel. The second, perhaps even cooler thing came three days later when Andrew Gazdecki of MicroAcquire tweeted out this video: (Caution, NSFW!) It’s official, $350,000 in ARR! No revenue graph this time. Got Russ Hanneman to clear something up for everyone. pic.twitter.com/sAkzL96Fpa — Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) March 13, 2021 For those of you not intimately familiar with HBO’s hit show Silicon Valley, this is the actor (Chris Diamantopoulos) who played flash billionaire investor Russ Hanneman. Russ was probably the most obnoxious (and one of the funniest) characters on SV and patron of his own Tequila brand Tres Comas! But why this video? For years, SaaS founders have been posting their ChartMogul screenshots on Twitter and LinkedIn to inspire other founders, promote their startup, or just to have fun and show off! Why not! Since we released our iPhone app back in December, the frequency of these tweets started to increase. Perhaps the ease of taking and sharing screengrabs on an iPhone helped. We’ve been advised many times that we should ‘brand’ our charts or build a ‘share’ button into our app so people seeing these shared charts would know they’re coming from ChartMogul. However, being stubborn about maintaining clean aesthetics and never prioritizing a ‘share’ button meant that when popular bootstrapper Andrew Gadzecki started regularly posting screenshots from MicroAcquire’s ChartMogul account, people constantly asked him “What app is that?”, “What are you using to measure your revenue?” Like… A LOT. Andrew got so sick of this that he hired Russ Hanneman Chris Diamantopoulos via Cameo to record a video to answer the question once and for all. The video blew up and had over 17,000 views in the first two days. To say thanks, we made Andrew a custom T-Shirt! https://twitter.com/agazdecki/status/1379231354236194816 What does it all mean? These two videos produced about 72 additional trial signups on our site in the four days following their release. For comparison, that is more trial signups than several months of experimenting with outbound sales yielded. We were already considering shuttering our outbound program, but the reaction to this single week of cool and fun stuff in March helped accelerate our decision. We’ll write about why we couldn’t get outbound working in another post. Why do something really hard that our audience often doesn’t appreciate (unsolicited email), when a couple of cool videos can produce better results in just a few days? This was a good lesson for us, and it’s something that I think other founders would find valuable too. With so much competition in SaaS and so many companies employing the tested playbooks (content, SEO, paid, ABM, etc.), brand is becoming an increasingly more important tool to drive growth. Therefore, you have to learn how to build your brand, invest in it, and ultimately, how to use it to grow your business. From now on, we’re going to focus on doing more cool fun stuff. We enjoy it, our audience enjoys it, and when it works, it works better than the tired playbooks of old. The best marketing is free. Tesla (and Elon Musk) are doing it right — make sure you have the best product, have fun, people will want to write about you, and the rest will follow. P.S. We’re going to be re-booting our SaaS Open Mic podcast soon and we’ll be hosting Andrew as one of our first guests.

[INST] It’s F***ing ChartMogul [/INST]

Two very cool things happened to ChartMogul in March. The first happened on March 10th, when longtime ChartMogul customer Slidebean published a video titled The Ultimate Guide to SaaS KPIs. We knew this was coming, as a few weeks earlier had agreed to sponsor the video. But what we didn’t anticipate was the reaction. The video had over 10,000 views in the first four days and, as of writing this, over 15,000 views (which is a lot considering this is a video about SaaS metrics). Slidebean has put in the work over the past years building a large and engaged audience of over 270 thousand subscribers. I highly recommend checking out the video (embedded below) — we’re now using it as part of our own internal onboarding for new employees to help get them up to speed on SaaS metrics faster. For more awesome content from Slidebean be sure to subscribe to their channel. The second, perhaps even cooler thing came three days later when Andrew Gazdecki of MicroAcquire tweeted out this video: (Caution, NSFW!) It’s official, $350,000 in ARR! No revenue graph this time. Got Russ Hanneman to clear something up for everyone. pic.twitter.com/sAkzL96Fpa — Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) March 13, 2021 For those of you not intimately familiar with HBO’s hit show Silicon Valley, this is the actor (Chris Diamantopoulos) who played flash billionaire investor Russ Hanneman. Russ was probably the most obnoxious (and one of the funniest) characters on SV and patron of his own Tequila brand Tres Comas! But why this video? For years, SaaS founders have been posting their ChartMogul screenshots on Twitter and LinkedIn to inspire other founders, promote their startup, or just to have fun and show off! Why not! Since we released our iPhone app back in December, the frequency of these tweets started to increase. Perhaps the ease of taking and sharing screengrabs on an iPhone helped. We’ve been advised many times that we should ‘brand’ our charts or build a ‘share’ button into our app so people seeing these shared charts would know they’re coming from ChartMogul. However, being stubborn about maintaining clean aesthetics and never prioritizing a ‘share’ button meant that when popular bootstrapper Andrew Gadzecki started regularly posting screenshots from MicroAcquire’s ChartMogul account, people constantly asked him “What app is that?”, “What are you using to measure your revenue?” Like… A LOT. Andrew got so sick of this that he hired Russ Hanneman Chris Diamantopoulos via Cameo to record a video to answer the question once and for all. The video blew up and had over 17,000 views in the first two days. To say thanks, we made Andrew a custom T-Shirt! https://twitter.com/agazdecki/status/1379231354236194816 What does it all mean? These two videos produced about 72 additional trial signups on our site in the four days following their release. For comparison, that is more trial signups than several months of experimenting with outbound sales yielded. We were already considering shuttering our outbound program, but the reaction to this single week of cool and fun stuff in March helped accelerate our decision. We’ll write about why we couldn’t get outbound working in another post. Why do something really hard that our audience often doesn’t appreciate (unsolicited email), when a couple of cool videos can produce better results in just a few days? This was a good lesson for us, and it’s something that I think other founders would find valuable too. With so much competition in SaaS and so many companies employing the tested playbooks (content, SEO, paid, ABM, etc.), brand is becoming an increasingly more important tool to drive growth. Therefore, you have to learn how to build your brand, invest in it, and ultimately, how to use it to grow your business. From now on, we’re going to focus on doing more cool fun stuff. We enjoy it, our audience enjoys it, and when it works, it works better than the tired playbooks of old. The best marketing is free. Tesla (and Elon Musk) are doing it right — make sure you have the best product, have fun, people will want to write about you, and the rest will follow. P.S. We’re going to be re-booting our SaaS Open Mic podcast soon and we’ll be hosting Andrew as one of our first guests.

<sys> [INST] It’s F***ing ChartMogul [/INST] Two very cool things happened to ChartMogul in March. The first happened on March 10th, when longtime ChartMogul customer Slidebean published a video titled The Ultimate Guide to SaaS KPIs. We knew this was coming, as a few weeks earlier had agreed to sponsor the video. But what we didn’t anticipate was the reaction. The video had over 10,000 views in the first four days and, as of writing this, over 15,000 views (which is a lot considering this is a video about SaaS metrics). Slidebean has put in the work over the past years building a large and engaged audience of over 270 thousand subscribers. I highly recommend checking out the video (embedded below) — we’re now using it as part of our own internal onboarding for new employees to help get them up to speed on SaaS metrics faster. For more awesome content from Slidebean be sure to subscribe to their channel. The second, perhaps even cooler thing came three days later when Andrew Gazdecki of MicroAcquire tweeted out this video: (Caution, NSFW!) It’s official, $350,000 in ARR! No revenue graph this time. Got Russ Hanneman to clear something up for everyone. pic.twitter.com/sAkzL96Fpa — Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) March 13, 2021 For those of you not intimately familiar with HBO’s hit show Silicon Valley, this is the actor (Chris Diamantopoulos) who played flash billionaire investor Russ Hanneman. Russ was probably the most obnoxious (and one of the funniest) characters on SV and patron of his own Tequila brand Tres Comas! But why this video? For years, SaaS founders have been posting their ChartMogul screenshots on Twitter and LinkedIn to inspire other founders, promote their startup, or just to have fun and show off! Why not! Since we released our iPhone app back in December, the frequency of these tweets started to increase. Perhaps the ease of taking and sharing screengrabs on an iPhone helped. We’ve been advised many times that we should ‘brand’ our charts or build a ‘share’ button into our app so people seeing these shared charts would know they’re coming from ChartMogul. However, being stubborn about maintaining clean aesthetics and never prioritizing a ‘share’ button meant that when popular bootstrapper Andrew Gadzecki started regularly posting screenshots from MicroAcquire’s ChartMogul account, people constantly asked him “What app is that?”, “What are you using to measure your revenue?” Like… A LOT. Andrew got so sick of this that he hired Russ Hanneman Chris Diamantopoulos via Cameo to record a video to answer the question once and for all. The video blew up and had over 17,000 views in the first two days. To say thanks, we made Andrew a custom T-Shirt! https://twitter.com/agazdecki/status/1379231354236194816 What does it all mean? These two videos produced about 72 additional trial signups on our site in the four days following their release. For comparison, that is more trial signups than several months of experimenting with outbound sales yielded. We were already considering shuttering our outbound program, but the reaction to this single week of cool and fun stuff in March helped accelerate our decision. We’ll write about why we couldn’t get outbound working in another post. Why do something really hard that our audience often doesn’t appreciate (unsolicited email), when a couple of cool videos can produce better results in just a few days? This was a good lesson for us, and it’s something that I think other founders would find valuable too. With so much competition in SaaS and so many companies employing the tested playbooks (content, SEO, paid, ABM, etc.), brand is becoming an increasingly more important tool to drive growth. Therefore, you have to learn how to build your brand, invest in it, and ultimately, how to use it to grow your business. From now on, we’re going to focus on doing more cool fun stuff. We enjoy it, our audience enjoys it, and when it works, it works better than the tired playbooks of old. The best marketing is free. Tesla (and Elon Musk) are doing it right — make sure you have the best product, have fun, people will want to write about you, and the rest will follow. P.S. We’re going to be re-booting our SaaS Open Mic podcast soon and we’ll be hosting Andrew as one of our first guests. </sys

Introducing the ChartMogul Google Sheets app. Since launching our Segmentation and Customer Attributes features back in January we’ve received a lot of positive responses. These tools have enabled ChartMogul users to create and compare customer groups in awesome new ways and dig much deeper into their subscription metrics. The biggest feedback so far: It would be amazing if we could add customer attributes without the need for a developer! With this in mind, we’ve created a really easy way for you to add attributes to your customers, with zero code. Using our new Google Sheets app, non-technical members of your team can add attributes to your customers. The app allows you to send attributes directly from a Google spreadsheet, without calling in IT Support. Recap: Customer Attributes A customer ‘attribute’ is a data point containing some meta information about one of your customers, e.g. sales rep, NPS score – virtually anything you can think of. Importing these customer attributes into ChartMogul allows you to create and compare segments of customers. This lets you answer complex questions such as: Which marketing funnel brings in the most MRR? Who are highest performing sales reps? Are NPS Promoters less likely to churn than Detractors? What are our highest performing verticals? Do users of a specific feature have a higher LTV? My favourite use case for Segmentation? Comparing the MRR generated by different advertising channels: Segmenting customers by advertising channel What does the Google Sheets app do? The app adds attributes to customer profiles. You can use these attributes to create filters. These customer attribute filters will be applied to your graphs. You can also save these filters as segments and compare them. Comparing sales reps with ChartMogul Examples You can use the Google sheets app to compare the success rate of advertising campaigns to see how they are growing your customer base, or to see how NPS scores affect your churn rates, or compare user behaviour attributes to see which features generate the most revenue. Use a filter to create a new segment. Then compare multiple segments on your graphs. Comparing Facebook, Google and Twitter ads How does it work? To use the Google sheets app: Install it from the Google web store Insert your data and ChartMogul API keys Finally, click “Send to ChartMogul” You can find the full instructions here. This enables you to import customer attributes without writing a single line of code. The ChartMogul Customer Attributes app See it in action This is just the beginning This is just the tip of the iceberg of what customer attributes will help you achieve. Your metrics will become more actionable with every customer attribute you import, and we’re hoping our new Google app will make this a whole lot easier. Also, if you have a minute when using the app, I’d love to hear your feedback. Other ways to import your customer attributes Developers can import customer attributes programmatically using our Enrichment API. Create one-click integrations with your other apps using our Zapier integration. Next: Read more about segmentation Read the setup documentation

[INST] Introducing the ChartMogul Google Sheets app [/INST]

Since launching our Segmentation and Customer Attributes features back in January we’ve received a lot of positive responses. These tools have enabled ChartMogul users to create and compare customer groups in awesome new ways and dig much deeper into their subscription metrics. The biggest feedback so far: It would be amazing if we could add customer attributes without the need for a developer! With this in mind, we’ve created a really easy way for you to add attributes to your customers, with zero code. Using our new Google Sheets app, non-technical members of your team can add attributes to your customers. The app allows you to send attributes directly from a Google spreadsheet, without calling in IT Support. Recap: Customer Attributes A customer ‘attribute’ is a data point containing some meta information about one of your customers, e.g. sales rep, NPS score – virtually anything you can think of. Importing these customer attributes into ChartMogul allows you to create and compare segments of customers. This lets you answer complex questions such as: Which marketing funnel brings in the most MRR? Who are highest performing sales reps? Are NPS Promoters less likely to churn than Detractors? What are our highest performing verticals? Do users of a specific feature have a higher LTV? My favourite use case for Segmentation? Comparing the MRR generated by different advertising channels: Segmenting customers by advertising channel What does the Google Sheets app do? The app adds attributes to customer profiles. You can use these attributes to create filters. These customer attribute filters will be applied to your graphs. You can also save these filters as segments and compare them. Comparing sales reps with ChartMogul Examples You can use the Google sheets app to compare the success rate of advertising campaigns to see how they are growing your customer base, or to see how NPS scores affect your churn rates, or compare user behaviour attributes to see which features generate the most revenue. Use a filter to create a new segment. Then compare multiple segments on your graphs. Comparing Facebook, Google and Twitter ads How does it work? To use the Google sheets app: Install it from the Google web store Insert your data and ChartMogul API keys Finally, click “Send to ChartMogul” You can find the full instructions here. This enables you to import customer attributes without writing a single line of code. The ChartMogul Customer Attributes app See it in action This is just the beginning This is just the tip of the iceberg of what customer attributes will help you achieve. Your metrics will become more actionable with every customer attribute you import, and we’re hoping our new Google app will make this a whole lot easier. Also, if you have a minute when using the app, I’d love to hear your feedback. Other ways to import your customer attributes Developers can import customer attributes programmatically using our Enrichment API. Create one-click integrations with your other apps using our Zapier integration. Next: Read more about segmentation Read the setup documentation

<sys> [INST] Introducing the ChartMogul Google Sheets app [/INST] Since launching our Segmentation and Customer Attributes features back in January we’ve received a lot of positive responses. These tools have enabled ChartMogul users to create and compare customer groups in awesome new ways and dig much deeper into their subscription metrics. The biggest feedback so far: It would be amazing if we could add customer attributes without the need for a developer! With this in mind, we’ve created a really easy way for you to add attributes to your customers, with zero code. Using our new Google Sheets app, non-technical members of your team can add attributes to your customers. The app allows you to send attributes directly from a Google spreadsheet, without calling in IT Support. Recap: Customer Attributes A customer ‘attribute’ is a data point containing some meta information about one of your customers, e.g. sales rep, NPS score – virtually anything you can think of. Importing these customer attributes into ChartMogul allows you to create and compare segments of customers. This lets you answer complex questions such as: Which marketing funnel brings in the most MRR? Who are highest performing sales reps? Are NPS Promoters less likely to churn than Detractors? What are our highest performing verticals? Do users of a specific feature have a higher LTV? My favourite use case for Segmentation? Comparing the MRR generated by different advertising channels: Segmenting customers by advertising channel What does the Google Sheets app do? The app adds attributes to customer profiles. You can use these attributes to create filters. These customer attribute filters will be applied to your graphs. You can also save these filters as segments and compare them. Comparing sales reps with ChartMogul Examples You can use the Google sheets app to compare the success rate of advertising campaigns to see how they are growing your customer base, or to see how NPS scores affect your churn rates, or compare user behaviour attributes to see which features generate the most revenue. Use a filter to create a new segment. Then compare multiple segments on your graphs. Comparing Facebook, Google and Twitter ads How does it work? To use the Google sheets app: Install it from the Google web store Insert your data and ChartMogul API keys Finally, click “Send to ChartMogul” You can find the full instructions here. This enables you to import customer attributes without writing a single line of code. The ChartMogul Customer Attributes app See it in action This is just the beginning This is just the tip of the iceberg of what customer attributes will help you achieve. Your metrics will become more actionable with every customer attribute you import, and we’re hoping our new Google app will make this a whole lot easier. Also, if you have a minute when using the app, I’d love to hear your feedback. Other ways to import your customer attributes Developers can import customer attributes programmatically using our Enrichment API. Create one-click integrations with your other apps using our Zapier integration. Next: Read more about segmentation Read the setup documentation </sys

Is Your Content Marketing Making Brand Withdrawals?. Nowadays there is a much greater awareness of the need to give your users a positive, stand-out experience right from the point that they’re being onboard into your app or service. Sites like User Onboarding help to drive this point home, as we see the onboarding flows of some of the most widely used and popular products torn apart and broken down, often revealing some laughably basic flaws (I’m looking at you, Apple Music). User Onboarding publishes some incredibly insightful teardowns of the onboarding user experience of popular tech products, including Buffer. So we’re on the same wavelength – user experience starts way before I’m logged in to your app or service, and ends long after I close my browser tab or app. But we need to take this notion further. Introducing Brand Deposits, Brand Withdrawals Steve Jobs outlined the over-arching effect of user experience in possibly the most eloquent, Steve-Jobs-esque way. But he didn’t call it user experience – he referred to Brand Deposits (and conversely, Brand Withdrawals). Here’s how he explained it: Every single interaction that the user has with your brand either results in a positive association (a deposit) or a negative one (withdrawal). At each interaction, you have the possibility to build up a positive balance with your users – a sort of “loyalty” that may be depleted or increased over time. The concept of brand deposits and withdrawals was heavily pushed by Jobs during his early time at Apple, and was subsequently taken with him to Pixar – where it was adopted by now Disney CEO Bob Iger, where in 2012 he referred to himself as the “Brand Manager” of the company, with his single goal to be to generate more “brand deposits” than “brand withdrawals”. For physical products, unboxing is a critical part of the user experience. Apple was one of the first companies to give the unboxing experience serious thought (unlike this example). SaaS UX: Think about every user touch-point When you start to look at all the touch points where you might be influencing the user’s perception of your SaaS brand (product), the possibilities are huge: Browsing your website Logged in to your app / service (i.e. using the product) Ads Content Marketing Email interaction User reviews Customer support If we think in terms of brand deposits, we should acknowledge that all of the above points will lead to some form of change to the “balance” we have with the user – either positively, or negatively. Some of these are obvious, such as the experience of using the product itself, or customer support – we know we have to provide a great experience here (big brand deposits). But when it comes to Content Marketing, do you think about how a particular piece of content affects your brand balance? When you write the next title: “30 tips for SaaS Unicorn Nirvana – number 12 will blow your mind!!” Do you ever consider that you might actually be promising more than you can deliver in reading the post? And if I see your title, click through to the article, and upon reaching the end, my overall impression is overwhelmingly negative compared to the (wildly overhyped) expectations I had on clicking in the beginning, is this not also taking a major Brand Withdrawal? You’ve in some way damaged the association between your company and the user. Putting out any form of content can be seen in some ways as a certain risk – albeit a fairly low risk. You have the chance to wow the user, provide them some insightful takeaways or resources, and change the way they think about certain concepts. But there’s always a risk, too. So who’s getting it right? In the SaaS space, think about some of the great content you’ve read recently. The kind of content that makes you want to take notes, or at least share insights with others. It’s not really that hard. Example: Unbounce The folks at Unbounce certainly promise nothing short of the moon on a stick when it comes to their article, The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You’ll Ever Read. But, you know what, I think it was actually the most entertaining guide to landing page optimization I’ve ever read! I mean, come on, they use a peacock to demonstrate Attention Ratio. A peacock. Regardless of the “entertainment factor”, I came away from this article armed with actionable things I was going to go and implement to build better optimized landing pages. The folks at Unbounce had earned considerable more respect from me. They had made a Brand Deposit. Do these three things If you do nothing else, at least consider these three actions: The next time you’re reading anything online, be aware of the impact it’s making on you, with regards to the relationship you have with the particular brand. The next time you’re hovering over the Publish button on the next piece of content, think about what you’re promising with the title, and think about what the resulting feeling in your readers is likely to be when the reach the end. Go back and read the title again. Incorporate (or at least consider) brand deposits and withdrawals in your marketing strategy. Remember, it’s okay to make the odd deposit, provided you have a healthy existing balance there, and the overall experience across all your user touch-points is positive.

[INST] Is Your Content Marketing Making Brand Withdrawals? [/INST]

Nowadays there is a much greater awareness of the need to give your users a positive, stand-out experience right from the point that they’re being onboard into your app or service. Sites like User Onboarding help to drive this point home, as we see the onboarding flows of some of the most widely used and popular products torn apart and broken down, often revealing some laughably basic flaws (I’m looking at you, Apple Music). User Onboarding publishes some incredibly insightful teardowns of the onboarding user experience of popular tech products, including Buffer. So we’re on the same wavelength – user experience starts way before I’m logged in to your app or service, and ends long after I close my browser tab or app. But we need to take this notion further. Introducing Brand Deposits, Brand Withdrawals Steve Jobs outlined the over-arching effect of user experience in possibly the most eloquent, Steve-Jobs-esque way. But he didn’t call it user experience – he referred to Brand Deposits (and conversely, Brand Withdrawals). Here’s how he explained it: Every single interaction that the user has with your brand either results in a positive association (a deposit) or a negative one (withdrawal). At each interaction, you have the possibility to build up a positive balance with your users – a sort of “loyalty” that may be depleted or increased over time. The concept of brand deposits and withdrawals was heavily pushed by Jobs during his early time at Apple, and was subsequently taken with him to Pixar – where it was adopted by now Disney CEO Bob Iger, where in 2012 he referred to himself as the “Brand Manager” of the company, with his single goal to be to generate more “brand deposits” than “brand withdrawals”. For physical products, unboxing is a critical part of the user experience. Apple was one of the first companies to give the unboxing experience serious thought (unlike this example). SaaS UX: Think about every user touch-point When you start to look at all the touch points where you might be influencing the user’s perception of your SaaS brand (product), the possibilities are huge: Browsing your website Logged in to your app / service (i.e. using the product) Ads Content Marketing Email interaction User reviews Customer support If we think in terms of brand deposits, we should acknowledge that all of the above points will lead to some form of change to the “balance” we have with the user – either positively, or negatively. Some of these are obvious, such as the experience of using the product itself, or customer support – we know we have to provide a great experience here (big brand deposits). But when it comes to Content Marketing, do you think about how a particular piece of content affects your brand balance? When you write the next title: “30 tips for SaaS Unicorn Nirvana – number 12 will blow your mind!!” Do you ever consider that you might actually be promising more than you can deliver in reading the post? And if I see your title, click through to the article, and upon reaching the end, my overall impression is overwhelmingly negative compared to the (wildly overhyped) expectations I had on clicking in the beginning, is this not also taking a major Brand Withdrawal? You’ve in some way damaged the association between your company and the user. Putting out any form of content can be seen in some ways as a certain risk – albeit a fairly low risk. You have the chance to wow the user, provide them some insightful takeaways or resources, and change the way they think about certain concepts. But there’s always a risk, too. So who’s getting it right? In the SaaS space, think about some of the great content you’ve read recently. The kind of content that makes you want to take notes, or at least share insights with others. It’s not really that hard. Example: Unbounce The folks at Unbounce certainly promise nothing short of the moon on a stick when it comes to their article, The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You’ll Ever Read. But, you know what, I think it was actually the most entertaining guide to landing page optimization I’ve ever read! I mean, come on, they use a peacock to demonstrate Attention Ratio. A peacock. Regardless of the “entertainment factor”, I came away from this article armed with actionable things I was going to go and implement to build better optimized landing pages. The folks at Unbounce had earned considerable more respect from me. They had made a Brand Deposit. Do these three things If you do nothing else, at least consider these three actions: The next time you’re reading anything online, be aware of the impact it’s making on you, with regards to the relationship you have with the particular brand. The next time you’re hovering over the Publish button on the next piece of content, think about what you’re promising with the title, and think about what the resulting feeling in your readers is likely to be when the reach the end. Go back and read the title again. Incorporate (or at least consider) brand deposits and withdrawals in your marketing strategy. Remember, it’s okay to make the odd deposit, provided you have a healthy existing balance there, and the overall experience across all your user touch-points is positive.

<sys> [INST] Is Your Content Marketing Making Brand Withdrawals? [/INST] Nowadays there is a much greater awareness of the need to give your users a positive, stand-out experience right from the point that they’re being onboard into your app or service. Sites like User Onboarding help to drive this point home, as we see the onboarding flows of some of the most widely used and popular products torn apart and broken down, often revealing some laughably basic flaws (I’m looking at you, Apple Music). User Onboarding publishes some incredibly insightful teardowns of the onboarding user experience of popular tech products, including Buffer. So we’re on the same wavelength – user experience starts way before I’m logged in to your app or service, and ends long after I close my browser tab or app. But we need to take this notion further. Introducing Brand Deposits, Brand Withdrawals Steve Jobs outlined the over-arching effect of user experience in possibly the most eloquent, Steve-Jobs-esque way. But he didn’t call it user experience – he referred to Brand Deposits (and conversely, Brand Withdrawals). Here’s how he explained it: Every single interaction that the user has with your brand either results in a positive association (a deposit) or a negative one (withdrawal). At each interaction, you have the possibility to build up a positive balance with your users – a sort of “loyalty” that may be depleted or increased over time. The concept of brand deposits and withdrawals was heavily pushed by Jobs during his early time at Apple, and was subsequently taken with him to Pixar – where it was adopted by now Disney CEO Bob Iger, where in 2012 he referred to himself as the “Brand Manager” of the company, with his single goal to be to generate more “brand deposits” than “brand withdrawals”. For physical products, unboxing is a critical part of the user experience. Apple was one of the first companies to give the unboxing experience serious thought (unlike this example). SaaS UX: Think about every user touch-point When you start to look at all the touch points where you might be influencing the user’s perception of your SaaS brand (product), the possibilities are huge: Browsing your website Logged in to your app / service (i.e. using the product) Ads Content Marketing Email interaction User reviews Customer support If we think in terms of brand deposits, we should acknowledge that all of the above points will lead to some form of change to the “balance” we have with the user – either positively, or negatively. Some of these are obvious, such as the experience of using the product itself, or customer support – we know we have to provide a great experience here (big brand deposits). But when it comes to Content Marketing, do you think about how a particular piece of content affects your brand balance? When you write the next title: “30 tips for SaaS Unicorn Nirvana – number 12 will blow your mind!!” Do you ever consider that you might actually be promising more than you can deliver in reading the post? And if I see your title, click through to the article, and upon reaching the end, my overall impression is overwhelmingly negative compared to the (wildly overhyped) expectations I had on clicking in the beginning, is this not also taking a major Brand Withdrawal? You’ve in some way damaged the association between your company and the user. Putting out any form of content can be seen in some ways as a certain risk – albeit a fairly low risk. You have the chance to wow the user, provide them some insightful takeaways or resources, and change the way they think about certain concepts. But there’s always a risk, too. So who’s getting it right? In the SaaS space, think about some of the great content you’ve read recently. The kind of content that makes you want to take notes, or at least share insights with others. It’s not really that hard. Example: Unbounce The folks at Unbounce certainly promise nothing short of the moon on a stick when it comes to their article, The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You’ll Ever Read. But, you know what, I think it was actually the most entertaining guide to landing page optimization I’ve ever read! I mean, come on, they use a peacock to demonstrate Attention Ratio. A peacock. Regardless of the “entertainment factor”, I came away from this article armed with actionable things I was going to go and implement to build better optimized landing pages. The folks at Unbounce had earned considerable more respect from me. They had made a Brand Deposit. Do these three things If you do nothing else, at least consider these three actions: The next time you’re reading anything online, be aware of the impact it’s making on you, with regards to the relationship you have with the particular brand. The next time you’re hovering over the Publish button on the next piece of content, think about what you’re promising with the title, and think about what the resulting feeling in your readers is likely to be when the reach the end. Go back and read the title again. Incorporate (or at least consider) brand deposits and withdrawals in your marketing strategy. Remember, it’s okay to make the odd deposit, provided you have a healthy existing balance there, and the overall experience across all your user touch-points is positive. </sys

Introducing Segmentation in ChartMogul. At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. Today we’re taking a big step towards helping our customers grow their revenue, with the launch of a new set of features we call Segmentation. Introducing Segmentation Segmentation is vital when it comes to growing subscription revenue, because it allows much deeper insights than high-level metrics. For example, viewing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) per marketing channel is far more actionable than a global LTV metric. Segmentation lets you answer hundreds of new questions about your customers, such as: Which marketing campaign brought in the most Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) last month? Which industry verticals have customers with the highest LTV? You could even generate a list of large customers who are coming up for annual renewal this month, or see what the churn rate is for customers who were given discounts. Add context to your customer data To make the most of Segmentation you need to enrich the customer data in your account. You can do this in the following ways: Manually tagging customer accounts in ChartMogul – if you have customers that you want to tag with specific information, you can do this with tagging. Using our new Enrichment API – Allows you to programmatically add metadata to your customer records in ChartMogul, which can then be used with Segmentation. This allows you to pipe in data from external sources such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Intercom, etc. or a data warehouse solution, and use it to segment your metrics in ChartMogul. (Read the API documentation here). Segment your SaaS metrics in ChartMogul Once you’ve added the customer metadata that’s important to your business, you can then put it to work by saving segments and drilling into the SaaS metrics in your ChartMogul account. You can create segments based upon collections of customer parameters that you’ve added to your customer accounts. Almost all of the analytics you see in ChartMogul can be segmented. Select a saved segment as a filter in the dashboard. You can even compare multiple segments on the same chart, such as MRR broken down by Marketing channel. Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles giving you tips and guidance on how to pipe in external data using the Enrichment API. We’ll also be releasing ‘connectors’ such as a Zapier ‘zap’ (contact us if you’d like to try this before it’s made public) to make it really easy to pipe in data without needing to write any code. We’re excited to see what you can achieve with Segmentation. If you have a ChartMogul account, you can log in and start using it right away. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can start a free 14-day trial to start using the features.

[INST] Introducing Segmentation in ChartMogul [/INST]

At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. Today we’re taking a big step towards helping our customers grow their revenue, with the launch of a new set of features we call Segmentation. Introducing Segmentation Segmentation is vital when it comes to growing subscription revenue, because it allows much deeper insights than high-level metrics. For example, viewing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) per marketing channel is far more actionable than a global LTV metric. Segmentation lets you answer hundreds of new questions about your customers, such as: Which marketing campaign brought in the most Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) last month? Which industry verticals have customers with the highest LTV? You could even generate a list of large customers who are coming up for annual renewal this month, or see what the churn rate is for customers who were given discounts. Add context to your customer data To make the most of Segmentation you need to enrich the customer data in your account. You can do this in the following ways: Manually tagging customer accounts in ChartMogul – if you have customers that you want to tag with specific information, you can do this with tagging. Using our new Enrichment API – Allows you to programmatically add metadata to your customer records in ChartMogul, which can then be used with Segmentation. This allows you to pipe in data from external sources such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Intercom, etc. or a data warehouse solution, and use it to segment your metrics in ChartMogul. (Read the API documentation here). Segment your SaaS metrics in ChartMogul Once you’ve added the customer metadata that’s important to your business, you can then put it to work by saving segments and drilling into the SaaS metrics in your ChartMogul account. You can create segments based upon collections of customer parameters that you’ve added to your customer accounts. Almost all of the analytics you see in ChartMogul can be segmented. Select a saved segment as a filter in the dashboard. You can even compare multiple segments on the same chart, such as MRR broken down by Marketing channel. Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles giving you tips and guidance on how to pipe in external data using the Enrichment API. We’ll also be releasing ‘connectors’ such as a Zapier ‘zap’ (contact us if you’d like to try this before it’s made public) to make it really easy to pipe in data without needing to write any code. We’re excited to see what you can achieve with Segmentation. If you have a ChartMogul account, you can log in and start using it right away. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can start a free 14-day trial to start using the features.

<sys> [INST] Introducing Segmentation in ChartMogul [/INST] At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. Today we’re taking a big step towards helping our customers grow their revenue, with the launch of a new set of features we call Segmentation. Introducing Segmentation Segmentation is vital when it comes to growing subscription revenue, because it allows much deeper insights than high-level metrics. For example, viewing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) per marketing channel is far more actionable than a global LTV metric. Segmentation lets you answer hundreds of new questions about your customers, such as: Which marketing campaign brought in the most Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) last month? Which industry verticals have customers with the highest LTV? You could even generate a list of large customers who are coming up for annual renewal this month, or see what the churn rate is for customers who were given discounts. Add context to your customer data To make the most of Segmentation you need to enrich the customer data in your account. You can do this in the following ways: Manually tagging customer accounts in ChartMogul – if you have customers that you want to tag with specific information, you can do this with tagging. Using our new Enrichment API – Allows you to programmatically add metadata to your customer records in ChartMogul, which can then be used with Segmentation. This allows you to pipe in data from external sources such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Intercom, etc. or a data warehouse solution, and use it to segment your metrics in ChartMogul. (Read the API documentation here). Segment your SaaS metrics in ChartMogul Once you’ve added the customer metadata that’s important to your business, you can then put it to work by saving segments and drilling into the SaaS metrics in your ChartMogul account. You can create segments based upon collections of customer parameters that you’ve added to your customer accounts. Almost all of the analytics you see in ChartMogul can be segmented. Select a saved segment as a filter in the dashboard. You can even compare multiple segments on the same chart, such as MRR broken down by Marketing channel. Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles giving you tips and guidance on how to pipe in external data using the Enrichment API. We’ll also be releasing ‘connectors’ such as a Zapier ‘zap’ (contact us if you’d like to try this before it’s made public) to make it really easy to pipe in data without needing to write any code. We’re excited to see what you can achieve with Segmentation. If you have a ChartMogul account, you can log in and start using it right away. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can start a free 14-day trial to start using the features. </sys

🚀 SaaS Roundup #119: Why product marketing is misunderstood. In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue. This week’s top reads After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost John O’Nolan & Hannah Wolfe, Ghost “The best marketing we’ve done has been to launch, over and over again. At least twice a year we try to make something big and launch it publicly. Sounds really obvious but most people don’t do it.” Huge congratulations to the team at Ghost for their success over the past five years. I’ve been following the company’s progress towards building a sustainable, non-profit SaaS business way back from their Kickstarter launch. I spoke to John on our SaaS Open Mic podcast back in 2017, and found his philosophy and drive towards company’s mission really compelling! This post is full of lessons — from marketing to tech stack. You’ll want to make notes on this one. The PMM Classification System Kevin Wu, AppDynamics “In the world of SaaS, hiring great PMMs can feel like an impossible task. The competition is fierce and unless you know exactly what your team needs, you’ll be doing phone screens and interviews until the (purple) cows come home.” Product marketing managers, similarly to product managers, are generalists. I would also argue that (again, similarly to product management) the nuances of the PMM role is rarely fully understood. This post does a good job of breaking down some aspects of the role, and the qualities and skills you should be looking for in a good candidate. The importance of an effective product marketing strategy Matt Hodges, Intercom “Getting through the first product launch requires more than a marketing Band-Aid; it requires instilling a company-wide philosophy that marketing and product aren’t two antithetical forces but two sides of the same coin.” Continuing the theme of product marketing, I loved this post from Matt who really manages to drive home how pivotal a good product marketing strategy can be for a business. If you don’t feel like you fully understand the role, this is a great place to start. That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still receive upcoming issues of SaaS Roundup in your email inbox. See you next Friday.

[INST] 🚀 SaaS Roundup #119: Why product marketing is misunderstood [/INST]

In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue. This week’s top reads After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost John O’Nolan & Hannah Wolfe, Ghost “The best marketing we’ve done has been to launch, over and over again. At least twice a year we try to make something big and launch it publicly. Sounds really obvious but most people don’t do it.” Huge congratulations to the team at Ghost for their success over the past five years. I’ve been following the company’s progress towards building a sustainable, non-profit SaaS business way back from their Kickstarter launch. I spoke to John on our SaaS Open Mic podcast back in 2017, and found his philosophy and drive towards company’s mission really compelling! This post is full of lessons — from marketing to tech stack. You’ll want to make notes on this one. The PMM Classification System Kevin Wu, AppDynamics “In the world of SaaS, hiring great PMMs can feel like an impossible task. The competition is fierce and unless you know exactly what your team needs, you’ll be doing phone screens and interviews until the (purple) cows come home.” Product marketing managers, similarly to product managers, are generalists. I would also argue that (again, similarly to product management) the nuances of the PMM role is rarely fully understood. This post does a good job of breaking down some aspects of the role, and the qualities and skills you should be looking for in a good candidate. The importance of an effective product marketing strategy Matt Hodges, Intercom “Getting through the first product launch requires more than a marketing Band-Aid; it requires instilling a company-wide philosophy that marketing and product aren’t two antithetical forces but two sides of the same coin.” Continuing the theme of product marketing, I loved this post from Matt who really manages to drive home how pivotal a good product marketing strategy can be for a business. If you don’t feel like you fully understand the role, this is a great place to start. That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still receive upcoming issues of SaaS Roundup in your email inbox. See you next Friday.

<sys> [INST] 🚀 SaaS Roundup #119: Why product marketing is misunderstood [/INST] In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue. This week’s top reads After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost John O’Nolan & Hannah Wolfe, Ghost “The best marketing we’ve done has been to launch, over and over again. At least twice a year we try to make something big and launch it publicly. Sounds really obvious but most people don’t do it.” Huge congratulations to the team at Ghost for their success over the past five years. I’ve been following the company’s progress towards building a sustainable, non-profit SaaS business way back from their Kickstarter launch. I spoke to John on our SaaS Open Mic podcast back in 2017, and found his philosophy and drive towards company’s mission really compelling! This post is full of lessons — from marketing to tech stack. You’ll want to make notes on this one. The PMM Classification System Kevin Wu, AppDynamics “In the world of SaaS, hiring great PMMs can feel like an impossible task. The competition is fierce and unless you know exactly what your team needs, you’ll be doing phone screens and interviews until the (purple) cows come home.” Product marketing managers, similarly to product managers, are generalists. I would also argue that (again, similarly to product management) the nuances of the PMM role is rarely fully understood. This post does a good job of breaking down some aspects of the role, and the qualities and skills you should be looking for in a good candidate. The importance of an effective product marketing strategy Matt Hodges, Intercom “Getting through the first product launch requires more than a marketing Band-Aid; it requires instilling a company-wide philosophy that marketing and product aren’t two antithetical forces but two sides of the same coin.” Continuing the theme of product marketing, I loved this post from Matt who really manages to drive home how pivotal a good product marketing strategy can be for a business. If you don’t feel like you fully understand the role, this is a great place to start. That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still receive upcoming issues of SaaS Roundup in your email inbox. See you next Friday. </sys

Lock-In vs. Stickiness in SaaS: Retaining Customers the Right Way. Stickiness is a term usually used with a positive sentiment in the tech industry — everyone wants a sticky product. However, the term lock-in is normally used negatively, describing products making it difficult for users to leave — even if they want to. The two meanings are very similar. So what’s the line between good and evil when it comes to actively retaining customers? How big-brand consumer products boost retention with stickiness Achieving great retention doesn’t have to mean locking your users in a room with bars on the windows and throwing away the key. The best products we use everyday are sticky in some form or another — they generate enough value or loyalty that users don’t want to leave. Be warned, however: the line between stickiness and lock-in is a fine one, as we’ll see later. iMessage – Apple’s built-in proprietary messaging platform is incredibly sticky by design. Leaving the iOS ecosystem (i.e., getting a different brand of smartphone) means leaving behind your iMessage conversations, and either adopting a different messaging platform altogether or sending old-school SMS (shudder). Spotify – Where unsubscribing means leaving behind all of those intricately curated mixtapes, subscribed playlists and personalized recommendations in your account. Nespresso – Where owning their coffee machine means that I can only ever use the coffee pods manufactured by Nespresso (at 3x the cost of loose ground coffee). Airline loyalty programs – “I need to keep flying with [airline] otherwise I’ll lose my platinum status!” What’s interesting is that all of the above products have loyal, happy customers. These companies have generally succeeded in striking a balance between value to the customer and product lock-in. Nespresso machines taste great for the majority of non-coffee nerds. Spotify inspires me every week with new music recommendations. My airline loyalty program allows me to fly around the world with perks I wouldn’t normally have access to. To the vast majority of customers, the value outweighs the potential pain of switching away. And the pain of switching away is enough to deter us in those dark times when we do consider it. The more I invest in Apple’s platform, the greater the value for me as a user (my data syncs everywhere, things connect automatically, etc.) but the harder it is for me to leave altogether. This can undoubtedly be viewed as a negative lock-in effect. But the value means that my Apple-branded prison cell is actually rather comfortable, has super fast WiFi and beautiful anodized aluminum walls. If Apple’s marketing was brutally honest… How can I make my B2B SaaS sticky? On the surface, stickiness and product lock-in seem a bit more straightforward in SaaS. Discussion points like data portability and available integrations are a known quantity (you either can export your data or you can’t). However, a growing number of SaaS businesses are leveraging techniques from the consumer world to keep customers subscribed. Encourage users to generate value inside your product (Consumer example: Spotify and all those carefully-curated playlists I created) This form of stickiness is common on large platforms, where the user generates, stores and works with their own data. It could be in the form of custom reports, complex workflows automation or generation of data. If that “thing” the customer generates is proprietary to your product, leaving means throwing away what may be hours of invested time and resources. Just like those carefully curated Spotify playlists we can’t let go of, the more times users invest in value creation inside your product, the stronger the stickiness. Build outstanding brand loyalty (Consumer example: Any company you had an incredible experience with!) What if the customer has simply built up such a rapport with your support team, your content, your brand, that their loyalty to your product stops them from leaving? Loyalty is a bigger factor than most of us expect (it’s built into us on a genetic level) and businesses can leverage this, with a well-executed engagement strategy. In B2B SaaS we’re starting to see businesses with a laser-sharp focus on brand. Companies like Drift are learning lessons from the consumer world and putting brand strategy at the center of their growth efforts. Peek Inside Drift’s Killer Brand Strategy: How to build a B2B SaaS brand that will stand the test of time is an excellent read on this topic. Enforce user habit (Consumer examples: Instagram, basically any modern social network) As your customer, I’ve spent the past nine months of my life routinely running a report and checking key metrics in your platform with my morning coffee. The notification I receive in my inbox when the report is ready gives me a pleasant feeling, and it’s going to take a lot for me to abandon this habit. Dominate your category (Consumer example: Gmail, which is both free AND the best solution) If you’re orders of magnitude better than any competition in your category, it’s very difficult for customers to leave you for a vastly inferior solution — even with a significant saving in cost. The advanced approach Of course, having one of the above characteristics in your SaaS business can contribute to increased stickiness and retention. The best businesses, however, have elements of them all. This multi-faceted approach means that falling down on one aspect (e.g. a bad customer support experience) isn’t the final nail in the coffin for your customer relationship.

[INST] Lock-In vs [/INST]

Stickiness in SaaS: Retaining Customers the Right Way. Stickiness is a term usually used with a positive sentiment in the tech industry — everyone wants a sticky product. However, the term lock-in is normally used negatively, describing products making it difficult for users to leave — even if they want to. The two meanings are very similar. So what’s the line between good and evil when it comes to actively retaining customers? How big-brand consumer products boost retention with stickiness Achieving great retention doesn’t have to mean locking your users in a room with bars on the windows and throwing away the key. The best products we use everyday are sticky in some form or another — they generate enough value or loyalty that users don’t want to leave. Be warned, however: the line between stickiness and lock-in is a fine one, as we’ll see later. iMessage – Apple’s built-in proprietary messaging platform is incredibly sticky by design. Leaving the iOS ecosystem (i.e., getting a different brand of smartphone) means leaving behind your iMessage conversations, and either adopting a different messaging platform altogether or sending old-school SMS (shudder). Spotify – Where unsubscribing means leaving behind all of those intricately curated mixtapes, subscribed playlists and personalized recommendations in your account. Nespresso – Where owning their coffee machine means that I can only ever use the coffee pods manufactured by Nespresso (at 3x the cost of loose ground coffee). Airline loyalty programs – “I need to keep flying with [airline] otherwise I’ll lose my platinum status!” What’s interesting is that all of the above products have loyal, happy customers. These companies have generally succeeded in striking a balance between value to the customer and product lock-in. Nespresso machines taste great for the majority of non-coffee nerds. Spotify inspires me every week with new music recommendations. My airline loyalty program allows me to fly around the world with perks I wouldn’t normally have access to. To the vast majority of customers, the value outweighs the potential pain of switching away. And the pain of switching away is enough to deter us in those dark times when we do consider it. The more I invest in Apple’s platform, the greater the value for me as a user (my data syncs everywhere, things connect automatically, etc.) but the harder it is for me to leave altogether. This can undoubtedly be viewed as a negative lock-in effect. But the value means that my Apple-branded prison cell is actually rather comfortable, has super fast WiFi and beautiful anodized aluminum walls. If Apple’s marketing was brutally honest… How can I make my B2B SaaS sticky? On the surface, stickiness and product lock-in seem a bit more straightforward in SaaS. Discussion points like data portability and available integrations are a known quantity (you either can export your data or you can’t). However, a growing number of SaaS businesses are leveraging techniques from the consumer world to keep customers subscribed. Encourage users to generate value inside your product (Consumer example: Spotify and all those carefully-curated playlists I created) This form of stickiness is common on large platforms, where the user generates, stores and works with their own data. It could be in the form of custom reports, complex workflows automation or generation of data. If that “thing” the customer generates is proprietary to your product, leaving means throwing away what may be hours of invested time and resources. Just like those carefully curated Spotify playlists we can’t let go of, the more times users invest in value creation inside your product, the stronger the stickiness. Build outstanding brand loyalty (Consumer example: Any company you had an incredible experience with!) What if the customer has simply built up such a rapport with your support team, your content, your brand, that their loyalty to your product stops them from leaving? Loyalty is a bigger factor than most of us expect (it’s built into us on a genetic level) and businesses can leverage this, with a well-executed engagement strategy. In B2B SaaS we’re starting to see businesses with a laser-sharp focus on brand. Companies like Drift are learning lessons from the consumer world and putting brand strategy at the center of their growth efforts. Peek Inside Drift’s Killer Brand Strategy: How to build a B2B SaaS brand that will stand the test of time is an excellent read on this topic. Enforce user habit (Consumer examples: Instagram, basically any modern social network) As your customer, I’ve spent the past nine months of my life routinely running a report and checking key metrics in your platform with my morning coffee. The notification I receive in my inbox when the report is ready gives me a pleasant feeling, and it’s going to take a lot for me to abandon this habit. Dominate your category (Consumer example: Gmail, which is both free AND the best solution) If you’re orders of magnitude better than any competition in your category, it’s very difficult for customers to leave you for a vastly inferior solution — even with a significant saving in cost. The advanced approach Of course, having one of the above characteristics in your SaaS business can contribute to increased stickiness and retention. The best businesses, however, have elements of them all. This multi-faceted approach means that falling down on one aspect (e.g. a bad customer support experience) isn’t the final nail in the coffin for your customer relationship.

<sys> [INST] Lock-In vs [/INST] Stickiness in SaaS: Retaining Customers the Right Way. Stickiness is a term usually used with a positive sentiment in the tech industry — everyone wants a sticky product. However, the term lock-in is normally used negatively, describing products making it difficult for users to leave — even if they want to. The two meanings are very similar. So what’s the line between good and evil when it comes to actively retaining customers? How big-brand consumer products boost retention with stickiness Achieving great retention doesn’t have to mean locking your users in a room with bars on the windows and throwing away the key. The best products we use everyday are sticky in some form or another — they generate enough value or loyalty that users don’t want to leave. Be warned, however: the line between stickiness and lock-in is a fine one, as we’ll see later. iMessage – Apple’s built-in proprietary messaging platform is incredibly sticky by design. Leaving the iOS ecosystem (i.e., getting a different brand of smartphone) means leaving behind your iMessage conversations, and either adopting a different messaging platform altogether or sending old-school SMS (shudder). Spotify – Where unsubscribing means leaving behind all of those intricately curated mixtapes, subscribed playlists and personalized recommendations in your account. Nespresso – Where owning their coffee machine means that I can only ever use the coffee pods manufactured by Nespresso (at 3x the cost of loose ground coffee). Airline loyalty programs – “I need to keep flying with [airline] otherwise I’ll lose my platinum status!” What’s interesting is that all of the above products have loyal, happy customers. These companies have generally succeeded in striking a balance between value to the customer and product lock-in. Nespresso machines taste great for the majority of non-coffee nerds. Spotify inspires me every week with new music recommendations. My airline loyalty program allows me to fly around the world with perks I wouldn’t normally have access to. To the vast majority of customers, the value outweighs the potential pain of switching away. And the pain of switching away is enough to deter us in those dark times when we do consider it. The more I invest in Apple’s platform, the greater the value for me as a user (my data syncs everywhere, things connect automatically, etc.) but the harder it is for me to leave altogether. This can undoubtedly be viewed as a negative lock-in effect. But the value means that my Apple-branded prison cell is actually rather comfortable, has super fast WiFi and beautiful anodized aluminum walls. If Apple’s marketing was brutally honest… How can I make my B2B SaaS sticky? On the surface, stickiness and product lock-in seem a bit more straightforward in SaaS. Discussion points like data portability and available integrations are a known quantity (you either can export your data or you can’t). However, a growing number of SaaS businesses are leveraging techniques from the consumer world to keep customers subscribed. Encourage users to generate value inside your product (Consumer example: Spotify and all those carefully-curated playlists I created) This form of stickiness is common on large platforms, where the user generates, stores and works with their own data. It could be in the form of custom reports, complex workflows automation or generation of data. If that “thing” the customer generates is proprietary to your product, leaving means throwing away what may be hours of invested time and resources. Just like those carefully curated Spotify playlists we can’t let go of, the more times users invest in value creation inside your product, the stronger the stickiness. Build outstanding brand loyalty (Consumer example: Any company you had an incredible experience with!) What if the customer has simply built up such a rapport with your support team, your content, your brand, that their loyalty to your product stops them from leaving? Loyalty is a bigger factor than most of us expect (it’s built into us on a genetic level) and businesses can leverage this, with a well-executed engagement strategy. In B2B SaaS we’re starting to see businesses with a laser-sharp focus on brand. Companies like Drift are learning lessons from the consumer world and putting brand strategy at the center of their growth efforts. Peek Inside Drift’s Killer Brand Strategy: How to build a B2B SaaS brand that will stand the test of time is an excellent read on this topic. Enforce user habit (Consumer examples: Instagram, basically any modern social network) As your customer, I’ve spent the past nine months of my life routinely running a report and checking key metrics in your platform with my morning coffee. The notification I receive in my inbox when the report is ready gives me a pleasant feeling, and it’s going to take a lot for me to abandon this habit. Dominate your category (Consumer example: Gmail, which is both free AND the best solution) If you’re orders of magnitude better than any competition in your category, it’s very difficult for customers to leave you for a vastly inferior solution — even with a significant saving in cost. The advanced approach Of course, having one of the above characteristics in your SaaS business can contribute to increased stickiness and retention. The best businesses, however, have elements of them all. This multi-faceted approach means that falling down on one aspect (e.g. a bad customer support experience) isn’t the final nail in the coffin for your customer relationship. </sys

How a Pricing Migration Enabled ChartMogul To Retain the Right Type of Customers. Early pricing experiments ChartMogul’s pricing model was customer-based at the company’s inception. The price you paid for using CharMogul was dependent on the number of customers your business served. Even in the early years of ChartMogul, we encountered several challenges with customer-based pricing: We frequently couldn’t close deals without discounting. We encountered a lot of friction with the entry-level pricing. Paying customers that were growing into higher pricing tiers would reach out regularly to ask for discounts. Ultimately, we ended up with many customers having discounts and all sorts of individual agreements and a large number of plans. There was a fundamental lack of a price to value alignment. ChartMogul’s pricing page in 2017 Decision to move away from customer-based pricing In the summer of 2018, we conducted extensive research into alternative pricing models. The research concluded with a clear recommendation: revenue-based pricing would result in a better price to value alignment. The decision to migrate from customer-based pricing to revenue-based pricing was just a first step. We decided that after the release of revenue-based pricing to new customers, we would also migrate all legacy customers to the new pricing. To understand the impact of the new pricing on our current recurring revenue, we mapped the whole customer base to MRR bands. We did this by creating ranges in $10K MRR increments such as $10-20K MRR, $20-30K MRR, and so forth. This showed us the customer count in each band and what the total amount paid would be. ChartMogul’s pricing page in 2022 Before migrating our first customer While preparing for the pricing migration, we determined that the account management team would take the lead on the project since we anticipated that re-selling and additional onboarding would be necessary to migrate some of these accounts successfully. We divided our customer base into groups, segmented by price and plan. Later, we prepared customizable messaging templates that reflected our company values like integrity and empathy. An iterative, empathetic pricing migration process The migration process started out with the oldest legacy plans and the lowest paying accounts in them. We worked through migrations in batches and set a quarterly goal for the account management team. The batching helped us to tweak our messaging as we went along. We found that showing strong empathy in our communication and allowing the customer to be heard really helped to get the buy-in. In many cases, we were asking for a lot of extra money so we aimed to always identify opportunities to deliver more value and expand the usage of ChartMogul. Some discussions took several weeks of back and forth and occasionally involved the product and engineering teams. What surprised us most was that many customers accepted the new pricing with little to no resistance. Challenges encountered A number of customers had strong emotional responses. Getting them to agree to the new pricing was a journey that required patience from both sides which at times resulted in several weeks of back and forth. When a conversation wasn’t going anywhere, myself or our CEO would get involved to help work towards a win-win solution. Some founders and executives responded better when talking to someone they perceived as an equal. In some cases, the price increases were extreme where a customer would move from paying something like $300 to paying $2500. We decided to be flexible when working with these types of high-value accounts. We developed a system we called gradual pricing alignment. Instead of asking a customer to pay the full amount right away, we would roll out the increase in increments over a more extended period of time. Letting go of bad-fit customers We determined during the pricing migration that some customers were simply not the right fit. Looking closer at these accounts, we found that we had been trying to keep some customers happy for years at great expense to our business. These accounts were leftovers from the early time of ChartMogul, when our positioning wasn’t that clear yet, which attracted all types of customers. Some had become bad fit customers over time. The gap between what ChartMogul could do for them and what they wanted to use our product for had grown significantly since signing up. When a customer had such a limited usage profile and no interest in expanding it, there was often no pathway to get the buy-in to our new pricing. 44.7% account retention is not the end of the world To understand the result of the migration, let’s dive into one customer segment and look at ChartMogu’s Pro Plan customers that migrated to the new Scale or Volume Plans. In that customer segment, we lost 178 accounts. From 322 subscribers in September 2018, we went to 144 in February 2020. Account retention was 44.7%. Chart: Migrating from Pro Plan to Scale or Volume Plans – Subscribers At first glance, this was a huge loss for the business. However, looking at MRR in that same segment tells a different story. We went from $57,640 to $85,838 and attained almost 148.9% MRR retention. Chart: Migrating from Pro Plan to Scale or Volume Plans – MRR Moreover, these accounts expanded further since we completed the pricing migration in Q1/2020. Our takeaways from the pricing migration All in all, the project took 1.5 years to complete. We consider the pricing migration a big success for several reasons. The remaining customers were primarily highly engaged, good-fit users that took full advantage of the platform. This made it easier for our success team to manage those customers. We saw our support volume relative to our customer number decrease. The pricing migration also helped our positioning. We learned that B2B SaaS was our sweet spot which impacted our product roadmap and marketing strategy. We gained a better understanding of our pricing power. Value-based pricing reduced friction for our sales team to convert leads to paying subscribers and our account managers to retain customers. My favorite part of the pricing migration was all the engaging conversations we had with our customers. These helped us build better, value-based relationships with them. Our team learned a ton about where our customers are realizing the most value. We gained a better understanding of our customers’ future needs which will empower our company to prepare for the future to grow alongside their changing needs.

[INST] How a Pricing Migration Enabled ChartMogul To Retain the Right Type of Customers [/INST]

Early pricing experiments ChartMogul’s pricing model was customer-based at the company’s inception. The price you paid for using CharMogul was dependent on the number of customers your business served. Even in the early years of ChartMogul, we encountered several challenges with customer-based pricing: We frequently couldn’t close deals without discounting. We encountered a lot of friction with the entry-level pricing. Paying customers that were growing into higher pricing tiers would reach out regularly to ask for discounts. Ultimately, we ended up with many customers having discounts and all sorts of individual agreements and a large number of plans. There was a fundamental lack of a price to value alignment. ChartMogul’s pricing page in 2017 Decision to move away from customer-based pricing In the summer of 2018, we conducted extensive research into alternative pricing models. The research concluded with a clear recommendation: revenue-based pricing would result in a better price to value alignment. The decision to migrate from customer-based pricing to revenue-based pricing was just a first step. We decided that after the release of revenue-based pricing to new customers, we would also migrate all legacy customers to the new pricing. To understand the impact of the new pricing on our current recurring revenue, we mapped the whole customer base to MRR bands. We did this by creating ranges in $10K MRR increments such as $10-20K MRR, $20-30K MRR, and so forth. This showed us the customer count in each band and what the total amount paid would be. ChartMogul’s pricing page in 2022 Before migrating our first customer While preparing for the pricing migration, we determined that the account management team would take the lead on the project since we anticipated that re-selling and additional onboarding would be necessary to migrate some of these accounts successfully. We divided our customer base into groups, segmented by price and plan. Later, we prepared customizable messaging templates that reflected our company values like integrity and empathy. An iterative, empathetic pricing migration process The migration process started out with the oldest legacy plans and the lowest paying accounts in them. We worked through migrations in batches and set a quarterly goal for the account management team. The batching helped us to tweak our messaging as we went along. We found that showing strong empathy in our communication and allowing the customer to be heard really helped to get the buy-in. In many cases, we were asking for a lot of extra money so we aimed to always identify opportunities to deliver more value and expand the usage of ChartMogul. Some discussions took several weeks of back and forth and occasionally involved the product and engineering teams. What surprised us most was that many customers accepted the new pricing with little to no resistance. Challenges encountered A number of customers had strong emotional responses. Getting them to agree to the new pricing was a journey that required patience from both sides which at times resulted in several weeks of back and forth. When a conversation wasn’t going anywhere, myself or our CEO would get involved to help work towards a win-win solution. Some founders and executives responded better when talking to someone they perceived as an equal. In some cases, the price increases were extreme where a customer would move from paying something like $300 to paying $2500. We decided to be flexible when working with these types of high-value accounts. We developed a system we called gradual pricing alignment. Instead of asking a customer to pay the full amount right away, we would roll out the increase in increments over a more extended period of time. Letting go of bad-fit customers We determined during the pricing migration that some customers were simply not the right fit. Looking closer at these accounts, we found that we had been trying to keep some customers happy for years at great expense to our business. These accounts were leftovers from the early time of ChartMogul, when our positioning wasn’t that clear yet, which attracted all types of customers. Some had become bad fit customers over time. The gap between what ChartMogul could do for them and what they wanted to use our product for had grown significantly since signing up. When a customer had such a limited usage profile and no interest in expanding it, there was often no pathway to get the buy-in to our new pricing. 44.7% account retention is not the end of the world To understand the result of the migration, let’s dive into one customer segment and look at ChartMogu’s Pro Plan customers that migrated to the new Scale or Volume Plans. In that customer segment, we lost 178 accounts. From 322 subscribers in September 2018, we went to 144 in February 2020. Account retention was 44.7%. Chart: Migrating from Pro Plan to Scale or Volume Plans – Subscribers At first glance, this was a huge loss for the business. However, looking at MRR in that same segment tells a different story. We went from $57,640 to $85,838 and attained almost 148.9% MRR retention. Chart: Migrating from Pro Plan to Scale or Volume Plans – MRR Moreover, these accounts expanded further since we completed the pricing migration in Q1/2020. Our takeaways from the pricing migration All in all, the project took 1.5 years to complete. We consider the pricing migration a big success for several reasons. The remaining customers were primarily highly engaged, good-fit users that took full advantage of the platform. This made it easier for our success team to manage those customers. We saw our support volume relative to our customer number decrease. The pricing migration also helped our positioning. We learned that B2B SaaS was our sweet spot which impacted our product roadmap and marketing strategy. We gained a better understanding of our pricing power. Value-based pricing reduced friction for our sales team to convert leads to paying subscribers and our account managers to retain customers. My favorite part of the pricing migration was all the engaging conversations we had with our customers. These helped us build better, value-based relationships with them. Our team learned a ton about where our customers are realizing the most value. We gained a better understanding of our customers’ future needs which will empower our company to prepare for the future to grow alongside their changing needs.

<sys> [INST] How a Pricing Migration Enabled ChartMogul To Retain the Right Type of Customers [/INST] Early pricing experiments ChartMogul’s pricing model was customer-based at the company’s inception. The price you paid for using CharMogul was dependent on the number of customers your business served. Even in the early years of ChartMogul, we encountered several challenges with customer-based pricing: We frequently couldn’t close deals without discounting. We encountered a lot of friction with the entry-level pricing. Paying customers that were growing into higher pricing tiers would reach out regularly to ask for discounts. Ultimately, we ended up with many customers having discounts and all sorts of individual agreements and a large number of plans. There was a fundamental lack of a price to value alignment. ChartMogul’s pricing page in 2017 Decision to move away from customer-based pricing In the summer of 2018, we conducted extensive research into alternative pricing models. The research concluded with a clear recommendation: revenue-based pricing would result in a better price to value alignment. The decision to migrate from customer-based pricing to revenue-based pricing was just a first step. We decided that after the release of revenue-based pricing to new customers, we would also migrate all legacy customers to the new pricing. To understand the impact of the new pricing on our current recurring revenue, we mapped the whole customer base to MRR bands. We did this by creating ranges in $10K MRR increments such as $10-20K MRR, $20-30K MRR, and so forth. This showed us the customer count in each band and what the total amount paid would be. ChartMogul’s pricing page in 2022 Before migrating our first customer While preparing for the pricing migration, we determined that the account management team would take the lead on the project since we anticipated that re-selling and additional onboarding would be necessary to migrate some of these accounts successfully. We divided our customer base into groups, segmented by price and plan. Later, we prepared customizable messaging templates that reflected our company values like integrity and empathy. An iterative, empathetic pricing migration process The migration process started out with the oldest legacy plans and the lowest paying accounts in them. We worked through migrations in batches and set a quarterly goal for the account management team. The batching helped us to tweak our messaging as we went along. We found that showing strong empathy in our communication and allowing the customer to be heard really helped to get the buy-in. In many cases, we were asking for a lot of extra money so we aimed to always identify opportunities to deliver more value and expand the usage of ChartMogul. Some discussions took several weeks of back and forth and occasionally involved the product and engineering teams. What surprised us most was that many customers accepted the new pricing with little to no resistance. Challenges encountered A number of customers had strong emotional responses. Getting them to agree to the new pricing was a journey that required patience from both sides which at times resulted in several weeks of back and forth. When a conversation wasn’t going anywhere, myself or our CEO would get involved to help work towards a win-win solution. Some founders and executives responded better when talking to someone they perceived as an equal. In some cases, the price increases were extreme where a customer would move from paying something like $300 to paying $2500. We decided to be flexible when working with these types of high-value accounts. We developed a system we called gradual pricing alignment. Instead of asking a customer to pay the full amount right away, we would roll out the increase in increments over a more extended period of time. Letting go of bad-fit customers We determined during the pricing migration that some customers were simply not the right fit. Looking closer at these accounts, we found that we had been trying to keep some customers happy for years at great expense to our business. These accounts were leftovers from the early time of ChartMogul, when our positioning wasn’t that clear yet, which attracted all types of customers. Some had become bad fit customers over time. The gap between what ChartMogul could do for them and what they wanted to use our product for had grown significantly since signing up. When a customer had such a limited usage profile and no interest in expanding it, there was often no pathway to get the buy-in to our new pricing. 44.7% account retention is not the end of the world To understand the result of the migration, let’s dive into one customer segment and look at ChartMogu’s Pro Plan customers that migrated to the new Scale or Volume Plans. In that customer segment, we lost 178 accounts. From 322 subscribers in September 2018, we went to 144 in February 2020. Account retention was 44.7%. Chart: Migrating from Pro Plan to Scale or Volume Plans – Subscribers At first glance, this was a huge loss for the business. However, looking at MRR in that same segment tells a different story. We went from $57,640 to $85,838 and attained almost 148.9% MRR retention. Chart: Migrating from Pro Plan to Scale or Volume Plans – MRR Moreover, these accounts expanded further since we completed the pricing migration in Q1/2020. Our takeaways from the pricing migration All in all, the project took 1.5 years to complete. We consider the pricing migration a big success for several reasons. The remaining customers were primarily highly engaged, good-fit users that took full advantage of the platform. This made it easier for our success team to manage those customers. We saw our support volume relative to our customer number decrease. The pricing migration also helped our positioning. We learned that B2B SaaS was our sweet spot which impacted our product roadmap and marketing strategy. We gained a better understanding of our pricing power. Value-based pricing reduced friction for our sales team to convert leads to paying subscribers and our account managers to retain customers. My favorite part of the pricing migration was all the engaging conversations we had with our customers. These helped us build better, value-based relationships with them. Our team learned a ton about where our customers are realizing the most value. We gained a better understanding of our customers’ future needs which will empower our company to prepare for the future to grow alongside their changing needs. </sys

Free Poster: The Anatomy of a SaaS Business. We’ve all seen the typical leaky bucket illustration, often used to represent Revenue Churn in a SaaS business. To be fair, although somewhat over-used, it’s a great metaphor for the loss of revenue (the water) from a business (the bucket), and the subsequent attempts to prevent this (sticking plaster over the bucket holes). We decided to take this metaphor a step further and give a high-level overview of the DNA of any successful SaaS operation. Working with the crazy-talented local illustrator and artist Designed By Alice, we produced an illustration that summarizes the processes and teams that make up a SaaS business, as well as some of the “flow of economy” through the business. Allow me to introduce: Marketing Team The Marketing Team plays a pivotal role in channeling new leads into the business. Marketing activities like targeted content generation drive traffic to the website of the business, grow recognition for the brand amongst its target audience. In our poster, the Marketing character is gathering buckets of new leads (water) and handing them on to the… Sales Team The Sales Team works hand-in-hand with the Marketing Team, working to nurture the inbound leads generated from content and other marketing activities. Their goal is to convert these leads into new business – i.e., get that water into the bucket! Inevitably, not all leads will be successfully converted – our Sales character is attempting the difficult job of throwing the leads (water) into our bucket (business). Perhaps he should move the ladder a bit closer. So, some of the new leads eventually land inside our bucket. Great, we’ve got new customers and revenue in our business. But wait… what’s this? There are HOLES in the bucket?! Sounds like a job for the… Customer Success & Support Team Customer Success and Support in a SaaS business is all about keeping customers happy, helping them achieve their goals within your product, and minimizing the risk of them cancelling (churning). Depending on the size of your business, this may be two discrete teams, or even just two individuals. So the Customer Success & Support Teams are fixing your leaky business (bucket). They’re finding the holes through which customers are leaving, and fixing the root causes of these problems. To keep your slightly leaky SaaS business growing, you need to evolve and grow your product – you need a bigger bucket, and more great features for your bucket, to keep people using it. That’ll be down to the… Product & Engineering Team Last but by no means least, the Product & Engineering Team (or teams) are the driving force for moving your product and business forwards. They work together in a tightly-knit development process which takes company strategy and vision along with customer feedback as its input and iterates on the product with value-add releases. They may also need to design fixes for the more major leaks identified by the Customer Success and Support teams. Note: Product people may not always wear a baseball cap with a spinner… Download the Poster We’re offering The Anatomy of a SaaS Business poster as a PDF download, free for you to do what you like with. You’re not required to submit your email address or any other information – it’s free, as in free. However, if you see some value from it, and the other SaaS-focused resources we produce, then consider signing up for our Weekly SaaS Digest – you’ll get an awesome weekly summary of just the best content each week: [mc4wp_form id=”1472″] Download PDF (print quality, A3 size) Share & Follow NEW on @ChartMogul: The Anatomy of a #SaaS Business [free poster] https://t.co/uwz5ceT5Kt pic.twitter.com/1VQpjhDl4J — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) October 23, 2015

[INST] Free Poster: The Anatomy of a SaaS Business [/INST]

We’ve all seen the typical leaky bucket illustration, often used to represent Revenue Churn in a SaaS business. To be fair, although somewhat over-used, it’s a great metaphor for the loss of revenue (the water) from a business (the bucket), and the subsequent attempts to prevent this (sticking plaster over the bucket holes). We decided to take this metaphor a step further and give a high-level overview of the DNA of any successful SaaS operation. Working with the crazy-talented local illustrator and artist Designed By Alice, we produced an illustration that summarizes the processes and teams that make up a SaaS business, as well as some of the “flow of economy” through the business. Allow me to introduce: Marketing Team The Marketing Team plays a pivotal role in channeling new leads into the business. Marketing activities like targeted content generation drive traffic to the website of the business, grow recognition for the brand amongst its target audience. In our poster, the Marketing character is gathering buckets of new leads (water) and handing them on to the… Sales Team The Sales Team works hand-in-hand with the Marketing Team, working to nurture the inbound leads generated from content and other marketing activities. Their goal is to convert these leads into new business – i.e., get that water into the bucket! Inevitably, not all leads will be successfully converted – our Sales character is attempting the difficult job of throwing the leads (water) into our bucket (business). Perhaps he should move the ladder a bit closer. So, some of the new leads eventually land inside our bucket. Great, we’ve got new customers and revenue in our business. But wait… what’s this? There are HOLES in the bucket?! Sounds like a job for the… Customer Success & Support Team Customer Success and Support in a SaaS business is all about keeping customers happy, helping them achieve their goals within your product, and minimizing the risk of them cancelling (churning). Depending on the size of your business, this may be two discrete teams, or even just two individuals. So the Customer Success & Support Teams are fixing your leaky business (bucket). They’re finding the holes through which customers are leaving, and fixing the root causes of these problems. To keep your slightly leaky SaaS business growing, you need to evolve and grow your product – you need a bigger bucket, and more great features for your bucket, to keep people using it. That’ll be down to the… Product & Engineering Team Last but by no means least, the Product & Engineering Team (or teams) are the driving force for moving your product and business forwards. They work together in a tightly-knit development process which takes company strategy and vision along with customer feedback as its input and iterates on the product with value-add releases. They may also need to design fixes for the more major leaks identified by the Customer Success and Support teams. Note: Product people may not always wear a baseball cap with a spinner… Download the Poster We’re offering The Anatomy of a SaaS Business poster as a PDF download, free for you to do what you like with. You’re not required to submit your email address or any other information – it’s free, as in free. However, if you see some value from it, and the other SaaS-focused resources we produce, then consider signing up for our Weekly SaaS Digest – you’ll get an awesome weekly summary of just the best content each week: [mc4wp_form id=”1472″] Download PDF (print quality, A3 size) Share & Follow NEW on @ChartMogul: The Anatomy of a #SaaS Business [free poster] https://t.co/uwz5ceT5Kt pic.twitter.com/1VQpjhDl4J — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) October 23, 2015

<sys> [INST] Free Poster: The Anatomy of a SaaS Business [/INST] We’ve all seen the typical leaky bucket illustration, often used to represent Revenue Churn in a SaaS business. To be fair, although somewhat over-used, it’s a great metaphor for the loss of revenue (the water) from a business (the bucket), and the subsequent attempts to prevent this (sticking plaster over the bucket holes). We decided to take this metaphor a step further and give a high-level overview of the DNA of any successful SaaS operation. Working with the crazy-talented local illustrator and artist Designed By Alice, we produced an illustration that summarizes the processes and teams that make up a SaaS business, as well as some of the “flow of economy” through the business. Allow me to introduce: Marketing Team The Marketing Team plays a pivotal role in channeling new leads into the business. Marketing activities like targeted content generation drive traffic to the website of the business, grow recognition for the brand amongst its target audience. In our poster, the Marketing character is gathering buckets of new leads (water) and handing them on to the… Sales Team The Sales Team works hand-in-hand with the Marketing Team, working to nurture the inbound leads generated from content and other marketing activities. Their goal is to convert these leads into new business – i.e., get that water into the bucket! Inevitably, not all leads will be successfully converted – our Sales character is attempting the difficult job of throwing the leads (water) into our bucket (business). Perhaps he should move the ladder a bit closer. So, some of the new leads eventually land inside our bucket. Great, we’ve got new customers and revenue in our business. But wait… what’s this? There are HOLES in the bucket?! Sounds like a job for the… Customer Success & Support Team Customer Success and Support in a SaaS business is all about keeping customers happy, helping them achieve their goals within your product, and minimizing the risk of them cancelling (churning). Depending on the size of your business, this may be two discrete teams, or even just two individuals. So the Customer Success & Support Teams are fixing your leaky business (bucket). They’re finding the holes through which customers are leaving, and fixing the root causes of these problems. To keep your slightly leaky SaaS business growing, you need to evolve and grow your product – you need a bigger bucket, and more great features for your bucket, to keep people using it. That’ll be down to the… Product & Engineering Team Last but by no means least, the Product & Engineering Team (or teams) are the driving force for moving your product and business forwards. They work together in a tightly-knit development process which takes company strategy and vision along with customer feedback as its input and iterates on the product with value-add releases. They may also need to design fixes for the more major leaks identified by the Customer Success and Support teams. Note: Product people may not always wear a baseball cap with a spinner… Download the Poster We’re offering The Anatomy of a SaaS Business poster as a PDF download, free for you to do what you like with. You’re not required to submit your email address or any other information – it’s free, as in free. However, if you see some value from it, and the other SaaS-focused resources we produce, then consider signing up for our Weekly SaaS Digest – you’ll get an awesome weekly summary of just the best content each week: [mc4wp_form id=”1472″] Download PDF (print quality, A3 size) Share & Follow NEW on @ChartMogul: The Anatomy of a #SaaS Business [free poster] https://t.co/uwz5ceT5Kt pic.twitter.com/1VQpjhDl4J — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) October 23, 2015 </sys

ChartMogul in 2020: What We Achieved This Year. This year has been challenging for both people and businesses. We believe that in order to overcome all the stress imposed on us, we should focus and reflect on the positive things that have happened over the last 12 months. And it is great to be able to share that 2020 was the best year yet for ChartMogul. As you can check for yourself, we say this every year (we also did in 2018, 2017, and 2016). The repeating theme is that this wouldn’t be possible without the support of our customers and the dedication of our team. To cap off the year, we’ve collected the accomplishments we’re most proud of on the product, business, and content sides. Check them out below! Product The highlight of this year was the launch of the world’s first Subscription Data Platform in March. Introducing the ChartMogul Subscription Data Platform. This is just the first step in our mission to revolutionize how subscription companies use their data. Throughout the year, our team has focused on improving the overall experience of ChartMogul by launching new features, improving the design and usability of the app, and by making it faster and more reliable. Here’s just a sample of all the great things we launched this year across these focus areas: This month we launched a brand new improvement, which allows you to add your custom saved charts to the ChartMogul dashboard. Your dashboard has never looked so good. The new CSV Uploader (an essential companion to the Subscription Data Platform) brings the whole experience of managing your billing data under one roof. It also gives you a lot more flexibility over the data you import into ChartMogul. Earlier in the year, we launched a brand-new Tags Manager and made several improvements to custom attributes in the app. This is a very helpful addition for users who bring in data from other systems (such as CRM tools and product analytics platforms) and use that data to segment and analyze their customers in ChartMogul. 2 of the most highly-demanded features on our roadmap also became a reality this year. MRR that entered/left segment gives you improved visibility in how your various plans are performing, while MRR per customer per month allows you to export a granular view of your customer base. Finally, we made another step in the development of the Subscription Data Platform. We launched the Beta version of MRR Webhooks, which gives superpowers to what founders can do with their subscription data. I’ll also lift the veil on a surprise we’re planning for you: We are also very close to launching our iPhone app! ChartMogul coming to an iPhone near you very soon! I hope I would be able to share more with you about this in the coming days. Team and Company A great product does not happen in a vacuum. It needs an equally strong and committed team behind it. Several events this year marked the growing maturity of ChartMogul as a company and a team. The first was our 6th anniversary. In lieu of getting together (due to the restrictions of travel imposed by the global pandemic), we celebrated by commissioning an artist to create an illustration that includes every member of the team. Click to view the full size illustration. Throughout the year, ChartMogul’s team grew from 33 to 43 people. Most of the people hired were in product and engineering, though we also added folks in sales, success, and operations. Our success team deserves a special mention as well. So far this year, we have solved a total of 9,340 tickets from customers with an average first reply time of 24 minutes and an overall satisfaction rating of 95%! https://twitter.com/drsim/status/1323193594782666753?s=20 This year, we also held our first internal hackathon. We ran it entirely virtually and it was a great event — not just because we had a lot of fun, but also because it resulted in a feature that was added to the app. Finally, the cherry on the top of the pie was the news that ChartMogul made it into the authoritative SaaS 1000 list. We can now say that we’re a household name in the cloud software industry. 😉 https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1293902145356406787 We like to think of this as a recognition of all the work we’ve done making the ChartMogul platform useful to our customers. Content Content is important to our team. Not just as a marketing tool, but even more as a way to educate our audience and forge a genuine connection with the people we believe we can help. This is the 48th post published on our blog this year. 5 of those have been the stories of ChartMogul customers, including an interview with Buffer’s CEO Joel Gascoigne. The highlight of the year on the content front was the launch of The B2B SaaS Pricing Masterclass. The report was based on the data we collected about the pricing practices (+ screenshot of pricing pages) of over 600 software companies. We used that information to analyze what are the current trends and the timeless best practices when it comes to monetization. We were very happy to hear that our efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. ChartMogul got recognized in 2 categories of the 2020 SaaS Brief MVP Awards for Travis’s excellent overview of expansion and reactivation MRR and for our MRR guide for 2021. Ready for 2021! We realize we have been really lucky in a year that has been tough for many people and businesses. We are committed to doing our (small) bit: helping companies understand and grow their business using their subscription data. This will continue to be our focus in 2021. See you next year!

[INST] ChartMogul in 2020: What We Achieved This Year [/INST]

This year has been challenging for both people and businesses. We believe that in order to overcome all the stress imposed on us, we should focus and reflect on the positive things that have happened over the last 12 months. And it is great to be able to share that 2020 was the best year yet for ChartMogul. As you can check for yourself, we say this every year (we also did in 2018, 2017, and 2016). The repeating theme is that this wouldn’t be possible without the support of our customers and the dedication of our team. To cap off the year, we’ve collected the accomplishments we’re most proud of on the product, business, and content sides. Check them out below! Product The highlight of this year was the launch of the world’s first Subscription Data Platform in March. Introducing the ChartMogul Subscription Data Platform. This is just the first step in our mission to revolutionize how subscription companies use their data. Throughout the year, our team has focused on improving the overall experience of ChartMogul by launching new features, improving the design and usability of the app, and by making it faster and more reliable. Here’s just a sample of all the great things we launched this year across these focus areas: This month we launched a brand new improvement, which allows you to add your custom saved charts to the ChartMogul dashboard. Your dashboard has never looked so good. The new CSV Uploader (an essential companion to the Subscription Data Platform) brings the whole experience of managing your billing data under one roof. It also gives you a lot more flexibility over the data you import into ChartMogul. Earlier in the year, we launched a brand-new Tags Manager and made several improvements to custom attributes in the app. This is a very helpful addition for users who bring in data from other systems (such as CRM tools and product analytics platforms) and use that data to segment and analyze their customers in ChartMogul. 2 of the most highly-demanded features on our roadmap also became a reality this year. MRR that entered/left segment gives you improved visibility in how your various plans are performing, while MRR per customer per month allows you to export a granular view of your customer base. Finally, we made another step in the development of the Subscription Data Platform. We launched the Beta version of MRR Webhooks, which gives superpowers to what founders can do with their subscription data. I’ll also lift the veil on a surprise we’re planning for you: We are also very close to launching our iPhone app! ChartMogul coming to an iPhone near you very soon! I hope I would be able to share more with you about this in the coming days. Team and Company A great product does not happen in a vacuum. It needs an equally strong and committed team behind it. Several events this year marked the growing maturity of ChartMogul as a company and a team. The first was our 6th anniversary. In lieu of getting together (due to the restrictions of travel imposed by the global pandemic), we celebrated by commissioning an artist to create an illustration that includes every member of the team. Click to view the full size illustration. Throughout the year, ChartMogul’s team grew from 33 to 43 people. Most of the people hired were in product and engineering, though we also added folks in sales, success, and operations. Our success team deserves a special mention as well. So far this year, we have solved a total of 9,340 tickets from customers with an average first reply time of 24 minutes and an overall satisfaction rating of 95%! https://twitter.com/drsim/status/1323193594782666753?s=20 This year, we also held our first internal hackathon. We ran it entirely virtually and it was a great event — not just because we had a lot of fun, but also because it resulted in a feature that was added to the app. Finally, the cherry on the top of the pie was the news that ChartMogul made it into the authoritative SaaS 1000 list. We can now say that we’re a household name in the cloud software industry. 😉 https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1293902145356406787 We like to think of this as a recognition of all the work we’ve done making the ChartMogul platform useful to our customers. Content Content is important to our team. Not just as a marketing tool, but even more as a way to educate our audience and forge a genuine connection with the people we believe we can help. This is the 48th post published on our blog this year. 5 of those have been the stories of ChartMogul customers, including an interview with Buffer’s CEO Joel Gascoigne. The highlight of the year on the content front was the launch of The B2B SaaS Pricing Masterclass. The report was based on the data we collected about the pricing practices (+ screenshot of pricing pages) of over 600 software companies. We used that information to analyze what are the current trends and the timeless best practices when it comes to monetization. We were very happy to hear that our efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. ChartMogul got recognized in 2 categories of the 2020 SaaS Brief MVP Awards for Travis’s excellent overview of expansion and reactivation MRR and for our MRR guide for 2021. Ready for 2021! We realize we have been really lucky in a year that has been tough for many people and businesses. We are committed to doing our (small) bit: helping companies understand and grow their business using their subscription data. This will continue to be our focus in 2021. See you next year!

<sys> [INST] ChartMogul in 2020: What We Achieved This Year [/INST] This year has been challenging for both people and businesses. We believe that in order to overcome all the stress imposed on us, we should focus and reflect on the positive things that have happened over the last 12 months. And it is great to be able to share that 2020 was the best year yet for ChartMogul. As you can check for yourself, we say this every year (we also did in 2018, 2017, and 2016). The repeating theme is that this wouldn’t be possible without the support of our customers and the dedication of our team. To cap off the year, we’ve collected the accomplishments we’re most proud of on the product, business, and content sides. Check them out below! Product The highlight of this year was the launch of the world’s first Subscription Data Platform in March. Introducing the ChartMogul Subscription Data Platform. This is just the first step in our mission to revolutionize how subscription companies use their data. Throughout the year, our team has focused on improving the overall experience of ChartMogul by launching new features, improving the design and usability of the app, and by making it faster and more reliable. Here’s just a sample of all the great things we launched this year across these focus areas: This month we launched a brand new improvement, which allows you to add your custom saved charts to the ChartMogul dashboard. Your dashboard has never looked so good. The new CSV Uploader (an essential companion to the Subscription Data Platform) brings the whole experience of managing your billing data under one roof. It also gives you a lot more flexibility over the data you import into ChartMogul. Earlier in the year, we launched a brand-new Tags Manager and made several improvements to custom attributes in the app. This is a very helpful addition for users who bring in data from other systems (such as CRM tools and product analytics platforms) and use that data to segment and analyze their customers in ChartMogul. 2 of the most highly-demanded features on our roadmap also became a reality this year. MRR that entered/left segment gives you improved visibility in how your various plans are performing, while MRR per customer per month allows you to export a granular view of your customer base. Finally, we made another step in the development of the Subscription Data Platform. We launched the Beta version of MRR Webhooks, which gives superpowers to what founders can do with their subscription data. I’ll also lift the veil on a surprise we’re planning for you: We are also very close to launching our iPhone app! ChartMogul coming to an iPhone near you very soon! I hope I would be able to share more with you about this in the coming days. Team and Company A great product does not happen in a vacuum. It needs an equally strong and committed team behind it. Several events this year marked the growing maturity of ChartMogul as a company and a team. The first was our 6th anniversary. In lieu of getting together (due to the restrictions of travel imposed by the global pandemic), we celebrated by commissioning an artist to create an illustration that includes every member of the team. Click to view the full size illustration. Throughout the year, ChartMogul’s team grew from 33 to 43 people. Most of the people hired were in product and engineering, though we also added folks in sales, success, and operations. Our success team deserves a special mention as well. So far this year, we have solved a total of 9,340 tickets from customers with an average first reply time of 24 minutes and an overall satisfaction rating of 95%! https://twitter.com/drsim/status/1323193594782666753?s=20 This year, we also held our first internal hackathon. We ran it entirely virtually and it was a great event — not just because we had a lot of fun, but also because it resulted in a feature that was added to the app. Finally, the cherry on the top of the pie was the news that ChartMogul made it into the authoritative SaaS 1000 list. We can now say that we’re a household name in the cloud software industry. 😉 https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1293902145356406787 We like to think of this as a recognition of all the work we’ve done making the ChartMogul platform useful to our customers. Content Content is important to our team. Not just as a marketing tool, but even more as a way to educate our audience and forge a genuine connection with the people we believe we can help. This is the 48th post published on our blog this year. 5 of those have been the stories of ChartMogul customers, including an interview with Buffer’s CEO Joel Gascoigne. The highlight of the year on the content front was the launch of The B2B SaaS Pricing Masterclass. The report was based on the data we collected about the pricing practices (+ screenshot of pricing pages) of over 600 software companies. We used that information to analyze what are the current trends and the timeless best practices when it comes to monetization. We were very happy to hear that our efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. ChartMogul got recognized in 2 categories of the 2020 SaaS Brief MVP Awards for Travis’s excellent overview of expansion and reactivation MRR and for our MRR guide for 2021. Ready for 2021! We realize we have been really lucky in a year that has been tough for many people and businesses. We are committed to doing our (small) bit: helping companies understand and grow their business using their subscription data. This will continue to be our focus in 2021. See you next year! </sys

Sync Your ChartMogul Data with Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery. Send ChartMogul data directly to your data warehouse: Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery. The new destinations allow you to combine your subscription and revenue data from ChartMogul with other data sets like product usage, customer data, and user feedback. Analyze your data in aggregate to understand your business and grow revenue. Export subscription data directly into your data warehouse You probably rely on custom code or a range of tools to load your subscription and revenue data into your data warehouse. The Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery integrations allow you to synchronize your ChartMogul data into your data warehouse in just a few steps and ultimately make your internal analysis easier. No additional implementation from your end is needed. You can export the following data points to your data warehouse: MRR movements Customers Custom attributes Tags I export activities to recreate historical MRR by date for each customer. It becomes handy in analyzing different product trends where I want to look at customers of certain segments. When connected, ChartMogul will synchronize your data, which you can directly combine with the rest of your databases and tables. Configure a destination in ChartMogul To add a new destination in ChartMogul navigate to Data Platform > Data Output > Destinations. It only takes a few minutes. Follow the instructions in these step-by-step guides to get started: Amazon Redshift Google BigQuery Snowflake Destinations allow you to export normalized subscription data Combining revenue, product, CRM, and other data sets can uncover powerful insights. Destinations help you to export your subscription and revenue data out of ChartMogul with only a few clicks. For more on Destinations, check out our latest release, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination. If you use Intercom, see how to enrich your Intercom customer profiles with data from ChartMogul.

[INST] Sync Your ChartMogul Data with Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery [/INST]

Send ChartMogul data directly to your data warehouse: Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery. The new destinations allow you to combine your subscription and revenue data from ChartMogul with other data sets like product usage, customer data, and user feedback. Analyze your data in aggregate to understand your business and grow revenue. Export subscription data directly into your data warehouse You probably rely on custom code or a range of tools to load your subscription and revenue data into your data warehouse. The Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery integrations allow you to synchronize your ChartMogul data into your data warehouse in just a few steps and ultimately make your internal analysis easier. No additional implementation from your end is needed. You can export the following data points to your data warehouse: MRR movements Customers Custom attributes Tags I export activities to recreate historical MRR by date for each customer. It becomes handy in analyzing different product trends where I want to look at customers of certain segments. When connected, ChartMogul will synchronize your data, which you can directly combine with the rest of your databases and tables. Configure a destination in ChartMogul To add a new destination in ChartMogul navigate to Data Platform > Data Output > Destinations. It only takes a few minutes. Follow the instructions in these step-by-step guides to get started: Amazon Redshift Google BigQuery Snowflake Destinations allow you to export normalized subscription data Combining revenue, product, CRM, and other data sets can uncover powerful insights. Destinations help you to export your subscription and revenue data out of ChartMogul with only a few clicks. For more on Destinations, check out our latest release, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination. If you use Intercom, see how to enrich your Intercom customer profiles with data from ChartMogul.

<sys> [INST] Sync Your ChartMogul Data with Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery [/INST] Send ChartMogul data directly to your data warehouse: Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery. The new destinations allow you to combine your subscription and revenue data from ChartMogul with other data sets like product usage, customer data, and user feedback. Analyze your data in aggregate to understand your business and grow revenue. Export subscription data directly into your data warehouse You probably rely on custom code or a range of tools to load your subscription and revenue data into your data warehouse. The Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery integrations allow you to synchronize your ChartMogul data into your data warehouse in just a few steps and ultimately make your internal analysis easier. No additional implementation from your end is needed. You can export the following data points to your data warehouse: MRR movements Customers Custom attributes Tags I export activities to recreate historical MRR by date for each customer. It becomes handy in analyzing different product trends where I want to look at customers of certain segments. When connected, ChartMogul will synchronize your data, which you can directly combine with the rest of your databases and tables. Configure a destination in ChartMogul To add a new destination in ChartMogul navigate to Data Platform > Data Output > Destinations. It only takes a few minutes. Follow the instructions in these step-by-step guides to get started: Amazon Redshift Google BigQuery Snowflake Destinations allow you to export normalized subscription data Combining revenue, product, CRM, and other data sets can uncover powerful insights. Destinations help you to export your subscription and revenue data out of ChartMogul with only a few clicks. For more on Destinations, check out our latest release, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination. If you use Intercom, see how to enrich your Intercom customer profiles with data from ChartMogul. </sys

How to turn a product into a platform. What’s in a name? I think we use the word ‘platform’ because it feels like it hints at some deeper value, suggesting that the product goes beyond the standard value exchange of an app. What we’re saying is “buy into my platform and you can fundamentally improve how your business works. Not only that, but the value you see from our platform will grow over time proportionally to the amount you invest.” So what does it mean to be a platform? Does the word carry a strict definition in enterprise software, and if so, what is it? Are we all cheating ourselves and our potential customers by calling ourselves platforms when in fact we’re just another ‘product’? Characteristics of a product To be clear, ‘Product’ is not the perfect opposite of ‘Platform’. If a product — broadly speaking — is something that can be manufactured or created and sold: …then a software platform falls under that same definition: a platform is simply a product with some specific characteristics. But for the purpose of illustration, in this article I’ll use the term ‘Product’ to refer to “a product that’s not a platform”. Rather than clutching at the straws of the language of definitions, let’s look at some products that I think are quite clearly Products — not of the platform flavor: Apple Macbook Adobe Photoshop Spotify Tesla Model S Super Mario Run All of the above are products that can be bought for a sum, and are consumed by the user in a value exchange that’s relatively simple. I open Spotify, play some music, receive some enjoyment. I get in my Model S (wishful thinking…), drive somewhere, receive value. You’ll notice that most of the above examples are considered consumer products. The reason I chose them as examples is because things get a little more cloudy when you try to make the distinction between Product and Platform for business software… Tesla Mode S. Definitely a product… but will it also be a platform one day? Defining a platform What comes to mind when you think of a platform? For me it almost always includes a suite of tools, probably some API-based, and a much more complex exchange of value between vendor and consumer. Let’s take a look at some different opinions on the definition of a platform in the software world: ”In construction, a platform is something that lifts you up and on which others can stand. The same is true in business. By building a digital platform, other businesses can easily connect their business with yours, build products and services on top of it, and co-create value.” (Harvard Business Review) ”Products are something you can sell or buy, make or lend. Platforms are ways of enabling one product to work with other products.” (Quora) “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” (Bill Gates) “A product is something you sell. A platform is common infrastructure that you build products on.” (Quora) “Platforms are structures that allow multiple products to be built within the same technical framework” (Johnathan Clarks) Some platform examples Microsoft Windows Apple iOS Salesforce (App Cloud) Amazon Web Services Facebook Shopify You’ll notice that many platforms are closely tied to product counterparts. Nike+ – a running & fitness platform is tightly integrated into Nike trainers. the iOS platform is inextricably tied to my iPhone 7. Salesforce App Cloud. They use the word platform – I agree! (source: salesforce.com) Components of a healthy platform Co-creation of value A succesful platform has the vendor and partners (those building on the platform) working hand-in-hand to create value for consumers. Microsoft works hard to drive value and adoption of the Windows platform, shipping features and updates that will (hopefully) attract consumers. At the same time, developers build on the Windows platform to provide additional value in the form of added functionality, software and media. Ease of technical integration A good platform offers a way for developers to build on it, through documented APIs, SDKs and other technical points of communication. A great platform is one that developers enjoy working with, and where any integration friction is minimal. A healthy ecosystem to service the value chain Platforms can support a complex economy which must be refined and balanced over time to allow the best value for all parties — the vendor, partner and consumer. Apple’s mobile platform ecosystem is massive in scale and logistically complex, but has been optimized over time to ensure that developers can build healthy businesses for consumers. In the cloud, everything can seem like a platform A major reason why a solid definition of ‘Platform’ seems so hard to reach is the nature of could-based computing, or more specifically, SaaS. At first glance, most B2B service-based software looks like a platform. The rise of API-based SaaS has led to an increasing number of services offering integrations with other services, along with APIs to integrate deeply into your own infrastructure. The mere presence of an API and set of integrations sounds like a characteristic of a platform. But is that accurate? It depends on your definition. Slack offers integrations with a huge number of services. Some products are even built on Slack entirely. Is it a platform? ChartMogul has a set of APIs for complete unfiltered access – both input and output. Is it a platform? Intercom integrates deeply into your customer support process, changing the way you build business. Is it a platform? During my research for this article I’ve spoken to people answering on each side for the above questions. Here are some of the finer points of debate: “It’s not a platform if it can easily be replaced with another product (i.e. it’s not painful for a customer to de-integrate).” “It’s not a platform if other businesses can’t make revenue in building on it.” “It’s not a platform if it’s part of an existing product.” What do you think? Please drop a comment at the end of this article! Twilio built a successful platform from the beginning – no product involved. Why platforms are so attractive For the platform vendor, there are a number of key benefits in offering a platform over a traditional product. Flexibility Where a product supports a reasonably fixed set of use cases, a platform is open-ended from the outset. This allows a multitude of companies to leverage the platform for their (often very different) use cases, opening the door to a much wider market segment. It also allows the vendor to re-use the platform for their own benefit. Longevity People buy products, use them for some time, and discard them when they’re no longer a good fit. The narrower your supported use case, the less likely you’re able to keep customers long term. Conversely, platforms are often deeply integrated into the infrastructure of businesses. Integration requires a greater commitment up front, but deep integration means that the pain of leaving is greater as well. Platforms are sticky. This, added to the flexibility mentioned above, means that businesses can generally stick around and adapt the platform to their needs over time. Network effects In many cases, the value of a platform is directly proportional to the number of people who use said platform. For example: Facebook. Facebook’s platform — the part of the business that deals with advertising, app building, etc. — relies on a large number of consumers actively using a Facebook account. The more people using Facebook, the more valuable their advertising platform, for example. Becoming a platform: What it takes Transitioning to a platform business is fairly common, especially in the SaaS world. It’s not surprising that nearly everyone wants to do it, given the massive benefits of owning the building blocks of other businesses. However, it’s deceptively hard and requires a well-thought-out strategy from day zero. Harvard Business School outlines three key components to a successful platform strategy: Connection: how easily others can plug into the platform to share and transact Gravity: how well the platform attracts participants, both producers and consumers Flow: how well the platform fosters the exchange and co-creation of value Which comes first: Product or platform? There are two very different approaches to building a platform business: Platform-first: Build a platform from scratch, without having a product in the first place. Product-first: Start with traction for an initial product, expand the scope of the business by transitioning to a platform. Number 1 is insanely hard. Number 2 is hard, but much more common. 1: The platform-first approach There’s a reason why most platform businesses start out with a product, which then expands in scope to become a platform for other businesses to build upon. Platforms are vast in scope, and difficult to produce an ‘MVP’ or ship an early version that covers just a small set of use cases. This means that the upfront cost involved in developing such a system is huge — along with the risk of not shipping anything until you’re done building it. Or if you do ship something, it’s going to feel unfinished, perhaps even messy to your early adopter customers. Example: Agorapulse Emeric Ernoult, Founder of Agorapulse, recently published a year in review for the social media management company. Amongst some very candid observations and metrics (it’s a great write-up and definitely worth a read), one part under “Why did it take us so long to be profitable?” stuck out for me: “Second, we faced the tool vs. platform issue. Take @buffer for example. They started with a simple tool to publish social content without the hassle of manually scheduling each piece (the now famous Buffer “content queue”). It was a very targeted tool just doing one thing great.” “The tool approach Buffer took was an infinitely smarter way to start a bootstrapped business. As for us, we went straight for the platform vision: build an all-in-one platform for all social media needs — not only publishing, but also listening, managing engagement, reporting metrics, and user management. This was much harder and longer to build. Admittedly, we had a half-baked product for a looooong time.” We can replace the term “Tool” with “Product” here – what Emeric is describing is a narrow-scoped product that simply solves problems for one or two use cases. The points is the same: Emeric and his team at Agorapulse set out to build a platform from the beginning, with all of the many features expected by its customers. The result was a product that was rough around the edges, or as Emeric puts it, “half-baked”. Agorapulse faced the “tool vs. platform” issue. Note: If you want to hear more from Emeric on his social media strategy and the story behind Agorapulse, read his interview on our SaaS Open Mic podcast. 2: The product-first approach From almost every angle, this route makes the most sense — from a business, product, and technical perspective. As a startup with limited resources and time, you need laser-sharp focus on shipping the most refined, stripped-down version of your product that still delivers enough value for consumers. If you build this ‘v1’ smartly however, you can lay the foundations for what ends up being the ultimate plan for your business: the platform. On the technical design level, this requires a commitment to separation of product business logic from the infrastructure parts of the system, often using APIs to facilitate communication around a very modular system. With this achieved, the next steps to a platform are far less painful — no rebuilding or tearing down existing components. Example: Amazon In 1995 (yes, I had to double check too) Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com as an online bookstore. The bookstore itself played a big part in popularizing online shopping across the U.S. and globally, but as I’m sure you’re aware, this was not the biggest achievement for Bezos and his now-public company. In order to build such a large-scale bookstore, Amazon required some serious infrastructure which at the time was not easy to provision, manage, or scale to meet traffic demands. So they built it. And this is where the platform comes in. Today, Amazon Web Services boasts over a million active customers, powering a significant proportion of the internet and allowing businesses to generate value worldwide. Amazon was able to ease themselves into building such a large-scale successful platform by first of all shipping a product. I daresay that building and shipping AWS by itself at that time was simply impossible given the effort of such a project. A very, very early amazon landing page. Pre-platform. (source: goodwebsiteguide.blogspot.co.uk) Apple’s difficult transition There are some obvious changes required to make the jump from product to platform – technical architecture, integration support, etc. However, when you dig deeper, it’s clear that such a transition touches every corner of a company, requiring processes, team structure and even culture to take a fundamental shift. Apple is probably the biggest example of a company that initially defined itself as a product company. Everything in Apple was organized around: Developing product ideas in complete secrecy Working with project teams to push projects through a rigorous design process Working towards a ‘big bang’ surprise launch, coordinated with laser-sharp Marketing Supporting products through retail and online channels Releasing a new version of the product, a year or more later *Note: If you want to read more on Apple’s design process, Ashlee Vance’s book on Johnathan Ive contains more detail than I’ve seen anywhere else. Successful platforms require: Open standards and developer-friendly access Constant, iterative improvements Transparency on almost every level Outstanding developer support & documentation None of the above are things that Apple was historically good at! In fact, they didn’t even want to be good at these things because many of them go against the nature of designing and shipping hit consumer products. Clearly, the company has come a long way since introducing modern developer platforms like iOS. But Apple is still structured as a Product company — it’s in their DNA. As Ben Thompson articulates so well on his Stratechery blog, regarding the iPad (any emphasis is mine): “[Tim] Cook’s conclusion that Apple could best improve the iPad by making a new product isn’t quite right: Apple could best improve the iPad by making it a better platform for developers. Specifically, being a great platform for developers is about more than having a well-developed SDK, or an App Store: what is most important is ensuring that said developers have access to sustainable business models that justify building the sort of complicated apps that transform the iPad’s glass into something indispensable.” “What’s fascinating to consider is that it’s arguable the iPad would actually be in a much better position were it owned by Microsoft: the company is at its core a platform company that has long bent over backwards to accommodate its developers even at the expense of the user experience. That, though, is the rub: in consumer markets the only way to gain the prerequisite scale to be a platform is to first have a superior product, like Apple. More than ever each has what the other needs.” Jony Ive and his design team at Apple are completely structured and focused around building products. (source: youtube.com/apple) Steps you can take today Documentation, documentation, documentation If you want developers to adopt your platform and businesses to integrate you into their own stack, the onboarding friction needs to be as low as possible. The bar is high when it comes to excellent technical documentation, and the best platform companies out there have whole teams dedicated to this. Onboarding in the developer world usually starts with documentation, so don’t leave this out. The biggest mistake people make with documentation? They produce it, and neglect to update it. An out-of-date doc is often worse than no doc at all. The ChartMogul Dev Center – holding a wealth of developer-focused documentation. Hire a Solution Engineer Many businesses call them Solution Engineers, or Integration Engineers. Whatever the name, you’ll need a crack-team of technically capable individuals on standby around the clock to solve technical issues and give guidance. It’s a tough role to hire for — these people are a rare breed, often with skills in engineering and software development, yet focused on support. If your SDK breaks or your API returns an unexpected error code, these folks need to dig deep to solve the problem. Hire a developer evangelist Developer evangelism can range from publishing developer-focused content about your platform, to hosting a “worldwide developer conference”. It almost always involves handing out free t-shirts at some point. Developer evangelism is built around one premise: If you can convince developers of your product’s value, they’ll promote you internally when the time comes to make a decision on a solution. Developers are your best friend, and your brand needs to build a rapport with them to succeed as a platform. Slack sure knows how to do startup swag. Slack socks! Restructure your Engineering teams In the pre-platform world, your product was probably treated as a fairly monolithic entity. You plan and add features to it according to a roadmap, and fix bugs. Not any more! In a platform environment, the product becomes a consumer of the platform, in a similar way to how customers will integrate and leverage the platform. The two things should be as loosely coupled as possible — not only in code, but in team structure. Your platform should have a separate roadmap to your product. Having a different team work on each entity is definitely not a bad idea, if you have the resources. When it’s time to reap the rewards With everything above said, the word ‘platform’ is thrown around more often than it actually applies. It’s a buzzword we’re all guilty of using at some point as startups, to position our products with a forward-looking spin and nod toward aspirations for the future. True platforms are both hard to achieve and require constant nurturing from every angle – product, development, marketing, sales… everything. If you can get there, what you’ve created is something that carries far more value than a product that solves a single use case. You’ve built something that facilitates whole new businesses to be created, and old ones transformed. …now get back to work because your API doesn’t have feature parity, and developers are revolting.

[INST] How to turn a product into a platform [/INST]

What’s in a name? I think we use the word ‘platform’ because it feels like it hints at some deeper value, suggesting that the product goes beyond the standard value exchange of an app. What we’re saying is “buy into my platform and you can fundamentally improve how your business works. Not only that, but the value you see from our platform will grow over time proportionally to the amount you invest.” So what does it mean to be a platform? Does the word carry a strict definition in enterprise software, and if so, what is it? Are we all cheating ourselves and our potential customers by calling ourselves platforms when in fact we’re just another ‘product’? Characteristics of a product To be clear, ‘Product’ is not the perfect opposite of ‘Platform’. If a product — broadly speaking — is something that can be manufactured or created and sold: …then a software platform falls under that same definition: a platform is simply a product with some specific characteristics. But for the purpose of illustration, in this article I’ll use the term ‘Product’ to refer to “a product that’s not a platform”. Rather than clutching at the straws of the language of definitions, let’s look at some products that I think are quite clearly Products — not of the platform flavor: Apple Macbook Adobe Photoshop Spotify Tesla Model S Super Mario Run All of the above are products that can be bought for a sum, and are consumed by the user in a value exchange that’s relatively simple. I open Spotify, play some music, receive some enjoyment. I get in my Model S (wishful thinking…), drive somewhere, receive value. You’ll notice that most of the above examples are considered consumer products. The reason I chose them as examples is because things get a little more cloudy when you try to make the distinction between Product and Platform for business software… Tesla Mode S. Definitely a product… but will it also be a platform one day? Defining a platform What comes to mind when you think of a platform? For me it almost always includes a suite of tools, probably some API-based, and a much more complex exchange of value between vendor and consumer. Let’s take a look at some different opinions on the definition of a platform in the software world: ”In construction, a platform is something that lifts you up and on which others can stand. The same is true in business. By building a digital platform, other businesses can easily connect their business with yours, build products and services on top of it, and co-create value.” (Harvard Business Review) ”Products are something you can sell or buy, make or lend. Platforms are ways of enabling one product to work with other products.” (Quora) “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” (Bill Gates) “A product is something you sell. A platform is common infrastructure that you build products on.” (Quora) “Platforms are structures that allow multiple products to be built within the same technical framework” (Johnathan Clarks) Some platform examples Microsoft Windows Apple iOS Salesforce (App Cloud) Amazon Web Services Facebook Shopify You’ll notice that many platforms are closely tied to product counterparts. Nike+ – a running & fitness platform is tightly integrated into Nike trainers. the iOS platform is inextricably tied to my iPhone 7. Salesforce App Cloud. They use the word platform – I agree! (source: salesforce.com) Components of a healthy platform Co-creation of value A succesful platform has the vendor and partners (those building on the platform) working hand-in-hand to create value for consumers. Microsoft works hard to drive value and adoption of the Windows platform, shipping features and updates that will (hopefully) attract consumers. At the same time, developers build on the Windows platform to provide additional value in the form of added functionality, software and media. Ease of technical integration A good platform offers a way for developers to build on it, through documented APIs, SDKs and other technical points of communication. A great platform is one that developers enjoy working with, and where any integration friction is minimal. A healthy ecosystem to service the value chain Platforms can support a complex economy which must be refined and balanced over time to allow the best value for all parties — the vendor, partner and consumer. Apple’s mobile platform ecosystem is massive in scale and logistically complex, but has been optimized over time to ensure that developers can build healthy businesses for consumers. In the cloud, everything can seem like a platform A major reason why a solid definition of ‘Platform’ seems so hard to reach is the nature of could-based computing, or more specifically, SaaS. At first glance, most B2B service-based software looks like a platform. The rise of API-based SaaS has led to an increasing number of services offering integrations with other services, along with APIs to integrate deeply into your own infrastructure. The mere presence of an API and set of integrations sounds like a characteristic of a platform. But is that accurate? It depends on your definition. Slack offers integrations with a huge number of services. Some products are even built on Slack entirely. Is it a platform? ChartMogul has a set of APIs for complete unfiltered access – both input and output. Is it a platform? Intercom integrates deeply into your customer support process, changing the way you build business. Is it a platform? During my research for this article I’ve spoken to people answering on each side for the above questions. Here are some of the finer points of debate: “It’s not a platform if it can easily be replaced with another product (i.e. it’s not painful for a customer to de-integrate).” “It’s not a platform if other businesses can’t make revenue in building on it.” “It’s not a platform if it’s part of an existing product.” What do you think? Please drop a comment at the end of this article! Twilio built a successful platform from the beginning – no product involved. Why platforms are so attractive For the platform vendor, there are a number of key benefits in offering a platform over a traditional product. Flexibility Where a product supports a reasonably fixed set of use cases, a platform is open-ended from the outset. This allows a multitude of companies to leverage the platform for their (often very different) use cases, opening the door to a much wider market segment. It also allows the vendor to re-use the platform for their own benefit. Longevity People buy products, use them for some time, and discard them when they’re no longer a good fit. The narrower your supported use case, the less likely you’re able to keep customers long term. Conversely, platforms are often deeply integrated into the infrastructure of businesses. Integration requires a greater commitment up front, but deep integration means that the pain of leaving is greater as well. Platforms are sticky. This, added to the flexibility mentioned above, means that businesses can generally stick around and adapt the platform to their needs over time. Network effects In many cases, the value of a platform is directly proportional to the number of people who use said platform. For example: Facebook. Facebook’s platform — the part of the business that deals with advertising, app building, etc. — relies on a large number of consumers actively using a Facebook account. The more people using Facebook, the more valuable their advertising platform, for example. Becoming a platform: What it takes Transitioning to a platform business is fairly common, especially in the SaaS world. It’s not surprising that nearly everyone wants to do it, given the massive benefits of owning the building blocks of other businesses. However, it’s deceptively hard and requires a well-thought-out strategy from day zero. Harvard Business School outlines three key components to a successful platform strategy: Connection: how easily others can plug into the platform to share and transact Gravity: how well the platform attracts participants, both producers and consumers Flow: how well the platform fosters the exchange and co-creation of value Which comes first: Product or platform? There are two very different approaches to building a platform business: Platform-first: Build a platform from scratch, without having a product in the first place. Product-first: Start with traction for an initial product, expand the scope of the business by transitioning to a platform. Number 1 is insanely hard. Number 2 is hard, but much more common. 1: The platform-first approach There’s a reason why most platform businesses start out with a product, which then expands in scope to become a platform for other businesses to build upon. Platforms are vast in scope, and difficult to produce an ‘MVP’ or ship an early version that covers just a small set of use cases. This means that the upfront cost involved in developing such a system is huge — along with the risk of not shipping anything until you’re done building it. Or if you do ship something, it’s going to feel unfinished, perhaps even messy to your early adopter customers. Example: Agorapulse Emeric Ernoult, Founder of Agorapulse, recently published a year in review for the social media management company. Amongst some very candid observations and metrics (it’s a great write-up and definitely worth a read), one part under “Why did it take us so long to be profitable?” stuck out for me: “Second, we faced the tool vs. platform issue. Take @buffer for example. They started with a simple tool to publish social content without the hassle of manually scheduling each piece (the now famous Buffer “content queue”). It was a very targeted tool just doing one thing great.” “The tool approach Buffer took was an infinitely smarter way to start a bootstrapped business. As for us, we went straight for the platform vision: build an all-in-one platform for all social media needs — not only publishing, but also listening, managing engagement, reporting metrics, and user management. This was much harder and longer to build. Admittedly, we had a half-baked product for a looooong time.” We can replace the term “Tool” with “Product” here – what Emeric is describing is a narrow-scoped product that simply solves problems for one or two use cases. The points is the same: Emeric and his team at Agorapulse set out to build a platform from the beginning, with all of the many features expected by its customers. The result was a product that was rough around the edges, or as Emeric puts it, “half-baked”. Agorapulse faced the “tool vs. platform” issue. Note: If you want to hear more from Emeric on his social media strategy and the story behind Agorapulse, read his interview on our SaaS Open Mic podcast. 2: The product-first approach From almost every angle, this route makes the most sense — from a business, product, and technical perspective. As a startup with limited resources and time, you need laser-sharp focus on shipping the most refined, stripped-down version of your product that still delivers enough value for consumers. If you build this ‘v1’ smartly however, you can lay the foundations for what ends up being the ultimate plan for your business: the platform. On the technical design level, this requires a commitment to separation of product business logic from the infrastructure parts of the system, often using APIs to facilitate communication around a very modular system. With this achieved, the next steps to a platform are far less painful — no rebuilding or tearing down existing components. Example: Amazon In 1995 (yes, I had to double check too) Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com as an online bookstore. The bookstore itself played a big part in popularizing online shopping across the U.S. and globally, but as I’m sure you’re aware, this was not the biggest achievement for Bezos and his now-public company. In order to build such a large-scale bookstore, Amazon required some serious infrastructure which at the time was not easy to provision, manage, or scale to meet traffic demands. So they built it. And this is where the platform comes in. Today, Amazon Web Services boasts over a million active customers, powering a significant proportion of the internet and allowing businesses to generate value worldwide. Amazon was able to ease themselves into building such a large-scale successful platform by first of all shipping a product. I daresay that building and shipping AWS by itself at that time was simply impossible given the effort of such a project. A very, very early amazon landing page. Pre-platform. (source: goodwebsiteguide.blogspot.co.uk) Apple’s difficult transition There are some obvious changes required to make the jump from product to platform – technical architecture, integration support, etc. However, when you dig deeper, it’s clear that such a transition touches every corner of a company, requiring processes, team structure and even culture to take a fundamental shift. Apple is probably the biggest example of a company that initially defined itself as a product company. Everything in Apple was organized around: Developing product ideas in complete secrecy Working with project teams to push projects through a rigorous design process Working towards a ‘big bang’ surprise launch, coordinated with laser-sharp Marketing Supporting products through retail and online channels Releasing a new version of the product, a year or more later *Note: If you want to read more on Apple’s design process, Ashlee Vance’s book on Johnathan Ive contains more detail than I’ve seen anywhere else. Successful platforms require: Open standards and developer-friendly access Constant, iterative improvements Transparency on almost every level Outstanding developer support & documentation None of the above are things that Apple was historically good at! In fact, they didn’t even want to be good at these things because many of them go against the nature of designing and shipping hit consumer products. Clearly, the company has come a long way since introducing modern developer platforms like iOS. But Apple is still structured as a Product company — it’s in their DNA. As Ben Thompson articulates so well on his Stratechery blog, regarding the iPad (any emphasis is mine): “[Tim] Cook’s conclusion that Apple could best improve the iPad by making a new product isn’t quite right: Apple could best improve the iPad by making it a better platform for developers. Specifically, being a great platform for developers is about more than having a well-developed SDK, or an App Store: what is most important is ensuring that said developers have access to sustainable business models that justify building the sort of complicated apps that transform the iPad’s glass into something indispensable.” “What’s fascinating to consider is that it’s arguable the iPad would actually be in a much better position were it owned by Microsoft: the company is at its core a platform company that has long bent over backwards to accommodate its developers even at the expense of the user experience. That, though, is the rub: in consumer markets the only way to gain the prerequisite scale to be a platform is to first have a superior product, like Apple. More than ever each has what the other needs.” Jony Ive and his design team at Apple are completely structured and focused around building products. (source: youtube.com/apple) Steps you can take today Documentation, documentation, documentation If you want developers to adopt your platform and businesses to integrate you into their own stack, the onboarding friction needs to be as low as possible. The bar is high when it comes to excellent technical documentation, and the best platform companies out there have whole teams dedicated to this. Onboarding in the developer world usually starts with documentation, so don’t leave this out. The biggest mistake people make with documentation? They produce it, and neglect to update it. An out-of-date doc is often worse than no doc at all. The ChartMogul Dev Center – holding a wealth of developer-focused documentation. Hire a Solution Engineer Many businesses call them Solution Engineers, or Integration Engineers. Whatever the name, you’ll need a crack-team of technically capable individuals on standby around the clock to solve technical issues and give guidance. It’s a tough role to hire for — these people are a rare breed, often with skills in engineering and software development, yet focused on support. If your SDK breaks or your API returns an unexpected error code, these folks need to dig deep to solve the problem. Hire a developer evangelist Developer evangelism can range from publishing developer-focused content about your platform, to hosting a “worldwide developer conference”. It almost always involves handing out free t-shirts at some point. Developer evangelism is built around one premise: If you can convince developers of your product’s value, they’ll promote you internally when the time comes to make a decision on a solution. Developers are your best friend, and your brand needs to build a rapport with them to succeed as a platform. Slack sure knows how to do startup swag. Slack socks! Restructure your Engineering teams In the pre-platform world, your product was probably treated as a fairly monolithic entity. You plan and add features to it according to a roadmap, and fix bugs. Not any more! In a platform environment, the product becomes a consumer of the platform, in a similar way to how customers will integrate and leverage the platform. The two things should be as loosely coupled as possible — not only in code, but in team structure. Your platform should have a separate roadmap to your product. Having a different team work on each entity is definitely not a bad idea, if you have the resources. When it’s time to reap the rewards With everything above said, the word ‘platform’ is thrown around more often than it actually applies. It’s a buzzword we’re all guilty of using at some point as startups, to position our products with a forward-looking spin and nod toward aspirations for the future. True platforms are both hard to achieve and require constant nurturing from every angle – product, development, marketing, sales… everything. If you can get there, what you’ve created is something that carries far more value than a product that solves a single use case. You’ve built something that facilitates whole new businesses to be created, and old ones transformed. …now get back to work because your API doesn’t have feature parity, and developers are revolting.

<sys> [INST] How to turn a product into a platform [/INST] What’s in a name? I think we use the word ‘platform’ because it feels like it hints at some deeper value, suggesting that the product goes beyond the standard value exchange of an app. What we’re saying is “buy into my platform and you can fundamentally improve how your business works. Not only that, but the value you see from our platform will grow over time proportionally to the amount you invest.” So what does it mean to be a platform? Does the word carry a strict definition in enterprise software, and if so, what is it? Are we all cheating ourselves and our potential customers by calling ourselves platforms when in fact we’re just another ‘product’? Characteristics of a product To be clear, ‘Product’ is not the perfect opposite of ‘Platform’. If a product — broadly speaking — is something that can be manufactured or created and sold: …then a software platform falls under that same definition: a platform is simply a product with some specific characteristics. But for the purpose of illustration, in this article I’ll use the term ‘Product’ to refer to “a product that’s not a platform”. Rather than clutching at the straws of the language of definitions, let’s look at some products that I think are quite clearly Products — not of the platform flavor: Apple Macbook Adobe Photoshop Spotify Tesla Model S Super Mario Run All of the above are products that can be bought for a sum, and are consumed by the user in a value exchange that’s relatively simple. I open Spotify, play some music, receive some enjoyment. I get in my Model S (wishful thinking…), drive somewhere, receive value. You’ll notice that most of the above examples are considered consumer products. The reason I chose them as examples is because things get a little more cloudy when you try to make the distinction between Product and Platform for business software… Tesla Mode S. Definitely a product… but will it also be a platform one day? Defining a platform What comes to mind when you think of a platform? For me it almost always includes a suite of tools, probably some API-based, and a much more complex exchange of value between vendor and consumer. Let’s take a look at some different opinions on the definition of a platform in the software world: ”In construction, a platform is something that lifts you up and on which others can stand. The same is true in business. By building a digital platform, other businesses can easily connect their business with yours, build products and services on top of it, and co-create value.” (Harvard Business Review) ”Products are something you can sell or buy, make or lend. Platforms are ways of enabling one product to work with other products.” (Quora) “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” (Bill Gates) “A product is something you sell. A platform is common infrastructure that you build products on.” (Quora) “Platforms are structures that allow multiple products to be built within the same technical framework” (Johnathan Clarks) Some platform examples Microsoft Windows Apple iOS Salesforce (App Cloud) Amazon Web Services Facebook Shopify You’ll notice that many platforms are closely tied to product counterparts. Nike+ – a running & fitness platform is tightly integrated into Nike trainers. the iOS platform is inextricably tied to my iPhone 7. Salesforce App Cloud. They use the word platform – I agree! (source: salesforce.com) Components of a healthy platform Co-creation of value A succesful platform has the vendor and partners (those building on the platform) working hand-in-hand to create value for consumers. Microsoft works hard to drive value and adoption of the Windows platform, shipping features and updates that will (hopefully) attract consumers. At the same time, developers build on the Windows platform to provide additional value in the form of added functionality, software and media. Ease of technical integration A good platform offers a way for developers to build on it, through documented APIs, SDKs and other technical points of communication. A great platform is one that developers enjoy working with, and where any integration friction is minimal. A healthy ecosystem to service the value chain Platforms can support a complex economy which must be refined and balanced over time to allow the best value for all parties — the vendor, partner and consumer. Apple’s mobile platform ecosystem is massive in scale and logistically complex, but has been optimized over time to ensure that developers can build healthy businesses for consumers. In the cloud, everything can seem like a platform A major reason why a solid definition of ‘Platform’ seems so hard to reach is the nature of could-based computing, or more specifically, SaaS. At first glance, most B2B service-based software looks like a platform. The rise of API-based SaaS has led to an increasing number of services offering integrations with other services, along with APIs to integrate deeply into your own infrastructure. The mere presence of an API and set of integrations sounds like a characteristic of a platform. But is that accurate? It depends on your definition. Slack offers integrations with a huge number of services. Some products are even built on Slack entirely. Is it a platform? ChartMogul has a set of APIs for complete unfiltered access – both input and output. Is it a platform? Intercom integrates deeply into your customer support process, changing the way you build business. Is it a platform? During my research for this article I’ve spoken to people answering on each side for the above questions. Here are some of the finer points of debate: “It’s not a platform if it can easily be replaced with another product (i.e. it’s not painful for a customer to de-integrate).” “It’s not a platform if other businesses can’t make revenue in building on it.” “It’s not a platform if it’s part of an existing product.” What do you think? Please drop a comment at the end of this article! Twilio built a successful platform from the beginning – no product involved. Why platforms are so attractive For the platform vendor, there are a number of key benefits in offering a platform over a traditional product. Flexibility Where a product supports a reasonably fixed set of use cases, a platform is open-ended from the outset. This allows a multitude of companies to leverage the platform for their (often very different) use cases, opening the door to a much wider market segment. It also allows the vendor to re-use the platform for their own benefit. Longevity People buy products, use them for some time, and discard them when they’re no longer a good fit. The narrower your supported use case, the less likely you’re able to keep customers long term. Conversely, platforms are often deeply integrated into the infrastructure of businesses. Integration requires a greater commitment up front, but deep integration means that the pain of leaving is greater as well. Platforms are sticky. This, added to the flexibility mentioned above, means that businesses can generally stick around and adapt the platform to their needs over time. Network effects In many cases, the value of a platform is directly proportional to the number of people who use said platform. For example: Facebook. Facebook’s platform — the part of the business that deals with advertising, app building, etc. — relies on a large number of consumers actively using a Facebook account. The more people using Facebook, the more valuable their advertising platform, for example. Becoming a platform: What it takes Transitioning to a platform business is fairly common, especially in the SaaS world. It’s not surprising that nearly everyone wants to do it, given the massive benefits of owning the building blocks of other businesses. However, it’s deceptively hard and requires a well-thought-out strategy from day zero. Harvard Business School outlines three key components to a successful platform strategy: Connection: how easily others can plug into the platform to share and transact Gravity: how well the platform attracts participants, both producers and consumers Flow: how well the platform fosters the exchange and co-creation of value Which comes first: Product or platform? There are two very different approaches to building a platform business: Platform-first: Build a platform from scratch, without having a product in the first place. Product-first: Start with traction for an initial product, expand the scope of the business by transitioning to a platform. Number 1 is insanely hard. Number 2 is hard, but much more common. 1: The platform-first approach There’s a reason why most platform businesses start out with a product, which then expands in scope to become a platform for other businesses to build upon. Platforms are vast in scope, and difficult to produce an ‘MVP’ or ship an early version that covers just a small set of use cases. This means that the upfront cost involved in developing such a system is huge — along with the risk of not shipping anything until you’re done building it. Or if you do ship something, it’s going to feel unfinished, perhaps even messy to your early adopter customers. Example: Agorapulse Emeric Ernoult, Founder of Agorapulse, recently published a year in review for the social media management company. Amongst some very candid observations and metrics (it’s a great write-up and definitely worth a read), one part under “Why did it take us so long to be profitable?” stuck out for me: “Second, we faced the tool vs. platform issue. Take @buffer for example. They started with a simple tool to publish social content without the hassle of manually scheduling each piece (the now famous Buffer “content queue”). It was a very targeted tool just doing one thing great.” “The tool approach Buffer took was an infinitely smarter way to start a bootstrapped business. As for us, we went straight for the platform vision: build an all-in-one platform for all social media needs — not only publishing, but also listening, managing engagement, reporting metrics, and user management. This was much harder and longer to build. Admittedly, we had a half-baked product for a looooong time.” We can replace the term “Tool” with “Product” here – what Emeric is describing is a narrow-scoped product that simply solves problems for one or two use cases. The points is the same: Emeric and his team at Agorapulse set out to build a platform from the beginning, with all of the many features expected by its customers. The result was a product that was rough around the edges, or as Emeric puts it, “half-baked”. Agorapulse faced the “tool vs. platform” issue. Note: If you want to hear more from Emeric on his social media strategy and the story behind Agorapulse, read his interview on our SaaS Open Mic podcast. 2: The product-first approach From almost every angle, this route makes the most sense — from a business, product, and technical perspective. As a startup with limited resources and time, you need laser-sharp focus on shipping the most refined, stripped-down version of your product that still delivers enough value for consumers. If you build this ‘v1’ smartly however, you can lay the foundations for what ends up being the ultimate plan for your business: the platform. On the technical design level, this requires a commitment to separation of product business logic from the infrastructure parts of the system, often using APIs to facilitate communication around a very modular system. With this achieved, the next steps to a platform are far less painful — no rebuilding or tearing down existing components. Example: Amazon In 1995 (yes, I had to double check too) Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com as an online bookstore. The bookstore itself played a big part in popularizing online shopping across the U.S. and globally, but as I’m sure you’re aware, this was not the biggest achievement for Bezos and his now-public company. In order to build such a large-scale bookstore, Amazon required some serious infrastructure which at the time was not easy to provision, manage, or scale to meet traffic demands. So they built it. And this is where the platform comes in. Today, Amazon Web Services boasts over a million active customers, powering a significant proportion of the internet and allowing businesses to generate value worldwide. Amazon was able to ease themselves into building such a large-scale successful platform by first of all shipping a product. I daresay that building and shipping AWS by itself at that time was simply impossible given the effort of such a project. A very, very early amazon landing page. Pre-platform. (source: goodwebsiteguide.blogspot.co.uk) Apple’s difficult transition There are some obvious changes required to make the jump from product to platform – technical architecture, integration support, etc. However, when you dig deeper, it’s clear that such a transition touches every corner of a company, requiring processes, team structure and even culture to take a fundamental shift. Apple is probably the biggest example of a company that initially defined itself as a product company. Everything in Apple was organized around: Developing product ideas in complete secrecy Working with project teams to push projects through a rigorous design process Working towards a ‘big bang’ surprise launch, coordinated with laser-sharp Marketing Supporting products through retail and online channels Releasing a new version of the product, a year or more later *Note: If you want to read more on Apple’s design process, Ashlee Vance’s book on Johnathan Ive contains more detail than I’ve seen anywhere else. Successful platforms require: Open standards and developer-friendly access Constant, iterative improvements Transparency on almost every level Outstanding developer support & documentation None of the above are things that Apple was historically good at! In fact, they didn’t even want to be good at these things because many of them go against the nature of designing and shipping hit consumer products. Clearly, the company has come a long way since introducing modern developer platforms like iOS. But Apple is still structured as a Product company — it’s in their DNA. As Ben Thompson articulates so well on his Stratechery blog, regarding the iPad (any emphasis is mine): “[Tim] Cook’s conclusion that Apple could best improve the iPad by making a new product isn’t quite right: Apple could best improve the iPad by making it a better platform for developers. Specifically, being a great platform for developers is about more than having a well-developed SDK, or an App Store: what is most important is ensuring that said developers have access to sustainable business models that justify building the sort of complicated apps that transform the iPad’s glass into something indispensable.” “What’s fascinating to consider is that it’s arguable the iPad would actually be in a much better position were it owned by Microsoft: the company is at its core a platform company that has long bent over backwards to accommodate its developers even at the expense of the user experience. That, though, is the rub: in consumer markets the only way to gain the prerequisite scale to be a platform is to first have a superior product, like Apple. More than ever each has what the other needs.” Jony Ive and his design team at Apple are completely structured and focused around building products. (source: youtube.com/apple) Steps you can take today Documentation, documentation, documentation If you want developers to adopt your platform and businesses to integrate you into their own stack, the onboarding friction needs to be as low as possible. The bar is high when it comes to excellent technical documentation, and the best platform companies out there have whole teams dedicated to this. Onboarding in the developer world usually starts with documentation, so don’t leave this out. The biggest mistake people make with documentation? They produce it, and neglect to update it. An out-of-date doc is often worse than no doc at all. The ChartMogul Dev Center – holding a wealth of developer-focused documentation. Hire a Solution Engineer Many businesses call them Solution Engineers, or Integration Engineers. Whatever the name, you’ll need a crack-team of technically capable individuals on standby around the clock to solve technical issues and give guidance. It’s a tough role to hire for — these people are a rare breed, often with skills in engineering and software development, yet focused on support. If your SDK breaks or your API returns an unexpected error code, these folks need to dig deep to solve the problem. Hire a developer evangelist Developer evangelism can range from publishing developer-focused content about your platform, to hosting a “worldwide developer conference”. It almost always involves handing out free t-shirts at some point. Developer evangelism is built around one premise: If you can convince developers of your product’s value, they’ll promote you internally when the time comes to make a decision on a solution. Developers are your best friend, and your brand needs to build a rapport with them to succeed as a platform. Slack sure knows how to do startup swag. Slack socks! Restructure your Engineering teams In the pre-platform world, your product was probably treated as a fairly monolithic entity. You plan and add features to it according to a roadmap, and fix bugs. Not any more! In a platform environment, the product becomes a consumer of the platform, in a similar way to how customers will integrate and leverage the platform. The two things should be as loosely coupled as possible — not only in code, but in team structure. Your platform should have a separate roadmap to your product. Having a different team work on each entity is definitely not a bad idea, if you have the resources. When it’s time to reap the rewards With everything above said, the word ‘platform’ is thrown around more often than it actually applies. It’s a buzzword we’re all guilty of using at some point as startups, to position our products with a forward-looking spin and nod toward aspirations for the future. True platforms are both hard to achieve and require constant nurturing from every angle – product, development, marketing, sales… everything. If you can get there, what you’ve created is something that carries far more value than a product that solves a single use case. You’ve built something that facilitates whole new businesses to be created, and old ones transformed. …now get back to work because your API doesn’t have feature parity, and developers are revolting. </sys

Webinar Marketing: How Webinars Can Be Used at Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle. Webinars are a top revenue driver for digital marketing, and 73% of B2B marketers say that webinars generate high-quality leads. So, it’s no wonder why successful companies are finding innovative ways to utilize webinars. At Demio, we love to see companies use webinar marketing to reach their customers and create a community with their audiences. Webinars are truly the best tool to take your leads and prospects from unaware to loyal customers. In this piece, we show you how to use webinars at every stage of the customer lifecycle so you can provide better customer experience, generate qualified, quality leads, and retain your customers longer. Awareness: Make a great first impression Awareness is the stage of the customer life cycle where customers are just beginning to learn about your company. It’s the first time a customer sees your Tweet, LinkedIn post, ad, or landing page. Studies have shown you have anywhere from one-tenth of a second to 7 seconds to make a first impression — and because first impressions are everything, you need to make yours count. How do you use webinars for potential customers in the awareness phase? Webinar Promotion Webinars make a great first impression. Of course, the webinar itself won’t be the first impression, rather, your promotion of the webinar could be how a potential lead or customer comes across your business for the first time. Every webinar you create should have a promotional strategy — a detailed plan outlining how you are going to reach as many people as possible and let them know about your upcoming event. A solid promotional strategy could include: Multiple Social Media Posts Create a buzz and a sense of anticipation about your upcoming event by teasing and promoting it on the social platforms your audience uses most frequently. You could create a countdown to the webinar, or, if your webinar includes a panel, showcase a different speaker every couple of days. If you’re covering a specific topic, you could share one interesting piece of information each day leading up to the event. Each social post should have a clear and simple call-to-action: sign up for the webinar! Ads Paid ads can be a great way to bring awareness to a webinar. With a highly targeted audience, you can ensure that people who would be most interested in your event will see the ad. You can place an ad on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, or Quora — essentially anywhere people spend time online allows for ad space. Include a result-oriented headline, a nice graphic, and a link to the registration page with the call-to-action to sign up for the webinar. This will allow for tracking your sign-ups and audience behavior. Registration Page The registration page is where you make your first big ask for the potential customer’s name and email address. This is where they make a commitment to learning more because you have piqued their curiosity and demonstrated you have the expertise and knowledge to help them with their pain points. A great landing page can see sign-ups as high as 60%. ActiveCampaign, email automation and CRM software, began to use webinars at every stage of the customer lifecycle and found that using them with detailed session analytics helped tighten their sales cycle, which increased conversions by 50% when users attended a webinar during their trial period. Because those webinars were so successful, ActiveCampaign began to host others with integration partners, such as Typeform and Unbounce, and saw attendance reach as high as 1,800 people. Here’s an example of ActiveCampaign and Unbounce’s registration page, and what they did right that encouraged 1,800 people to attend the event live. It clearly shows each brand Has a great headline that speaks to the audience’s pain points Simple sign-up form Actionable and clear CTA So, how do you write a great registration page? Write an Interesting Headline The headline is the hook. It’s the first thing a reader will see and one of the most important pieces of verbiage you have on your registration page. In just a few words, you need to attract and intrigue the reader enough to showcase that you’re going to bring value to them. To write an interesting and informative headline, focus on the benefit to the attendee. What are they going to get out of the event, or what have previous webinar attendees gotten out of your events? If you’ve had a customer increase their sales by 75% after learning about the tactics you share in your webinar, then a great headline could be: (*I feel like this statement should come with a disclaimer: only promise things you have already helped others achieve, and if you know you can help future attendees achieve the same thing. We’re not promoting sleazy marketing here.) Contact Fields The wrong contact fields can stop registration in a microsecond. If one thing goes wrong here, the reader leaves the page and is likely gone forever. When creating your contact form, ask yourself, “What is the least amount of information I need to know to get the reader to attend the webinar?” Keep in mind, the only job of the registration page is to get the reader signed up for a webinar. You’re not selling them on your product…yet. 97% of B2B businesses believe that Email is the most important form field for gathering quality leads, followed by Name (92%), and Company (79%) Tweet this quote Hubspot did a study and found that three fields yield the highest conversion rate at 25%, and “97% of B2B businesses believe that Email is the most important form field for gathering quality leads, followed by Name (92%), and Company (79%).” So, the least amount of information needed to get your reader registered for your webinar is most likely their name, email address, and company name. Call-to-Action Earlier, I mentioned a clear and simple call-to-action (CTA) for your social media posts, but what exactly is a clear and simple CTA, and where should it go on your registration page? A call-to-action is the word or phrase you use to encourage your reader to act. On a registration page, there’s only one action to take, and that’s to sign up for the webinar. Another Hubspot study found that when your CTA is “Submit” or “Register,” it doesn’t perform as well as “Go” or “Click Here,” but the best way to know which CTA’s work for your audience is to A/B test the buttons. Engagement: Earn customers’ trust in a fraction of the time The Engagement phase is when the customer knows you exist, knows your product can help them with their problem, and are trying to learn more. This phase is full of research. They’ll look at reviews, your social media, sign up for your email lists, read your blog posts and feature descriptions, and attend your webinars. A webinar can provide the same amount of information in one hour that it might take a customer weeks or even months to learn on their own — that’s why they are a powerhouse lead generation tool. But there’s no need to wait until the webinar date to begin to engage your registered attendees. The best time to begin to engage your potential attendees is right after they register for the webinar. They’ve just shared some crucial information with you: the topic of your webinar is something they either need to learn more about or it’s a problem they need to solve. Why make them wait days or weeks until your webinar before you start helping them out? Ways to engage your readers right away: Send them blog posts or videos you have that could help them Send them a reply email asking if they have a pressing question you could answer Invite them to a Facebook or LinkedIn group or Slack Channel with other people in the community working through the same issues. Create Automated Events and Connect With Your Audience Automated events generate and qualify leads for your business. In 2020 we are launching features that will allow your audience to connect with your content and with you. You’ll have the ability to create an automated event, and receive real-time notifications of people’s questions, and comments, so you can engage with your audience days, weeks, or months after you’ve recorded your event. Don’t Forget To Remind Wild Apricot increased their webinar attendance by 200% with a 3-email reminder sequence before their webinars. They send one email a week before the event, one the day before, and one on the day of the event. Don’t leave it up to your registered attendees to remember on their own that you’re hosting an event. Engage During the Webinar The webinar is your opportunity to reach numerous people at the same time. It’s the perfect one-to-many method, but not if you neglect your audience and treat it as a one-way form of communication. How To Use Your Webinar as a 2-way Communication Tool Chat Boxes Chatting with your attendees is a great way to break the ice, become more personable and relatable to your audience, and keep them engaged throughout your webinar. Have you ever attended a webinar where the host was taking questions from the attendees and speaking directly to them? I have, and I can tell you, I stayed through the whole thing just to hear my name and question answered. I was committed, and they had my undivided attention. Polls Poll questions are a fun way to include all the attendees in a format that many are comfortable using thanks to Facebook and Twitter polls. You can also find some amazing data from polling questions that will better serve future audiences and customers. Ask questions that allow attendees to choose their greatest pain point out of a group of three or four, or ask attendees about other options they considered or tried. Templates and Handouts So many standard webinars are slide presentations with one person speaking into a camera. Yawn! Give your attendees something to do while they listen and watch. Chances are their attention is going to be divided. They’ll become distracted and check their email, or wonder what’s on their Twitter or Facebook feed. Combat this with an interactive handout or template. Give them something to do while you share. For example: A fill-in-the-blank note-taking handout A fun quiz with points for the right answers A coloring sheet Find something that fits your brand and message, then share it with your attendees during the webinar. Demio has a feature where you can distribute handouts during the webinar which allows you to share the handout while you have the attendee’s attention, and not have to send an email with an attachment that will likely never make it with them to the webinar. Purchase: Help customers understand the value you provide The purchase phase of the customer life cycle is where the customer, well…makes the purchase. :) They’ve done their research and are ready to buy. For some companies, this is where the nurturing and relationship building ends — those companies won’t last long in a subscription-based market, but for the rest of us, this is where we get to work. Webinars can be a great tool to help your customers through their purchase as well. Customer Onboarding In the SaaS industry, the onboarding process is one of the most crucial steps of the customer lifecycle. When a customer is new to a product, every button, menu, or dashboard is an opportunity for confusion, overwhelm, and retreat. The best way to keep your customers actively using your product is to help them understand how it works, and how they can use it. Host a weekly webinar with new customers. Walk them through features and applications. These webinars should allow for plenty of Q&A time, and be hosted by someone with in-depth knowledge of your tool. The attendance on these webinars will likely be small. When ActiveCampaign began implementing onboarding webinars to trial users, their average number of attendees was four per webinar. But over the course of a year and 377 sessions, they began to see a 50% increase in users who converted compared to those who didn’t attend an onboarding webinar. Activation: Create a community The action phase is where you have the opportunity to retain your current customers and truly grow your company. This is the phase of the lifecycle where you can expand your creativity in your webinars, and use them as a tool to build community. Consistently scheduled webinars focusing on a topic or speakers A weekly, monthly, or quarterly webinar that features a leader from within your company, another company within a similar space, or a company that has a product that integrates with yours, helps to encourage growth and community. It’s a great way to continue to hear concerns and questions from your best customers. Some customers and audiences are like fans; they really want to hear your take on certain topics or issues. If this describes your audience, it’s a good idea for you to be the host of each webinar and interact with the audience about the given topic or subject. Retention: Educate your customers The greatest contributor to your growth is your retention. This is the phase where you turn customers into fans and they become your biggest brand advocates. Use webinars in this phase of the funnel to meet the interests of your customers and keep them coming back for more. Webinars that educate on new integrations or features You can also use webinars to make announcements of launches or company changes. When people attend these webinars, you know they are your “ride-or-die” customers. Apple uses this approach with their launch events. Their “ride-or-die” customers/fans attend the events or watch the live stream to be one of the first people to see the new product. You can do the same with webinars! Build the hype and share the news while your best, most enthusiastic customers interact over chat. Key Takeaways: Webinar Marketing for the Customer Life Cycle Webinars are an amazing tool to support your company’s growth and provide great customer experience. Awareness: Promote, promote, promote! Get the word out about your event. Have a strong registration page with a simple call-to-action and the least amount of contact fields you can. Engagement: Remind your registrants about the event — three emails is the charm! Use chat, polls, and handouts to engage your attendees during the event. Purchase: Webinars during onboarding is a great way to get customers actively using the product as well as clear up any confusion or questions they have. Activation and Retention: Share upcoming launches and promote integrations with your customers. Use webinars to discuss topics that interest them most, with speakers they would love to hear. About the Author: Adrienne is a B2B SaaS content marketer at Demio and ANB SaaS Consulting and Content Marketing. She loves customer research, kombucha, and the smell of an old book. With a curious and nosey nature, she’s constantly asking questions and wondering why.

[INST] Webinar Marketing: How Webinars Can Be Used at Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle [/INST]

Webinars are a top revenue driver for digital marketing, and 73% of B2B marketers say that webinars generate high-quality leads. So, it’s no wonder why successful companies are finding innovative ways to utilize webinars. At Demio, we love to see companies use webinar marketing to reach their customers and create a community with their audiences. Webinars are truly the best tool to take your leads and prospects from unaware to loyal customers. In this piece, we show you how to use webinars at every stage of the customer lifecycle so you can provide better customer experience, generate qualified, quality leads, and retain your customers longer. Awareness: Make a great first impression Awareness is the stage of the customer life cycle where customers are just beginning to learn about your company. It’s the first time a customer sees your Tweet, LinkedIn post, ad, or landing page. Studies have shown you have anywhere from one-tenth of a second to 7 seconds to make a first impression — and because first impressions are everything, you need to make yours count. How do you use webinars for potential customers in the awareness phase? Webinar Promotion Webinars make a great first impression. Of course, the webinar itself won’t be the first impression, rather, your promotion of the webinar could be how a potential lead or customer comes across your business for the first time. Every webinar you create should have a promotional strategy — a detailed plan outlining how you are going to reach as many people as possible and let them know about your upcoming event. A solid promotional strategy could include: Multiple Social Media Posts Create a buzz and a sense of anticipation about your upcoming event by teasing and promoting it on the social platforms your audience uses most frequently. You could create a countdown to the webinar, or, if your webinar includes a panel, showcase a different speaker every couple of days. If you’re covering a specific topic, you could share one interesting piece of information each day leading up to the event. Each social post should have a clear and simple call-to-action: sign up for the webinar! Ads Paid ads can be a great way to bring awareness to a webinar. With a highly targeted audience, you can ensure that people who would be most interested in your event will see the ad. You can place an ad on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, or Quora — essentially anywhere people spend time online allows for ad space. Include a result-oriented headline, a nice graphic, and a link to the registration page with the call-to-action to sign up for the webinar. This will allow for tracking your sign-ups and audience behavior. Registration Page The registration page is where you make your first big ask for the potential customer’s name and email address. This is where they make a commitment to learning more because you have piqued their curiosity and demonstrated you have the expertise and knowledge to help them with their pain points. A great landing page can see sign-ups as high as 60%. ActiveCampaign, email automation and CRM software, began to use webinars at every stage of the customer lifecycle and found that using them with detailed session analytics helped tighten their sales cycle, which increased conversions by 50% when users attended a webinar during their trial period. Because those webinars were so successful, ActiveCampaign began to host others with integration partners, such as Typeform and Unbounce, and saw attendance reach as high as 1,800 people. Here’s an example of ActiveCampaign and Unbounce’s registration page, and what they did right that encouraged 1,800 people to attend the event live. It clearly shows each brand Has a great headline that speaks to the audience’s pain points Simple sign-up form Actionable and clear CTA So, how do you write a great registration page? Write an Interesting Headline The headline is the hook. It’s the first thing a reader will see and one of the most important pieces of verbiage you have on your registration page. In just a few words, you need to attract and intrigue the reader enough to showcase that you’re going to bring value to them. To write an interesting and informative headline, focus on the benefit to the attendee. What are they going to get out of the event, or what have previous webinar attendees gotten out of your events? If you’ve had a customer increase their sales by 75% after learning about the tactics you share in your webinar, then a great headline could be: (*I feel like this statement should come with a disclaimer: only promise things you have already helped others achieve, and if you know you can help future attendees achieve the same thing. We’re not promoting sleazy marketing here.) Contact Fields The wrong contact fields can stop registration in a microsecond. If one thing goes wrong here, the reader leaves the page and is likely gone forever. When creating your contact form, ask yourself, “What is the least amount of information I need to know to get the reader to attend the webinar?” Keep in mind, the only job of the registration page is to get the reader signed up for a webinar. You’re not selling them on your product…yet. 97% of B2B businesses believe that Email is the most important form field for gathering quality leads, followed by Name (92%), and Company (79%) Tweet this quote Hubspot did a study and found that three fields yield the highest conversion rate at 25%, and “97% of B2B businesses believe that Email is the most important form field for gathering quality leads, followed by Name (92%), and Company (79%).” So, the least amount of information needed to get your reader registered for your webinar is most likely their name, email address, and company name. Call-to-Action Earlier, I mentioned a clear and simple call-to-action (CTA) for your social media posts, but what exactly is a clear and simple CTA, and where should it go on your registration page? A call-to-action is the word or phrase you use to encourage your reader to act. On a registration page, there’s only one action to take, and that’s to sign up for the webinar. Another Hubspot study found that when your CTA is “Submit” or “Register,” it doesn’t perform as well as “Go” or “Click Here,” but the best way to know which CTA’s work for your audience is to A/B test the buttons. Engagement: Earn customers’ trust in a fraction of the time The Engagement phase is when the customer knows you exist, knows your product can help them with their problem, and are trying to learn more. This phase is full of research. They’ll look at reviews, your social media, sign up for your email lists, read your blog posts and feature descriptions, and attend your webinars. A webinar can provide the same amount of information in one hour that it might take a customer weeks or even months to learn on their own — that’s why they are a powerhouse lead generation tool. But there’s no need to wait until the webinar date to begin to engage your registered attendees. The best time to begin to engage your potential attendees is right after they register for the webinar. They’ve just shared some crucial information with you: the topic of your webinar is something they either need to learn more about or it’s a problem they need to solve. Why make them wait days or weeks until your webinar before you start helping them out? Ways to engage your readers right away: Send them blog posts or videos you have that could help them Send them a reply email asking if they have a pressing question you could answer Invite them to a Facebook or LinkedIn group or Slack Channel with other people in the community working through the same issues. Create Automated Events and Connect With Your Audience Automated events generate and qualify leads for your business. In 2020 we are launching features that will allow your audience to connect with your content and with you. You’ll have the ability to create an automated event, and receive real-time notifications of people’s questions, and comments, so you can engage with your audience days, weeks, or months after you’ve recorded your event. Don’t Forget To Remind Wild Apricot increased their webinar attendance by 200% with a 3-email reminder sequence before their webinars. They send one email a week before the event, one the day before, and one on the day of the event. Don’t leave it up to your registered attendees to remember on their own that you’re hosting an event. Engage During the Webinar The webinar is your opportunity to reach numerous people at the same time. It’s the perfect one-to-many method, but not if you neglect your audience and treat it as a one-way form of communication. How To Use Your Webinar as a 2-way Communication Tool Chat Boxes Chatting with your attendees is a great way to break the ice, become more personable and relatable to your audience, and keep them engaged throughout your webinar. Have you ever attended a webinar where the host was taking questions from the attendees and speaking directly to them? I have, and I can tell you, I stayed through the whole thing just to hear my name and question answered. I was committed, and they had my undivided attention. Polls Poll questions are a fun way to include all the attendees in a format that many are comfortable using thanks to Facebook and Twitter polls. You can also find some amazing data from polling questions that will better serve future audiences and customers. Ask questions that allow attendees to choose their greatest pain point out of a group of three or four, or ask attendees about other options they considered or tried. Templates and Handouts So many standard webinars are slide presentations with one person speaking into a camera. Yawn! Give your attendees something to do while they listen and watch. Chances are their attention is going to be divided. They’ll become distracted and check their email, or wonder what’s on their Twitter or Facebook feed. Combat this with an interactive handout or template. Give them something to do while you share. For example: A fill-in-the-blank note-taking handout A fun quiz with points for the right answers A coloring sheet Find something that fits your brand and message, then share it with your attendees during the webinar. Demio has a feature where you can distribute handouts during the webinar which allows you to share the handout while you have the attendee’s attention, and not have to send an email with an attachment that will likely never make it with them to the webinar. Purchase: Help customers understand the value you provide The purchase phase of the customer life cycle is where the customer, well…makes the purchase. :) They’ve done their research and are ready to buy. For some companies, this is where the nurturing and relationship building ends — those companies won’t last long in a subscription-based market, but for the rest of us, this is where we get to work. Webinars can be a great tool to help your customers through their purchase as well. Customer Onboarding In the SaaS industry, the onboarding process is one of the most crucial steps of the customer lifecycle. When a customer is new to a product, every button, menu, or dashboard is an opportunity for confusion, overwhelm, and retreat. The best way to keep your customers actively using your product is to help them understand how it works, and how they can use it. Host a weekly webinar with new customers. Walk them through features and applications. These webinars should allow for plenty of Q&A time, and be hosted by someone with in-depth knowledge of your tool. The attendance on these webinars will likely be small. When ActiveCampaign began implementing onboarding webinars to trial users, their average number of attendees was four per webinar. But over the course of a year and 377 sessions, they began to see a 50% increase in users who converted compared to those who didn’t attend an onboarding webinar. Activation: Create a community The action phase is where you have the opportunity to retain your current customers and truly grow your company. This is the phase of the lifecycle where you can expand your creativity in your webinars, and use them as a tool to build community. Consistently scheduled webinars focusing on a topic or speakers A weekly, monthly, or quarterly webinar that features a leader from within your company, another company within a similar space, or a company that has a product that integrates with yours, helps to encourage growth and community. It’s a great way to continue to hear concerns and questions from your best customers. Some customers and audiences are like fans; they really want to hear your take on certain topics or issues. If this describes your audience, it’s a good idea for you to be the host of each webinar and interact with the audience about the given topic or subject. Retention: Educate your customers The greatest contributor to your growth is your retention. This is the phase where you turn customers into fans and they become your biggest brand advocates. Use webinars in this phase of the funnel to meet the interests of your customers and keep them coming back for more. Webinars that educate on new integrations or features You can also use webinars to make announcements of launches or company changes. When people attend these webinars, you know they are your “ride-or-die” customers. Apple uses this approach with their launch events. Their “ride-or-die” customers/fans attend the events or watch the live stream to be one of the first people to see the new product. You can do the same with webinars! Build the hype and share the news while your best, most enthusiastic customers interact over chat. Key Takeaways: Webinar Marketing for the Customer Life Cycle Webinars are an amazing tool to support your company’s growth and provide great customer experience. Awareness: Promote, promote, promote! Get the word out about your event. Have a strong registration page with a simple call-to-action and the least amount of contact fields you can. Engagement: Remind your registrants about the event — three emails is the charm! Use chat, polls, and handouts to engage your attendees during the event. Purchase: Webinars during onboarding is a great way to get customers actively using the product as well as clear up any confusion or questions they have. Activation and Retention: Share upcoming launches and promote integrations with your customers. Use webinars to discuss topics that interest them most, with speakers they would love to hear. About the Author: Adrienne is a B2B SaaS content marketer at Demio and ANB SaaS Consulting and Content Marketing. She loves customer research, kombucha, and the smell of an old book. With a curious and nosey nature, she’s constantly asking questions and wondering why.

<sys> [INST] Webinar Marketing: How Webinars Can Be Used at Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle [/INST] Webinars are a top revenue driver for digital marketing, and 73% of B2B marketers say that webinars generate high-quality leads. So, it’s no wonder why successful companies are finding innovative ways to utilize webinars. At Demio, we love to see companies use webinar marketing to reach their customers and create a community with their audiences. Webinars are truly the best tool to take your leads and prospects from unaware to loyal customers. In this piece, we show you how to use webinars at every stage of the customer lifecycle so you can provide better customer experience, generate qualified, quality leads, and retain your customers longer. Awareness: Make a great first impression Awareness is the stage of the customer life cycle where customers are just beginning to learn about your company. It’s the first time a customer sees your Tweet, LinkedIn post, ad, or landing page. Studies have shown you have anywhere from one-tenth of a second to 7 seconds to make a first impression — and because first impressions are everything, you need to make yours count. How do you use webinars for potential customers in the awareness phase? Webinar Promotion Webinars make a great first impression. Of course, the webinar itself won’t be the first impression, rather, your promotion of the webinar could be how a potential lead or customer comes across your business for the first time. Every webinar you create should have a promotional strategy — a detailed plan outlining how you are going to reach as many people as possible and let them know about your upcoming event. A solid promotional strategy could include: Multiple Social Media Posts Create a buzz and a sense of anticipation about your upcoming event by teasing and promoting it on the social platforms your audience uses most frequently. You could create a countdown to the webinar, or, if your webinar includes a panel, showcase a different speaker every couple of days. If you’re covering a specific topic, you could share one interesting piece of information each day leading up to the event. Each social post should have a clear and simple call-to-action: sign up for the webinar! Ads Paid ads can be a great way to bring awareness to a webinar. With a highly targeted audience, you can ensure that people who would be most interested in your event will see the ad. You can place an ad on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, or Quora — essentially anywhere people spend time online allows for ad space. Include a result-oriented headline, a nice graphic, and a link to the registration page with the call-to-action to sign up for the webinar. This will allow for tracking your sign-ups and audience behavior. Registration Page The registration page is where you make your first big ask for the potential customer’s name and email address. This is where they make a commitment to learning more because you have piqued their curiosity and demonstrated you have the expertise and knowledge to help them with their pain points. A great landing page can see sign-ups as high as 60%. ActiveCampaign, email automation and CRM software, began to use webinars at every stage of the customer lifecycle and found that using them with detailed session analytics helped tighten their sales cycle, which increased conversions by 50% when users attended a webinar during their trial period. Because those webinars were so successful, ActiveCampaign began to host others with integration partners, such as Typeform and Unbounce, and saw attendance reach as high as 1,800 people. Here’s an example of ActiveCampaign and Unbounce’s registration page, and what they did right that encouraged 1,800 people to attend the event live. It clearly shows each brand Has a great headline that speaks to the audience’s pain points Simple sign-up form Actionable and clear CTA So, how do you write a great registration page? Write an Interesting Headline The headline is the hook. It’s the first thing a reader will see and one of the most important pieces of verbiage you have on your registration page. In just a few words, you need to attract and intrigue the reader enough to showcase that you’re going to bring value to them. To write an interesting and informative headline, focus on the benefit to the attendee. What are they going to get out of the event, or what have previous webinar attendees gotten out of your events? If you’ve had a customer increase their sales by 75% after learning about the tactics you share in your webinar, then a great headline could be: (*I feel like this statement should come with a disclaimer: only promise things you have already helped others achieve, and if you know you can help future attendees achieve the same thing. We’re not promoting sleazy marketing here.) Contact Fields The wrong contact fields can stop registration in a microsecond. If one thing goes wrong here, the reader leaves the page and is likely gone forever. When creating your contact form, ask yourself, “What is the least amount of information I need to know to get the reader to attend the webinar?” Keep in mind, the only job of the registration page is to get the reader signed up for a webinar. You’re not selling them on your product…yet. 97% of B2B businesses believe that Email is the most important form field for gathering quality leads, followed by Name (92%), and Company (79%) Tweet this quote Hubspot did a study and found that three fields yield the highest conversion rate at 25%, and “97% of B2B businesses believe that Email is the most important form field for gathering quality leads, followed by Name (92%), and Company (79%).” So, the least amount of information needed to get your reader registered for your webinar is most likely their name, email address, and company name. Call-to-Action Earlier, I mentioned a clear and simple call-to-action (CTA) for your social media posts, but what exactly is a clear and simple CTA, and where should it go on your registration page? A call-to-action is the word or phrase you use to encourage your reader to act. On a registration page, there’s only one action to take, and that’s to sign up for the webinar. Another Hubspot study found that when your CTA is “Submit” or “Register,” it doesn’t perform as well as “Go” or “Click Here,” but the best way to know which CTA’s work for your audience is to A/B test the buttons. Engagement: Earn customers’ trust in a fraction of the time The Engagement phase is when the customer knows you exist, knows your product can help them with their problem, and are trying to learn more. This phase is full of research. They’ll look at reviews, your social media, sign up for your email lists, read your blog posts and feature descriptions, and attend your webinars. A webinar can provide the same amount of information in one hour that it might take a customer weeks or even months to learn on their own — that’s why they are a powerhouse lead generation tool. But there’s no need to wait until the webinar date to begin to engage your registered attendees. The best time to begin to engage your potential attendees is right after they register for the webinar. They’ve just shared some crucial information with you: the topic of your webinar is something they either need to learn more about or it’s a problem they need to solve. Why make them wait days or weeks until your webinar before you start helping them out? Ways to engage your readers right away: Send them blog posts or videos you have that could help them Send them a reply email asking if they have a pressing question you could answer Invite them to a Facebook or LinkedIn group or Slack Channel with other people in the community working through the same issues. Create Automated Events and Connect With Your Audience Automated events generate and qualify leads for your business. In 2020 we are launching features that will allow your audience to connect with your content and with you. You’ll have the ability to create an automated event, and receive real-time notifications of people’s questions, and comments, so you can engage with your audience days, weeks, or months after you’ve recorded your event. Don’t Forget To Remind Wild Apricot increased their webinar attendance by 200% with a 3-email reminder sequence before their webinars. They send one email a week before the event, one the day before, and one on the day of the event. Don’t leave it up to your registered attendees to remember on their own that you’re hosting an event. Engage During the Webinar The webinar is your opportunity to reach numerous people at the same time. It’s the perfect one-to-many method, but not if you neglect your audience and treat it as a one-way form of communication. How To Use Your Webinar as a 2-way Communication Tool Chat Boxes Chatting with your attendees is a great way to break the ice, become more personable and relatable to your audience, and keep them engaged throughout your webinar. Have you ever attended a webinar where the host was taking questions from the attendees and speaking directly to them? I have, and I can tell you, I stayed through the whole thing just to hear my name and question answered. I was committed, and they had my undivided attention. Polls Poll questions are a fun way to include all the attendees in a format that many are comfortable using thanks to Facebook and Twitter polls. You can also find some amazing data from polling questions that will better serve future audiences and customers. Ask questions that allow attendees to choose their greatest pain point out of a group of three or four, or ask attendees about other options they considered or tried. Templates and Handouts So many standard webinars are slide presentations with one person speaking into a camera. Yawn! Give your attendees something to do while they listen and watch. Chances are their attention is going to be divided. They’ll become distracted and check their email, or wonder what’s on their Twitter or Facebook feed. Combat this with an interactive handout or template. Give them something to do while you share. For example: A fill-in-the-blank note-taking handout A fun quiz with points for the right answers A coloring sheet Find something that fits your brand and message, then share it with your attendees during the webinar. Demio has a feature where you can distribute handouts during the webinar which allows you to share the handout while you have the attendee’s attention, and not have to send an email with an attachment that will likely never make it with them to the webinar. Purchase: Help customers understand the value you provide The purchase phase of the customer life cycle is where the customer, well…makes the purchase. :) They’ve done their research and are ready to buy. For some companies, this is where the nurturing and relationship building ends — those companies won’t last long in a subscription-based market, but for the rest of us, this is where we get to work. Webinars can be a great tool to help your customers through their purchase as well. Customer Onboarding In the SaaS industry, the onboarding process is one of the most crucial steps of the customer lifecycle. When a customer is new to a product, every button, menu, or dashboard is an opportunity for confusion, overwhelm, and retreat. The best way to keep your customers actively using your product is to help them understand how it works, and how they can use it. Host a weekly webinar with new customers. Walk them through features and applications. These webinars should allow for plenty of Q&A time, and be hosted by someone with in-depth knowledge of your tool. The attendance on these webinars will likely be small. When ActiveCampaign began implementing onboarding webinars to trial users, their average number of attendees was four per webinar. But over the course of a year and 377 sessions, they began to see a 50% increase in users who converted compared to those who didn’t attend an onboarding webinar. Activation: Create a community The action phase is where you have the opportunity to retain your current customers and truly grow your company. This is the phase of the lifecycle where you can expand your creativity in your webinars, and use them as a tool to build community. Consistently scheduled webinars focusing on a topic or speakers A weekly, monthly, or quarterly webinar that features a leader from within your company, another company within a similar space, or a company that has a product that integrates with yours, helps to encourage growth and community. It’s a great way to continue to hear concerns and questions from your best customers. Some customers and audiences are like fans; they really want to hear your take on certain topics or issues. If this describes your audience, it’s a good idea for you to be the host of each webinar and interact with the audience about the given topic or subject. Retention: Educate your customers The greatest contributor to your growth is your retention. This is the phase where you turn customers into fans and they become your biggest brand advocates. Use webinars in this phase of the funnel to meet the interests of your customers and keep them coming back for more. Webinars that educate on new integrations or features You can also use webinars to make announcements of launches or company changes. When people attend these webinars, you know they are your “ride-or-die” customers. Apple uses this approach with their launch events. Their “ride-or-die” customers/fans attend the events or watch the live stream to be one of the first people to see the new product. You can do the same with webinars! Build the hype and share the news while your best, most enthusiastic customers interact over chat. Key Takeaways: Webinar Marketing for the Customer Life Cycle Webinars are an amazing tool to support your company’s growth and provide great customer experience. Awareness: Promote, promote, promote! Get the word out about your event. Have a strong registration page with a simple call-to-action and the least amount of contact fields you can. Engagement: Remind your registrants about the event — three emails is the charm! Use chat, polls, and handouts to engage your attendees during the event. Purchase: Webinars during onboarding is a great way to get customers actively using the product as well as clear up any confusion or questions they have. Activation and Retention: Share upcoming launches and promote integrations with your customers. Use webinars to discuss topics that interest them most, with speakers they would love to hear. About the Author: Adrienne is a B2B SaaS content marketer at Demio and ANB SaaS Consulting and Content Marketing. She loves customer research, kombucha, and the smell of an old book. With a curious and nosey nature, she’s constantly asking questions and wondering why. </sys

eLearning Video Production: How to Create Effective Courses in 7 Steps. Elearning really is big business. Analysts from Research and Markets forecast that the industry will be worth a whopping $325 Billion by 2025. That means that the industry is going to get even more competitive. So to succeed, you’d need to bring your A-game, and produce very well crafted eLearning videos. But just how hard is it to produce your own course? And how can you tip the scales in your favor to guarantee as much success as possible? In this blog post, we’re answering both questions. We’ll cover one of the most important aspects of creating highly successful eLearning courses: creating videos. So, if you’ve been on the fence about starting your very own eLearning business, but just don’t know where to begin, this blog post will give you all the basics you need to start. Let’s get into it! Why video quality is so important Video is the easiest way to quickly reach a large group of people with engaging content. Today, people don’t need to travel long distances or sit in lecture rooms to be educated. Internet access, the subscription economy, and mobile learning (mLearning) have made it easier to acquire new skills. But just shooting video won’t do. The quality of the video content you create makes all the difference. In fact, it’s a deciding factor that could propel your eLearning business’ success or cripple it. Isaac Rudansky is a perfect example of why great video matters. His Ultimate Google Ads course on Udemy has a 4.7 rating from 29,406 students and counting. Image: Udemy How and why is that possible? He produces great videos. You can do this Before we dive into the 7-step guide, let’s take a step back and address common concerns eLearning course creators have. This part is as important as the 7 steps that follow. It will help you overcome the three most common mental barriers that could see you decide against creating your videos. 1. I don’t know where to start The easiest way to complete your project is by creating a game plan. This blog post will guide you through the process of planning your videos. 2. I don’t know how to shoot video You won’t become a world-class videographer overnight, but the tips in this blog post will give you enough to get started. Your growth from there on is in your hands and all you need to do is learn and practice to elevate your skill level. 3. I don’t think I can do this All new endeavors can be scary. If you’re afraid of getting in front of a camera and sharing your knowledge, you can overcome that fear. Step 5 of this guide includes a video on how to be more confident on camera. It’s also worth remembering that practice makes perfect. As you shoot more videos, you’ll become more comfortable with the process. Planning your storyboard, being in front of the camera and editing video will become second nature. 7 steps to creating amazing eLearning videos The 7-step framework is a basic foundation for creating videos. Here’s what we’ll cover: Creating a storyboard Preparing your course material Preparing the equipment you’ll need Setting the stage Preparing yourself to be on camera Recording your video Editing your video Step 1: Creating a storyboard Storyboards create structure. They include a step-by-step sequence of events that take place in your videos. Here’s what yours should include: Image: TechSmith What you’ll share The easiest way to determine what you’ll share is to make a list. Document all the important points you’ll need to cover in the video. Think about the major topics and then segment them into smaller or sub-topics. When you’ll cover specific topics eLearning involves sharing knowledge in an easy-to-understand format. This also includes knowing when to cover certain topics to help connect the dots for your students. Your storyboard must include a timeline that shows which topics are covered throughout each video. How long your video will be Elearning, while still learning, is received differently by students. Research by Philip Guo, a professor of Computer Science found that eLearning videos shouldn’t exceed 6 minutes. When they do, students lose interest and motivation to continue with course content. Image: Edx Your storyboard will help you plan when to share different topics and how long you should spend covering each idea. How you’ll record content Planning your storyboard must account for how you’ll present your video. Here are the 3 questions that will help you determine how you’ll share your content: Will you use face-to-face recordings? Will you need to use a whiteboard? Does using an overhead camera work better than sharing your computer screen? How and when you’ll transition between shots Transitions are an important part of creating dynamic and engaging videos. They keep learners focused on your content as you switch camera angles and use different shots. Which effects will you use to switch between shots? Will you dissolve, fade in and out of shots, or transition using a wipe from left to right effect? Which camera angles you’ll use Camera angles make a world of difference to viewers. The help learning better understand what they are looking at based on the detail that appears in the video. For example, a full shot shows the entire subject of the video, while a medium shot will only include ¾ of the subject. Here are three shots that will work well for eLearning videos: Full shot Shows the subjects entire body. You may not show your entire body but may need to display other elements as subjects in your videos. For example, full shots are perfect for demonstrating how to perform particular physical fitness exercises. A full shot will allow you to show learners the complete body movement, including where to place their hands, feet and what position their bodies should be in to generate the best results. Image: Game Philosophy Medium shot The subject is shown filmed from their head to their knees. This shot works well for demonstrations don’t require the subject’s entire body being captured (think whiteboarding videos). Image: Year of Clean Water Close-up shot The subject’s face is typically the main focus. This shot is great for use when you want to place emphasis on a certain subject matter or create a more personalized experience for your learners. Image: Business 2 Community Step 2: Preparing your course material The structure of your video will be influenced by your course material. The volume of material, depth of subject matter and the additional resources you make available all matter. Here are 3 steps for gathering all course material you’ll need to include in your videos. Identify the major topics you’ll need to cover in your video course along with any sub-topics Identify any external resources you’ll need to share with learners and create a list with each. This includes examples and case studies to help strengthen your course material. Create a folder on your computer where you’ll save all resources, ensuring that you structure content by major topic as parent folders and sub-topics as child folders. Building the ultimate informational resource for your videos is vital. The more detail you include in your course, the more value your viewers will experience. You’ll also be able to complete your video recording faster as you’ll know what material to reference and when. Step 3: Prepare the equipment you’ll need Here’s a list of the basic equipment you’ll need to create your videos: Camera Shooting video and the quality thereof is determined by the camera you use. Most digital cameras include a basic set of features that allow you to capture the right shots easily. If you’re using a digital camera, here are two features that will help streamline your recording process. Autofocus Being able to set up your camera once makes the recording easier. Autofocus helps by allowing you to quickly establish which areas your lens needs to focus on for a series of shots. Face Recognition Like autofocus, face recognition saves you the time it takes to manually focus on areas in your setting. Digital Cameras Finding a digital camera with an external microphone input port from a name brand for under $200 will be a challenge. If your budget doesn’t allow you to spend more than $200 on a digital camera, you can purchase an affordable camera and record your sound on a smartphone (see more under “Tips for recording audio” below). There are a variety of beginner digital camera without external microphone input ports on the market. All on offer will help you record great video. If you’re looking for a recommendation, try the Sony DSCW800/B. It comes with 20.1 MP capability and records in 720 HD. It also offers 5x optical zoom and reduced blur with SteadyShot Image stabilization. Pricing for this camera starts at around $80. Learn more about the Sony DSCW800/B. Should you be able to invest in a camera that offers an external microphone input port, consider the Panasonic Lumix G7. It captures 4K QFHD video, has a 16MP lens and includes WiFi connectivity. Pricing starts at around $500. Learn more about the Panasonic Lumix G7. Recording Video with a Smartphone If you don’t have a digital camera, can you use your smartphone? It depends on how advanced your phone is. Most smartphones offer high-quality video recording capabilities. If you plan to use your smartphone, here are a few tips to help you produce great videos: Resolution matters While the higher resolution is always better, it may be challenging to record high-quality video on a smartphone. The resolution you chose to record in will influence the storage space each video will require on your phone. For example, if you record 4K resolution video on your iPhone 6S, you’ll be able to store up to 40 minutes of video — if you don’t have any other apps or files on your phone. Most phones settings allow for recording in Full HD, HD, and SD. To save as much storage space as you can and deliver quality video, use the HD setting. Set your focus manually Smartphones allow you to set the lens focus by touching your screen. While this works for hand-held videos, it won’t suffice for eLearning videos. You’ll need to keep your shots consistent and therefore change your focus option to manual. While most phones have different operating systems and camera settings, opening your camera app and selecting the video recording feature should help you find the focus settings. Audio can be tricky Videos recorded on smartphones don’t produce high-quality audio. This is because the speakers on smartphones aren’t designed with sophisticated noise-canceling capabilities. Solve this problem by investing in an external microphone. Saramonic Flexible Microphone with High Sensitivity for Apple iOS Note: sound quality is also affected by your surroundings. Try and shoot your video in quiet spaces. Tips for working with your camera: Use a tripod Tripods help level your camera or smartphone. When used with floor markers, you’ll be able to quickly replicate settings for any reshoots and not worry about losing perfect angles. There are tons of tripod options available on the market and most will work with almost every camera. Prices start at around $20. If you’re looking for an entry-level tripod, you could opt for the AmazonBasics Lightweight Camera Mount Tripod Stand. It comes with a bag, measures at 16.5 inches collapsed and 50 inches extended. Learn more about the AmazonBasic Tripod. If you plan to record video with your smartphone, you have two options. Option one: you could buy an attachment that connects to a standard camera tripod. It’s recommended that you choose something relatively strong to hold your smartphone in place. The Ulanzi Phone Tripod Mount Adapter/Vertical Bracket will do the job. It also allows for landscape/horizontal recording. Learn more about the Ulanzi Phone Tripod Mount Adapter/Vertical Bracket. Option two: purchase a stand built for supporting smartphones. While there are many mobile phone stand options available, the UBeesize Portable and Adjustable Camera Holder may be the best choice. It is sturdy and also comes with a wireless remote for recording. Pricing starts at around $13. Learn more about the UBeesize Portable and Adjustable Camera Holder. Shoot in landscape (horizontally) when using your smartphone Most video-on-demand (VOD) platforms used for eLearning are built to accommodate users with desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. In order to make your video render perfectly, shoot your content in landscape mode. This will allow you to fill desktop, tablet and mobile phone screens. Microphone Audio is just as important as the quality of your video. In fact, professional videographers argue that you could get away with poor video quality, but bad audio quality can ruin great videos. While most cameras and digital video recording devices can pick up sound when used on their own, they don’t record high-quality audio without the help of external microphones. Whether you’re using a digital camera or smartphone, investing in an external microphone will be worthwhile. If you’re considering using the Panasonic Lumix G7, you can pair it with the Vidpro lavalier external microphone. Pricing starts at around $20. Learn more about the Vidpro lavalier microphone. Tips for recording audio Use a portable audio recording device Recording audio for digital camera video can be handled in various ways. But if your environment is prone to noise disruptions, an external microphone attachment may not cancel out all the noise. In this case, you could use a portable audio recorder. Image: Zoom ZH1 H1 Handy Portable Digital Recorder This approach is referred to as “dual-system sound” recording. Your video and audio are synced in the editing phase. Portable audio recorders will connect to a digital camera. They are somewhat advanced pieces of hardware and don’t do the job on their own. You will need a portable audio recorder, a cable from the mic to the portable recorder, and your mic. Here’s a great video on how to record sound for your video using a portable audio device: Can’t afford a portable audio device? You can use a smartphone. Simply connect your external mic to your phone. You can then record your video on another smartphone or your digital camera while recording your audio. Here’s a quick video on how to use an external mic and smartphone to record audio: A note for Android users: recording audio on your Android smartphone works the same way. Connect an external mic, use an audio recording app and hit the record button. Set your lighting The right lighting is crucial. It elevates the overall look of a video and can be used to it set the scene for whatever subject matter you’re covering and produce the effect you want to create for your audience. The good news is that creating the perfect lighting for your video isn’t as hard as you might think. Before we cover what kind of lighting equipment you need, it makes sense to share how to use lighting first. Here are 3 tips on how to set up your lighting for the best results: Focus on the subject first The subject of any video is what you want your audience to pay attention to. But if your subject doesn’t get enough lighting, it makes for dull and disengaging viewer experience. Natural light works Natural light works excellently for video recording. All you need to do is position your subject in front of a window with your camera facing the subject. The idea is to have as much light reflecting off of the subject. Use what you can While using natural lighting or artificial LED lighting would be ideal, you can get away with a lamp pointed in the right direction. The most important rule to stick to is that your subject must receive light first. If you’re able to invest in lighting equipment, there really isn’t any hard and fast rule to follow. For many videographers, choosing lighting is almost a matter of personal preference. You could opt for LED lamps or rings. You could also use a photography umbrella kit. Lighting options start from as low as $20 on Amazon. With many options to choose from, don’t let the idea of choosing your lighting instruments overwhelm you. Try the GVM 560 LED Video Light. It can be mounted to your roof or on a tripod and controlled by a smartphone app (iOS and Android apps are available). Pricing starts at around $80. Learn more about the GVM 560 LED Video Light. Bonus lighting tip: Avoid overhead lighting Overhead lighting may seem like a good idea, but it doesn’t produce the right effect. It creates shadows on your body and darker lines on your face. Storage Recording video and audio often involves more than one take. And when you’re recording a complete course, you need to be able to save as much video and audio to put together a perfect product in when editing. Access to data storage is therefore important. Here is a list of data storage options along with usage tips and considerations: External hard drives Most videographers rely on portable external hard drives. They’re easy to connect to PCs and often fast enough to support quick file transfer. If you opt for external hard drives, purchase one with as much size you can afford. This will save you from the tough decision of which recording to sacrifice in the name of space. External hard drive prices start at around $40. The Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive is a good choice. With 2TB of storage, you’ll be able to record ample footage. Pricing starts at around $60. Learn more about the Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive. Google Drive Your standard free Google Account will give you up to 15GB of free space. Additional space is available at a fee and will require upgrading your GDrive account to a Google One account. Learn more here. Create a free Google Drive account and get 15GB of space here. Dropbox Dropbox offers a free 2GB storage account. There’s a good chance that you’ll need more storage and can upgrade to a 2 terabyte account for $9.99/mo. See Dropbox’s pricing plans here and sign-up for a free 2GB account here. MEGA You can get 15GB from MEGA with an additional 35GB that expire after 30 days. Upgrades are available. Create your free 15GB account and see pricing plan here. Online storage is a convenient way to save footage, but there are two considerations to make when you using the cloud. First, you’ll need to ensure that you have access to a fast and reliable internet connection. Uploading large files can be time-consuming and a slow and weak connection will work against you. Secondly, while most cloud services are secure, they are not impervious to failure. Reduce the risk of losing your footage by storing it on both external drives and in a secure cloud storage account. Step 4: Setting the stage Choosing the location to record your video directly impacts the quality of your video. Everything from the background you use to the objects that appear in your video matter. Here are 6 tips to help you create the perfect setting: Get the right amount of light While we’ve covered lighting above, it’s worth emphasizing how important adequate lighting is for creating great videos. If you’ll do most or all of your recording at nighttime, ensure that you use enough light to compensate for darkness. For the best lighting, use two light sources positions at 45-degree angles in front of you. This setup will eliminate shadows that would appear with just one light. Image: Vlogger Gear Remove reflective surfaces Ensure that you’re using an area that doesn’t have any reflective surfaces. Reflective surfaces cause glare on camera lenses and will degrade the quality of your videos. Use backgrounds that offer contrast You can use color contrast between yourself and the background in your video. This is easily achieved by using colors that make you stand out on video. Color contrast applied effectively also makes for aesthetically pleasing, and therefore, more engaging video. Image: Matt D’Avella Creating a professional-looking background for your videos isn’t expensive and can be accomplished with the use of background paper. Using Background Leader Bars and Background Paper Background paper is affordable and comes in various sizes and colors. It is ideal for creating a professional studio look relatively quickly with minimal effort. Background paper hanging from a background leader bar, you to easily create the background you need in minutes. If you’re not able to get your hands on a leader bar, you can secure your background paper to a surface with tape or staples. But if you can afford to, invest in a leader bar. Leader bar makes it easier to reuse, handle and limit wear and tear of the background paper. Visit Savageuniversal.com for more on background leader bars and paper. Order background objects Create a sense of order between all objects that appear in the background of your video. Ordered objects are easier for the eye to accept. For example, if you recorded a video with an untidy bookshelf in the background, there’s a good chance that it will distract your viewers. Image: Callum Wojcik An ordered bookshelf on the order hand will easily be noticed and then dismissed, allowing your audience to focus on you. Avoid using windows as backgrounds Stay away from recording in front of windows where people pass by. They will cause distractions for viewers and ultimately make the learning process challenging. Soundproof where possible You need as quiet an environment as possible to ensure the best sound quality. Your microphone may be able to block out certain sounds, but a loud train or crowd of people will influence the audio quality of your video. Invest in acoustic foam to help create a quieter setting. Pricing starts at around $10. Keep pets out of the recording room Pets may distract you from recording. They may also make it hard to find the momentum you need to record all the shots you require. Step 5: Preparing yourself to be on camera Getting camera-ready can be a little daunting, especially if you’re not used to recording video. But don’t let hold you back from starting. Like all skills, speaking into a camera can be learned and developed. Here are 4 tips for preparing yourself to record videos: Appear confident on camera Yes, it sounds easier said than done, but appearing confident on video is something you can practice. When Nick Nimmin started recording videos on YouTube, he worried about the information he shared and what people would think about him. In this video, he shares helpful tips on how to prepare your voice, body, and think about recording video. Watch his video on how to be more confident on camera: Look the part First impressions count. When you shoot your video, it doesn’t take much to appear professional and presentable. Here’s a quick checklist for ensuring that you look presentable: Get adequate rest before you hit record. Video has a way of reflecting a subject’s energy levels. If you’re exhausted, you will come across as exhausted. Style your hair. Hair is often one of the first characteristics people notice when they meet someone new. If your hair appears to be unkempt, your audience could feel that you appear as a less credible information source. Wear freshly pressed clothing. Lighting can show more detail than people would otherwise notice in real life. Ensure that your clothing is clean and freshly pressed to ensure that you come across as a professional. Dress the part. Your dress code is dependent on who your audience is. Recording eLearning videos for business executives would differ from recording for graphics designers. When it comes to choosing what to wear consider who will watch your video and what they expect from you. Step 6: Recording your video Your storyboard is ready, course material prepped, equipment and stage are set and you’re prepared to be in front of the camera. Before you hit record, here are a few tips to help you maximize your time and effort. Prepare Your Script Preparing what you’ll say is essential. It will help calm your nerves and make it easier to deliver your message. Should you create an entire script or just write down talking points? Should you memorize your lines? Each option works and it’s all dependant on your preference. What’s most important is your delivery. You need to present yourself as confident and knowledgeable. Batch your recording Batching your video recording will save you time. The batching process involves recording similar shots all at once, allowing you to breeze through your content faster and get it done in one sitting. It may seem like a counter-intuitive approach since you’ve created a storyboard, but it’s a more effective approach. When you’re recording eLearning videos, you’ll have more than one section of content to record. If you follow the same camera transition format (start with a face-to-face recording and then move to a whiteboard or screen share) for all videos, you can record all face-to-face videos together and do the same for whiteboard or screen share shots. Batching your video also enables you to use your equipment setups once. You won’t have to change angles as you follow your storyboard. You also need not worry about the positioning of cameras and lighting equipment or background elements that you may notice have become inconsistent in the editing process. Step 7: Editing your video Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final step! Video editing can be considered a complex process. It involves picking software to use, piecing together shots, incorporating sound and tweaking lighting. In this step, we’ll dive into free video editing software you can use and tips for editing your videos. Video editing software There are many free video editing software suites available, but most are not very user-friendly. They typically require advanced video editing knowledge. There are, however, more simplistic and easier-to-use programs out there. Here are 3 editing suites worth considering: Filmora Filmora tops the list. It’s clean and basic layout is ideal for quick editing and includes everything beginner and advanced users need. Features include trimming, transitions, overlays, and effects. You’re also able to add up to 100 media layers, making it possible to create highly complex videos. Filmora works on Windows and Mac. Get Filmora. Lightworks Lightworks is open source and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. While it comes with advanced features, it isn’t complex to navigate and use. Lightworks comes with a sizable library of royalty-free audio and video, trimming and editing functionality and audio and visual effects. Get Lightworks. Shotcut Image: Shotcut Shotcut also works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s regarded as a powerful video editing tool and supports 4K resolution. Like Lightworks, Shotcut is for more advanced video editors. Features include audio and visual effects, the ability to drag-and-drop files from your file manager, trim and edit frames, and more. Get Shotcut While video editing is a field on its own, you don’t need to be a pro video editor to make your videos look professional. Here are 8 tips for editing your videos: Use your storyboard Having recorded multiple takes for different course material can make it hard to figure out which footage goes where. This is where your storyboard comes to the rescue. It will help you order your video and also guide your editing. By sticking to your storyboard, you’ll be able to eliminate unnecessary footage to produce impactful videos. Pair your narratives with visual elements Pairing narratives with visual elements can make for engaging videos. While it may require a little more effort to piece them together, it’s worth exploring to give your audience a more rewarding experience. Here, turn to your storyboard for guidance on what takes place along your story timeline. Your goal is to find opportunities to express your storyline visually. For example, in MKHB’s Google Pixel 3a Review, he walks viewers through his opinion of the Google Pixel 3a smartphone. As he shares more about the phone’s specs, he shows various shots of the phone being used to perform a certain task (taking photos and video): Trim your videos to make them short and engaging As you trim your videos, be sure to limit them to no longer than 6 minutes. This may be difficult, especially with a complex subject matter, but rest assured that you can always segment ideas into shorter videos. Trim your videos then add transitions Trim your video to identify the footage you’ll use before creating transitions. This approach will ensure that your video length is as short and polished as possible before adding to it. Add titles Titles help learners quickly identify the subject matter. When editing your videos, include a title at the beginning of each video to serve as a mental marker or primer for what comes next. Control lighting to enhance video Lighting can be enhanced during the editing process, but be careful. Too much or too little light can make your video look unnatural and therefore unappealing. Layer sound If you’ve recorded sound separately (see step 3), you’ll need to sync your audio with your video. Most editing suites are easy to work with and syncing video with audio involves pairing both formats using drag-and-drop functionality. Using background music Background music can be a nice touch but should be used sparingly. eLearning videos are meant to focus on course material first and music that lingers for too long can become distracting. If you use background music, limit it and ensure that you fade it out as your video progresses. Establishing your video speed It is possible to speed up or slow down your video during editing, but it may not always be necessary. Most eLearning video platforms offer students the ability to control the speed of videos. This allows them to set a pace that helps them better understand the content and learn at their own speed. If you must adjust the speed of your video, it’s recommended that you use this feature in extreme cases where your content delivery is either too fast or too slow. Using intros and outros Intros and outros are triggers. They tell viewers when a video beginning and when it has ended. Without both, your videos would have abrupt openings and endings and make for a poor viewing experience. As you plan your intro and outro, limit the length to no more than 8 seconds. This will be enough to prime your audience to receive new information. Follow the formula for effective eLearning video production Creating great eLearning videos is formulaic. You need a clear plan, the right equipment, and practice. When these ingredients come together in the 7-step framework, you’ll be able to create well-structured and impactful videos. Amir Shahzeidi is the digital marketing manager at Uscreen, the leading all-in-one video monetization platform that allows creators to launch OTT platforms and monetize their content online.

[INST] eLearning Video Production: How to Create Effective Courses in 7 Steps [/INST]

Elearning really is big business. Analysts from Research and Markets forecast that the industry will be worth a whopping $325 Billion by 2025. That means that the industry is going to get even more competitive. So to succeed, you’d need to bring your A-game, and produce very well crafted eLearning videos. But just how hard is it to produce your own course? And how can you tip the scales in your favor to guarantee as much success as possible? In this blog post, we’re answering both questions. We’ll cover one of the most important aspects of creating highly successful eLearning courses: creating videos. So, if you’ve been on the fence about starting your very own eLearning business, but just don’t know where to begin, this blog post will give you all the basics you need to start. Let’s get into it! Why video quality is so important Video is the easiest way to quickly reach a large group of people with engaging content. Today, people don’t need to travel long distances or sit in lecture rooms to be educated. Internet access, the subscription economy, and mobile learning (mLearning) have made it easier to acquire new skills. But just shooting video won’t do. The quality of the video content you create makes all the difference. In fact, it’s a deciding factor that could propel your eLearning business’ success or cripple it. Isaac Rudansky is a perfect example of why great video matters. His Ultimate Google Ads course on Udemy has a 4.7 rating from 29,406 students and counting. Image: Udemy How and why is that possible? He produces great videos. You can do this Before we dive into the 7-step guide, let’s take a step back and address common concerns eLearning course creators have. This part is as important as the 7 steps that follow. It will help you overcome the three most common mental barriers that could see you decide against creating your videos. 1. I don’t know where to start The easiest way to complete your project is by creating a game plan. This blog post will guide you through the process of planning your videos. 2. I don’t know how to shoot video You won’t become a world-class videographer overnight, but the tips in this blog post will give you enough to get started. Your growth from there on is in your hands and all you need to do is learn and practice to elevate your skill level. 3. I don’t think I can do this All new endeavors can be scary. If you’re afraid of getting in front of a camera and sharing your knowledge, you can overcome that fear. Step 5 of this guide includes a video on how to be more confident on camera. It’s also worth remembering that practice makes perfect. As you shoot more videos, you’ll become more comfortable with the process. Planning your storyboard, being in front of the camera and editing video will become second nature. 7 steps to creating amazing eLearning videos The 7-step framework is a basic foundation for creating videos. Here’s what we’ll cover: Creating a storyboard Preparing your course material Preparing the equipment you’ll need Setting the stage Preparing yourself to be on camera Recording your video Editing your video Step 1: Creating a storyboard Storyboards create structure. They include a step-by-step sequence of events that take place in your videos. Here’s what yours should include: Image: TechSmith What you’ll share The easiest way to determine what you’ll share is to make a list. Document all the important points you’ll need to cover in the video. Think about the major topics and then segment them into smaller or sub-topics. When you’ll cover specific topics eLearning involves sharing knowledge in an easy-to-understand format. This also includes knowing when to cover certain topics to help connect the dots for your students. Your storyboard must include a timeline that shows which topics are covered throughout each video. How long your video will be Elearning, while still learning, is received differently by students. Research by Philip Guo, a professor of Computer Science found that eLearning videos shouldn’t exceed 6 minutes. When they do, students lose interest and motivation to continue with course content. Image: Edx Your storyboard will help you plan when to share different topics and how long you should spend covering each idea. How you’ll record content Planning your storyboard must account for how you’ll present your video. Here are the 3 questions that will help you determine how you’ll share your content: Will you use face-to-face recordings? Will you need to use a whiteboard? Does using an overhead camera work better than sharing your computer screen? How and when you’ll transition between shots Transitions are an important part of creating dynamic and engaging videos. They keep learners focused on your content as you switch camera angles and use different shots. Which effects will you use to switch between shots? Will you dissolve, fade in and out of shots, or transition using a wipe from left to right effect? Which camera angles you’ll use Camera angles make a world of difference to viewers. The help learning better understand what they are looking at based on the detail that appears in the video. For example, a full shot shows the entire subject of the video, while a medium shot will only include ¾ of the subject. Here are three shots that will work well for eLearning videos: Full shot Shows the subjects entire body. You may not show your entire body but may need to display other elements as subjects in your videos. For example, full shots are perfect for demonstrating how to perform particular physical fitness exercises. A full shot will allow you to show learners the complete body movement, including where to place their hands, feet and what position their bodies should be in to generate the best results. Image: Game Philosophy Medium shot The subject is shown filmed from their head to their knees. This shot works well for demonstrations don’t require the subject’s entire body being captured (think whiteboarding videos). Image: Year of Clean Water Close-up shot The subject’s face is typically the main focus. This shot is great for use when you want to place emphasis on a certain subject matter or create a more personalized experience for your learners. Image: Business 2 Community Step 2: Preparing your course material The structure of your video will be influenced by your course material. The volume of material, depth of subject matter and the additional resources you make available all matter. Here are 3 steps for gathering all course material you’ll need to include in your videos. Identify the major topics you’ll need to cover in your video course along with any sub-topics Identify any external resources you’ll need to share with learners and create a list with each. This includes examples and case studies to help strengthen your course material. Create a folder on your computer where you’ll save all resources, ensuring that you structure content by major topic as parent folders and sub-topics as child folders. Building the ultimate informational resource for your videos is vital. The more detail you include in your course, the more value your viewers will experience. You’ll also be able to complete your video recording faster as you’ll know what material to reference and when. Step 3: Prepare the equipment you’ll need Here’s a list of the basic equipment you’ll need to create your videos: Camera Shooting video and the quality thereof is determined by the camera you use. Most digital cameras include a basic set of features that allow you to capture the right shots easily. If you’re using a digital camera, here are two features that will help streamline your recording process. Autofocus Being able to set up your camera once makes the recording easier. Autofocus helps by allowing you to quickly establish which areas your lens needs to focus on for a series of shots. Face Recognition Like autofocus, face recognition saves you the time it takes to manually focus on areas in your setting. Digital Cameras Finding a digital camera with an external microphone input port from a name brand for under $200 will be a challenge. If your budget doesn’t allow you to spend more than $200 on a digital camera, you can purchase an affordable camera and record your sound on a smartphone (see more under “Tips for recording audio” below). There are a variety of beginner digital camera without external microphone input ports on the market. All on offer will help you record great video. If you’re looking for a recommendation, try the Sony DSCW800/B. It comes with 20.1 MP capability and records in 720 HD. It also offers 5x optical zoom and reduced blur with SteadyShot Image stabilization. Pricing for this camera starts at around $80. Learn more about the Sony DSCW800/B. Should you be able to invest in a camera that offers an external microphone input port, consider the Panasonic Lumix G7. It captures 4K QFHD video, has a 16MP lens and includes WiFi connectivity. Pricing starts at around $500. Learn more about the Panasonic Lumix G7. Recording Video with a Smartphone If you don’t have a digital camera, can you use your smartphone? It depends on how advanced your phone is. Most smartphones offer high-quality video recording capabilities. If you plan to use your smartphone, here are a few tips to help you produce great videos: Resolution matters While the higher resolution is always better, it may be challenging to record high-quality video on a smartphone. The resolution you chose to record in will influence the storage space each video will require on your phone. For example, if you record 4K resolution video on your iPhone 6S, you’ll be able to store up to 40 minutes of video — if you don’t have any other apps or files on your phone. Most phones settings allow for recording in Full HD, HD, and SD. To save as much storage space as you can and deliver quality video, use the HD setting. Set your focus manually Smartphones allow you to set the lens focus by touching your screen. While this works for hand-held videos, it won’t suffice for eLearning videos. You’ll need to keep your shots consistent and therefore change your focus option to manual. While most phones have different operating systems and camera settings, opening your camera app and selecting the video recording feature should help you find the focus settings. Audio can be tricky Videos recorded on smartphones don’t produce high-quality audio. This is because the speakers on smartphones aren’t designed with sophisticated noise-canceling capabilities. Solve this problem by investing in an external microphone. Saramonic Flexible Microphone with High Sensitivity for Apple iOS Note: sound quality is also affected by your surroundings. Try and shoot your video in quiet spaces. Tips for working with your camera: Use a tripod Tripods help level your camera or smartphone. When used with floor markers, you’ll be able to quickly replicate settings for any reshoots and not worry about losing perfect angles. There are tons of tripod options available on the market and most will work with almost every camera. Prices start at around $20. If you’re looking for an entry-level tripod, you could opt for the AmazonBasics Lightweight Camera Mount Tripod Stand. It comes with a bag, measures at 16.5 inches collapsed and 50 inches extended. Learn more about the AmazonBasic Tripod. If you plan to record video with your smartphone, you have two options. Option one: you could buy an attachment that connects to a standard camera tripod. It’s recommended that you choose something relatively strong to hold your smartphone in place. The Ulanzi Phone Tripod Mount Adapter/Vertical Bracket will do the job. It also allows for landscape/horizontal recording. Learn more about the Ulanzi Phone Tripod Mount Adapter/Vertical Bracket. Option two: purchase a stand built for supporting smartphones. While there are many mobile phone stand options available, the UBeesize Portable and Adjustable Camera Holder may be the best choice. It is sturdy and also comes with a wireless remote for recording. Pricing starts at around $13. Learn more about the UBeesize Portable and Adjustable Camera Holder. Shoot in landscape (horizontally) when using your smartphone Most video-on-demand (VOD) platforms used for eLearning are built to accommodate users with desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. In order to make your video render perfectly, shoot your content in landscape mode. This will allow you to fill desktop, tablet and mobile phone screens. Microphone Audio is just as important as the quality of your video. In fact, professional videographers argue that you could get away with poor video quality, but bad audio quality can ruin great videos. While most cameras and digital video recording devices can pick up sound when used on their own, they don’t record high-quality audio without the help of external microphones. Whether you’re using a digital camera or smartphone, investing in an external microphone will be worthwhile. If you’re considering using the Panasonic Lumix G7, you can pair it with the Vidpro lavalier external microphone. Pricing starts at around $20. Learn more about the Vidpro lavalier microphone. Tips for recording audio Use a portable audio recording device Recording audio for digital camera video can be handled in various ways. But if your environment is prone to noise disruptions, an external microphone attachment may not cancel out all the noise. In this case, you could use a portable audio recorder. Image: Zoom ZH1 H1 Handy Portable Digital Recorder This approach is referred to as “dual-system sound” recording. Your video and audio are synced in the editing phase. Portable audio recorders will connect to a digital camera. They are somewhat advanced pieces of hardware and don’t do the job on their own. You will need a portable audio recorder, a cable from the mic to the portable recorder, and your mic. Here’s a great video on how to record sound for your video using a portable audio device: Can’t afford a portable audio device? You can use a smartphone. Simply connect your external mic to your phone. You can then record your video on another smartphone or your digital camera while recording your audio. Here’s a quick video on how to use an external mic and smartphone to record audio: A note for Android users: recording audio on your Android smartphone works the same way. Connect an external mic, use an audio recording app and hit the record button. Set your lighting The right lighting is crucial. It elevates the overall look of a video and can be used to it set the scene for whatever subject matter you’re covering and produce the effect you want to create for your audience. The good news is that creating the perfect lighting for your video isn’t as hard as you might think. Before we cover what kind of lighting equipment you need, it makes sense to share how to use lighting first. Here are 3 tips on how to set up your lighting for the best results: Focus on the subject first The subject of any video is what you want your audience to pay attention to. But if your subject doesn’t get enough lighting, it makes for dull and disengaging viewer experience. Natural light works Natural light works excellently for video recording. All you need to do is position your subject in front of a window with your camera facing the subject. The idea is to have as much light reflecting off of the subject. Use what you can While using natural lighting or artificial LED lighting would be ideal, you can get away with a lamp pointed in the right direction. The most important rule to stick to is that your subject must receive light first. If you’re able to invest in lighting equipment, there really isn’t any hard and fast rule to follow. For many videographers, choosing lighting is almost a matter of personal preference. You could opt for LED lamps or rings. You could also use a photography umbrella kit. Lighting options start from as low as $20 on Amazon. With many options to choose from, don’t let the idea of choosing your lighting instruments overwhelm you. Try the GVM 560 LED Video Light. It can be mounted to your roof or on a tripod and controlled by a smartphone app (iOS and Android apps are available). Pricing starts at around $80. Learn more about the GVM 560 LED Video Light. Bonus lighting tip: Avoid overhead lighting Overhead lighting may seem like a good idea, but it doesn’t produce the right effect. It creates shadows on your body and darker lines on your face. Storage Recording video and audio often involves more than one take. And when you’re recording a complete course, you need to be able to save as much video and audio to put together a perfect product in when editing. Access to data storage is therefore important. Here is a list of data storage options along with usage tips and considerations: External hard drives Most videographers rely on portable external hard drives. They’re easy to connect to PCs and often fast enough to support quick file transfer. If you opt for external hard drives, purchase one with as much size you can afford. This will save you from the tough decision of which recording to sacrifice in the name of space. External hard drive prices start at around $40. The Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive is a good choice. With 2TB of storage, you’ll be able to record ample footage. Pricing starts at around $60. Learn more about the Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive. Google Drive Your standard free Google Account will give you up to 15GB of free space. Additional space is available at a fee and will require upgrading your GDrive account to a Google One account. Learn more here. Create a free Google Drive account and get 15GB of space here. Dropbox Dropbox offers a free 2GB storage account. There’s a good chance that you’ll need more storage and can upgrade to a 2 terabyte account for $9.99/mo. See Dropbox’s pricing plans here and sign-up for a free 2GB account here. MEGA You can get 15GB from MEGA with an additional 35GB that expire after 30 days. Upgrades are available. Create your free 15GB account and see pricing plan here. Online storage is a convenient way to save footage, but there are two considerations to make when you using the cloud. First, you’ll need to ensure that you have access to a fast and reliable internet connection. Uploading large files can be time-consuming and a slow and weak connection will work against you. Secondly, while most cloud services are secure, they are not impervious to failure. Reduce the risk of losing your footage by storing it on both external drives and in a secure cloud storage account. Step 4: Setting the stage Choosing the location to record your video directly impacts the quality of your video. Everything from the background you use to the objects that appear in your video matter. Here are 6 tips to help you create the perfect setting: Get the right amount of light While we’ve covered lighting above, it’s worth emphasizing how important adequate lighting is for creating great videos. If you’ll do most or all of your recording at nighttime, ensure that you use enough light to compensate for darkness. For the best lighting, use two light sources positions at 45-degree angles in front of you. This setup will eliminate shadows that would appear with just one light. Image: Vlogger Gear Remove reflective surfaces Ensure that you’re using an area that doesn’t have any reflective surfaces. Reflective surfaces cause glare on camera lenses and will degrade the quality of your videos. Use backgrounds that offer contrast You can use color contrast between yourself and the background in your video. This is easily achieved by using colors that make you stand out on video. Color contrast applied effectively also makes for aesthetically pleasing, and therefore, more engaging video. Image: Matt D’Avella Creating a professional-looking background for your videos isn’t expensive and can be accomplished with the use of background paper. Using Background Leader Bars and Background Paper Background paper is affordable and comes in various sizes and colors. It is ideal for creating a professional studio look relatively quickly with minimal effort. Background paper hanging from a background leader bar, you to easily create the background you need in minutes. If you’re not able to get your hands on a leader bar, you can secure your background paper to a surface with tape or staples. But if you can afford to, invest in a leader bar. Leader bar makes it easier to reuse, handle and limit wear and tear of the background paper. Visit Savageuniversal.com for more on background leader bars and paper. Order background objects Create a sense of order between all objects that appear in the background of your video. Ordered objects are easier for the eye to accept. For example, if you recorded a video with an untidy bookshelf in the background, there’s a good chance that it will distract your viewers. Image: Callum Wojcik An ordered bookshelf on the order hand will easily be noticed and then dismissed, allowing your audience to focus on you. Avoid using windows as backgrounds Stay away from recording in front of windows where people pass by. They will cause distractions for viewers and ultimately make the learning process challenging. Soundproof where possible You need as quiet an environment as possible to ensure the best sound quality. Your microphone may be able to block out certain sounds, but a loud train or crowd of people will influence the audio quality of your video. Invest in acoustic foam to help create a quieter setting. Pricing starts at around $10. Keep pets out of the recording room Pets may distract you from recording. They may also make it hard to find the momentum you need to record all the shots you require. Step 5: Preparing yourself to be on camera Getting camera-ready can be a little daunting, especially if you’re not used to recording video. But don’t let hold you back from starting. Like all skills, speaking into a camera can be learned and developed. Here are 4 tips for preparing yourself to record videos: Appear confident on camera Yes, it sounds easier said than done, but appearing confident on video is something you can practice. When Nick Nimmin started recording videos on YouTube, he worried about the information he shared and what people would think about him. In this video, he shares helpful tips on how to prepare your voice, body, and think about recording video. Watch his video on how to be more confident on camera: Look the part First impressions count. When you shoot your video, it doesn’t take much to appear professional and presentable. Here’s a quick checklist for ensuring that you look presentable: Get adequate rest before you hit record. Video has a way of reflecting a subject’s energy levels. If you’re exhausted, you will come across as exhausted. Style your hair. Hair is often one of the first characteristics people notice when they meet someone new. If your hair appears to be unkempt, your audience could feel that you appear as a less credible information source. Wear freshly pressed clothing. Lighting can show more detail than people would otherwise notice in real life. Ensure that your clothing is clean and freshly pressed to ensure that you come across as a professional. Dress the part. Your dress code is dependent on who your audience is. Recording eLearning videos for business executives would differ from recording for graphics designers. When it comes to choosing what to wear consider who will watch your video and what they expect from you. Step 6: Recording your video Your storyboard is ready, course material prepped, equipment and stage are set and you’re prepared to be in front of the camera. Before you hit record, here are a few tips to help you maximize your time and effort. Prepare Your Script Preparing what you’ll say is essential. It will help calm your nerves and make it easier to deliver your message. Should you create an entire script or just write down talking points? Should you memorize your lines? Each option works and it’s all dependant on your preference. What’s most important is your delivery. You need to present yourself as confident and knowledgeable. Batch your recording Batching your video recording will save you time. The batching process involves recording similar shots all at once, allowing you to breeze through your content faster and get it done in one sitting. It may seem like a counter-intuitive approach since you’ve created a storyboard, but it’s a more effective approach. When you’re recording eLearning videos, you’ll have more than one section of content to record. If you follow the same camera transition format (start with a face-to-face recording and then move to a whiteboard or screen share) for all videos, you can record all face-to-face videos together and do the same for whiteboard or screen share shots. Batching your video also enables you to use your equipment setups once. You won’t have to change angles as you follow your storyboard. You also need not worry about the positioning of cameras and lighting equipment or background elements that you may notice have become inconsistent in the editing process. Step 7: Editing your video Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final step! Video editing can be considered a complex process. It involves picking software to use, piecing together shots, incorporating sound and tweaking lighting. In this step, we’ll dive into free video editing software you can use and tips for editing your videos. Video editing software There are many free video editing software suites available, but most are not very user-friendly. They typically require advanced video editing knowledge. There are, however, more simplistic and easier-to-use programs out there. Here are 3 editing suites worth considering: Filmora Filmora tops the list. It’s clean and basic layout is ideal for quick editing and includes everything beginner and advanced users need. Features include trimming, transitions, overlays, and effects. You’re also able to add up to 100 media layers, making it possible to create highly complex videos. Filmora works on Windows and Mac. Get Filmora. Lightworks Lightworks is open source and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. While it comes with advanced features, it isn’t complex to navigate and use. Lightworks comes with a sizable library of royalty-free audio and video, trimming and editing functionality and audio and visual effects. Get Lightworks. Shotcut Image: Shotcut Shotcut also works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s regarded as a powerful video editing tool and supports 4K resolution. Like Lightworks, Shotcut is for more advanced video editors. Features include audio and visual effects, the ability to drag-and-drop files from your file manager, trim and edit frames, and more. Get Shotcut While video editing is a field on its own, you don’t need to be a pro video editor to make your videos look professional. Here are 8 tips for editing your videos: Use your storyboard Having recorded multiple takes for different course material can make it hard to figure out which footage goes where. This is where your storyboard comes to the rescue. It will help you order your video and also guide your editing. By sticking to your storyboard, you’ll be able to eliminate unnecessary footage to produce impactful videos. Pair your narratives with visual elements Pairing narratives with visual elements can make for engaging videos. While it may require a little more effort to piece them together, it’s worth exploring to give your audience a more rewarding experience. Here, turn to your storyboard for guidance on what takes place along your story timeline. Your goal is to find opportunities to express your storyline visually. For example, in MKHB’s Google Pixel 3a Review, he walks viewers through his opinion of the Google Pixel 3a smartphone. As he shares more about the phone’s specs, he shows various shots of the phone being used to perform a certain task (taking photos and video): Trim your videos to make them short and engaging As you trim your videos, be sure to limit them to no longer than 6 minutes. This may be difficult, especially with a complex subject matter, but rest assured that you can always segment ideas into shorter videos. Trim your videos then add transitions Trim your video to identify the footage you’ll use before creating transitions. This approach will ensure that your video length is as short and polished as possible before adding to it. Add titles Titles help learners quickly identify the subject matter. When editing your videos, include a title at the beginning of each video to serve as a mental marker or primer for what comes next. Control lighting to enhance video Lighting can be enhanced during the editing process, but be careful. Too much or too little light can make your video look unnatural and therefore unappealing. Layer sound If you’ve recorded sound separately (see step 3), you’ll need to sync your audio with your video. Most editing suites are easy to work with and syncing video with audio involves pairing both formats using drag-and-drop functionality. Using background music Background music can be a nice touch but should be used sparingly. eLearning videos are meant to focus on course material first and music that lingers for too long can become distracting. If you use background music, limit it and ensure that you fade it out as your video progresses. Establishing your video speed It is possible to speed up or slow down your video during editing, but it may not always be necessary. Most eLearning video platforms offer students the ability to control the speed of videos. This allows them to set a pace that helps them better understand the content and learn at their own speed. If you must adjust the speed of your video, it’s recommended that you use this feature in extreme cases where your content delivery is either too fast or too slow. Using intros and outros Intros and outros are triggers. They tell viewers when a video beginning and when it has ended. Without both, your videos would have abrupt openings and endings and make for a poor viewing experience. As you plan your intro and outro, limit the length to no more than 8 seconds. This will be enough to prime your audience to receive new information. Follow the formula for effective eLearning video production Creating great eLearning videos is formulaic. You need a clear plan, the right equipment, and practice. When these ingredients come together in the 7-step framework, you’ll be able to create well-structured and impactful videos. Amir Shahzeidi is the digital marketing manager at Uscreen, the leading all-in-one video monetization platform that allows creators to launch OTT platforms and monetize their content online.

<sys> [INST] eLearning Video Production: How to Create Effective Courses in 7 Steps [/INST] Elearning really is big business. Analysts from Research and Markets forecast that the industry will be worth a whopping $325 Billion by 2025. That means that the industry is going to get even more competitive. So to succeed, you’d need to bring your A-game, and produce very well crafted eLearning videos. But just how hard is it to produce your own course? And how can you tip the scales in your favor to guarantee as much success as possible? In this blog post, we’re answering both questions. We’ll cover one of the most important aspects of creating highly successful eLearning courses: creating videos. So, if you’ve been on the fence about starting your very own eLearning business, but just don’t know where to begin, this blog post will give you all the basics you need to start. Let’s get into it! Why video quality is so important Video is the easiest way to quickly reach a large group of people with engaging content. Today, people don’t need to travel long distances or sit in lecture rooms to be educated. Internet access, the subscription economy, and mobile learning (mLearning) have made it easier to acquire new skills. But just shooting video won’t do. The quality of the video content you create makes all the difference. In fact, it’s a deciding factor that could propel your eLearning business’ success or cripple it. Isaac Rudansky is a perfect example of why great video matters. His Ultimate Google Ads course on Udemy has a 4.7 rating from 29,406 students and counting. Image: Udemy How and why is that possible? He produces great videos. You can do this Before we dive into the 7-step guide, let’s take a step back and address common concerns eLearning course creators have. This part is as important as the 7 steps that follow. It will help you overcome the three most common mental barriers that could see you decide against creating your videos. 1. I don’t know where to start The easiest way to complete your project is by creating a game plan. This blog post will guide you through the process of planning your videos. 2. I don’t know how to shoot video You won’t become a world-class videographer overnight, but the tips in this blog post will give you enough to get started. Your growth from there on is in your hands and all you need to do is learn and practice to elevate your skill level. 3. I don’t think I can do this All new endeavors can be scary. If you’re afraid of getting in front of a camera and sharing your knowledge, you can overcome that fear. Step 5 of this guide includes a video on how to be more confident on camera. It’s also worth remembering that practice makes perfect. As you shoot more videos, you’ll become more comfortable with the process. Planning your storyboard, being in front of the camera and editing video will become second nature. 7 steps to creating amazing eLearning videos The 7-step framework is a basic foundation for creating videos. Here’s what we’ll cover: Creating a storyboard Preparing your course material Preparing the equipment you’ll need Setting the stage Preparing yourself to be on camera Recording your video Editing your video Step 1: Creating a storyboard Storyboards create structure. They include a step-by-step sequence of events that take place in your videos. Here’s what yours should include: Image: TechSmith What you’ll share The easiest way to determine what you’ll share is to make a list. Document all the important points you’ll need to cover in the video. Think about the major topics and then segment them into smaller or sub-topics. When you’ll cover specific topics eLearning involves sharing knowledge in an easy-to-understand format. This also includes knowing when to cover certain topics to help connect the dots for your students. Your storyboard must include a timeline that shows which topics are covered throughout each video. How long your video will be Elearning, while still learning, is received differently by students. Research by Philip Guo, a professor of Computer Science found that eLearning videos shouldn’t exceed 6 minutes. When they do, students lose interest and motivation to continue with course content. Image: Edx Your storyboard will help you plan when to share different topics and how long you should spend covering each idea. How you’ll record content Planning your storyboard must account for how you’ll present your video. Here are the 3 questions that will help you determine how you’ll share your content: Will you use face-to-face recordings? Will you need to use a whiteboard? Does using an overhead camera work better than sharing your computer screen? How and when you’ll transition between shots Transitions are an important part of creating dynamic and engaging videos. They keep learners focused on your content as you switch camera angles and use different shots. Which effects will you use to switch between shots? Will you dissolve, fade in and out of shots, or transition using a wipe from left to right effect? Which camera angles you’ll use Camera angles make a world of difference to viewers. The help learning better understand what they are looking at based on the detail that appears in the video. For example, a full shot shows the entire subject of the video, while a medium shot will only include ¾ of the subject. Here are three shots that will work well for eLearning videos: Full shot Shows the subjects entire body. You may not show your entire body but may need to display other elements as subjects in your videos. For example, full shots are perfect for demonstrating how to perform particular physical fitness exercises. A full shot will allow you to show learners the complete body movement, including where to place their hands, feet and what position their bodies should be in to generate the best results. Image: Game Philosophy Medium shot The subject is shown filmed from their head to their knees. This shot works well for demonstrations don’t require the subject’s entire body being captured (think whiteboarding videos). Image: Year of Clean Water Close-up shot The subject’s face is typically the main focus. This shot is great for use when you want to place emphasis on a certain subject matter or create a more personalized experience for your learners. Image: Business 2 Community Step 2: Preparing your course material The structure of your video will be influenced by your course material. The volume of material, depth of subject matter and the additional resources you make available all matter. Here are 3 steps for gathering all course material you’ll need to include in your videos. Identify the major topics you’ll need to cover in your video course along with any sub-topics Identify any external resources you’ll need to share with learners and create a list with each. This includes examples and case studies to help strengthen your course material. Create a folder on your computer where you’ll save all resources, ensuring that you structure content by major topic as parent folders and sub-topics as child folders. Building the ultimate informational resource for your videos is vital. The more detail you include in your course, the more value your viewers will experience. You’ll also be able to complete your video recording faster as you’ll know what material to reference and when. Step 3: Prepare the equipment you’ll need Here’s a list of the basic equipment you’ll need to create your videos: Camera Shooting video and the quality thereof is determined by the camera you use. Most digital cameras include a basic set of features that allow you to capture the right shots easily. If you’re using a digital camera, here are two features that will help streamline your recording process. Autofocus Being able to set up your camera once makes the recording easier. Autofocus helps by allowing you to quickly establish which areas your lens needs to focus on for a series of shots. Face Recognition Like autofocus, face recognition saves you the time it takes to manually focus on areas in your setting. Digital Cameras Finding a digital camera with an external microphone input port from a name brand for under $200 will be a challenge. If your budget doesn’t allow you to spend more than $200 on a digital camera, you can purchase an affordable camera and record your sound on a smartphone (see more under “Tips for recording audio” below). There are a variety of beginner digital camera without external microphone input ports on the market. All on offer will help you record great video. If you’re looking for a recommendation, try the Sony DSCW800/B. It comes with 20.1 MP capability and records in 720 HD. It also offers 5x optical zoom and reduced blur with SteadyShot Image stabilization. Pricing for this camera starts at around $80. Learn more about the Sony DSCW800/B. Should you be able to invest in a camera that offers an external microphone input port, consider the Panasonic Lumix G7. It captures 4K QFHD video, has a 16MP lens and includes WiFi connectivity. Pricing starts at around $500. Learn more about the Panasonic Lumix G7. Recording Video with a Smartphone If you don’t have a digital camera, can you use your smartphone? It depends on how advanced your phone is. Most smartphones offer high-quality video recording capabilities. If you plan to use your smartphone, here are a few tips to help you produce great videos: Resolution matters While the higher resolution is always better, it may be challenging to record high-quality video on a smartphone. The resolution you chose to record in will influence the storage space each video will require on your phone. For example, if you record 4K resolution video on your iPhone 6S, you’ll be able to store up to 40 minutes of video — if you don’t have any other apps or files on your phone. Most phones settings allow for recording in Full HD, HD, and SD. To save as much storage space as you can and deliver quality video, use the HD setting. Set your focus manually Smartphones allow you to set the lens focus by touching your screen. While this works for hand-held videos, it won’t suffice for eLearning videos. You’ll need to keep your shots consistent and therefore change your focus option to manual. While most phones have different operating systems and camera settings, opening your camera app and selecting the video recording feature should help you find the focus settings. Audio can be tricky Videos recorded on smartphones don’t produce high-quality audio. This is because the speakers on smartphones aren’t designed with sophisticated noise-canceling capabilities. Solve this problem by investing in an external microphone. Saramonic Flexible Microphone with High Sensitivity for Apple iOS Note: sound quality is also affected by your surroundings. Try and shoot your video in quiet spaces. Tips for working with your camera: Use a tripod Tripods help level your camera or smartphone. When used with floor markers, you’ll be able to quickly replicate settings for any reshoots and not worry about losing perfect angles. There are tons of tripod options available on the market and most will work with almost every camera. Prices start at around $20. If you’re looking for an entry-level tripod, you could opt for the AmazonBasics Lightweight Camera Mount Tripod Stand. It comes with a bag, measures at 16.5 inches collapsed and 50 inches extended. Learn more about the AmazonBasic Tripod. If you plan to record video with your smartphone, you have two options. Option one: you could buy an attachment that connects to a standard camera tripod. It’s recommended that you choose something relatively strong to hold your smartphone in place. The Ulanzi Phone Tripod Mount Adapter/Vertical Bracket will do the job. It also allows for landscape/horizontal recording. Learn more about the Ulanzi Phone Tripod Mount Adapter/Vertical Bracket. Option two: purchase a stand built for supporting smartphones. While there are many mobile phone stand options available, the UBeesize Portable and Adjustable Camera Holder may be the best choice. It is sturdy and also comes with a wireless remote for recording. Pricing starts at around $13. Learn more about the UBeesize Portable and Adjustable Camera Holder. Shoot in landscape (horizontally) when using your smartphone Most video-on-demand (VOD) platforms used for eLearning are built to accommodate users with desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. In order to make your video render perfectly, shoot your content in landscape mode. This will allow you to fill desktop, tablet and mobile phone screens. Microphone Audio is just as important as the quality of your video. In fact, professional videographers argue that you could get away with poor video quality, but bad audio quality can ruin great videos. While most cameras and digital video recording devices can pick up sound when used on their own, they don’t record high-quality audio without the help of external microphones. Whether you’re using a digital camera or smartphone, investing in an external microphone will be worthwhile. If you’re considering using the Panasonic Lumix G7, you can pair it with the Vidpro lavalier external microphone. Pricing starts at around $20. Learn more about the Vidpro lavalier microphone. Tips for recording audio Use a portable audio recording device Recording audio for digital camera video can be handled in various ways. But if your environment is prone to noise disruptions, an external microphone attachment may not cancel out all the noise. In this case, you could use a portable audio recorder. Image: Zoom ZH1 H1 Handy Portable Digital Recorder This approach is referred to as “dual-system sound” recording. Your video and audio are synced in the editing phase. Portable audio recorders will connect to a digital camera. They are somewhat advanced pieces of hardware and don’t do the job on their own. You will need a portable audio recorder, a cable from the mic to the portable recorder, and your mic. Here’s a great video on how to record sound for your video using a portable audio device: Can’t afford a portable audio device? You can use a smartphone. Simply connect your external mic to your phone. You can then record your video on another smartphone or your digital camera while recording your audio. Here’s a quick video on how to use an external mic and smartphone to record audio: A note for Android users: recording audio on your Android smartphone works the same way. Connect an external mic, use an audio recording app and hit the record button. Set your lighting The right lighting is crucial. It elevates the overall look of a video and can be used to it set the scene for whatever subject matter you’re covering and produce the effect you want to create for your audience. The good news is that creating the perfect lighting for your video isn’t as hard as you might think. Before we cover what kind of lighting equipment you need, it makes sense to share how to use lighting first. Here are 3 tips on how to set up your lighting for the best results: Focus on the subject first The subject of any video is what you want your audience to pay attention to. But if your subject doesn’t get enough lighting, it makes for dull and disengaging viewer experience. Natural light works Natural light works excellently for video recording. All you need to do is position your subject in front of a window with your camera facing the subject. The idea is to have as much light reflecting off of the subject. Use what you can While using natural lighting or artificial LED lighting would be ideal, you can get away with a lamp pointed in the right direction. The most important rule to stick to is that your subject must receive light first. If you’re able to invest in lighting equipment, there really isn’t any hard and fast rule to follow. For many videographers, choosing lighting is almost a matter of personal preference. You could opt for LED lamps or rings. You could also use a photography umbrella kit. Lighting options start from as low as $20 on Amazon. With many options to choose from, don’t let the idea of choosing your lighting instruments overwhelm you. Try the GVM 560 LED Video Light. It can be mounted to your roof or on a tripod and controlled by a smartphone app (iOS and Android apps are available). Pricing starts at around $80. Learn more about the GVM 560 LED Video Light. Bonus lighting tip: Avoid overhead lighting Overhead lighting may seem like a good idea, but it doesn’t produce the right effect. It creates shadows on your body and darker lines on your face. Storage Recording video and audio often involves more than one take. And when you’re recording a complete course, you need to be able to save as much video and audio to put together a perfect product in when editing. Access to data storage is therefore important. Here is a list of data storage options along with usage tips and considerations: External hard drives Most videographers rely on portable external hard drives. They’re easy to connect to PCs and often fast enough to support quick file transfer. If you opt for external hard drives, purchase one with as much size you can afford. This will save you from the tough decision of which recording to sacrifice in the name of space. External hard drive prices start at around $40. The Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive is a good choice. With 2TB of storage, you’ll be able to record ample footage. Pricing starts at around $60. Learn more about the Seagate Portable 2TB External Hard Drive. Google Drive Your standard free Google Account will give you up to 15GB of free space. Additional space is available at a fee and will require upgrading your GDrive account to a Google One account. Learn more here. Create a free Google Drive account and get 15GB of space here. Dropbox Dropbox offers a free 2GB storage account. There’s a good chance that you’ll need more storage and can upgrade to a 2 terabyte account for $9.99/mo. See Dropbox’s pricing plans here and sign-up for a free 2GB account here. MEGA You can get 15GB from MEGA with an additional 35GB that expire after 30 days. Upgrades are available. Create your free 15GB account and see pricing plan here. Online storage is a convenient way to save footage, but there are two considerations to make when you using the cloud. First, you’ll need to ensure that you have access to a fast and reliable internet connection. Uploading large files can be time-consuming and a slow and weak connection will work against you. Secondly, while most cloud services are secure, they are not impervious to failure. Reduce the risk of losing your footage by storing it on both external drives and in a secure cloud storage account. Step 4: Setting the stage Choosing the location to record your video directly impacts the quality of your video. Everything from the background you use to the objects that appear in your video matter. Here are 6 tips to help you create the perfect setting: Get the right amount of light While we’ve covered lighting above, it’s worth emphasizing how important adequate lighting is for creating great videos. If you’ll do most or all of your recording at nighttime, ensure that you use enough light to compensate for darkness. For the best lighting, use two light sources positions at 45-degree angles in front of you. This setup will eliminate shadows that would appear with just one light. Image: Vlogger Gear Remove reflective surfaces Ensure that you’re using an area that doesn’t have any reflective surfaces. Reflective surfaces cause glare on camera lenses and will degrade the quality of your videos. Use backgrounds that offer contrast You can use color contrast between yourself and the background in your video. This is easily achieved by using colors that make you stand out on video. Color contrast applied effectively also makes for aesthetically pleasing, and therefore, more engaging video. Image: Matt D’Avella Creating a professional-looking background for your videos isn’t expensive and can be accomplished with the use of background paper. Using Background Leader Bars and Background Paper Background paper is affordable and comes in various sizes and colors. It is ideal for creating a professional studio look relatively quickly with minimal effort. Background paper hanging from a background leader bar, you to easily create the background you need in minutes. If you’re not able to get your hands on a leader bar, you can secure your background paper to a surface with tape or staples. But if you can afford to, invest in a leader bar. Leader bar makes it easier to reuse, handle and limit wear and tear of the background paper. Visit Savageuniversal.com for more on background leader bars and paper. Order background objects Create a sense of order between all objects that appear in the background of your video. Ordered objects are easier for the eye to accept. For example, if you recorded a video with an untidy bookshelf in the background, there’s a good chance that it will distract your viewers. Image: Callum Wojcik An ordered bookshelf on the order hand will easily be noticed and then dismissed, allowing your audience to focus on you. Avoid using windows as backgrounds Stay away from recording in front of windows where people pass by. They will cause distractions for viewers and ultimately make the learning process challenging. Soundproof where possible You need as quiet an environment as possible to ensure the best sound quality. Your microphone may be able to block out certain sounds, but a loud train or crowd of people will influence the audio quality of your video. Invest in acoustic foam to help create a quieter setting. Pricing starts at around $10. Keep pets out of the recording room Pets may distract you from recording. They may also make it hard to find the momentum you need to record all the shots you require. Step 5: Preparing yourself to be on camera Getting camera-ready can be a little daunting, especially if you’re not used to recording video. But don’t let hold you back from starting. Like all skills, speaking into a camera can be learned and developed. Here are 4 tips for preparing yourself to record videos: Appear confident on camera Yes, it sounds easier said than done, but appearing confident on video is something you can practice. When Nick Nimmin started recording videos on YouTube, he worried about the information he shared and what people would think about him. In this video, he shares helpful tips on how to prepare your voice, body, and think about recording video. Watch his video on how to be more confident on camera: Look the part First impressions count. When you shoot your video, it doesn’t take much to appear professional and presentable. Here’s a quick checklist for ensuring that you look presentable: Get adequate rest before you hit record. Video has a way of reflecting a subject’s energy levels. If you’re exhausted, you will come across as exhausted. Style your hair. Hair is often one of the first characteristics people notice when they meet someone new. If your hair appears to be unkempt, your audience could feel that you appear as a less credible information source. Wear freshly pressed clothing. Lighting can show more detail than people would otherwise notice in real life. Ensure that your clothing is clean and freshly pressed to ensure that you come across as a professional. Dress the part. Your dress code is dependent on who your audience is. Recording eLearning videos for business executives would differ from recording for graphics designers. When it comes to choosing what to wear consider who will watch your video and what they expect from you. Step 6: Recording your video Your storyboard is ready, course material prepped, equipment and stage are set and you’re prepared to be in front of the camera. Before you hit record, here are a few tips to help you maximize your time and effort. Prepare Your Script Preparing what you’ll say is essential. It will help calm your nerves and make it easier to deliver your message. Should you create an entire script or just write down talking points? Should you memorize your lines? Each option works and it’s all dependant on your preference. What’s most important is your delivery. You need to present yourself as confident and knowledgeable. Batch your recording Batching your video recording will save you time. The batching process involves recording similar shots all at once, allowing you to breeze through your content faster and get it done in one sitting. It may seem like a counter-intuitive approach since you’ve created a storyboard, but it’s a more effective approach. When you’re recording eLearning videos, you’ll have more than one section of content to record. If you follow the same camera transition format (start with a face-to-face recording and then move to a whiteboard or screen share) for all videos, you can record all face-to-face videos together and do the same for whiteboard or screen share shots. Batching your video also enables you to use your equipment setups once. You won’t have to change angles as you follow your storyboard. You also need not worry about the positioning of cameras and lighting equipment or background elements that you may notice have become inconsistent in the editing process. Step 7: Editing your video Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final step! Video editing can be considered a complex process. It involves picking software to use, piecing together shots, incorporating sound and tweaking lighting. In this step, we’ll dive into free video editing software you can use and tips for editing your videos. Video editing software There are many free video editing software suites available, but most are not very user-friendly. They typically require advanced video editing knowledge. There are, however, more simplistic and easier-to-use programs out there. Here are 3 editing suites worth considering: Filmora Filmora tops the list. It’s clean and basic layout is ideal for quick editing and includes everything beginner and advanced users need. Features include trimming, transitions, overlays, and effects. You’re also able to add up to 100 media layers, making it possible to create highly complex videos. Filmora works on Windows and Mac. Get Filmora. Lightworks Lightworks is open source and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. While it comes with advanced features, it isn’t complex to navigate and use. Lightworks comes with a sizable library of royalty-free audio and video, trimming and editing functionality and audio and visual effects. Get Lightworks. Shotcut Image: Shotcut Shotcut also works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s regarded as a powerful video editing tool and supports 4K resolution. Like Lightworks, Shotcut is for more advanced video editors. Features include audio and visual effects, the ability to drag-and-drop files from your file manager, trim and edit frames, and more. Get Shotcut While video editing is a field on its own, you don’t need to be a pro video editor to make your videos look professional. Here are 8 tips for editing your videos: Use your storyboard Having recorded multiple takes for different course material can make it hard to figure out which footage goes where. This is where your storyboard comes to the rescue. It will help you order your video and also guide your editing. By sticking to your storyboard, you’ll be able to eliminate unnecessary footage to produce impactful videos. Pair your narratives with visual elements Pairing narratives with visual elements can make for engaging videos. While it may require a little more effort to piece them together, it’s worth exploring to give your audience a more rewarding experience. Here, turn to your storyboard for guidance on what takes place along your story timeline. Your goal is to find opportunities to express your storyline visually. For example, in MKHB’s Google Pixel 3a Review, he walks viewers through his opinion of the Google Pixel 3a smartphone. As he shares more about the phone’s specs, he shows various shots of the phone being used to perform a certain task (taking photos and video): Trim your videos to make them short and engaging As you trim your videos, be sure to limit them to no longer than 6 minutes. This may be difficult, especially with a complex subject matter, but rest assured that you can always segment ideas into shorter videos. Trim your videos then add transitions Trim your video to identify the footage you’ll use before creating transitions. This approach will ensure that your video length is as short and polished as possible before adding to it. Add titles Titles help learners quickly identify the subject matter. When editing your videos, include a title at the beginning of each video to serve as a mental marker or primer for what comes next. Control lighting to enhance video Lighting can be enhanced during the editing process, but be careful. Too much or too little light can make your video look unnatural and therefore unappealing. Layer sound If you’ve recorded sound separately (see step 3), you’ll need to sync your audio with your video. Most editing suites are easy to work with and syncing video with audio involves pairing both formats using drag-and-drop functionality. Using background music Background music can be a nice touch but should be used sparingly. eLearning videos are meant to focus on course material first and music that lingers for too long can become distracting. If you use background music, limit it and ensure that you fade it out as your video progresses. Establishing your video speed It is possible to speed up or slow down your video during editing, but it may not always be necessary. Most eLearning video platforms offer students the ability to control the speed of videos. This allows them to set a pace that helps them better understand the content and learn at their own speed. If you must adjust the speed of your video, it’s recommended that you use this feature in extreme cases where your content delivery is either too fast or too slow. Using intros and outros Intros and outros are triggers. They tell viewers when a video beginning and when it has ended. Without both, your videos would have abrupt openings and endings and make for a poor viewing experience. As you plan your intro and outro, limit the length to no more than 8 seconds. This will be enough to prime your audience to receive new information. Follow the formula for effective eLearning video production Creating great eLearning videos is formulaic. You need a clear plan, the right equipment, and practice. When these ingredients come together in the 7-step framework, you’ll be able to create well-structured and impactful videos. Amir Shahzeidi is the digital marketing manager at Uscreen, the leading all-in-one video monetization platform that allows creators to launch OTT platforms and monetize their content online. </sys

See Future Changes to Your Recurring Revenue with CMRR. Wouldn’t it be great to see how the deals your sales team has just closed will impact your MRR? Or see how scheduled cancellations will impact your end of quarter results? We have got good news. And no, you will not need to rev your Delorean up to 88mph to see your upcoming MRR movements. It’s now possible to get a glimpse of your future MRR with ChartMogul’s new Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR) reporting features. Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue, is a projection of MRR in the future. It considers any committed revenue addition (including new business, expansion, reactivation) or scheduled churn/contraction. You might also see it written as Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue. CMRR allows you to get the complete picture of your SaaS business – to see if you’re on target to reach your monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals. That kind of information is really powerful; you can take action to mitigate upcoming churn, allocate marketing spend, or just give you the motivation you need to push a bit harder to hit that target. Awesome feature. Really important to track CMRR as well as MRR to present the full value of your subscription base when valuing SaaS companies. Shane Greenan, ActivePipe MRR versus CMRR MRR gives you insight about what has already happened. It is primarily derived from the subscription service periods that appear on your invoice data; the amount being billed for a given service period. But MRR doesn’t tell the whole story about what’s happening in your business. There are events that are already scheduled to occur that will have an impact on your revenue. Your MRR doesn’t take into account these committed and anticipated future movements, and is thus only painting part of the picture. CMRR is based on movements from scheduled changes to your subscriptions. When you make changes to a customer’s subscription in your billing platform, those changes will automatically appear in ChartMogul even before an invoice is generated. In this sense, CMRR will show you what your MRR will be in the future. When you combine MRR and CMRR you’ll have the most up-to-the-minute information about your business. What’s changing in ChartMogul? In the Charts section of the app, you’ll see the brand new CMRR Forecast report. You’ll be able to see the most complete picture of your company’s financial health with a breakdown of all scheduled monthly MRR movements from now into the future, and how they will impact your MRR and ARR. Looks like we’ve got some new business, expansion, and contraction coming up. We’ve also updated the MRR Breakdown dashboard tile. When you login to ChartMogul, you’ll see a quick overview of scheduled MRR movements for the month, quarter, or year right on your dashboard. We’ve added ‘Scheduled movements’ to the MRR Breakdown tile. You can also see scheduled movements on customer profiles. Subscription event-based movements like upgrades, downgrades and cancellations will appear above past MRR movements on each customer’s profile. You’ll be able to see when the event occurred, and when the anticipated movement will take effect, giving you an up-to-date record of each customer. Billionaire Bruce Wayne just committed $100 in New Business. What’s next for CMRR? Currently, CMRR is available for users with the latest version of our Stripe integration, Recurly, or a Custom Data Source. We’re working on adding other billing systems, like Chargebee, for the next version. We’re also adding support for historical reporting of CMRR for those who prefer to report on CMRR over MRR to their investors and other stakeholders. Curious to see how CMRR can help your business? Sign up for a 14-day free trial today.

[INST] See Future Changes to Your Recurring Revenue with CMRR [/INST]

Wouldn’t it be great to see how the deals your sales team has just closed will impact your MRR? Or see how scheduled cancellations will impact your end of quarter results? We have got good news. And no, you will not need to rev your Delorean up to 88mph to see your upcoming MRR movements. It’s now possible to get a glimpse of your future MRR with ChartMogul’s new Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR) reporting features. Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue, is a projection of MRR in the future. It considers any committed revenue addition (including new business, expansion, reactivation) or scheduled churn/contraction. You might also see it written as Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue. CMRR allows you to get the complete picture of your SaaS business – to see if you’re on target to reach your monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals. That kind of information is really powerful; you can take action to mitigate upcoming churn, allocate marketing spend, or just give you the motivation you need to push a bit harder to hit that target. Awesome feature. Really important to track CMRR as well as MRR to present the full value of your subscription base when valuing SaaS companies. Shane Greenan, ActivePipe MRR versus CMRR MRR gives you insight about what has already happened. It is primarily derived from the subscription service periods that appear on your invoice data; the amount being billed for a given service period. But MRR doesn’t tell the whole story about what’s happening in your business. There are events that are already scheduled to occur that will have an impact on your revenue. Your MRR doesn’t take into account these committed and anticipated future movements, and is thus only painting part of the picture. CMRR is based on movements from scheduled changes to your subscriptions. When you make changes to a customer’s subscription in your billing platform, those changes will automatically appear in ChartMogul even before an invoice is generated. In this sense, CMRR will show you what your MRR will be in the future. When you combine MRR and CMRR you’ll have the most up-to-the-minute information about your business. What’s changing in ChartMogul? In the Charts section of the app, you’ll see the brand new CMRR Forecast report. You’ll be able to see the most complete picture of your company’s financial health with a breakdown of all scheduled monthly MRR movements from now into the future, and how they will impact your MRR and ARR. Looks like we’ve got some new business, expansion, and contraction coming up. We’ve also updated the MRR Breakdown dashboard tile. When you login to ChartMogul, you’ll see a quick overview of scheduled MRR movements for the month, quarter, or year right on your dashboard. We’ve added ‘Scheduled movements’ to the MRR Breakdown tile. You can also see scheduled movements on customer profiles. Subscription event-based movements like upgrades, downgrades and cancellations will appear above past MRR movements on each customer’s profile. You’ll be able to see when the event occurred, and when the anticipated movement will take effect, giving you an up-to-date record of each customer. Billionaire Bruce Wayne just committed $100 in New Business. What’s next for CMRR? Currently, CMRR is available for users with the latest version of our Stripe integration, Recurly, or a Custom Data Source. We’re working on adding other billing systems, like Chargebee, for the next version. We’re also adding support for historical reporting of CMRR for those who prefer to report on CMRR over MRR to their investors and other stakeholders. Curious to see how CMRR can help your business? Sign up for a 14-day free trial today.

<sys> [INST] See Future Changes to Your Recurring Revenue with CMRR [/INST] Wouldn’t it be great to see how the deals your sales team has just closed will impact your MRR? Or see how scheduled cancellations will impact your end of quarter results? We have got good news. And no, you will not need to rev your Delorean up to 88mph to see your upcoming MRR movements. It’s now possible to get a glimpse of your future MRR with ChartMogul’s new Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR) reporting features. Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue, is a projection of MRR in the future. It considers any committed revenue addition (including new business, expansion, reactivation) or scheduled churn/contraction. You might also see it written as Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue. CMRR allows you to get the complete picture of your SaaS business – to see if you’re on target to reach your monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals. That kind of information is really powerful; you can take action to mitigate upcoming churn, allocate marketing spend, or just give you the motivation you need to push a bit harder to hit that target. Awesome feature. Really important to track CMRR as well as MRR to present the full value of your subscription base when valuing SaaS companies. Shane Greenan, ActivePipe MRR versus CMRR MRR gives you insight about what has already happened. It is primarily derived from the subscription service periods that appear on your invoice data; the amount being billed for a given service period. But MRR doesn’t tell the whole story about what’s happening in your business. There are events that are already scheduled to occur that will have an impact on your revenue. Your MRR doesn’t take into account these committed and anticipated future movements, and is thus only painting part of the picture. CMRR is based on movements from scheduled changes to your subscriptions. When you make changes to a customer’s subscription in your billing platform, those changes will automatically appear in ChartMogul even before an invoice is generated. In this sense, CMRR will show you what your MRR will be in the future. When you combine MRR and CMRR you’ll have the most up-to-the-minute information about your business. What’s changing in ChartMogul? In the Charts section of the app, you’ll see the brand new CMRR Forecast report. You’ll be able to see the most complete picture of your company’s financial health with a breakdown of all scheduled monthly MRR movements from now into the future, and how they will impact your MRR and ARR. Looks like we’ve got some new business, expansion, and contraction coming up. We’ve also updated the MRR Breakdown dashboard tile. When you login to ChartMogul, you’ll see a quick overview of scheduled MRR movements for the month, quarter, or year right on your dashboard. We’ve added ‘Scheduled movements’ to the MRR Breakdown tile. You can also see scheduled movements on customer profiles. Subscription event-based movements like upgrades, downgrades and cancellations will appear above past MRR movements on each customer’s profile. You’ll be able to see when the event occurred, and when the anticipated movement will take effect, giving you an up-to-date record of each customer. Billionaire Bruce Wayne just committed $100 in New Business. What’s next for CMRR? Currently, CMRR is available for users with the latest version of our Stripe integration, Recurly, or a Custom Data Source. We’re working on adding other billing systems, like Chargebee, for the next version. We’re also adding support for historical reporting of CMRR for those who prefer to report on CMRR over MRR to their investors and other stakeholders. Curious to see how CMRR can help your business? Sign up for a 14-day free trial today. </sys

SaaS Q&A: How can I give a better product demo?. The quest for a rock-solid product demo is common to most companies, young and old, SMB and enterprise. There are standard best practices that are often overlooked or misunderstood, though, which you should implement to build a strong foundation for the product demo and eventual sales pitch. Qualify your product demos. A qualified demo meets the following three criteria: The prospect is aware of the problems they’re facing. The prospect is seeking a solution to the problem. They are starting to see your company as a potential solution. Only once you’ve confirmed they have a need for your product can you create a sense of urgency and interest for them to purchase it. Qualifying your demos makes sure a real sales opportunity exists, and as a result it saves you from wasting time on unlikely prospects. Understand your product demos. You need to know exactly the problem the prospect is trying to solve. Ask questions ahead of time, or at the very beginning of the demo, to understand their business and their pain points. Then you can proceed strategically, focused on demonstrating how your product provides that specific solution. Keep it short. Less than 15 minutes. Any longer and you would lose their attention anyway. And at least this way you show that you respect their time. Also: don’t forget to set aside a bit of time before the call or meeting to prepare, so that you are in top form. Focus on benefits, not features. Prospects care about how your product will change their workflow, their revenue, their company. That’s the value of benefits. They don’t think in terms of features. It’s your job to translate features into benefits that are valuable specifically to their business. “Demos are not about your product. Not about showing off your product’s capabilities.” – Dave Brock Ask them questions. And ask them throughout the product demo. Sprinkle them through your presentation to keep them engaged. Even if it’s just, “Do you have any questions?” or “Does this all makes sense?” or “Would you like to see how this works?” Of course you want to build in time for the prospect’s Q&A to you, but often people forget that questions can (and should) go two ways. Plus, you learn a lot from asking the prospect questions. Steli Efti even recommends flipping a prospect’s question back around onto them. For example, if a prospect asks how they would do a specific task using your product — don’t just tell them how they would do it. Ask them how they’d prefer to do that task. Then, armed with that answer, proceed strategically and demo something that would appeal to them. “Flipping questions is a great way to learn more about the underlying motives and reasons for why a prospect wants things a certain way.” – Steli Efti End with a goal. Sale > Trial > Feedback Don’t just thank the prospect for their time. Go all the way to the sale. That’s the ultimate goal, after all. And if the sale doesn’t go through, there are still other tiered goals you can aim for. If not a sale, then a trial sign-up. If the customer doesn’t even want a trial of your product, then you should leave the conversation with precise feedback on why not. This could be invaluable insight into the product and also the product demo itself. Of course, as many people have said, not much can beat practice, practice, practice. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How can I give better SaaS product demos? NEW SaaS Q&A: How can I give a better product demo? — https://t.co/QlGlcXRWES #product #sales #SaaS pic.twitter.com/dzZFoArrdT — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) June 9, 2016

[INST] SaaS Q&A: How can I give a better product demo? [/INST]

The quest for a rock-solid product demo is common to most companies, young and old, SMB and enterprise. There are standard best practices that are often overlooked or misunderstood, though, which you should implement to build a strong foundation for the product demo and eventual sales pitch. Qualify your product demos. A qualified demo meets the following three criteria: The prospect is aware of the problems they’re facing. The prospect is seeking a solution to the problem. They are starting to see your company as a potential solution. Only once you’ve confirmed they have a need for your product can you create a sense of urgency and interest for them to purchase it. Qualifying your demos makes sure a real sales opportunity exists, and as a result it saves you from wasting time on unlikely prospects. Understand your product demos. You need to know exactly the problem the prospect is trying to solve. Ask questions ahead of time, or at the very beginning of the demo, to understand their business and their pain points. Then you can proceed strategically, focused on demonstrating how your product provides that specific solution. Keep it short. Less than 15 minutes. Any longer and you would lose their attention anyway. And at least this way you show that you respect their time. Also: don’t forget to set aside a bit of time before the call or meeting to prepare, so that you are in top form. Focus on benefits, not features. Prospects care about how your product will change their workflow, their revenue, their company. That’s the value of benefits. They don’t think in terms of features. It’s your job to translate features into benefits that are valuable specifically to their business. “Demos are not about your product. Not about showing off your product’s capabilities.” – Dave Brock Ask them questions. And ask them throughout the product demo. Sprinkle them through your presentation to keep them engaged. Even if it’s just, “Do you have any questions?” or “Does this all makes sense?” or “Would you like to see how this works?” Of course you want to build in time for the prospect’s Q&A to you, but often people forget that questions can (and should) go two ways. Plus, you learn a lot from asking the prospect questions. Steli Efti even recommends flipping a prospect’s question back around onto them. For example, if a prospect asks how they would do a specific task using your product — don’t just tell them how they would do it. Ask them how they’d prefer to do that task. Then, armed with that answer, proceed strategically and demo something that would appeal to them. “Flipping questions is a great way to learn more about the underlying motives and reasons for why a prospect wants things a certain way.” – Steli Efti End with a goal. Sale > Trial > Feedback Don’t just thank the prospect for their time. Go all the way to the sale. That’s the ultimate goal, after all. And if the sale doesn’t go through, there are still other tiered goals you can aim for. If not a sale, then a trial sign-up. If the customer doesn’t even want a trial of your product, then you should leave the conversation with precise feedback on why not. This could be invaluable insight into the product and also the product demo itself. Of course, as many people have said, not much can beat practice, practice, practice. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How can I give better SaaS product demos? NEW SaaS Q&A: How can I give a better product demo? — https://t.co/QlGlcXRWES #product #sales #SaaS pic.twitter.com/dzZFoArrdT — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) June 9, 2016

<sys> [INST] SaaS Q&A: How can I give a better product demo? [/INST] The quest for a rock-solid product demo is common to most companies, young and old, SMB and enterprise. There are standard best practices that are often overlooked or misunderstood, though, which you should implement to build a strong foundation for the product demo and eventual sales pitch. Qualify your product demos. A qualified demo meets the following three criteria: The prospect is aware of the problems they’re facing. The prospect is seeking a solution to the problem. They are starting to see your company as a potential solution. Only once you’ve confirmed they have a need for your product can you create a sense of urgency and interest for them to purchase it. Qualifying your demos makes sure a real sales opportunity exists, and as a result it saves you from wasting time on unlikely prospects. Understand your product demos. You need to know exactly the problem the prospect is trying to solve. Ask questions ahead of time, or at the very beginning of the demo, to understand their business and their pain points. Then you can proceed strategically, focused on demonstrating how your product provides that specific solution. Keep it short. Less than 15 minutes. Any longer and you would lose their attention anyway. And at least this way you show that you respect their time. Also: don’t forget to set aside a bit of time before the call or meeting to prepare, so that you are in top form. Focus on benefits, not features. Prospects care about how your product will change their workflow, their revenue, their company. That’s the value of benefits. They don’t think in terms of features. It’s your job to translate features into benefits that are valuable specifically to their business. “Demos are not about your product. Not about showing off your product’s capabilities.” – Dave Brock Ask them questions. And ask them throughout the product demo. Sprinkle them through your presentation to keep them engaged. Even if it’s just, “Do you have any questions?” or “Does this all makes sense?” or “Would you like to see how this works?” Of course you want to build in time for the prospect’s Q&A to you, but often people forget that questions can (and should) go two ways. Plus, you learn a lot from asking the prospect questions. Steli Efti even recommends flipping a prospect’s question back around onto them. For example, if a prospect asks how they would do a specific task using your product — don’t just tell them how they would do it. Ask them how they’d prefer to do that task. Then, armed with that answer, proceed strategically and demo something that would appeal to them. “Flipping questions is a great way to learn more about the underlying motives and reasons for why a prospect wants things a certain way.” – Steli Efti End with a goal. Sale > Trial > Feedback Don’t just thank the prospect for their time. Go all the way to the sale. That’s the ultimate goal, after all. And if the sale doesn’t go through, there are still other tiered goals you can aim for. If not a sale, then a trial sign-up. If the customer doesn’t even want a trial of your product, then you should leave the conversation with precise feedback on why not. This could be invaluable insight into the product and also the product demo itself. Of course, as many people have said, not much can beat practice, practice, practice. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How can I give better SaaS product demos? NEW SaaS Q&A: How can I give a better product demo? — https://t.co/QlGlcXRWES #product #sales #SaaS pic.twitter.com/dzZFoArrdT — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) June 9, 2016 </sys

The ChartMogul 2018 year in review. January We kicked the year off with an awesome customer story about how DroneDeploy uses ChartMogul to inform their expansion strategy — it’s certainly worth a read. As someone who studied computer animation in college, I was really excited when we finally introduced some great looking animations into ChartMogul… Another big improvement that we introduced in January (which we stealthily slipped into our release notes) was the ability to compare segments anywhere within ChartMogul — our third overhaul of the segmentation UX in 3 years — but totally worth it. February Apple’s big push to encourage iOS app developers to embrace the subscription business model saw momentum in 2018, with app categories such as e-learning, media streaming, and fitness and lifestyle leading the way. We released our own native integration for iTunes Connect in February, so businesses offering subscriptions via the App Store could, for the first time, get access to market-leading subscription analytics with just a few clicks. April We launched the Targets feature to make it easy to track progress towards your company subscriber goals. With 2019 just days away, it’s time to start adding new targets for next year :-) Ed wrote an excellent article on how B2B companies are now really embracing brand. May – June May and June saw us put on our first-ever event series, Mogul I/O, designed to bring together ChartMogul customers and leaders from the subscription economy to network, share knowledge and tips, and of course, have fun. To make things interesting, we co-hosted each event with a ChartMogul customer or partner in each city. We kicked things off in San Francisco with Autopilot before heading to NYC (co-hosted with Honey and WorkBench). After the States, we headed to London (co-hosted with Marvel), then finished things off in Berlin with Point Nine Capital. (Our illustrator struggled to tell Christoph and me apart ;-) ) Running our own event series was a ton of fun and also hard work. We wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without the help from our co-host event partners, speakers, and customers. We’re really lucky and honored to have such an awesome community supporting us. If June wasn’t busy enough, we also completely rebranded ChartMogul and launched a new public website. Rebrands famously disgust and alienate loyal customers, but we managed to avoid this trap and the reaction from the ChartMogul community was positive. You can read more about our rebrand process here. The content train continued with an awesome piece by Ed on what it takes to be category king. July July saw probably the biggest feature release of the year with the introduction of custom charts. You can now save custom reports that compare complex segments of revenue data — and you can share them with your team! Stripe also rolled out their official partner program in July and were honored to be named one of their initial launch partners and to be named a verified partner. September We launched our SaaS metrics refresher course, which is designed to distill our learnings from the past 4+ years into an easy-to-digest online course. Guess which course this illustrates? In September, the ChartMogul team headed to Split, Croatia, for our annual offsite. As a highly-distributed company, our Croatia adventures were focused on team bonding and on finding focus for the next 12 months ahead. You can see more photos from our offsite on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1042799961056976896 October October is the time of year when ChartMogul heads to Dublin for SaaStock, where we have a standing order for a Gold Sponsorship. SaaStock is a really cool conference (SaaStock = SaaS + Woodstock for those of you who didn’t figure this out yet) where we meet dozens of ChartMogul customers and friends, and collect masses of customer feedback. @Peter from Teamwork… yes, we will build an iPhone app at some point :-) Our new branding looking slick at our SaaStock booth. https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1052913804626022400 We launched a Shopify integration in October, as well as a new set of charts to help better measure non-subscription revenues. December Ed finally managed to get the legendary David Skok on our podcast; it’s well worth a listen. 2018 was our biggest year at ChartMogul by pretty much every measure. I’m really proud of what our team accomplished, and incredibly grateful to all of our customers, partners and investors who continue to support us on this journey. See you in 2019! We have some really exciting plans for 2019, including an awesome new feature release that is being tested internally and will be ready for release soon after the holidays. Subscribe to our blog to stay up to date. Happy holidays and see you next year!

[INST] The ChartMogul 2018 year in review [/INST]

January We kicked the year off with an awesome customer story about how DroneDeploy uses ChartMogul to inform their expansion strategy — it’s certainly worth a read. As someone who studied computer animation in college, I was really excited when we finally introduced some great looking animations into ChartMogul… Another big improvement that we introduced in January (which we stealthily slipped into our release notes) was the ability to compare segments anywhere within ChartMogul — our third overhaul of the segmentation UX in 3 years — but totally worth it. February Apple’s big push to encourage iOS app developers to embrace the subscription business model saw momentum in 2018, with app categories such as e-learning, media streaming, and fitness and lifestyle leading the way. We released our own native integration for iTunes Connect in February, so businesses offering subscriptions via the App Store could, for the first time, get access to market-leading subscription analytics with just a few clicks. April We launched the Targets feature to make it easy to track progress towards your company subscriber goals. With 2019 just days away, it’s time to start adding new targets for next year :-) Ed wrote an excellent article on how B2B companies are now really embracing brand. May – June May and June saw us put on our first-ever event series, Mogul I/O, designed to bring together ChartMogul customers and leaders from the subscription economy to network, share knowledge and tips, and of course, have fun. To make things interesting, we co-hosted each event with a ChartMogul customer or partner in each city. We kicked things off in San Francisco with Autopilot before heading to NYC (co-hosted with Honey and WorkBench). After the States, we headed to London (co-hosted with Marvel), then finished things off in Berlin with Point Nine Capital. (Our illustrator struggled to tell Christoph and me apart ;-) ) Running our own event series was a ton of fun and also hard work. We wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without the help from our co-host event partners, speakers, and customers. We’re really lucky and honored to have such an awesome community supporting us. If June wasn’t busy enough, we also completely rebranded ChartMogul and launched a new public website. Rebrands famously disgust and alienate loyal customers, but we managed to avoid this trap and the reaction from the ChartMogul community was positive. You can read more about our rebrand process here. The content train continued with an awesome piece by Ed on what it takes to be category king. July July saw probably the biggest feature release of the year with the introduction of custom charts. You can now save custom reports that compare complex segments of revenue data — and you can share them with your team! Stripe also rolled out their official partner program in July and were honored to be named one of their initial launch partners and to be named a verified partner. September We launched our SaaS metrics refresher course, which is designed to distill our learnings from the past 4+ years into an easy-to-digest online course. Guess which course this illustrates? In September, the ChartMogul team headed to Split, Croatia, for our annual offsite. As a highly-distributed company, our Croatia adventures were focused on team bonding and on finding focus for the next 12 months ahead. You can see more photos from our offsite on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1042799961056976896 October October is the time of year when ChartMogul heads to Dublin for SaaStock, where we have a standing order for a Gold Sponsorship. SaaStock is a really cool conference (SaaStock = SaaS + Woodstock for those of you who didn’t figure this out yet) where we meet dozens of ChartMogul customers and friends, and collect masses of customer feedback. @Peter from Teamwork… yes, we will build an iPhone app at some point :-) Our new branding looking slick at our SaaStock booth. https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1052913804626022400 We launched a Shopify integration in October, as well as a new set of charts to help better measure non-subscription revenues. December Ed finally managed to get the legendary David Skok on our podcast; it’s well worth a listen. 2018 was our biggest year at ChartMogul by pretty much every measure. I’m really proud of what our team accomplished, and incredibly grateful to all of our customers, partners and investors who continue to support us on this journey. See you in 2019! We have some really exciting plans for 2019, including an awesome new feature release that is being tested internally and will be ready for release soon after the holidays. Subscribe to our blog to stay up to date. Happy holidays and see you next year!

<sys> [INST] The ChartMogul 2018 year in review [/INST] January We kicked the year off with an awesome customer story about how DroneDeploy uses ChartMogul to inform their expansion strategy — it’s certainly worth a read. As someone who studied computer animation in college, I was really excited when we finally introduced some great looking animations into ChartMogul… Another big improvement that we introduced in January (which we stealthily slipped into our release notes) was the ability to compare segments anywhere within ChartMogul — our third overhaul of the segmentation UX in 3 years — but totally worth it. February Apple’s big push to encourage iOS app developers to embrace the subscription business model saw momentum in 2018, with app categories such as e-learning, media streaming, and fitness and lifestyle leading the way. We released our own native integration for iTunes Connect in February, so businesses offering subscriptions via the App Store could, for the first time, get access to market-leading subscription analytics with just a few clicks. April We launched the Targets feature to make it easy to track progress towards your company subscriber goals. With 2019 just days away, it’s time to start adding new targets for next year :-) Ed wrote an excellent article on how B2B companies are now really embracing brand. May – June May and June saw us put on our first-ever event series, Mogul I/O, designed to bring together ChartMogul customers and leaders from the subscription economy to network, share knowledge and tips, and of course, have fun. To make things interesting, we co-hosted each event with a ChartMogul customer or partner in each city. We kicked things off in San Francisco with Autopilot before heading to NYC (co-hosted with Honey and WorkBench). After the States, we headed to London (co-hosted with Marvel), then finished things off in Berlin with Point Nine Capital. (Our illustrator struggled to tell Christoph and me apart ;-) ) Running our own event series was a ton of fun and also hard work. We wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without the help from our co-host event partners, speakers, and customers. We’re really lucky and honored to have such an awesome community supporting us. If June wasn’t busy enough, we also completely rebranded ChartMogul and launched a new public website. Rebrands famously disgust and alienate loyal customers, but we managed to avoid this trap and the reaction from the ChartMogul community was positive. You can read more about our rebrand process here. The content train continued with an awesome piece by Ed on what it takes to be category king. July July saw probably the biggest feature release of the year with the introduction of custom charts. You can now save custom reports that compare complex segments of revenue data — and you can share them with your team! Stripe also rolled out their official partner program in July and were honored to be named one of their initial launch partners and to be named a verified partner. September We launched our SaaS metrics refresher course, which is designed to distill our learnings from the past 4+ years into an easy-to-digest online course. Guess which course this illustrates? In September, the ChartMogul team headed to Split, Croatia, for our annual offsite. As a highly-distributed company, our Croatia adventures were focused on team bonding and on finding focus for the next 12 months ahead. You can see more photos from our offsite on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1042799961056976896 October October is the time of year when ChartMogul heads to Dublin for SaaStock, where we have a standing order for a Gold Sponsorship. SaaStock is a really cool conference (SaaStock = SaaS + Woodstock for those of you who didn’t figure this out yet) where we meet dozens of ChartMogul customers and friends, and collect masses of customer feedback. @Peter from Teamwork… yes, we will build an iPhone app at some point :-) Our new branding looking slick at our SaaStock booth. https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1052913804626022400 We launched a Shopify integration in October, as well as a new set of charts to help better measure non-subscription revenues. December Ed finally managed to get the legendary David Skok on our podcast; it’s well worth a listen. 2018 was our biggest year at ChartMogul by pretty much every measure. I’m really proud of what our team accomplished, and incredibly grateful to all of our customers, partners and investors who continue to support us on this journey. See you in 2019! We have some really exciting plans for 2019, including an awesome new feature release that is being tested internally and will be ready for release soon after the holidays. Subscribe to our blog to stay up to date. Happy holidays and see you next year! </sys

Driving Startup Growth With Cold Outreach: Use Cases And Best Practices. The road from a small startup to a sustainable business is a bumpy one. And it invariably goes through growth. To survive the first five years (which only half of all companies do) and get profitable, your startup needs to grow at a proper pace. A bootstrapped startup, we’ve been through the ups and downs of business growth. We’ve tried different tactics and experimented with dozens of approaches. But there’s one method — the one that is usually off-radar for most startups — which, however, has been particularly useful on our road to sustainable growth as a company. It’s cold outreach. In this article, we will explore the 5 cold emailing use cases as well as share some pro tips on how to make it work for your startup. An introduction to cold outreach Before we dive into the details, I want to explain what I mean by “cold outreach” and how it works in a nutshell. So, let’s start with that. What is a cold email anyway? Who hasn’t heard about cold calling? This notorious telemarketing tactic (that many now claim to be dead) has been in widespread use for the last few decades. A cold call was usually initiated by a sales rep who, out of a blue sky, reached out to a potential buyer via phone and tried to talk them into purchasing their product or service. However, things have changed as email and social networks became the dominant means for business communication. Cold outreach is a modern twist to the traditional outbound sales tactic which, however, has certain differences: Modern-day cold outreach focuses on the quality of prospects rather than their quantity. Instead of mass emailing thousands of random contacts from a list you’ve bought online, more sales teams hand-pick the right prospects based on their buyer personas. Personalization is everything! One size fits all approach with a generic call script doesn’t work anymore – you need to tailor your messaging and follow-up strategy to the specific audience you are targeting. It doesn’t rely on a single outreach channel, i.e. voice calls, anymore. The “triple touch” approach, including phone, email, and LinkedIn, is now widely used for prospecting (with chats and AI bots expected to follow soon). In fact, using three or more channels in your campaign can result in a 287% higher purchase rate. Cold outreach: a perfect addition to your startup growth strategy or a waste of time? Cold email outreach as a strategy poses a number of challenges for sales reps. First of all, considering that your audience doesn’t know you yet it might be difficult to get their attention. Secondly, in case of email or social media contact, there’s no immediate verbal feedback from your recipients so you can’t alter your approach on the go (as with voice or video calls). On the other hand, this tactic can offer lots of benefits to a startup, including: Low investment: If you research the contacts manually, all you need is an email account to get started. The only investment you might want to consider at this stage is a reliable software platform to automate your outreach to some extent. Scalability: Thanks to the automation tools mentioned above, the whole outreach process is very easy to scale. To ramp up your sales, all you need to do is add more contacts to your list or create more campaigns targeting different audience segments. Predictable results: Once you’ve found the right approach, cold outreach can become a pretty reliable source of leads (as you can have several campaigns running in the background non-stop). Also, cold outreach can be pretty effective. My team knows it firsthand — we’ve been doing it since day one in business. We still have a dedicated SDR team working full-time to attract more high-quality leads. The efforts have been paying off pretty well: we see on average 60-80% open rate and 10-20% response rate: And here’s a snapshot of one of our latest campaigns: But the best part about cold outreach is that it is a universal startup growth tool — sales prospecting is only one area of application for this tactic. There are other ways to use it, from marketing to recruitment and networking. So, let’s take a closer look at each one of these use cases. 5 ways cold email outreach can drive your startup growth There are many aspects of healthy startup growth: from increasing the number of customers and revenue to scaling the team and product portfolio or launching in other markets. And, while there are dozens of tactics to explore, only one of them can be used to tackle most of the growth aspects — it’s cold outreach. Here are some of the ways cold outreach can come in handy when growing your startup. Sales development Outbound sales represent the default use case for cold outreach for a number of reasons we’ve mentioned above. When you need to ramp up your startup sales, proactively reaching out to the prospects might be the only way to quickly get some leads into your pipeline. And even if a prospect churns, you can still use cold outreach as a way to source first-hand market knowledge and validate your product. After all, asking for advice or feedback is a much better cold email marketing strategy than pitching your product right away (we will get to that later). Networking Your network is arguably the most important business asset. Aside from bringing in more leads through the word of mouth (which is one of the most powerful marketing tactics), you can use it to connect with fellow startup owners. From seeking mentorship or expert advice, inquiring about cross-promotion opportunities or inviting them to your affiliate program to building long-term strategic partnerships with other businesses, there are many ways networking outreach can help your startup grow. Also, unlike sales outreach, networking emails tend to have a higher success rate (up to 96% according to Hubspot). Marketing Apart from networking, you should also consider establishing connections with media or reputable industry resources. Whether it’s a new product launch, exciting partnership, or simply a startup story that is worth sharing, cold emailing is a great way to spread the word and get some press coverage. Cold email outreach can also be used as an effective link building tactic (Update: here’s another great resource on link building). If your content is noteworthy, i.e. unique, insightful, and valuable, other websites will be happy to share it (or at least link to it in their publications, which is still great for SEO). Recruiting Getting the right people to work on your startup is just as important as building a solid sales pipeline. However, staffing a startup can be a real challenge, especially if you need to build a team from scratch. Cold outreach can become your secret startup recruitment weapon, whether you’re looking for the best engineers or trying to attract experienced co-founders (just like we did). After all, people who are not actively looking for a job might still consider your offer if you use an effective recruiting email that resonates with them. Fundraising If you’re going to reach out to perfect candidates and potential business partners, why not try sending cold emails to investors as well? This use case isn’t too different from the previous ones — it takes the right person and the right message that you send at the right time but there’s also a chance to raise some startup funding. Even if they don’t fund your startup, they might share some advice, refer you to other investors, or even become your advisor which is still an amazing result. In any case, it’s better than sitting around and waiting for the investors to come around. How to make your cold emails work: a hands-on manual While cold outreach isn’t rocket science, it still takes certain preparations to get started and reach the desired outcomes. Here are the most important aspects of the cold outreach campaign setup and some proven tactics to make it work. Getting started with cold outreach Build a list. There are two ways to do that: manually hand-pick the best prospects using email finder tools like Name2Email use trusted B2B databases like ZoomInfo or Uplead for bulk contact extraction. Ensure proper tech setup. This includes email domain warm-up, authentication, and deliverability testing to make sure that your messages will reach the prospects’ inboxes and not get flagged as spam. Also, it’s a great idea to employ outreach automation tools (e.g. Reply) to streamline the whole process. Craft a perfect message. Once you’ve set up your infrastructure, you can go on and put your pitch together (we’ll get to that). And don’t forget about the follow-ups! Pick the right timing. It is also important to pick the right day and time for each step in your outreach sequence. Start with the proven “mid-week, mid-day” approach or get creative and experiment with different timing options to see what works best with your audience. Come up with a solid follow-up strategy. This includes the timing, frequency, outreach channels, as well as messaging. For the best results, don’t focus on a single channel, e.g. email, — use a mix of automated and manual touches across email, phone, and social media. That’s pretty much it. Once you’re done with the preparations, you can launch your campaign. However, this doesn’t mean you should sit there and wait for the leads to start coming in. Track your metrics, try to understand what works and what doesn’t, iterate and improve your strategy. The anatomy of a perfect cold sales email (including proven templates) Getting your message right across to the prospects is arguably the most challenging part of the whole outreach process. To make sure your cold emails hit the target, follow the proven framework when crafting your message. Namely, here are some essential elements of such an email you should include: Short and clear subject line: The first thing your prospect sees when your email lands in their inbox, it can either make or break your whole cold email marketing campaign. In fact, 47% of recipients will make the decision to open the message and 69% of them will report it as spam based on the subject line alone. Personalized intro for each prospect: Personalization is the cornerstone of an effective outreach campaign. By including a customized intro, you make your email look like it’s been sent to this prospect exclusively, with their problems and needs in mind. This can significantly boost both the click-through and response rates as well as your ROI. Value proposition: There are multiple ways to add value with your emails — e.g. from providing a spot-on solution to the prospect’s problems to including relevant content or personalized offer. Just make sure it doesn’t look selfish or too salesy. Call to action: The key here is to be very clear with your request and make it as easy as possible to do what you’re asking for. If it’s a call appointment — include a link to your calendar or offer a specific timeslot. If it’s a business inquiry, make it a yes/no question. Here’s an example of a cold sales email template we’ve used at Reply: Growing your sales team? Hi {FirstName}, I’m reaching out to you because I noticed that you are expanding your sales team at {Company}. I assume, as a {ProspectTitle}, you want your company’s sales to grow as well, so would you like an idea of boosting {Company}’s email outreach activities? Reply is designed for sales teams and helps them to grow their pipeline by using our platform to double their number of conversations with right-fit accounts and contacts by automating sales communications with existing and prospective clients while keeping them warm and personal. Are you available for a 10-minute call to see how we could help {Company}’s sales team? And here are the results we’ve seen from this email: This is only one example of effective cold email templates. You can use it as an inspiration and tailor to the specifics of your business and audience needs. For example, instead of hiring intent, you can refer to the technology they are using, recent acquisitions, locations they operate in, or even the person’s individual interests. Further reading: Here’s another list of proven cold email templates you can use. The DOs and DON’Ts of a successful cold outreach campaign Lastly, it is important to address a common concern regarding cold outreach. Many people avoid this tactic due to certain bias attached to it. Indeed, cold email outreach is often viewed as aggressive or annoying. But it doesn’t have to be that way! You can make your outreach effective and build lasting relationships with the prospect as long as you focus on the following aspects: Targeting: Do your homework and get to know your audience first. Having a clear understanding of who your prospects are will help you come up with an effective engagement strategy. Personalization: Avoid sounding generic at all costs and always make sure your offer is relevant and interesting to the people you address. Be it a simple {FirstName} variable in the intro or 100% custom message for each prospect, personalization is vital. Value: Before you ask for anything, offer value first. As mentioned above, there are many ways to do that, from including a clearly communicated solution to the prospect’s problem to sharing interesting and insightful content. On top of that, there are some common mistakes you need to avoid at all costs, including: Misleading subject lines: They might slightly increase your open rate at first, yet, they also can get you flagged for spam. Needless to say how bad such a strategy can be for your brand image, and you definitely can’t expect to make a sale by lying to your prospects. Giving up after just one follow-up: This is the most common (and most harmful) cold outreach mistake most businesses make. If you are afraid to come off as annoying, rethink your strategy but don’t underestimate the power of follow-ups. Each contact with the prospect increases your chances to hear back from them. Pitching: Another typical fear that many SDRs have is to come off as too aggressive or salesy in your cold emails. The best way to avoid this is to refrain from pitching your product in the first email. Focus on establishing a connection instead. Ignore cold outreach at your own peril To pin down everything that has been said above: Cold emailing is an extremely multi-purpose growth tactic that is, however, often overlooked by startups. It CAN be effective, but only if done right — following best practices and proven tactics is a must if you want to reach your goals with cold outreach. Despite that, this tactic also offers room for experiments. A/B testing is a great way to see which approaches have the best outcomes and improve your tactic. If you are still hesitant to try cold email marketing, start small: reach out to 100 prospects, pitch your content to 10 online resources, contact at least one related business to inquire about partnerships. This won’t take too much of your time but can help you see what business opportunities you might be missing out on. After all, the only way to grow your startup is through trial and error.

[INST] Driving Startup Growth With Cold Outreach: Use Cases And Best Practices [/INST]

The road from a small startup to a sustainable business is a bumpy one. And it invariably goes through growth. To survive the first five years (which only half of all companies do) and get profitable, your startup needs to grow at a proper pace. A bootstrapped startup, we’ve been through the ups and downs of business growth. We’ve tried different tactics and experimented with dozens of approaches. But there’s one method — the one that is usually off-radar for most startups — which, however, has been particularly useful on our road to sustainable growth as a company. It’s cold outreach. In this article, we will explore the 5 cold emailing use cases as well as share some pro tips on how to make it work for your startup. An introduction to cold outreach Before we dive into the details, I want to explain what I mean by “cold outreach” and how it works in a nutshell. So, let’s start with that. What is a cold email anyway? Who hasn’t heard about cold calling? This notorious telemarketing tactic (that many now claim to be dead) has been in widespread use for the last few decades. A cold call was usually initiated by a sales rep who, out of a blue sky, reached out to a potential buyer via phone and tried to talk them into purchasing their product or service. However, things have changed as email and social networks became the dominant means for business communication. Cold outreach is a modern twist to the traditional outbound sales tactic which, however, has certain differences: Modern-day cold outreach focuses on the quality of prospects rather than their quantity. Instead of mass emailing thousands of random contacts from a list you’ve bought online, more sales teams hand-pick the right prospects based on their buyer personas. Personalization is everything! One size fits all approach with a generic call script doesn’t work anymore – you need to tailor your messaging and follow-up strategy to the specific audience you are targeting. It doesn’t rely on a single outreach channel, i.e. voice calls, anymore. The “triple touch” approach, including phone, email, and LinkedIn, is now widely used for prospecting (with chats and AI bots expected to follow soon). In fact, using three or more channels in your campaign can result in a 287% higher purchase rate. Cold outreach: a perfect addition to your startup growth strategy or a waste of time? Cold email outreach as a strategy poses a number of challenges for sales reps. First of all, considering that your audience doesn’t know you yet it might be difficult to get their attention. Secondly, in case of email or social media contact, there’s no immediate verbal feedback from your recipients so you can’t alter your approach on the go (as with voice or video calls). On the other hand, this tactic can offer lots of benefits to a startup, including: Low investment: If you research the contacts manually, all you need is an email account to get started. The only investment you might want to consider at this stage is a reliable software platform to automate your outreach to some extent. Scalability: Thanks to the automation tools mentioned above, the whole outreach process is very easy to scale. To ramp up your sales, all you need to do is add more contacts to your list or create more campaigns targeting different audience segments. Predictable results: Once you’ve found the right approach, cold outreach can become a pretty reliable source of leads (as you can have several campaigns running in the background non-stop). Also, cold outreach can be pretty effective. My team knows it firsthand — we’ve been doing it since day one in business. We still have a dedicated SDR team working full-time to attract more high-quality leads. The efforts have been paying off pretty well: we see on average 60-80% open rate and 10-20% response rate: And here’s a snapshot of one of our latest campaigns: But the best part about cold outreach is that it is a universal startup growth tool — sales prospecting is only one area of application for this tactic. There are other ways to use it, from marketing to recruitment and networking. So, let’s take a closer look at each one of these use cases. 5 ways cold email outreach can drive your startup growth There are many aspects of healthy startup growth: from increasing the number of customers and revenue to scaling the team and product portfolio or launching in other markets. And, while there are dozens of tactics to explore, only one of them can be used to tackle most of the growth aspects — it’s cold outreach. Here are some of the ways cold outreach can come in handy when growing your startup. Sales development Outbound sales represent the default use case for cold outreach for a number of reasons we’ve mentioned above. When you need to ramp up your startup sales, proactively reaching out to the prospects might be the only way to quickly get some leads into your pipeline. And even if a prospect churns, you can still use cold outreach as a way to source first-hand market knowledge and validate your product. After all, asking for advice or feedback is a much better cold email marketing strategy than pitching your product right away (we will get to that later). Networking Your network is arguably the most important business asset. Aside from bringing in more leads through the word of mouth (which is one of the most powerful marketing tactics), you can use it to connect with fellow startup owners. From seeking mentorship or expert advice, inquiring about cross-promotion opportunities or inviting them to your affiliate program to building long-term strategic partnerships with other businesses, there are many ways networking outreach can help your startup grow. Also, unlike sales outreach, networking emails tend to have a higher success rate (up to 96% according to Hubspot). Marketing Apart from networking, you should also consider establishing connections with media or reputable industry resources. Whether it’s a new product launch, exciting partnership, or simply a startup story that is worth sharing, cold emailing is a great way to spread the word and get some press coverage. Cold email outreach can also be used as an effective link building tactic (Update: here’s another great resource on link building). If your content is noteworthy, i.e. unique, insightful, and valuable, other websites will be happy to share it (or at least link to it in their publications, which is still great for SEO). Recruiting Getting the right people to work on your startup is just as important as building a solid sales pipeline. However, staffing a startup can be a real challenge, especially if you need to build a team from scratch. Cold outreach can become your secret startup recruitment weapon, whether you’re looking for the best engineers or trying to attract experienced co-founders (just like we did). After all, people who are not actively looking for a job might still consider your offer if you use an effective recruiting email that resonates with them. Fundraising If you’re going to reach out to perfect candidates and potential business partners, why not try sending cold emails to investors as well? This use case isn’t too different from the previous ones — it takes the right person and the right message that you send at the right time but there’s also a chance to raise some startup funding. Even if they don’t fund your startup, they might share some advice, refer you to other investors, or even become your advisor which is still an amazing result. In any case, it’s better than sitting around and waiting for the investors to come around. How to make your cold emails work: a hands-on manual While cold outreach isn’t rocket science, it still takes certain preparations to get started and reach the desired outcomes. Here are the most important aspects of the cold outreach campaign setup and some proven tactics to make it work. Getting started with cold outreach Build a list. There are two ways to do that: manually hand-pick the best prospects using email finder tools like Name2Email use trusted B2B databases like ZoomInfo or Uplead for bulk contact extraction. Ensure proper tech setup. This includes email domain warm-up, authentication, and deliverability testing to make sure that your messages will reach the prospects’ inboxes and not get flagged as spam. Also, it’s a great idea to employ outreach automation tools (e.g. Reply) to streamline the whole process. Craft a perfect message. Once you’ve set up your infrastructure, you can go on and put your pitch together (we’ll get to that). And don’t forget about the follow-ups! Pick the right timing. It is also important to pick the right day and time for each step in your outreach sequence. Start with the proven “mid-week, mid-day” approach or get creative and experiment with different timing options to see what works best with your audience. Come up with a solid follow-up strategy. This includes the timing, frequency, outreach channels, as well as messaging. For the best results, don’t focus on a single channel, e.g. email, — use a mix of automated and manual touches across email, phone, and social media. That’s pretty much it. Once you’re done with the preparations, you can launch your campaign. However, this doesn’t mean you should sit there and wait for the leads to start coming in. Track your metrics, try to understand what works and what doesn’t, iterate and improve your strategy. The anatomy of a perfect cold sales email (including proven templates) Getting your message right across to the prospects is arguably the most challenging part of the whole outreach process. To make sure your cold emails hit the target, follow the proven framework when crafting your message. Namely, here are some essential elements of such an email you should include: Short and clear subject line: The first thing your prospect sees when your email lands in their inbox, it can either make or break your whole cold email marketing campaign. In fact, 47% of recipients will make the decision to open the message and 69% of them will report it as spam based on the subject line alone. Personalized intro for each prospect: Personalization is the cornerstone of an effective outreach campaign. By including a customized intro, you make your email look like it’s been sent to this prospect exclusively, with their problems and needs in mind. This can significantly boost both the click-through and response rates as well as your ROI. Value proposition: There are multiple ways to add value with your emails — e.g. from providing a spot-on solution to the prospect’s problems to including relevant content or personalized offer. Just make sure it doesn’t look selfish or too salesy. Call to action: The key here is to be very clear with your request and make it as easy as possible to do what you’re asking for. If it’s a call appointment — include a link to your calendar or offer a specific timeslot. If it’s a business inquiry, make it a yes/no question. Here’s an example of a cold sales email template we’ve used at Reply: Growing your sales team? Hi {FirstName}, I’m reaching out to you because I noticed that you are expanding your sales team at {Company}. I assume, as a {ProspectTitle}, you want your company’s sales to grow as well, so would you like an idea of boosting {Company}’s email outreach activities? Reply is designed for sales teams and helps them to grow their pipeline by using our platform to double their number of conversations with right-fit accounts and contacts by automating sales communications with existing and prospective clients while keeping them warm and personal. Are you available for a 10-minute call to see how we could help {Company}’s sales team? And here are the results we’ve seen from this email: This is only one example of effective cold email templates. You can use it as an inspiration and tailor to the specifics of your business and audience needs. For example, instead of hiring intent, you can refer to the technology they are using, recent acquisitions, locations they operate in, or even the person’s individual interests. Further reading: Here’s another list of proven cold email templates you can use. The DOs and DON’Ts of a successful cold outreach campaign Lastly, it is important to address a common concern regarding cold outreach. Many people avoid this tactic due to certain bias attached to it. Indeed, cold email outreach is often viewed as aggressive or annoying. But it doesn’t have to be that way! You can make your outreach effective and build lasting relationships with the prospect as long as you focus on the following aspects: Targeting: Do your homework and get to know your audience first. Having a clear understanding of who your prospects are will help you come up with an effective engagement strategy. Personalization: Avoid sounding generic at all costs and always make sure your offer is relevant and interesting to the people you address. Be it a simple {FirstName} variable in the intro or 100% custom message for each prospect, personalization is vital. Value: Before you ask for anything, offer value first. As mentioned above, there are many ways to do that, from including a clearly communicated solution to the prospect’s problem to sharing interesting and insightful content. On top of that, there are some common mistakes you need to avoid at all costs, including: Misleading subject lines: They might slightly increase your open rate at first, yet, they also can get you flagged for spam. Needless to say how bad such a strategy can be for your brand image, and you definitely can’t expect to make a sale by lying to your prospects. Giving up after just one follow-up: This is the most common (and most harmful) cold outreach mistake most businesses make. If you are afraid to come off as annoying, rethink your strategy but don’t underestimate the power of follow-ups. Each contact with the prospect increases your chances to hear back from them. Pitching: Another typical fear that many SDRs have is to come off as too aggressive or salesy in your cold emails. The best way to avoid this is to refrain from pitching your product in the first email. Focus on establishing a connection instead. Ignore cold outreach at your own peril To pin down everything that has been said above: Cold emailing is an extremely multi-purpose growth tactic that is, however, often overlooked by startups. It CAN be effective, but only if done right — following best practices and proven tactics is a must if you want to reach your goals with cold outreach. Despite that, this tactic also offers room for experiments. A/B testing is a great way to see which approaches have the best outcomes and improve your tactic. If you are still hesitant to try cold email marketing, start small: reach out to 100 prospects, pitch your content to 10 online resources, contact at least one related business to inquire about partnerships. This won’t take too much of your time but can help you see what business opportunities you might be missing out on. After all, the only way to grow your startup is through trial and error.

<sys> [INST] Driving Startup Growth With Cold Outreach: Use Cases And Best Practices [/INST] The road from a small startup to a sustainable business is a bumpy one. And it invariably goes through growth. To survive the first five years (which only half of all companies do) and get profitable, your startup needs to grow at a proper pace. A bootstrapped startup, we’ve been through the ups and downs of business growth. We’ve tried different tactics and experimented with dozens of approaches. But there’s one method — the one that is usually off-radar for most startups — which, however, has been particularly useful on our road to sustainable growth as a company. It’s cold outreach. In this article, we will explore the 5 cold emailing use cases as well as share some pro tips on how to make it work for your startup. An introduction to cold outreach Before we dive into the details, I want to explain what I mean by “cold outreach” and how it works in a nutshell. So, let’s start with that. What is a cold email anyway? Who hasn’t heard about cold calling? This notorious telemarketing tactic (that many now claim to be dead) has been in widespread use for the last few decades. A cold call was usually initiated by a sales rep who, out of a blue sky, reached out to a potential buyer via phone and tried to talk them into purchasing their product or service. However, things have changed as email and social networks became the dominant means for business communication. Cold outreach is a modern twist to the traditional outbound sales tactic which, however, has certain differences: Modern-day cold outreach focuses on the quality of prospects rather than their quantity. Instead of mass emailing thousands of random contacts from a list you’ve bought online, more sales teams hand-pick the right prospects based on their buyer personas. Personalization is everything! One size fits all approach with a generic call script doesn’t work anymore – you need to tailor your messaging and follow-up strategy to the specific audience you are targeting. It doesn’t rely on a single outreach channel, i.e. voice calls, anymore. The “triple touch” approach, including phone, email, and LinkedIn, is now widely used for prospecting (with chats and AI bots expected to follow soon). In fact, using three or more channels in your campaign can result in a 287% higher purchase rate. Cold outreach: a perfect addition to your startup growth strategy or a waste of time? Cold email outreach as a strategy poses a number of challenges for sales reps. First of all, considering that your audience doesn’t know you yet it might be difficult to get their attention. Secondly, in case of email or social media contact, there’s no immediate verbal feedback from your recipients so you can’t alter your approach on the go (as with voice or video calls). On the other hand, this tactic can offer lots of benefits to a startup, including: Low investment: If you research the contacts manually, all you need is an email account to get started. The only investment you might want to consider at this stage is a reliable software platform to automate your outreach to some extent. Scalability: Thanks to the automation tools mentioned above, the whole outreach process is very easy to scale. To ramp up your sales, all you need to do is add more contacts to your list or create more campaigns targeting different audience segments. Predictable results: Once you’ve found the right approach, cold outreach can become a pretty reliable source of leads (as you can have several campaigns running in the background non-stop). Also, cold outreach can be pretty effective. My team knows it firsthand — we’ve been doing it since day one in business. We still have a dedicated SDR team working full-time to attract more high-quality leads. The efforts have been paying off pretty well: we see on average 60-80% open rate and 10-20% response rate: And here’s a snapshot of one of our latest campaigns: But the best part about cold outreach is that it is a universal startup growth tool — sales prospecting is only one area of application for this tactic. There are other ways to use it, from marketing to recruitment and networking. So, let’s take a closer look at each one of these use cases. 5 ways cold email outreach can drive your startup growth There are many aspects of healthy startup growth: from increasing the number of customers and revenue to scaling the team and product portfolio or launching in other markets. And, while there are dozens of tactics to explore, only one of them can be used to tackle most of the growth aspects — it’s cold outreach. Here are some of the ways cold outreach can come in handy when growing your startup. Sales development Outbound sales represent the default use case for cold outreach for a number of reasons we’ve mentioned above. When you need to ramp up your startup sales, proactively reaching out to the prospects might be the only way to quickly get some leads into your pipeline. And even if a prospect churns, you can still use cold outreach as a way to source first-hand market knowledge and validate your product. After all, asking for advice or feedback is a much better cold email marketing strategy than pitching your product right away (we will get to that later). Networking Your network is arguably the most important business asset. Aside from bringing in more leads through the word of mouth (which is one of the most powerful marketing tactics), you can use it to connect with fellow startup owners. From seeking mentorship or expert advice, inquiring about cross-promotion opportunities or inviting them to your affiliate program to building long-term strategic partnerships with other businesses, there are many ways networking outreach can help your startup grow. Also, unlike sales outreach, networking emails tend to have a higher success rate (up to 96% according to Hubspot). Marketing Apart from networking, you should also consider establishing connections with media or reputable industry resources. Whether it’s a new product launch, exciting partnership, or simply a startup story that is worth sharing, cold emailing is a great way to spread the word and get some press coverage. Cold email outreach can also be used as an effective link building tactic (Update: here’s another great resource on link building). If your content is noteworthy, i.e. unique, insightful, and valuable, other websites will be happy to share it (or at least link to it in their publications, which is still great for SEO). Recruiting Getting the right people to work on your startup is just as important as building a solid sales pipeline. However, staffing a startup can be a real challenge, especially if you need to build a team from scratch. Cold outreach can become your secret startup recruitment weapon, whether you’re looking for the best engineers or trying to attract experienced co-founders (just like we did). After all, people who are not actively looking for a job might still consider your offer if you use an effective recruiting email that resonates with them. Fundraising If you’re going to reach out to perfect candidates and potential business partners, why not try sending cold emails to investors as well? This use case isn’t too different from the previous ones — it takes the right person and the right message that you send at the right time but there’s also a chance to raise some startup funding. Even if they don’t fund your startup, they might share some advice, refer you to other investors, or even become your advisor which is still an amazing result. In any case, it’s better than sitting around and waiting for the investors to come around. How to make your cold emails work: a hands-on manual While cold outreach isn’t rocket science, it still takes certain preparations to get started and reach the desired outcomes. Here are the most important aspects of the cold outreach campaign setup and some proven tactics to make it work. Getting started with cold outreach Build a list. There are two ways to do that: manually hand-pick the best prospects using email finder tools like Name2Email use trusted B2B databases like ZoomInfo or Uplead for bulk contact extraction. Ensure proper tech setup. This includes email domain warm-up, authentication, and deliverability testing to make sure that your messages will reach the prospects’ inboxes and not get flagged as spam. Also, it’s a great idea to employ outreach automation tools (e.g. Reply) to streamline the whole process. Craft a perfect message. Once you’ve set up your infrastructure, you can go on and put your pitch together (we’ll get to that). And don’t forget about the follow-ups! Pick the right timing. It is also important to pick the right day and time for each step in your outreach sequence. Start with the proven “mid-week, mid-day” approach or get creative and experiment with different timing options to see what works best with your audience. Come up with a solid follow-up strategy. This includes the timing, frequency, outreach channels, as well as messaging. For the best results, don’t focus on a single channel, e.g. email, — use a mix of automated and manual touches across email, phone, and social media. That’s pretty much it. Once you’re done with the preparations, you can launch your campaign. However, this doesn’t mean you should sit there and wait for the leads to start coming in. Track your metrics, try to understand what works and what doesn’t, iterate and improve your strategy. The anatomy of a perfect cold sales email (including proven templates) Getting your message right across to the prospects is arguably the most challenging part of the whole outreach process. To make sure your cold emails hit the target, follow the proven framework when crafting your message. Namely, here are some essential elements of such an email you should include: Short and clear subject line: The first thing your prospect sees when your email lands in their inbox, it can either make or break your whole cold email marketing campaign. In fact, 47% of recipients will make the decision to open the message and 69% of them will report it as spam based on the subject line alone. Personalized intro for each prospect: Personalization is the cornerstone of an effective outreach campaign. By including a customized intro, you make your email look like it’s been sent to this prospect exclusively, with their problems and needs in mind. This can significantly boost both the click-through and response rates as well as your ROI. Value proposition: There are multiple ways to add value with your emails — e.g. from providing a spot-on solution to the prospect’s problems to including relevant content or personalized offer. Just make sure it doesn’t look selfish or too salesy. Call to action: The key here is to be very clear with your request and make it as easy as possible to do what you’re asking for. If it’s a call appointment — include a link to your calendar or offer a specific timeslot. If it’s a business inquiry, make it a yes/no question. Here’s an example of a cold sales email template we’ve used at Reply: Growing your sales team? Hi {FirstName}, I’m reaching out to you because I noticed that you are expanding your sales team at {Company}. I assume, as a {ProspectTitle}, you want your company’s sales to grow as well, so would you like an idea of boosting {Company}’s email outreach activities? Reply is designed for sales teams and helps them to grow their pipeline by using our platform to double their number of conversations with right-fit accounts and contacts by automating sales communications with existing and prospective clients while keeping them warm and personal. Are you available for a 10-minute call to see how we could help {Company}’s sales team? And here are the results we’ve seen from this email: This is only one example of effective cold email templates. You can use it as an inspiration and tailor to the specifics of your business and audience needs. For example, instead of hiring intent, you can refer to the technology they are using, recent acquisitions, locations they operate in, or even the person’s individual interests. Further reading: Here’s another list of proven cold email templates you can use. The DOs and DON’Ts of a successful cold outreach campaign Lastly, it is important to address a common concern regarding cold outreach. Many people avoid this tactic due to certain bias attached to it. Indeed, cold email outreach is often viewed as aggressive or annoying. But it doesn’t have to be that way! You can make your outreach effective and build lasting relationships with the prospect as long as you focus on the following aspects: Targeting: Do your homework and get to know your audience first. Having a clear understanding of who your prospects are will help you come up with an effective engagement strategy. Personalization: Avoid sounding generic at all costs and always make sure your offer is relevant and interesting to the people you address. Be it a simple {FirstName} variable in the intro or 100% custom message for each prospect, personalization is vital. Value: Before you ask for anything, offer value first. As mentioned above, there are many ways to do that, from including a clearly communicated solution to the prospect’s problem to sharing interesting and insightful content. On top of that, there are some common mistakes you need to avoid at all costs, including: Misleading subject lines: They might slightly increase your open rate at first, yet, they also can get you flagged for spam. Needless to say how bad such a strategy can be for your brand image, and you definitely can’t expect to make a sale by lying to your prospects. Giving up after just one follow-up: This is the most common (and most harmful) cold outreach mistake most businesses make. If you are afraid to come off as annoying, rethink your strategy but don’t underestimate the power of follow-ups. Each contact with the prospect increases your chances to hear back from them. Pitching: Another typical fear that many SDRs have is to come off as too aggressive or salesy in your cold emails. The best way to avoid this is to refrain from pitching your product in the first email. Focus on establishing a connection instead. Ignore cold outreach at your own peril To pin down everything that has been said above: Cold emailing is an extremely multi-purpose growth tactic that is, however, often overlooked by startups. It CAN be effective, but only if done right — following best practices and proven tactics is a must if you want to reach your goals with cold outreach. Despite that, this tactic also offers room for experiments. A/B testing is a great way to see which approaches have the best outcomes and improve your tactic. If you are still hesitant to try cold email marketing, start small: reach out to 100 prospects, pitch your content to 10 online resources, contact at least one related business to inquire about partnerships. This won’t take too much of your time but can help you see what business opportunities you might be missing out on. After all, the only way to grow your startup is through trial and error. </sys

SaaS Q&A: How much should you spend on customer support?. Consider how crucial customer success and retention are to SaaS growth and profitability. If your customer support system can help keep a customer happy, engaged, and onboard — and keep that revenue recurring — then the money invested in customer support is worth it. Of course it’s also worth it to keep your customer support lean and efficient. What’s normal? There’s likely not such a thing as a “typical amount” that SaaS companies spend on support. SaaS companies are all different in terms of their size and product offering, as well as the volume and complexity of the questions they receive. The most useful answer would probably be some comparison between companies as to what percentage of expenditure goes to customer support, though it’s unclear where this data is available. As a point of reference, though, Totango recommends spending 1 to 2 percent of revenue on customer success programs. Whether customer support falls under the larger umbrella of customer success in your organization, and how you prioritize those two programs, factors into how you might budget for customer support specifically. Other factors that impact your customer support budget are below… followed by some ideas to help lower those costs, too. Here are some of the main factors determining customer support costs: If real-time channels such as live chat and voice are offered or just email (voice is more expensive than email). The volume of incoming requests. The complexity of incoming requests. The location of the company and its support team: real estate, salaries, all of the costs impacted by the cost of living in a particular city. And here are a number of ways to reduce customer support costs: Track the most frequently asked questions. Then make changes to your product or website so people don’t need to ask the questions in the first place. e.g.- Put information directly on the corresponding page, change UI so the next step is more intuitive, etc. This makes for happier customers, too! Make support self-service. If it isn’t possible to make a question obsolete through product/site improvements, then add the answer to your FAQs/knowledge base. Maintaining a thorough, accurate FAQ is key — most customers would rather find the answer on their own than take the time to contact a support member. Design your site so that users must search your FAQ/knowledge base before submitting a support request. This tactic is known as “ticket deflection” or “case deflection”. Maintain an up-to-date library of canned responses to common questions that you support staff can have at-the-ready. This keeps the team more efficient. (If your team uses real-time channels such as live online chat and phone calls, have them send these canned responses as follow-up emails to the customer, too. This reinforces the answer and hopefully the customer will absorb the information better.) You could move all or part of your support operation to a lower cost region. E.g. the midwest United States, or even SE Asia (for really low cost). This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How much do SaaS companies typically spend on customer support? Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul: #SaaS Q&A: How much should you spend on customer support? https://t.co/BApUbxfCzA pic.twitter.com/JkJAkpjf0N — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) March 31, 2016

[INST] SaaS Q&A: How much should you spend on customer support? [/INST]

Consider how crucial customer success and retention are to SaaS growth and profitability. If your customer support system can help keep a customer happy, engaged, and onboard — and keep that revenue recurring — then the money invested in customer support is worth it. Of course it’s also worth it to keep your customer support lean and efficient. What’s normal? There’s likely not such a thing as a “typical amount” that SaaS companies spend on support. SaaS companies are all different in terms of their size and product offering, as well as the volume and complexity of the questions they receive. The most useful answer would probably be some comparison between companies as to what percentage of expenditure goes to customer support, though it’s unclear where this data is available. As a point of reference, though, Totango recommends spending 1 to 2 percent of revenue on customer success programs. Whether customer support falls under the larger umbrella of customer success in your organization, and how you prioritize those two programs, factors into how you might budget for customer support specifically. Other factors that impact your customer support budget are below… followed by some ideas to help lower those costs, too. Here are some of the main factors determining customer support costs: If real-time channels such as live chat and voice are offered or just email (voice is more expensive than email). The volume of incoming requests. The complexity of incoming requests. The location of the company and its support team: real estate, salaries, all of the costs impacted by the cost of living in a particular city. And here are a number of ways to reduce customer support costs: Track the most frequently asked questions. Then make changes to your product or website so people don’t need to ask the questions in the first place. e.g.- Put information directly on the corresponding page, change UI so the next step is more intuitive, etc. This makes for happier customers, too! Make support self-service. If it isn’t possible to make a question obsolete through product/site improvements, then add the answer to your FAQs/knowledge base. Maintaining a thorough, accurate FAQ is key — most customers would rather find the answer on their own than take the time to contact a support member. Design your site so that users must search your FAQ/knowledge base before submitting a support request. This tactic is known as “ticket deflection” or “case deflection”. Maintain an up-to-date library of canned responses to common questions that you support staff can have at-the-ready. This keeps the team more efficient. (If your team uses real-time channels such as live online chat and phone calls, have them send these canned responses as follow-up emails to the customer, too. This reinforces the answer and hopefully the customer will absorb the information better.) You could move all or part of your support operation to a lower cost region. E.g. the midwest United States, or even SE Asia (for really low cost). This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How much do SaaS companies typically spend on customer support? Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul: #SaaS Q&A: How much should you spend on customer support? https://t.co/BApUbxfCzA pic.twitter.com/JkJAkpjf0N — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) March 31, 2016

<sys> [INST] SaaS Q&A: How much should you spend on customer support? [/INST] Consider how crucial customer success and retention are to SaaS growth and profitability. If your customer support system can help keep a customer happy, engaged, and onboard — and keep that revenue recurring — then the money invested in customer support is worth it. Of course it’s also worth it to keep your customer support lean and efficient. What’s normal? There’s likely not such a thing as a “typical amount” that SaaS companies spend on support. SaaS companies are all different in terms of their size and product offering, as well as the volume and complexity of the questions they receive. The most useful answer would probably be some comparison between companies as to what percentage of expenditure goes to customer support, though it’s unclear where this data is available. As a point of reference, though, Totango recommends spending 1 to 2 percent of revenue on customer success programs. Whether customer support falls under the larger umbrella of customer success in your organization, and how you prioritize those two programs, factors into how you might budget for customer support specifically. Other factors that impact your customer support budget are below… followed by some ideas to help lower those costs, too. Here are some of the main factors determining customer support costs: If real-time channels such as live chat and voice are offered or just email (voice is more expensive than email). The volume of incoming requests. The complexity of incoming requests. The location of the company and its support team: real estate, salaries, all of the costs impacted by the cost of living in a particular city. And here are a number of ways to reduce customer support costs: Track the most frequently asked questions. Then make changes to your product or website so people don’t need to ask the questions in the first place. e.g.- Put information directly on the corresponding page, change UI so the next step is more intuitive, etc. This makes for happier customers, too! Make support self-service. If it isn’t possible to make a question obsolete through product/site improvements, then add the answer to your FAQs/knowledge base. Maintaining a thorough, accurate FAQ is key — most customers would rather find the answer on their own than take the time to contact a support member. Design your site so that users must search your FAQ/knowledge base before submitting a support request. This tactic is known as “ticket deflection” or “case deflection”. Maintain an up-to-date library of canned responses to common questions that you support staff can have at-the-ready. This keeps the team more efficient. (If your team uses real-time channels such as live online chat and phone calls, have them send these canned responses as follow-up emails to the customer, too. This reinforces the answer and hopefully the customer will absorb the information better.) You could move all or part of your support operation to a lower cost region. E.g. the midwest United States, or even SE Asia (for really low cost). This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How much do SaaS companies typically spend on customer support? Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul: #SaaS Q&A: How much should you spend on customer support? https://t.co/BApUbxfCzA pic.twitter.com/JkJAkpjf0N — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) March 31, 2016 </sys

Replace Your Sales-Led Motions with Product-Led Growth. The SaaS industry is growing, and people’s expectations around purchasing software are changing. There is a desire and an ability to get into a product without ever needing to talk to anyone. Companies that have been sales-led in the past are now moving in a more product-led direction. They allow potential customers to experience the product straight away on a free plan or a trial, without the intervention of a sales rep. On this week’s podcast, I talk with Esben Friis-Jensen, co-founder of Userflow and Cobalt.io, about moving away from direct sales, and enabling product-led growth instead. About the episode Userflow lets your team build customized in-app tours, checklists and surveys, without code. It’s a tool to help drive onboarding and trial conversions. It was a conscious choice of the Userflow team to focus on product-led growth from day one. They try to avoid hiring people to solve problems and look into improving the product instead. If you’re product-led, your entire organization revolves around making the product drive growth. Esben recently wrote about product-led growth (PLG) and defined it as an approach where you think product-first, instead of people-first. The easiest way to explain product-led growth is to look at the opposite, sales-led growth, where you involve people in every single step of the sales process. Product-led means that you put the product in the hands of the customers. Esben Friis-Jensen, Userflow To move away from sales-led growth at his previous company Cobalt, Esben started with a spreadsheet of all manual processes. He was going through them one by one asking himself how to automate them or turn them into self-service. If your business is moving from sales-led to product-led, then it’s a big change management exercise. Don’t do everything at once. Do an MVP, iterate, and learn. Esben Friis-Jensen, Userflow Overall, Esben and I talk about: What is product-led growth and what is the difference between product-led and sales-led growth The SaaS industry maturing into PLG How too much customization can make it harder to move away from sales-led motions Examining if PLG is working within a company How to tackle support questions proactively The best tools for product-led growth Hope you enjoy this SaaS Open Mic episode!

[INST] Replace Your Sales-Led Motions with Product-Led Growth [/INST]

The SaaS industry is growing, and people’s expectations around purchasing software are changing. There is a desire and an ability to get into a product without ever needing to talk to anyone. Companies that have been sales-led in the past are now moving in a more product-led direction. They allow potential customers to experience the product straight away on a free plan or a trial, without the intervention of a sales rep. On this week’s podcast, I talk with Esben Friis-Jensen, co-founder of Userflow and Cobalt.io, about moving away from direct sales, and enabling product-led growth instead. About the episode Userflow lets your team build customized in-app tours, checklists and surveys, without code. It’s a tool to help drive onboarding and trial conversions. It was a conscious choice of the Userflow team to focus on product-led growth from day one. They try to avoid hiring people to solve problems and look into improving the product instead. If you’re product-led, your entire organization revolves around making the product drive growth. Esben recently wrote about product-led growth (PLG) and defined it as an approach where you think product-first, instead of people-first. The easiest way to explain product-led growth is to look at the opposite, sales-led growth, where you involve people in every single step of the sales process. Product-led means that you put the product in the hands of the customers. Esben Friis-Jensen, Userflow To move away from sales-led growth at his previous company Cobalt, Esben started with a spreadsheet of all manual processes. He was going through them one by one asking himself how to automate them or turn them into self-service. If your business is moving from sales-led to product-led, then it’s a big change management exercise. Don’t do everything at once. Do an MVP, iterate, and learn. Esben Friis-Jensen, Userflow Overall, Esben and I talk about: What is product-led growth and what is the difference between product-led and sales-led growth The SaaS industry maturing into PLG How too much customization can make it harder to move away from sales-led motions Examining if PLG is working within a company How to tackle support questions proactively The best tools for product-led growth Hope you enjoy this SaaS Open Mic episode!

<sys> [INST] Replace Your Sales-Led Motions with Product-Led Growth [/INST] The SaaS industry is growing, and people’s expectations around purchasing software are changing. There is a desire and an ability to get into a product without ever needing to talk to anyone. Companies that have been sales-led in the past are now moving in a more product-led direction. They allow potential customers to experience the product straight away on a free plan or a trial, without the intervention of a sales rep. On this week’s podcast, I talk with Esben Friis-Jensen, co-founder of Userflow and Cobalt.io, about moving away from direct sales, and enabling product-led growth instead. About the episode Userflow lets your team build customized in-app tours, checklists and surveys, without code. It’s a tool to help drive onboarding and trial conversions. It was a conscious choice of the Userflow team to focus on product-led growth from day one. They try to avoid hiring people to solve problems and look into improving the product instead. If you’re product-led, your entire organization revolves around making the product drive growth. Esben recently wrote about product-led growth (PLG) and defined it as an approach where you think product-first, instead of people-first. The easiest way to explain product-led growth is to look at the opposite, sales-led growth, where you involve people in every single step of the sales process. Product-led means that you put the product in the hands of the customers. Esben Friis-Jensen, Userflow To move away from sales-led growth at his previous company Cobalt, Esben started with a spreadsheet of all manual processes. He was going through them one by one asking himself how to automate them or turn them into self-service. If your business is moving from sales-led to product-led, then it’s a big change management exercise. Don’t do everything at once. Do an MVP, iterate, and learn. Esben Friis-Jensen, Userflow Overall, Esben and I talk about: What is product-led growth and what is the difference between product-led and sales-led growth The SaaS industry maturing into PLG How too much customization can make it harder to move away from sales-led motions Examining if PLG is working within a company How to tackle support questions proactively The best tools for product-led growth Hope you enjoy this SaaS Open Mic episode! </sys

Bootstrap vs VC Funding: These 4 Factors Can Help Determine Which Path Is Right for You. There’s been quite a bit of debate on Twitter recently about bootstrapping vs VC funding. While it’s been an interesting (and often heated) debate, there’s one main problem with it: It presents bootstrapping vs VC funding as a choice that founders make based on their personal desires. As if it’s a 50/50 call. However, I don’t believe that’s the case. Instead, I think there is a multitude of factors (ranging from product, company, founding team, market, etc.) that largely determine which path is right for you and your software business. In this article, we’ll look at why the choice of bootstrapping vs VC funding could be the single most important choice you make in your business as well as some of the factors that can help you determine which path is the right one for you. Why bootstrapping vs VC could be the single most important decision you make In Moz Founder Rand Fishkin’s brilliantly open and honest book Lost and Founder, he uses an example VC fund called “Scorpio Ventures” to outline some of the fundamentals of how venture capital firms work. Scorpio Ventures goes out to a series of limited partners (LPs) and pitches their ability to pick great startups. They raise a $400 million fund. Typically, LP’s would expect a 3-4x return on their investment over the course of a decade in order to make it worthwhile and effectively ‘beat the market’ (I.e. get a greater return than the 8-10% annual growth they’d get putting their money into public stocks, bonds, etc). This means that in 10 years’ time, Scorpio has to return about $1.2 billion to its investors in order to be considered successful. With his new money in the bank, Scorpio comes along and invests in your company, Globex Corporation. They invest $15 million at a $45 million valuation, taking 33% of the company. You use this money and grow like rocketship over the next 5 years. The next thing you know, industry giant Burns, Inc. offers you a whopping $450 million for the company. As the founder, you’re ecstatic. You stand to make almost $300 million. Enough to buy a waterfront house with a yacht and enjoy the rest of your life with your family & friends. However, while you’re having the best day of your life, Scorpio Ventures is having its worst. Although they stand to make about $150 million from the deal (10X their original investment), your company, Globex, was one of their most promising investments, and this amount won’t be anywhere near the $1.2 billion they need to get to in order to deliver the 3X they promised their LPs. Now you’re in a sticky position: You want to take the money and spend more time with your family, but Scorpio Ventures is pushing you to reject the offer. And because the investment terms give them veto rights over any transaction, you’re now in a position where you’ve built an amazing business, have a huge offer on the table, and want to get out, but can’t. All because years ago you took VC funding. While this fable might seem a bit hyperbolic, it’s reflective of how the venture capital business works and shows that taking funding from them could literally be one of the most consequential decisions of your life and career. 4 Factors to consider when choosing to bootstrap or raise Now that you fully understand the importance of the decision, let’s next look at a few factors you should consider when deciding which path to go down. There are four key factors to evaluate when choosing to bootstrap or to seek funding, and each has a number of considerations. 1. Market: Size, competition, and maturity The market you are entering (who you are targeting, existing competition, maturity, etc.) is a key factor in determining whether to bootstrap or not. Total addressable market How big is the market opportunity you are going after? Is it big enough that if you were to take a portion of it you could generate tens of millions in revenue? Or is it a small niche market that could likely only generate your business $1-2 million in revenue? A good example of this is Shaperbase, an order management app for surfboard shapers. Most estimates put the number of surfboard shapers in the world at 1,000-2,000. With a price point that varies from $20-$100 per month, the reality for this business is that even if they were to somehow take 100% of the market, the maximum revenue they could really make is around $1 million ARR. While this would make a wonderful bootstrapped business with two or three employees, it’s not going to be compatible with the business model of a VC. So when considering whether to start pitching investors, think about what the total addressable market is for your business and whether or not it’s going to be big enough to be interesting to investors. Competition How much competition is there in the market? And have they taken funding? If so, how much and what stage? If you have a number of competitors who have taken venture-backed funding, then they’re going to be using their considerable financial war chests to grow. They’ll be outbidding you on Google Ads, showing Facebook ads to all of your potential customers, and they’ll have bigger booths and presences at industry events. Over time, this generally means they’ll outgrow you. They’ll build a bigger brand, network effects and virality will snowball, and they’ll take the market. A good example of this is Saasu, an online accounting application you’ve likely never heard of. They were very early to the online accounting game (a full six years before Xero, in fact.) For a long time, they had a comparable (or even better) product. However, while SaaSu bootstrapped their business took, Xero went out and raised $680 million in funding over nine rounds and used this funding to accelerate their growth and product development. They did TV and out-of-home ads, they ran huge conferences across the world, and they built a huge network of accountants who love their product and refer their clients. Ultimately, Xero became a global SaaS behemoth with over $550 million in revenue, 2,500+ employees and a $12 billion valuation. Saasu, on the other hand, is still a small business with around 20 employees. When thinking about taking VC funding, consider what your competitors are doing and whether you need the funding to match their spending on growth. Tweet this quote Maturity How mature is the market for your product? Is it a well-known market category like email marketing software, or are you trying to create a new one, like Inbound Marketing? Generally speaking, if you’re trying to build a new market it’s going to be difficult to do without VC funding, as it takes a lot of money and resources to educate people on why they need the category of product (let alone your product specifically.) Hubspot is a good example of this. They famously created the category of Inbound Marketing, but it wasn’t cheap to do. They raised over $100 million from venture capitalists and used that considerable war chest to promote inbound marketing as a ‘new’ way of doing marketing. They created a conference, an academy, free tools, tens of thousands of blog posts and hundreds of eBooks. At one point, their content team included 50 people with multiple blog post writers and editors, a podcast team, a video team, a co-marketing team, and more. As such, it’s worth considering the market maturity when making your decision about VC funding vs bootstrap. If you need to build the market in order to grow your business (rather than just capturing existing demand), then you’re likely going to need some outside funding to do it. Tweet this quote 2. Resources: Current capacity, resellers, and partners The resources you have at your disposal should be another key factor in determining whether venture capital or bootstrapping is the right path for you. Here’s what you need to think about when it comes to your resources. Current team resources What does your current team look like? Do you have skills and experience in both product and go-to-market? Salesforce Co-Founder Marc Benioff once said: Great companies are at the intersection of a great product and a great go-to-market strategy. Tweet this quote That’s the truth: It’s hard to build a great SaaS company if you only have product/development capacity and no experience in go-to-market functions like marketing, sales, and customer success. Simul Docs, a version control and collaboration tool for Microsoft Word documents, is fortunate to have both sides on their founding team. My co-founder Ben has extensive development experience (having most recently been a Senior Engineer at Canva), while I have extensive go-to-market experience having led sales and marketing teams at multiple SaaS unicorns (including InVision and Campaign Monitor.) Because of this, it’s much more possible for us to go down the bootstrap route because even with our small founding team, we have the experience needed to develop, market, sell and support the product. So when you’re considering bootstrapping vs VC, look around and see what skills you already have within your team (and whether that’s enough to achieve what you’re hoping to achieve.) If not, you’ll either need enough revenue to hire out that expertise, or it might make more sense to take venture capital so you can access the expertise you need to reach your objectives. Availability of resellers/partners If you don’t have the required skills in-house, are there partners or resellers that you could lean on to bring them to the table? Mandoe, an Australian digital signage software company, didn’t have all of the necessary resources in-house when it first started, so it sold its product exclusively through Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. Mandoe focused on creating a great product while Telstra’s army of thousands of salespeople across the country sold its product to the beauty salons, retail stores, and cafes to whom they already provided telephone and internet services. It was a successful strategy for Mandoe: It fueled growth to a rumored $50 million acquisition. The lesson here: If you don’t have the resources and expertise in-house to handle certain parts of development or go-to-market functions before you start looking at venture capital, it’s worth considering whether or not there are strategic partners or resellers you could leverage. 3. Go-to-market model: Channels & conversions The go-to-market model you use also has a significant impact on your bootstrap vs VC decision. As you weigh the factors in this arena, be sure to consider your channels and conversion model. Channels What channels are available to you to attract potential customers to your product? Are there low-cost channels like SEO and virality, or is it going to be more events, paid marketing, sponsorships, etc.? Qwilr, a SaaS product for making proposals and quotes as beautiful web pages (rather than boring PDFs), is a product that has a huge potential SEO channel. The product has a number of templates like a Business Proposal Template or a Sales Proposal Template within the product, and they’ve created landing pages for each of those templates which rank within Google results. Some basic keyword research suggests there are over 250,000 searches per month for these template terms (i.e. business proposal template), which is a huge amount of people searching for something similar to what Qwilr offers. As a result, they can tap into this audience to drive new signups and customers at a low cost. However, if low-cost channels aren’t available to you (i.e. because there’s not a lot of search volume), then you may need to look at higher-cost channels like events, which require capital to do well. When you’re deciding to go the VC or bootstrapped route, consider what channels you might use to get your product in the hands of potential customers. If it seems like there are low-cost options that could have enough volume to help reach your goals, you may be able to do it without a huge amount of capital. However, if your channels are all paid (i.e. advertising, events, sponsorships, etc.) then it’s likely you’re going to need some capital to pay for those more expensive acquisition channels. Conversion model How do you convert people interested in your product into paying customers? Do you have a self-service product where people sign up and pay using their credit cards within the product, or do you primarily convert people through a sales team? Generally speaking, self-service businesses are cheaper to scale in the early days and likely more fitting to a bootstrapped path. Many successful bootstrapped companies (including Zoho, Basecamp, MailChimp, and Aweber) are primarily self-service. Launchpad6, a company I previously founded, made a video CMS product that companies used to create their own video sites. We used an inside sales model to sell the product and then had a Customer Success team that helped with the implementation of the site. The problem was: With just two people in the founding team, I was in charge of marketing, sales, and customer success. After we signed a contract with a new customer, I’d spend weeks bogged down in overseeing the implementation and would dedicate zero time to bringing in new customers through sales and marketing activities. If we’d taken VC funding, we would have been able to hire a few more people and dedicate them to each function — and as result, we would have been able to grow and scale the company more. When thinking about your bootstrapped vs VC path, consider the resources you need to build the sales and marketing machine that will drive your revenue growth. If you have a self-serve model, it’s likely you can achieve some scale with fewer resources, but if your product requires people to market, sell, and then implement the tool, it’s likely you’ll need to hire dedicated team members who can get the machine humming. That costs money. 4. Product: Adoption cycle & roadmap Aspects of the product you sell also have a significant impact on your bootstrapped vs VC decision, so before you make the call, be sure you’ve thought through the product-related aspects of the equation. Adoption cycle What does it take to get started using your product? Is it as simple as uploading a document (like Dropbox, for instance)? Or do customers need to do a full company-wide implementation of your product (i.e. HR software like Gusto or Bamboo HR)? Earlier we talked about the effect your go-to-market model has on your decision and how self-serve business can often scale with fewer people. However, even self-serve businesses have different adoption cycles. For instance, if you look at the standard self-service funnel, it typically looks something like: Signup: The moment when a person signs up for an account Activation: The moment a person completes an action where they see the value your product provides Subscribe: The moment a person upgrades their account to become a paying customer Depending on the nature of your product, the signup to activation rates can vary dramatically. In the case of Simul Docs (the aforementioned version control tool for Microsoft Word), all a user needed to do was to upload a Word document, open it, and make a change. The software then automatically creates a new version — which is when the user realizes the value of the product. Because it’s only three quick steps, the activation rate is around 30%. However, for more complex products (like Shopify, for instance) the process of getting started is much more complex. In order to launch a store, you’d have to create your account, upload products, set prices, set up shipping options, connect payment providers, etc. With so many required actions, the activation rate is likely much lower. This then gives you two options: You either need to have huge volumes at the top of your funnel in order to overcome low activation rates, OR you need Customer Success and Support employees to help users reach the activation point. Both cost money. When thinking about bootstrapping vs taking VC, consider how easy it is to adopt your product and what that would mean for your funnel metrics and unit economics. Roadmap No product is ever complete, but some are likely a lot closer to their vision than others. How far along are you in your product roadmap? Are there still outstanding features that your product still needs to have to be considered viable, or is it quite mature already? Qwilr, the previously mentioned tool for creating proposals as beautiful webpages, is an interesting example of how the maturity of the roadmap can change as the target market changes. Originally built for smaller businesses and freelancers to help them win more work by sending better-looking proposals, the early product was at a mature stage with a solid editor for building proposals — complete with hundreds of templates, digital signatures, payments, and more. It had everything a freelancer or small business would need to send great proposals and win more work. However, as larger organizations started to use the product, the roadmap extended. Larger organizations needed features small businesses and freelancers didn’t (like collaborative editing of proposals so multiple people can work on them at the same time, or integrations with enterprise-level CRMs such as Salesforce.) As a result, the company built out a team of product managers, designers, and engineers dedicated to designing and building these features in order to better serve the needs of larger customers. The lesson: When thinking about whether or not to go down the VC path, consider not just what your roadmap might look like now and where you need to get the product to for your current market, but where you might need to get it for future markets as well. When thinking about whether or not to go down the VC path, consider not just what your roadmap might look like now, but where you might need to get it for future markets as well. Tweet this quote The forgotten 5th factor: Desire If you’re running a software company, it’s likely that you read a lot of content and opinions from VC’s. This is a good thing, as the likes of Jason Lemkin, Tomas Tunguz, Christoph Janz, David Skok and the rest of them have produced some amazing content over the years that has genuinely progressed the knowledge and understanding that we all have of the SaaS business model. However, if you’ve spent enough time reading these posts, you’ve likely been led to believe that the only definition of success is creating a billion-dollar company (or a Unicorn as they’ve named it). This just simply isn’t true. As Basecamp Co-Founder David Heinemeier Hansson points out in this Twitter thread, building a billion-dollar company isn’t the only definition of success. Basecamp founder DHH does not mince his words when it comes to VCs Despite what VC’s will have you believe, it’s actually perfectly fine to want to build a smaller, profitable business that allows you to enjoy a good but modest lifestyle, appropriate work/life balance, more time with family, etc. So when thinking about whether you want to take on VC funding, think about what you want your life and your company to look like. Do you want to build a large company with hundreds of employees, working long hours in an attempt to turn it into a Unicorn in 10 years’ time? Or would you rather build a smaller company with fewer employees, maintain a healthy work/life balance and enjoy the freedom of not answering to anyone? Both are perfectly acceptable paths, but it’s important you consider which one is right for you and the other stakeholders. Bootstrapping vs VC: It’s not (just) a personal preference Your decision around whether you should go down the VC or bootstrapped path is one of the most important decisions in any company’s existence. It can have a significant impact on the kind of company you create and its outcomes. However, contrary to what Twitter may have you believe, it isn’t simply a decision you make based on personal preference. There are a number of factors about your market, product, and company that can help determine which is the right path for you. Don’t rush the decision, and make sure you think every aspect through. It’s not a 50/50 call. Author Bio Aaron Beashel is a B2B SaaS marketer who helps companies grow customer acquisition. He can be found riding waves or sliding down snowy mountains at all other times.

[INST] Bootstrap vs VC Funding: These 4 Factors Can Help Determine Which Path Is Right for You [/INST]

There’s been quite a bit of debate on Twitter recently about bootstrapping vs VC funding. While it’s been an interesting (and often heated) debate, there’s one main problem with it: It presents bootstrapping vs VC funding as a choice that founders make based on their personal desires. As if it’s a 50/50 call. However, I don’t believe that’s the case. Instead, I think there is a multitude of factors (ranging from product, company, founding team, market, etc.) that largely determine which path is right for you and your software business. In this article, we’ll look at why the choice of bootstrapping vs VC funding could be the single most important choice you make in your business as well as some of the factors that can help you determine which path is the right one for you. Why bootstrapping vs VC could be the single most important decision you make In Moz Founder Rand Fishkin’s brilliantly open and honest book Lost and Founder, he uses an example VC fund called “Scorpio Ventures” to outline some of the fundamentals of how venture capital firms work. Scorpio Ventures goes out to a series of limited partners (LPs) and pitches their ability to pick great startups. They raise a $400 million fund. Typically, LP’s would expect a 3-4x return on their investment over the course of a decade in order to make it worthwhile and effectively ‘beat the market’ (I.e. get a greater return than the 8-10% annual growth they’d get putting their money into public stocks, bonds, etc). This means that in 10 years’ time, Scorpio has to return about $1.2 billion to its investors in order to be considered successful. With his new money in the bank, Scorpio comes along and invests in your company, Globex Corporation. They invest $15 million at a $45 million valuation, taking 33% of the company. You use this money and grow like rocketship over the next 5 years. The next thing you know, industry giant Burns, Inc. offers you a whopping $450 million for the company. As the founder, you’re ecstatic. You stand to make almost $300 million. Enough to buy a waterfront house with a yacht and enjoy the rest of your life with your family & friends. However, while you’re having the best day of your life, Scorpio Ventures is having its worst. Although they stand to make about $150 million from the deal (10X their original investment), your company, Globex, was one of their most promising investments, and this amount won’t be anywhere near the $1.2 billion they need to get to in order to deliver the 3X they promised their LPs. Now you’re in a sticky position: You want to take the money and spend more time with your family, but Scorpio Ventures is pushing you to reject the offer. And because the investment terms give them veto rights over any transaction, you’re now in a position where you’ve built an amazing business, have a huge offer on the table, and want to get out, but can’t. All because years ago you took VC funding. While this fable might seem a bit hyperbolic, it’s reflective of how the venture capital business works and shows that taking funding from them could literally be one of the most consequential decisions of your life and career. 4 Factors to consider when choosing to bootstrap or raise Now that you fully understand the importance of the decision, let’s next look at a few factors you should consider when deciding which path to go down. There are four key factors to evaluate when choosing to bootstrap or to seek funding, and each has a number of considerations. 1. Market: Size, competition, and maturity The market you are entering (who you are targeting, existing competition, maturity, etc.) is a key factor in determining whether to bootstrap or not. Total addressable market How big is the market opportunity you are going after? Is it big enough that if you were to take a portion of it you could generate tens of millions in revenue? Or is it a small niche market that could likely only generate your business $1-2 million in revenue? A good example of this is Shaperbase, an order management app for surfboard shapers. Most estimates put the number of surfboard shapers in the world at 1,000-2,000. With a price point that varies from $20-$100 per month, the reality for this business is that even if they were to somehow take 100% of the market, the maximum revenue they could really make is around $1 million ARR. While this would make a wonderful bootstrapped business with two or three employees, it’s not going to be compatible with the business model of a VC. So when considering whether to start pitching investors, think about what the total addressable market is for your business and whether or not it’s going to be big enough to be interesting to investors. Competition How much competition is there in the market? And have they taken funding? If so, how much and what stage? If you have a number of competitors who have taken venture-backed funding, then they’re going to be using their considerable financial war chests to grow. They’ll be outbidding you on Google Ads, showing Facebook ads to all of your potential customers, and they’ll have bigger booths and presences at industry events. Over time, this generally means they’ll outgrow you. They’ll build a bigger brand, network effects and virality will snowball, and they’ll take the market. A good example of this is Saasu, an online accounting application you’ve likely never heard of. They were very early to the online accounting game (a full six years before Xero, in fact.) For a long time, they had a comparable (or even better) product. However, while SaaSu bootstrapped their business took, Xero went out and raised $680 million in funding over nine rounds and used this funding to accelerate their growth and product development. They did TV and out-of-home ads, they ran huge conferences across the world, and they built a huge network of accountants who love their product and refer their clients. Ultimately, Xero became a global SaaS behemoth with over $550 million in revenue, 2,500+ employees and a $12 billion valuation. Saasu, on the other hand, is still a small business with around 20 employees. When thinking about taking VC funding, consider what your competitors are doing and whether you need the funding to match their spending on growth. Tweet this quote Maturity How mature is the market for your product? Is it a well-known market category like email marketing software, or are you trying to create a new one, like Inbound Marketing? Generally speaking, if you’re trying to build a new market it’s going to be difficult to do without VC funding, as it takes a lot of money and resources to educate people on why they need the category of product (let alone your product specifically.) Hubspot is a good example of this. They famously created the category of Inbound Marketing, but it wasn’t cheap to do. They raised over $100 million from venture capitalists and used that considerable war chest to promote inbound marketing as a ‘new’ way of doing marketing. They created a conference, an academy, free tools, tens of thousands of blog posts and hundreds of eBooks. At one point, their content team included 50 people with multiple blog post writers and editors, a podcast team, a video team, a co-marketing team, and more. As such, it’s worth considering the market maturity when making your decision about VC funding vs bootstrap. If you need to build the market in order to grow your business (rather than just capturing existing demand), then you’re likely going to need some outside funding to do it. Tweet this quote 2. Resources: Current capacity, resellers, and partners The resources you have at your disposal should be another key factor in determining whether venture capital or bootstrapping is the right path for you. Here’s what you need to think about when it comes to your resources. Current team resources What does your current team look like? Do you have skills and experience in both product and go-to-market? Salesforce Co-Founder Marc Benioff once said: Great companies are at the intersection of a great product and a great go-to-market strategy. Tweet this quote That’s the truth: It’s hard to build a great SaaS company if you only have product/development capacity and no experience in go-to-market functions like marketing, sales, and customer success. Simul Docs, a version control and collaboration tool for Microsoft Word documents, is fortunate to have both sides on their founding team. My co-founder Ben has extensive development experience (having most recently been a Senior Engineer at Canva), while I have extensive go-to-market experience having led sales and marketing teams at multiple SaaS unicorns (including InVision and Campaign Monitor.) Because of this, it’s much more possible for us to go down the bootstrap route because even with our small founding team, we have the experience needed to develop, market, sell and support the product. So when you’re considering bootstrapping vs VC, look around and see what skills you already have within your team (and whether that’s enough to achieve what you’re hoping to achieve.) If not, you’ll either need enough revenue to hire out that expertise, or it might make more sense to take venture capital so you can access the expertise you need to reach your objectives. Availability of resellers/partners If you don’t have the required skills in-house, are there partners or resellers that you could lean on to bring them to the table? Mandoe, an Australian digital signage software company, didn’t have all of the necessary resources in-house when it first started, so it sold its product exclusively through Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. Mandoe focused on creating a great product while Telstra’s army of thousands of salespeople across the country sold its product to the beauty salons, retail stores, and cafes to whom they already provided telephone and internet services. It was a successful strategy for Mandoe: It fueled growth to a rumored $50 million acquisition. The lesson here: If you don’t have the resources and expertise in-house to handle certain parts of development or go-to-market functions before you start looking at venture capital, it’s worth considering whether or not there are strategic partners or resellers you could leverage. 3. Go-to-market model: Channels & conversions The go-to-market model you use also has a significant impact on your bootstrap vs VC decision. As you weigh the factors in this arena, be sure to consider your channels and conversion model. Channels What channels are available to you to attract potential customers to your product? Are there low-cost channels like SEO and virality, or is it going to be more events, paid marketing, sponsorships, etc.? Qwilr, a SaaS product for making proposals and quotes as beautiful web pages (rather than boring PDFs), is a product that has a huge potential SEO channel. The product has a number of templates like a Business Proposal Template or a Sales Proposal Template within the product, and they’ve created landing pages for each of those templates which rank within Google results. Some basic keyword research suggests there are over 250,000 searches per month for these template terms (i.e. business proposal template), which is a huge amount of people searching for something similar to what Qwilr offers. As a result, they can tap into this audience to drive new signups and customers at a low cost. However, if low-cost channels aren’t available to you (i.e. because there’s not a lot of search volume), then you may need to look at higher-cost channels like events, which require capital to do well. When you’re deciding to go the VC or bootstrapped route, consider what channels you might use to get your product in the hands of potential customers. If it seems like there are low-cost options that could have enough volume to help reach your goals, you may be able to do it without a huge amount of capital. However, if your channels are all paid (i.e. advertising, events, sponsorships, etc.) then it’s likely you’re going to need some capital to pay for those more expensive acquisition channels. Conversion model How do you convert people interested in your product into paying customers? Do you have a self-service product where people sign up and pay using their credit cards within the product, or do you primarily convert people through a sales team? Generally speaking, self-service businesses are cheaper to scale in the early days and likely more fitting to a bootstrapped path. Many successful bootstrapped companies (including Zoho, Basecamp, MailChimp, and Aweber) are primarily self-service. Launchpad6, a company I previously founded, made a video CMS product that companies used to create their own video sites. We used an inside sales model to sell the product and then had a Customer Success team that helped with the implementation of the site. The problem was: With just two people in the founding team, I was in charge of marketing, sales, and customer success. After we signed a contract with a new customer, I’d spend weeks bogged down in overseeing the implementation and would dedicate zero time to bringing in new customers through sales and marketing activities. If we’d taken VC funding, we would have been able to hire a few more people and dedicate them to each function — and as result, we would have been able to grow and scale the company more. When thinking about your bootstrapped vs VC path, consider the resources you need to build the sales and marketing machine that will drive your revenue growth. If you have a self-serve model, it’s likely you can achieve some scale with fewer resources, but if your product requires people to market, sell, and then implement the tool, it’s likely you’ll need to hire dedicated team members who can get the machine humming. That costs money. 4. Product: Adoption cycle & roadmap Aspects of the product you sell also have a significant impact on your bootstrapped vs VC decision, so before you make the call, be sure you’ve thought through the product-related aspects of the equation. Adoption cycle What does it take to get started using your product? Is it as simple as uploading a document (like Dropbox, for instance)? Or do customers need to do a full company-wide implementation of your product (i.e. HR software like Gusto or Bamboo HR)? Earlier we talked about the effect your go-to-market model has on your decision and how self-serve business can often scale with fewer people. However, even self-serve businesses have different adoption cycles. For instance, if you look at the standard self-service funnel, it typically looks something like: Signup: The moment when a person signs up for an account Activation: The moment a person completes an action where they see the value your product provides Subscribe: The moment a person upgrades their account to become a paying customer Depending on the nature of your product, the signup to activation rates can vary dramatically. In the case of Simul Docs (the aforementioned version control tool for Microsoft Word), all a user needed to do was to upload a Word document, open it, and make a change. The software then automatically creates a new version — which is when the user realizes the value of the product. Because it’s only three quick steps, the activation rate is around 30%. However, for more complex products (like Shopify, for instance) the process of getting started is much more complex. In order to launch a store, you’d have to create your account, upload products, set prices, set up shipping options, connect payment providers, etc. With so many required actions, the activation rate is likely much lower. This then gives you two options: You either need to have huge volumes at the top of your funnel in order to overcome low activation rates, OR you need Customer Success and Support employees to help users reach the activation point. Both cost money. When thinking about bootstrapping vs taking VC, consider how easy it is to adopt your product and what that would mean for your funnel metrics and unit economics. Roadmap No product is ever complete, but some are likely a lot closer to their vision than others. How far along are you in your product roadmap? Are there still outstanding features that your product still needs to have to be considered viable, or is it quite mature already? Qwilr, the previously mentioned tool for creating proposals as beautiful webpages, is an interesting example of how the maturity of the roadmap can change as the target market changes. Originally built for smaller businesses and freelancers to help them win more work by sending better-looking proposals, the early product was at a mature stage with a solid editor for building proposals — complete with hundreds of templates, digital signatures, payments, and more. It had everything a freelancer or small business would need to send great proposals and win more work. However, as larger organizations started to use the product, the roadmap extended. Larger organizations needed features small businesses and freelancers didn’t (like collaborative editing of proposals so multiple people can work on them at the same time, or integrations with enterprise-level CRMs such as Salesforce.) As a result, the company built out a team of product managers, designers, and engineers dedicated to designing and building these features in order to better serve the needs of larger customers. The lesson: When thinking about whether or not to go down the VC path, consider not just what your roadmap might look like now and where you need to get the product to for your current market, but where you might need to get it for future markets as well. When thinking about whether or not to go down the VC path, consider not just what your roadmap might look like now, but where you might need to get it for future markets as well. Tweet this quote The forgotten 5th factor: Desire If you’re running a software company, it’s likely that you read a lot of content and opinions from VC’s. This is a good thing, as the likes of Jason Lemkin, Tomas Tunguz, Christoph Janz, David Skok and the rest of them have produced some amazing content over the years that has genuinely progressed the knowledge and understanding that we all have of the SaaS business model. However, if you’ve spent enough time reading these posts, you’ve likely been led to believe that the only definition of success is creating a billion-dollar company (or a Unicorn as they’ve named it). This just simply isn’t true. As Basecamp Co-Founder David Heinemeier Hansson points out in this Twitter thread, building a billion-dollar company isn’t the only definition of success. Basecamp founder DHH does not mince his words when it comes to VCs Despite what VC’s will have you believe, it’s actually perfectly fine to want to build a smaller, profitable business that allows you to enjoy a good but modest lifestyle, appropriate work/life balance, more time with family, etc. So when thinking about whether you want to take on VC funding, think about what you want your life and your company to look like. Do you want to build a large company with hundreds of employees, working long hours in an attempt to turn it into a Unicorn in 10 years’ time? Or would you rather build a smaller company with fewer employees, maintain a healthy work/life balance and enjoy the freedom of not answering to anyone? Both are perfectly acceptable paths, but it’s important you consider which one is right for you and the other stakeholders. Bootstrapping vs VC: It’s not (just) a personal preference Your decision around whether you should go down the VC or bootstrapped path is one of the most important decisions in any company’s existence. It can have a significant impact on the kind of company you create and its outcomes. However, contrary to what Twitter may have you believe, it isn’t simply a decision you make based on personal preference. There are a number of factors about your market, product, and company that can help determine which is the right path for you. Don’t rush the decision, and make sure you think every aspect through. It’s not a 50/50 call. Author Bio Aaron Beashel is a B2B SaaS marketer who helps companies grow customer acquisition. He can be found riding waves or sliding down snowy mountains at all other times.

<sys> [INST] Bootstrap vs VC Funding: These 4 Factors Can Help Determine Which Path Is Right for You [/INST] There’s been quite a bit of debate on Twitter recently about bootstrapping vs VC funding. While it’s been an interesting (and often heated) debate, there’s one main problem with it: It presents bootstrapping vs VC funding as a choice that founders make based on their personal desires. As if it’s a 50/50 call. However, I don’t believe that’s the case. Instead, I think there is a multitude of factors (ranging from product, company, founding team, market, etc.) that largely determine which path is right for you and your software business. In this article, we’ll look at why the choice of bootstrapping vs VC funding could be the single most important choice you make in your business as well as some of the factors that can help you determine which path is the right one for you. Why bootstrapping vs VC could be the single most important decision you make In Moz Founder Rand Fishkin’s brilliantly open and honest book Lost and Founder, he uses an example VC fund called “Scorpio Ventures” to outline some of the fundamentals of how venture capital firms work. Scorpio Ventures goes out to a series of limited partners (LPs) and pitches their ability to pick great startups. They raise a $400 million fund. Typically, LP’s would expect a 3-4x return on their investment over the course of a decade in order to make it worthwhile and effectively ‘beat the market’ (I.e. get a greater return than the 8-10% annual growth they’d get putting their money into public stocks, bonds, etc). This means that in 10 years’ time, Scorpio has to return about $1.2 billion to its investors in order to be considered successful. With his new money in the bank, Scorpio comes along and invests in your company, Globex Corporation. They invest $15 million at a $45 million valuation, taking 33% of the company. You use this money and grow like rocketship over the next 5 years. The next thing you know, industry giant Burns, Inc. offers you a whopping $450 million for the company. As the founder, you’re ecstatic. You stand to make almost $300 million. Enough to buy a waterfront house with a yacht and enjoy the rest of your life with your family & friends. However, while you’re having the best day of your life, Scorpio Ventures is having its worst. Although they stand to make about $150 million from the deal (10X their original investment), your company, Globex, was one of their most promising investments, and this amount won’t be anywhere near the $1.2 billion they need to get to in order to deliver the 3X they promised their LPs. Now you’re in a sticky position: You want to take the money and spend more time with your family, but Scorpio Ventures is pushing you to reject the offer. And because the investment terms give them veto rights over any transaction, you’re now in a position where you’ve built an amazing business, have a huge offer on the table, and want to get out, but can’t. All because years ago you took VC funding. While this fable might seem a bit hyperbolic, it’s reflective of how the venture capital business works and shows that taking funding from them could literally be one of the most consequential decisions of your life and career. 4 Factors to consider when choosing to bootstrap or raise Now that you fully understand the importance of the decision, let’s next look at a few factors you should consider when deciding which path to go down. There are four key factors to evaluate when choosing to bootstrap or to seek funding, and each has a number of considerations. 1. Market: Size, competition, and maturity The market you are entering (who you are targeting, existing competition, maturity, etc.) is a key factor in determining whether to bootstrap or not. Total addressable market How big is the market opportunity you are going after? Is it big enough that if you were to take a portion of it you could generate tens of millions in revenue? Or is it a small niche market that could likely only generate your business $1-2 million in revenue? A good example of this is Shaperbase, an order management app for surfboard shapers. Most estimates put the number of surfboard shapers in the world at 1,000-2,000. With a price point that varies from $20-$100 per month, the reality for this business is that even if they were to somehow take 100% of the market, the maximum revenue they could really make is around $1 million ARR. While this would make a wonderful bootstrapped business with two or three employees, it’s not going to be compatible with the business model of a VC. So when considering whether to start pitching investors, think about what the total addressable market is for your business and whether or not it’s going to be big enough to be interesting to investors. Competition How much competition is there in the market? And have they taken funding? If so, how much and what stage? If you have a number of competitors who have taken venture-backed funding, then they’re going to be using their considerable financial war chests to grow. They’ll be outbidding you on Google Ads, showing Facebook ads to all of your potential customers, and they’ll have bigger booths and presences at industry events. Over time, this generally means they’ll outgrow you. They’ll build a bigger brand, network effects and virality will snowball, and they’ll take the market. A good example of this is Saasu, an online accounting application you’ve likely never heard of. They were very early to the online accounting game (a full six years before Xero, in fact.) For a long time, they had a comparable (or even better) product. However, while SaaSu bootstrapped their business took, Xero went out and raised $680 million in funding over nine rounds and used this funding to accelerate their growth and product development. They did TV and out-of-home ads, they ran huge conferences across the world, and they built a huge network of accountants who love their product and refer their clients. Ultimately, Xero became a global SaaS behemoth with over $550 million in revenue, 2,500+ employees and a $12 billion valuation. Saasu, on the other hand, is still a small business with around 20 employees. When thinking about taking VC funding, consider what your competitors are doing and whether you need the funding to match their spending on growth. Tweet this quote Maturity How mature is the market for your product? Is it a well-known market category like email marketing software, or are you trying to create a new one, like Inbound Marketing? Generally speaking, if you’re trying to build a new market it’s going to be difficult to do without VC funding, as it takes a lot of money and resources to educate people on why they need the category of product (let alone your product specifically.) Hubspot is a good example of this. They famously created the category of Inbound Marketing, but it wasn’t cheap to do. They raised over $100 million from venture capitalists and used that considerable war chest to promote inbound marketing as a ‘new’ way of doing marketing. They created a conference, an academy, free tools, tens of thousands of blog posts and hundreds of eBooks. At one point, their content team included 50 people with multiple blog post writers and editors, a podcast team, a video team, a co-marketing team, and more. As such, it’s worth considering the market maturity when making your decision about VC funding vs bootstrap. If you need to build the market in order to grow your business (rather than just capturing existing demand), then you’re likely going to need some outside funding to do it. Tweet this quote 2. Resources: Current capacity, resellers, and partners The resources you have at your disposal should be another key factor in determining whether venture capital or bootstrapping is the right path for you. Here’s what you need to think about when it comes to your resources. Current team resources What does your current team look like? Do you have skills and experience in both product and go-to-market? Salesforce Co-Founder Marc Benioff once said: Great companies are at the intersection of a great product and a great go-to-market strategy. Tweet this quote That’s the truth: It’s hard to build a great SaaS company if you only have product/development capacity and no experience in go-to-market functions like marketing, sales, and customer success. Simul Docs, a version control and collaboration tool for Microsoft Word documents, is fortunate to have both sides on their founding team. My co-founder Ben has extensive development experience (having most recently been a Senior Engineer at Canva), while I have extensive go-to-market experience having led sales and marketing teams at multiple SaaS unicorns (including InVision and Campaign Monitor.) Because of this, it’s much more possible for us to go down the bootstrap route because even with our small founding team, we have the experience needed to develop, market, sell and support the product. So when you’re considering bootstrapping vs VC, look around and see what skills you already have within your team (and whether that’s enough to achieve what you’re hoping to achieve.) If not, you’ll either need enough revenue to hire out that expertise, or it might make more sense to take venture capital so you can access the expertise you need to reach your objectives. Availability of resellers/partners If you don’t have the required skills in-house, are there partners or resellers that you could lean on to bring them to the table? Mandoe, an Australian digital signage software company, didn’t have all of the necessary resources in-house when it first started, so it sold its product exclusively through Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. Mandoe focused on creating a great product while Telstra’s army of thousands of salespeople across the country sold its product to the beauty salons, retail stores, and cafes to whom they already provided telephone and internet services. It was a successful strategy for Mandoe: It fueled growth to a rumored $50 million acquisition. The lesson here: If you don’t have the resources and expertise in-house to handle certain parts of development or go-to-market functions before you start looking at venture capital, it’s worth considering whether or not there are strategic partners or resellers you could leverage. 3. Go-to-market model: Channels & conversions The go-to-market model you use also has a significant impact on your bootstrap vs VC decision. As you weigh the factors in this arena, be sure to consider your channels and conversion model. Channels What channels are available to you to attract potential customers to your product? Are there low-cost channels like SEO and virality, or is it going to be more events, paid marketing, sponsorships, etc.? Qwilr, a SaaS product for making proposals and quotes as beautiful web pages (rather than boring PDFs), is a product that has a huge potential SEO channel. The product has a number of templates like a Business Proposal Template or a Sales Proposal Template within the product, and they’ve created landing pages for each of those templates which rank within Google results. Some basic keyword research suggests there are over 250,000 searches per month for these template terms (i.e. business proposal template), which is a huge amount of people searching for something similar to what Qwilr offers. As a result, they can tap into this audience to drive new signups and customers at a low cost. However, if low-cost channels aren’t available to you (i.e. because there’s not a lot of search volume), then you may need to look at higher-cost channels like events, which require capital to do well. When you’re deciding to go the VC or bootstrapped route, consider what channels you might use to get your product in the hands of potential customers. If it seems like there are low-cost options that could have enough volume to help reach your goals, you may be able to do it without a huge amount of capital. However, if your channels are all paid (i.e. advertising, events, sponsorships, etc.) then it’s likely you’re going to need some capital to pay for those more expensive acquisition channels. Conversion model How do you convert people interested in your product into paying customers? Do you have a self-service product where people sign up and pay using their credit cards within the product, or do you primarily convert people through a sales team? Generally speaking, self-service businesses are cheaper to scale in the early days and likely more fitting to a bootstrapped path. Many successful bootstrapped companies (including Zoho, Basecamp, MailChimp, and Aweber) are primarily self-service. Launchpad6, a company I previously founded, made a video CMS product that companies used to create their own video sites. We used an inside sales model to sell the product and then had a Customer Success team that helped with the implementation of the site. The problem was: With just two people in the founding team, I was in charge of marketing, sales, and customer success. After we signed a contract with a new customer, I’d spend weeks bogged down in overseeing the implementation and would dedicate zero time to bringing in new customers through sales and marketing activities. If we’d taken VC funding, we would have been able to hire a few more people and dedicate them to each function — and as result, we would have been able to grow and scale the company more. When thinking about your bootstrapped vs VC path, consider the resources you need to build the sales and marketing machine that will drive your revenue growth. If you have a self-serve model, it’s likely you can achieve some scale with fewer resources, but if your product requires people to market, sell, and then implement the tool, it’s likely you’ll need to hire dedicated team members who can get the machine humming. That costs money. 4. Product: Adoption cycle & roadmap Aspects of the product you sell also have a significant impact on your bootstrapped vs VC decision, so before you make the call, be sure you’ve thought through the product-related aspects of the equation. Adoption cycle What does it take to get started using your product? Is it as simple as uploading a document (like Dropbox, for instance)? Or do customers need to do a full company-wide implementation of your product (i.e. HR software like Gusto or Bamboo HR)? Earlier we talked about the effect your go-to-market model has on your decision and how self-serve business can often scale with fewer people. However, even self-serve businesses have different adoption cycles. For instance, if you look at the standard self-service funnel, it typically looks something like: Signup: The moment when a person signs up for an account Activation: The moment a person completes an action where they see the value your product provides Subscribe: The moment a person upgrades their account to become a paying customer Depending on the nature of your product, the signup to activation rates can vary dramatically. In the case of Simul Docs (the aforementioned version control tool for Microsoft Word), all a user needed to do was to upload a Word document, open it, and make a change. The software then automatically creates a new version — which is when the user realizes the value of the product. Because it’s only three quick steps, the activation rate is around 30%. However, for more complex products (like Shopify, for instance) the process of getting started is much more complex. In order to launch a store, you’d have to create your account, upload products, set prices, set up shipping options, connect payment providers, etc. With so many required actions, the activation rate is likely much lower. This then gives you two options: You either need to have huge volumes at the top of your funnel in order to overcome low activation rates, OR you need Customer Success and Support employees to help users reach the activation point. Both cost money. When thinking about bootstrapping vs taking VC, consider how easy it is to adopt your product and what that would mean for your funnel metrics and unit economics. Roadmap No product is ever complete, but some are likely a lot closer to their vision than others. How far along are you in your product roadmap? Are there still outstanding features that your product still needs to have to be considered viable, or is it quite mature already? Qwilr, the previously mentioned tool for creating proposals as beautiful webpages, is an interesting example of how the maturity of the roadmap can change as the target market changes. Originally built for smaller businesses and freelancers to help them win more work by sending better-looking proposals, the early product was at a mature stage with a solid editor for building proposals — complete with hundreds of templates, digital signatures, payments, and more. It had everything a freelancer or small business would need to send great proposals and win more work. However, as larger organizations started to use the product, the roadmap extended. Larger organizations needed features small businesses and freelancers didn’t (like collaborative editing of proposals so multiple people can work on them at the same time, or integrations with enterprise-level CRMs such as Salesforce.) As a result, the company built out a team of product managers, designers, and engineers dedicated to designing and building these features in order to better serve the needs of larger customers. The lesson: When thinking about whether or not to go down the VC path, consider not just what your roadmap might look like now and where you need to get the product to for your current market, but where you might need to get it for future markets as well. When thinking about whether or not to go down the VC path, consider not just what your roadmap might look like now, but where you might need to get it for future markets as well. Tweet this quote The forgotten 5th factor: Desire If you’re running a software company, it’s likely that you read a lot of content and opinions from VC’s. This is a good thing, as the likes of Jason Lemkin, Tomas Tunguz, Christoph Janz, David Skok and the rest of them have produced some amazing content over the years that has genuinely progressed the knowledge and understanding that we all have of the SaaS business model. However, if you’ve spent enough time reading these posts, you’ve likely been led to believe that the only definition of success is creating a billion-dollar company (or a Unicorn as they’ve named it). This just simply isn’t true. As Basecamp Co-Founder David Heinemeier Hansson points out in this Twitter thread, building a billion-dollar company isn’t the only definition of success. Basecamp founder DHH does not mince his words when it comes to VCs Despite what VC’s will have you believe, it’s actually perfectly fine to want to build a smaller, profitable business that allows you to enjoy a good but modest lifestyle, appropriate work/life balance, more time with family, etc. So when thinking about whether you want to take on VC funding, think about what you want your life and your company to look like. Do you want to build a large company with hundreds of employees, working long hours in an attempt to turn it into a Unicorn in 10 years’ time? Or would you rather build a smaller company with fewer employees, maintain a healthy work/life balance and enjoy the freedom of not answering to anyone? Both are perfectly acceptable paths, but it’s important you consider which one is right for you and the other stakeholders. Bootstrapping vs VC: It’s not (just) a personal preference Your decision around whether you should go down the VC or bootstrapped path is one of the most important decisions in any company’s existence. It can have a significant impact on the kind of company you create and its outcomes. However, contrary to what Twitter may have you believe, it isn’t simply a decision you make based on personal preference. There are a number of factors about your market, product, and company that can help determine which is the right path for you. Don’t rush the decision, and make sure you think every aspect through. It’s not a 50/50 call. Author Bio Aaron Beashel is a B2B SaaS marketer who helps companies grow customer acquisition. He can be found riding waves or sliding down snowy mountains at all other times. </sys

Fostering feedback culture, with Small Improvements Founder & CEO. “[A one-on-one is] where the employee can tell the manager freely what’s on their mind, so that the manager can start fixing things – that’s what the manager is paid for.” Feedback, and the culture surrounding it, is one of the biggest contributors to a company’s desirability, from a recruiting standpoint. But after some quick research, it occurred to me that the act of developing good feedback processes is almost always under-invested in, especially with early stage startups. Per Fragemann (@perfragemann) has made it his mission to improve feedback and feedback culture in business, with a business he started called Small Improvements. Small Improvements, Headquartered in Berlin, grew from a passion project during Per’s former employment at Engineering giant Atlassian in Australia. Today they have over 25 employees and have bootstrapped their way to profitability in the 6 years since creation. Per and his Berlin-based team work out of a quirky apartment-style office in a majestic, old building in the heart of the city. In our discussion, Per and I talked about: How he turned a side project into a full-scale business with paying customers, almost by accident How anyone can create a foundation for good feedback in their business The core components of good, productive feedback What a one-on-one session means at Small Improvements, and why so many people get this wrong Building a culture of feedback is *hard*, and Per does a great job of breaking it down in an actionable way. So let’s dive into the episode. Enjoying SaaS Open Mic? Please take a moment to review the podcast on iTunes – it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!

[INST] Fostering feedback culture, with Small Improvements Founder & CEO [/INST]

“[A one-on-one is] where the employee can tell the manager freely what’s on their mind, so that the manager can start fixing things – that’s what the manager is paid for.” Feedback, and the culture surrounding it, is one of the biggest contributors to a company’s desirability, from a recruiting standpoint. But after some quick research, it occurred to me that the act of developing good feedback processes is almost always under-invested in, especially with early stage startups. Per Fragemann (@perfragemann) has made it his mission to improve feedback and feedback culture in business, with a business he started called Small Improvements. Small Improvements, Headquartered in Berlin, grew from a passion project during Per’s former employment at Engineering giant Atlassian in Australia. Today they have over 25 employees and have bootstrapped their way to profitability in the 6 years since creation. Per and his Berlin-based team work out of a quirky apartment-style office in a majestic, old building in the heart of the city. In our discussion, Per and I talked about: How he turned a side project into a full-scale business with paying customers, almost by accident How anyone can create a foundation for good feedback in their business The core components of good, productive feedback What a one-on-one session means at Small Improvements, and why so many people get this wrong Building a culture of feedback is *hard*, and Per does a great job of breaking it down in an actionable way. So let’s dive into the episode. Enjoying SaaS Open Mic? Please take a moment to review the podcast on iTunes – it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!

<sys> [INST] Fostering feedback culture, with Small Improvements Founder & CEO [/INST] “[A one-on-one is] where the employee can tell the manager freely what’s on their mind, so that the manager can start fixing things – that’s what the manager is paid for.” Feedback, and the culture surrounding it, is one of the biggest contributors to a company’s desirability, from a recruiting standpoint. But after some quick research, it occurred to me that the act of developing good feedback processes is almost always under-invested in, especially with early stage startups. Per Fragemann (@perfragemann) has made it his mission to improve feedback and feedback culture in business, with a business he started called Small Improvements. Small Improvements, Headquartered in Berlin, grew from a passion project during Per’s former employment at Engineering giant Atlassian in Australia. Today they have over 25 employees and have bootstrapped their way to profitability in the 6 years since creation. Per and his Berlin-based team work out of a quirky apartment-style office in a majestic, old building in the heart of the city. In our discussion, Per and I talked about: How he turned a side project into a full-scale business with paying customers, almost by accident How anyone can create a foundation for good feedback in their business The core components of good, productive feedback What a one-on-one session means at Small Improvements, and why so many people get this wrong Building a culture of feedback is *hard*, and Per does a great job of breaking it down in an actionable way. So let’s dive into the episode. Enjoying SaaS Open Mic? Please take a moment to review the podcast on iTunes – it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you! </sys

4 Tips on Creating a Best in Class Sales to Customer Success Handoff. Customer Success (CS) professionals know that a client’s handoff from sales is a critical point of the customer journey. The stakes are high: this transition can make or break your customer relationships, well before they’ve begun using your product. This sales to customer success transition is a delicate balancing act. When done correctly, this handoff makes for a customer that is excited and ready to leverage your solution to accomplish their goals. However, when done haphazardly, your customer can be left disoriented and confused about the next steps. An ineffective handoff often leaves your customers lacking the support and structure they need to realize product value. Poor handoff practices also have a much broader impact than just making a few customers unhappy — they dramatically affect retention and your company’s bottom line. A poor handoff from sales to customer success dramatically affects retention and your company’s bottom line. Tweet this quote Strengthening your handoff strategy creates a win-win scenario for both your customers and internal stakeholders alike. Read on for 4 tips on creating a best-in-class sales to customer success handoff. Set expectations from the start Successful handoff experiences have one thing in common — expectations are made clear from the start. Everyone on your team should know what they will be offering your customers in the context of the broader post-purchase relationship. Likewise, your customers should properly understand the next steps and other specifics about their onboarding process. Managing these expectations and avoiding unrealistic ones are a must. After all, customers with unrealistic expectations are those that are most likely to churn. Nailing down these details are critical to meeting and exceeding a customer’s expectations. As a start, ensure that your sales and customer success teams agree on the meaning of what a “good customer” is. Developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and identifying the traits of your most successful clients helps avoid poor fit customers from the start. The seeds of churn are sown early, especially among customers outside of your ICP. Sales should understand that solely focusing on growth (closing deals) can mean the difference between weak and strong retention. While customers who have poor fit can be signed, their long-term success is rare. Expectations should also be set by providing prospective customers with a brief overview of the onboarding process, well before beginning the contract process. This overview can include details about the assignment of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) and the guidance they’ll offer post-purchase. Discussing these next steps isn’t a one-time mention – sales should reinforce details like timelines and implementation requirements continuously throughout the sales cycle. That said, it’s best to leave the in-depth details to be covered by a CSM during their introductory call. Sales should set standards early for what implementation entails. Walk your customers through this process in your initial sales presentations. Taking the time to walk your potential customer through the onboarding process and other next steps can even help push a deal forward. When a prospect is facing an intimidating implementation, discussing these details can help quell any last-minute buyer concerns. If your customer is still asking ‘What’s next?’, you haven’t properly set expectations. Timing is everything when introducing customer success Time is of the essence when introducing Customer Success to a new customer. It’s important to keep the momentum going as you make a transition to onboarding from a successful sales cycle. If a handoff is slow to occur, clients risk losing sight of their end goals and how their new investment will solve their problems. Generally, one of two approaches is taken when formally introducing a CSM to a company — either introducing the Customer Success prior to closing a deal or by introducing them shortly after closing. Some organizations find it most effective for Account Executives (AEs) to introduce customer success in one of the last calls prior to closing. The idea of customer success will have been mentioned earlier in the discussion but including CS in a pre-closing call provides a helpful starting point in building the CSM-Customer relationship. During this initial call, the goal shouldn’t be for a CSM to close the deal or get into the weeds about onboarding specifics. Instead, the call should serve as an opportunity to cement expectations surrounding CS’s role moving forward in the onboarding process, while bridging the excitement between signing and onboarding. Alternatively, other organizations opt to introduce customer success post-contract as part of a formal kickoff call. While this may not be applicable for all organizations, this approach has value for companies with overly technical products where introducing a CSM pre-sale would be detrimental. Post-contract introductory calls for these types of organizations help your CS team avoid taking on the role of a Sales Engineer. If you opt to introduce customer success post-signing, consider having sales schedule the formal kickoff call. After making introductions and opening the call, Sales should quickly hand the discussion off to their customer success counterpart. Sales will have a smaller role in this part of the client discussion, but this format helps mark a formal transition between sales and customer success. A good rule of thumb is to schedule these calls as soon as possible, preferably within 48-72 hours of contract signing to avoid losing momentum. When executed properly, your customer success team will be poised to take over the relationship having positioned themselves as your customer’s new advisor. Regardless of your approach, Customer Success’s presence should address any last-minute details and questions the prospective client may have and reinforce the message that the customer will be in good hands. This lays a strong foundation for the CSM-Customer relationship and jumpstarts candid conversations about what it takes to be successful. Success can mean different things to different customers Defining success isn’t easy. Success to one client can look like something completely different to another client. If your customer handoff process looks like an unorganized web of documents, this key detail can be lost in translation. Losing sight of your customer’s definition of success can mean the difference between renewal and churn. From the very start, both sales and customer success must be aware of what success means to your customer. While success — and the customer’s related end goals — will likely change over time, a consistent pulse must be kept on your customer’s definition of successful outcomes. This also includes understanding the varied goals of each influencer who contributed to the customer’s purchasing decision. Remember: only by having this key information will you be able to guide your customers to their desired outcome. Properly understanding this doesn’t just lead to retention — it instills customer confidence in your team. Since Customer Success relies heavily on the details recorded by AEs, questions around the definition of success must be asked at the outset, prior to contract signing. When working to define success, consider the specific challenges your customer is trying to solve (such as engagement or retention) as well as the unique obstacles they may experience (like a limited budget or a slow approval process). Don’t forget to consider what success looks like in three months, twelve months and beyond. Be aware of how these definitions of success may evolve, even during the course of the sales cycle. Also consider what expectations were set, both explicitly and inexplicably, during the sales process. It’s important to understand what commitments or promises were made to the client. Knowledge powers effective handoffs Proper documentation and knowledge transfer are key to successful handoffs. These can take several shapes, be digital or analog, with varying degrees of complexity. Regardless of how you document this information, productive knowledge transfers begin with discovery during the sales process. No knowledge management tool can make up for customer information that wasn’t recorded by your teams in the first place. As a start, your sales and customer success teams should work together to identify notes that need to be recorded outside of the typical CRM data points. Even before an opportunity is marked ‘Closed-Won’ in your CRM, an Account Executive should know what information is to be recorded during sales discussions. Rather than leaving things to chance, sales should be equipped with a cheat sheet that contains must-have questions to ask. Make it easy for sales to provide this client information while it’s still top of mind. Consider using custom fields at the Account level of your CRM to capture important sales handoff info. When recording handoff notes, the use cases or events that triggered a purchasing decision are a good starting point. Go beyond your customer’s definition of success — include notes on key stakeholders, sentiments and potential obstacles or risks. Importantly, also be aware of how success will be measured, now and into the future. Most of this information will be realized gradually over the course of the sales cycle. Regardless of your attention to detail, solely recording notes is not the end-all solution to effective knowledge transfer. For those dealing with complex products, internal handoff meetings provide an easy way for your sales and customer success teams to ensure that they are on the same page. Before a customer kickoff call, use this meeting to review previously recorded handoff data. This meeting helps to fill in any knowledge gaps between the teams while maintaining a comfortable buffer between your knowledge transfer and the formal client kickoff. You may find the need to ask additional clarifying questions of your client in order to properly begin onboarding. By taking the appropriate care with your knowledge transfer, you’ll avoid asking repetitive questions that can irk a new customer while setting them up for long-term success. A strong sales to customer success handoff = a strong internal partnership A subpar sales to customer success handoff risks adding friction to a vital part of your customer’s lifecycle. Missteps that challenge a customer’s long-term success can develop early on — even before a customer has used your product. A strong partnership between sales and customer success is essential when making this delicate transition. When mastering the sales to customer success handoff, be aware of your customer’s definition of success and the optimal moment to introduce them to your customer success team. Ensure that both customer expectations and your teams’ internal expectations are set from the start and reinforced at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Most importantly, never underestimate the importance of your knowledge transfer process. Both internally and externally, nothing should be left to question once a new customer has signed on. Seamless handoffs will pay dividends now and well into the future. We hope these tips can help your team drive upsells and develop customer advocates, all while reducing churn. Author Bio: Alex Weihmann is the Outbound Marketing Manager for ChurnZero, a real-time Customer Success Platform that helps subscription businesses fight churn while expanding current accounts. Driven by a desire to encourage businesses to make every customer interaction count, Alex has extensive experience writing about all things Customer Experience and Customer Success.

[INST] 4 Tips on Creating a Best in Class Sales to Customer Success Handoff [/INST]

Customer Success (CS) professionals know that a client’s handoff from sales is a critical point of the customer journey. The stakes are high: this transition can make or break your customer relationships, well before they’ve begun using your product. This sales to customer success transition is a delicate balancing act. When done correctly, this handoff makes for a customer that is excited and ready to leverage your solution to accomplish their goals. However, when done haphazardly, your customer can be left disoriented and confused about the next steps. An ineffective handoff often leaves your customers lacking the support and structure they need to realize product value. Poor handoff practices also have a much broader impact than just making a few customers unhappy — they dramatically affect retention and your company’s bottom line. A poor handoff from sales to customer success dramatically affects retention and your company’s bottom line. Tweet this quote Strengthening your handoff strategy creates a win-win scenario for both your customers and internal stakeholders alike. Read on for 4 tips on creating a best-in-class sales to customer success handoff. Set expectations from the start Successful handoff experiences have one thing in common — expectations are made clear from the start. Everyone on your team should know what they will be offering your customers in the context of the broader post-purchase relationship. Likewise, your customers should properly understand the next steps and other specifics about their onboarding process. Managing these expectations and avoiding unrealistic ones are a must. After all, customers with unrealistic expectations are those that are most likely to churn. Nailing down these details are critical to meeting and exceeding a customer’s expectations. As a start, ensure that your sales and customer success teams agree on the meaning of what a “good customer” is. Developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and identifying the traits of your most successful clients helps avoid poor fit customers from the start. The seeds of churn are sown early, especially among customers outside of your ICP. Sales should understand that solely focusing on growth (closing deals) can mean the difference between weak and strong retention. While customers who have poor fit can be signed, their long-term success is rare. Expectations should also be set by providing prospective customers with a brief overview of the onboarding process, well before beginning the contract process. This overview can include details about the assignment of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) and the guidance they’ll offer post-purchase. Discussing these next steps isn’t a one-time mention – sales should reinforce details like timelines and implementation requirements continuously throughout the sales cycle. That said, it’s best to leave the in-depth details to be covered by a CSM during their introductory call. Sales should set standards early for what implementation entails. Walk your customers through this process in your initial sales presentations. Taking the time to walk your potential customer through the onboarding process and other next steps can even help push a deal forward. When a prospect is facing an intimidating implementation, discussing these details can help quell any last-minute buyer concerns. If your customer is still asking ‘What’s next?’, you haven’t properly set expectations. Timing is everything when introducing customer success Time is of the essence when introducing Customer Success to a new customer. It’s important to keep the momentum going as you make a transition to onboarding from a successful sales cycle. If a handoff is slow to occur, clients risk losing sight of their end goals and how their new investment will solve their problems. Generally, one of two approaches is taken when formally introducing a CSM to a company — either introducing the Customer Success prior to closing a deal or by introducing them shortly after closing. Some organizations find it most effective for Account Executives (AEs) to introduce customer success in one of the last calls prior to closing. The idea of customer success will have been mentioned earlier in the discussion but including CS in a pre-closing call provides a helpful starting point in building the CSM-Customer relationship. During this initial call, the goal shouldn’t be for a CSM to close the deal or get into the weeds about onboarding specifics. Instead, the call should serve as an opportunity to cement expectations surrounding CS’s role moving forward in the onboarding process, while bridging the excitement between signing and onboarding. Alternatively, other organizations opt to introduce customer success post-contract as part of a formal kickoff call. While this may not be applicable for all organizations, this approach has value for companies with overly technical products where introducing a CSM pre-sale would be detrimental. Post-contract introductory calls for these types of organizations help your CS team avoid taking on the role of a Sales Engineer. If you opt to introduce customer success post-signing, consider having sales schedule the formal kickoff call. After making introductions and opening the call, Sales should quickly hand the discussion off to their customer success counterpart. Sales will have a smaller role in this part of the client discussion, but this format helps mark a formal transition between sales and customer success. A good rule of thumb is to schedule these calls as soon as possible, preferably within 48-72 hours of contract signing to avoid losing momentum. When executed properly, your customer success team will be poised to take over the relationship having positioned themselves as your customer’s new advisor. Regardless of your approach, Customer Success’s presence should address any last-minute details and questions the prospective client may have and reinforce the message that the customer will be in good hands. This lays a strong foundation for the CSM-Customer relationship and jumpstarts candid conversations about what it takes to be successful. Success can mean different things to different customers Defining success isn’t easy. Success to one client can look like something completely different to another client. If your customer handoff process looks like an unorganized web of documents, this key detail can be lost in translation. Losing sight of your customer’s definition of success can mean the difference between renewal and churn. From the very start, both sales and customer success must be aware of what success means to your customer. While success — and the customer’s related end goals — will likely change over time, a consistent pulse must be kept on your customer’s definition of successful outcomes. This also includes understanding the varied goals of each influencer who contributed to the customer’s purchasing decision. Remember: only by having this key information will you be able to guide your customers to their desired outcome. Properly understanding this doesn’t just lead to retention — it instills customer confidence in your team. Since Customer Success relies heavily on the details recorded by AEs, questions around the definition of success must be asked at the outset, prior to contract signing. When working to define success, consider the specific challenges your customer is trying to solve (such as engagement or retention) as well as the unique obstacles they may experience (like a limited budget or a slow approval process). Don’t forget to consider what success looks like in three months, twelve months and beyond. Be aware of how these definitions of success may evolve, even during the course of the sales cycle. Also consider what expectations were set, both explicitly and inexplicably, during the sales process. It’s important to understand what commitments or promises were made to the client. Knowledge powers effective handoffs Proper documentation and knowledge transfer are key to successful handoffs. These can take several shapes, be digital or analog, with varying degrees of complexity. Regardless of how you document this information, productive knowledge transfers begin with discovery during the sales process. No knowledge management tool can make up for customer information that wasn’t recorded by your teams in the first place. As a start, your sales and customer success teams should work together to identify notes that need to be recorded outside of the typical CRM data points. Even before an opportunity is marked ‘Closed-Won’ in your CRM, an Account Executive should know what information is to be recorded during sales discussions. Rather than leaving things to chance, sales should be equipped with a cheat sheet that contains must-have questions to ask. Make it easy for sales to provide this client information while it’s still top of mind. Consider using custom fields at the Account level of your CRM to capture important sales handoff info. When recording handoff notes, the use cases or events that triggered a purchasing decision are a good starting point. Go beyond your customer’s definition of success — include notes on key stakeholders, sentiments and potential obstacles or risks. Importantly, also be aware of how success will be measured, now and into the future. Most of this information will be realized gradually over the course of the sales cycle. Regardless of your attention to detail, solely recording notes is not the end-all solution to effective knowledge transfer. For those dealing with complex products, internal handoff meetings provide an easy way for your sales and customer success teams to ensure that they are on the same page. Before a customer kickoff call, use this meeting to review previously recorded handoff data. This meeting helps to fill in any knowledge gaps between the teams while maintaining a comfortable buffer between your knowledge transfer and the formal client kickoff. You may find the need to ask additional clarifying questions of your client in order to properly begin onboarding. By taking the appropriate care with your knowledge transfer, you’ll avoid asking repetitive questions that can irk a new customer while setting them up for long-term success. A strong sales to customer success handoff = a strong internal partnership A subpar sales to customer success handoff risks adding friction to a vital part of your customer’s lifecycle. Missteps that challenge a customer’s long-term success can develop early on — even before a customer has used your product. A strong partnership between sales and customer success is essential when making this delicate transition. When mastering the sales to customer success handoff, be aware of your customer’s definition of success and the optimal moment to introduce them to your customer success team. Ensure that both customer expectations and your teams’ internal expectations are set from the start and reinforced at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Most importantly, never underestimate the importance of your knowledge transfer process. Both internally and externally, nothing should be left to question once a new customer has signed on. Seamless handoffs will pay dividends now and well into the future. We hope these tips can help your team drive upsells and develop customer advocates, all while reducing churn. Author Bio: Alex Weihmann is the Outbound Marketing Manager for ChurnZero, a real-time Customer Success Platform that helps subscription businesses fight churn while expanding current accounts. Driven by a desire to encourage businesses to make every customer interaction count, Alex has extensive experience writing about all things Customer Experience and Customer Success.

<sys> [INST] 4 Tips on Creating a Best in Class Sales to Customer Success Handoff [/INST] Customer Success (CS) professionals know that a client’s handoff from sales is a critical point of the customer journey. The stakes are high: this transition can make or break your customer relationships, well before they’ve begun using your product. This sales to customer success transition is a delicate balancing act. When done correctly, this handoff makes for a customer that is excited and ready to leverage your solution to accomplish their goals. However, when done haphazardly, your customer can be left disoriented and confused about the next steps. An ineffective handoff often leaves your customers lacking the support and structure they need to realize product value. Poor handoff practices also have a much broader impact than just making a few customers unhappy — they dramatically affect retention and your company’s bottom line. A poor handoff from sales to customer success dramatically affects retention and your company’s bottom line. Tweet this quote Strengthening your handoff strategy creates a win-win scenario for both your customers and internal stakeholders alike. Read on for 4 tips on creating a best-in-class sales to customer success handoff. Set expectations from the start Successful handoff experiences have one thing in common — expectations are made clear from the start. Everyone on your team should know what they will be offering your customers in the context of the broader post-purchase relationship. Likewise, your customers should properly understand the next steps and other specifics about their onboarding process. Managing these expectations and avoiding unrealistic ones are a must. After all, customers with unrealistic expectations are those that are most likely to churn. Nailing down these details are critical to meeting and exceeding a customer’s expectations. As a start, ensure that your sales and customer success teams agree on the meaning of what a “good customer” is. Developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and identifying the traits of your most successful clients helps avoid poor fit customers from the start. The seeds of churn are sown early, especially among customers outside of your ICP. Sales should understand that solely focusing on growth (closing deals) can mean the difference between weak and strong retention. While customers who have poor fit can be signed, their long-term success is rare. Expectations should also be set by providing prospective customers with a brief overview of the onboarding process, well before beginning the contract process. This overview can include details about the assignment of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) and the guidance they’ll offer post-purchase. Discussing these next steps isn’t a one-time mention – sales should reinforce details like timelines and implementation requirements continuously throughout the sales cycle. That said, it’s best to leave the in-depth details to be covered by a CSM during their introductory call. Sales should set standards early for what implementation entails. Walk your customers through this process in your initial sales presentations. Taking the time to walk your potential customer through the onboarding process and other next steps can even help push a deal forward. When a prospect is facing an intimidating implementation, discussing these details can help quell any last-minute buyer concerns. If your customer is still asking ‘What’s next?’, you haven’t properly set expectations. Timing is everything when introducing customer success Time is of the essence when introducing Customer Success to a new customer. It’s important to keep the momentum going as you make a transition to onboarding from a successful sales cycle. If a handoff is slow to occur, clients risk losing sight of their end goals and how their new investment will solve their problems. Generally, one of two approaches is taken when formally introducing a CSM to a company — either introducing the Customer Success prior to closing a deal or by introducing them shortly after closing. Some organizations find it most effective for Account Executives (AEs) to introduce customer success in one of the last calls prior to closing. The idea of customer success will have been mentioned earlier in the discussion but including CS in a pre-closing call provides a helpful starting point in building the CSM-Customer relationship. During this initial call, the goal shouldn’t be for a CSM to close the deal or get into the weeds about onboarding specifics. Instead, the call should serve as an opportunity to cement expectations surrounding CS’s role moving forward in the onboarding process, while bridging the excitement between signing and onboarding. Alternatively, other organizations opt to introduce customer success post-contract as part of a formal kickoff call. While this may not be applicable for all organizations, this approach has value for companies with overly technical products where introducing a CSM pre-sale would be detrimental. Post-contract introductory calls for these types of organizations help your CS team avoid taking on the role of a Sales Engineer. If you opt to introduce customer success post-signing, consider having sales schedule the formal kickoff call. After making introductions and opening the call, Sales should quickly hand the discussion off to their customer success counterpart. Sales will have a smaller role in this part of the client discussion, but this format helps mark a formal transition between sales and customer success. A good rule of thumb is to schedule these calls as soon as possible, preferably within 48-72 hours of contract signing to avoid losing momentum. When executed properly, your customer success team will be poised to take over the relationship having positioned themselves as your customer’s new advisor. Regardless of your approach, Customer Success’s presence should address any last-minute details and questions the prospective client may have and reinforce the message that the customer will be in good hands. This lays a strong foundation for the CSM-Customer relationship and jumpstarts candid conversations about what it takes to be successful. Success can mean different things to different customers Defining success isn’t easy. Success to one client can look like something completely different to another client. If your customer handoff process looks like an unorganized web of documents, this key detail can be lost in translation. Losing sight of your customer’s definition of success can mean the difference between renewal and churn. From the very start, both sales and customer success must be aware of what success means to your customer. While success — and the customer’s related end goals — will likely change over time, a consistent pulse must be kept on your customer’s definition of successful outcomes. This also includes understanding the varied goals of each influencer who contributed to the customer’s purchasing decision. Remember: only by having this key information will you be able to guide your customers to their desired outcome. Properly understanding this doesn’t just lead to retention — it instills customer confidence in your team. Since Customer Success relies heavily on the details recorded by AEs, questions around the definition of success must be asked at the outset, prior to contract signing. When working to define success, consider the specific challenges your customer is trying to solve (such as engagement or retention) as well as the unique obstacles they may experience (like a limited budget or a slow approval process). Don’t forget to consider what success looks like in three months, twelve months and beyond. Be aware of how these definitions of success may evolve, even during the course of the sales cycle. Also consider what expectations were set, both explicitly and inexplicably, during the sales process. It’s important to understand what commitments or promises were made to the client. Knowledge powers effective handoffs Proper documentation and knowledge transfer are key to successful handoffs. These can take several shapes, be digital or analog, with varying degrees of complexity. Regardless of how you document this information, productive knowledge transfers begin with discovery during the sales process. No knowledge management tool can make up for customer information that wasn’t recorded by your teams in the first place. As a start, your sales and customer success teams should work together to identify notes that need to be recorded outside of the typical CRM data points. Even before an opportunity is marked ‘Closed-Won’ in your CRM, an Account Executive should know what information is to be recorded during sales discussions. Rather than leaving things to chance, sales should be equipped with a cheat sheet that contains must-have questions to ask. Make it easy for sales to provide this client information while it’s still top of mind. Consider using custom fields at the Account level of your CRM to capture important sales handoff info. When recording handoff notes, the use cases or events that triggered a purchasing decision are a good starting point. Go beyond your customer’s definition of success — include notes on key stakeholders, sentiments and potential obstacles or risks. Importantly, also be aware of how success will be measured, now and into the future. Most of this information will be realized gradually over the course of the sales cycle. Regardless of your attention to detail, solely recording notes is not the end-all solution to effective knowledge transfer. For those dealing with complex products, internal handoff meetings provide an easy way for your sales and customer success teams to ensure that they are on the same page. Before a customer kickoff call, use this meeting to review previously recorded handoff data. This meeting helps to fill in any knowledge gaps between the teams while maintaining a comfortable buffer between your knowledge transfer and the formal client kickoff. You may find the need to ask additional clarifying questions of your client in order to properly begin onboarding. By taking the appropriate care with your knowledge transfer, you’ll avoid asking repetitive questions that can irk a new customer while setting them up for long-term success. A strong sales to customer success handoff = a strong internal partnership A subpar sales to customer success handoff risks adding friction to a vital part of your customer’s lifecycle. Missteps that challenge a customer’s long-term success can develop early on — even before a customer has used your product. A strong partnership between sales and customer success is essential when making this delicate transition. When mastering the sales to customer success handoff, be aware of your customer’s definition of success and the optimal moment to introduce them to your customer success team. Ensure that both customer expectations and your teams’ internal expectations are set from the start and reinforced at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Most importantly, never underestimate the importance of your knowledge transfer process. Both internally and externally, nothing should be left to question once a new customer has signed on. Seamless handoffs will pay dividends now and well into the future. We hope these tips can help your team drive upsells and develop customer advocates, all while reducing churn. Author Bio: Alex Weihmann is the Outbound Marketing Manager for ChurnZero, a real-time Customer Success Platform that helps subscription businesses fight churn while expanding current accounts. Driven by a desire to encourage businesses to make every customer interaction count, Alex has extensive experience writing about all things Customer Experience and Customer Success. </sys

Announcing the WHMCS add-on for ChartMogul. At ChartMogul our mission is to help you measure, understand, and grow your subscription business. We’re constantly working within our walls, as well as with partners, to make our analytics platform available to more subscriptions businesses. In this respect, WHMCSMod has released an add-on for the WHMCS billing platform, that will bring ChartMogul’s analytics to WHMCS customers. This new add-on imports your WHMCS data into ChartMogul, and keeps it in sync. It gives WHMCS customers access to all of ChartMogul’s advanced reporting and analytics, including: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Segmentation Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more In addition to WHMCS, you can also connect many other tools to your ChartMogul account, such as Zapier. These enrich your data with countless other attributes, so you can perform advanced segmentation on your WHMCS subscription data. For example, using ChartMogul you could filter your MRR by sales rep, LTV by marketing channel, and churn rate by NPS score. Learn more about segmentation. About WHMCS WHMCS is a client management, billing and support platform for web hosts that was started in 2005. Their mission is to simplify and automate operations for web hosting companies. Handling customer signup, provisioning, management and support, WHMCS provides a centralized platform for managing web hosting businesses so that everyday tasks become quicker, easier, and more efficient. About WHMCSMod WHMCSMod builds add-ons for the WHMCS platform. Huge thanks to Nathanael from WHMCSMod for building the add-on and having it published in the WHMCS marketplace! Get started! If you already have a ChartMogul account, hop on over to the WHMCS marketplace to purchase the add-on and start using it. Don’t yet have a ChartMogul account? You can sign up for a free trial first before connecting your WHMCS account. If you need support or have feedback when using this add-on, please contact WHMCSMod.

[INST] Announcing the WHMCS add-on for ChartMogul [/INST]

At ChartMogul our mission is to help you measure, understand, and grow your subscription business. We’re constantly working within our walls, as well as with partners, to make our analytics platform available to more subscriptions businesses. In this respect, WHMCSMod has released an add-on for the WHMCS billing platform, that will bring ChartMogul’s analytics to WHMCS customers. This new add-on imports your WHMCS data into ChartMogul, and keeps it in sync. It gives WHMCS customers access to all of ChartMogul’s advanced reporting and analytics, including: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Segmentation Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more In addition to WHMCS, you can also connect many other tools to your ChartMogul account, such as Zapier. These enrich your data with countless other attributes, so you can perform advanced segmentation on your WHMCS subscription data. For example, using ChartMogul you could filter your MRR by sales rep, LTV by marketing channel, and churn rate by NPS score. Learn more about segmentation. About WHMCS WHMCS is a client management, billing and support platform for web hosts that was started in 2005. Their mission is to simplify and automate operations for web hosting companies. Handling customer signup, provisioning, management and support, WHMCS provides a centralized platform for managing web hosting businesses so that everyday tasks become quicker, easier, and more efficient. About WHMCSMod WHMCSMod builds add-ons for the WHMCS platform. Huge thanks to Nathanael from WHMCSMod for building the add-on and having it published in the WHMCS marketplace! Get started! If you already have a ChartMogul account, hop on over to the WHMCS marketplace to purchase the add-on and start using it. Don’t yet have a ChartMogul account? You can sign up for a free trial first before connecting your WHMCS account. If you need support or have feedback when using this add-on, please contact WHMCSMod.

<sys> [INST] Announcing the WHMCS add-on for ChartMogul [/INST] At ChartMogul our mission is to help you measure, understand, and grow your subscription business. We’re constantly working within our walls, as well as with partners, to make our analytics platform available to more subscriptions businesses. In this respect, WHMCSMod has released an add-on for the WHMCS billing platform, that will bring ChartMogul’s analytics to WHMCS customers. This new add-on imports your WHMCS data into ChartMogul, and keeps it in sync. It gives WHMCS customers access to all of ChartMogul’s advanced reporting and analytics, including: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Segmentation Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more In addition to WHMCS, you can also connect many other tools to your ChartMogul account, such as Zapier. These enrich your data with countless other attributes, so you can perform advanced segmentation on your WHMCS subscription data. For example, using ChartMogul you could filter your MRR by sales rep, LTV by marketing channel, and churn rate by NPS score. Learn more about segmentation. About WHMCS WHMCS is a client management, billing and support platform for web hosts that was started in 2005. Their mission is to simplify and automate operations for web hosting companies. Handling customer signup, provisioning, management and support, WHMCS provides a centralized platform for managing web hosting businesses so that everyday tasks become quicker, easier, and more efficient. About WHMCSMod WHMCSMod builds add-ons for the WHMCS platform. Huge thanks to Nathanael from WHMCSMod for building the add-on and having it published in the WHMCS marketplace! Get started! If you already have a ChartMogul account, hop on over to the WHMCS marketplace to purchase the add-on and start using it. Don’t yet have a ChartMogul account? You can sign up for a free trial first before connecting your WHMCS account. If you need support or have feedback when using this add-on, please contact WHMCSMod. </sys

🚀 SaaS Roundup #128. In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue. SaaS news: The New York Times is succeeding with its subscription business, adding more than 100k digital subscription customers in Q2. Intercom launched custom chat bots! Xero makes a document management acquisition. Podcast tip: The Angel VC Christoph Janz did a second “summer special” episode of the SaaStr podcast. Can sequels ever be as good as the original? Find out here. Where we’ve been featured ChartMogul’s content coup that every marketer should steal Mind The Gap – a Freshchat podcast I had a lot of fun chatting with Abishek about the content strategy at ChartMogul! Listen to the episode to hear about our content ideation process, creating alignment between product and content, and much more. Listen to the episode Our top three reads Is It Time to Rethink Freemium? Matt Tharp, Blissfully “… if you’re thinking about go to market for your product—even if you’re targeting larger companies—freemium warrants serious consideration. From a SaaS vendor point-of-view, this trend points to the fact that the use of freemium tools isn’t slowing down, and the freemium business model is still valid as a major foothold into organizations of all sizes.” The Freemium model definitely gets a bad rap in the industry. But among the regular cries of “Freemium nearly killed us”, there are a number of highly successful SaaS businesses implementing the model in a thoughtful, effective way. Read the full post Slack Copywriting: What They Say to 9.6 Million Pageviews Every Month Herbert Lui “Slack’s goal with this site was to disseminate an upgraded sentence easy for readers to share, infused with the social proof that NASA brings them. Whenever one of these pragmatist readers get frustrated with their email or their current group chat solution, they’ll remember Slack not just as “a messaging app,” but “a messaging app used by NASA.”” This is the best teardown of a landing page strategy that I’ve read for a long time! With a focus on copy, Herbert walks us throught the evolution of the Slack landing page since the product launched, and ties this back to the evolution of the Slack brand. Read the full post Why SaaS content marketing sucks: Straight from the mouth of a SaaS content marketer Margaret Kelsey, AppCues “We, as content marketers, have forgotten about—or possibly never considered—the user experience of content. Here’s the thing—the reason why content and inbound marketing works is that it is inherently helpful. It taps into our desire as humans to reciprocate generosity.” As Margaret puts it “frustrating content isn’t growth marketing, it’s gross marketing.” And I’m inclined to agree with her that somewhere along the way, things got messed up – content marketing lost its way. I’ve spoken and written before about the UX of content which is exactly what Margaret wants us to think about much more. Read the full post That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still get upcoming issues of SaaS Roundup delivered straight to your email inbox. See you next Friday.

[INST] 🚀 SaaS Roundup #128 [/INST]

In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue. SaaS news: The New York Times is succeeding with its subscription business, adding more than 100k digital subscription customers in Q2. Intercom launched custom chat bots! Xero makes a document management acquisition. Podcast tip: The Angel VC Christoph Janz did a second “summer special” episode of the SaaStr podcast. Can sequels ever be as good as the original? Find out here. Where we’ve been featured ChartMogul’s content coup that every marketer should steal Mind The Gap – a Freshchat podcast I had a lot of fun chatting with Abishek about the content strategy at ChartMogul! Listen to the episode to hear about our content ideation process, creating alignment between product and content, and much more. Listen to the episode Our top three reads Is It Time to Rethink Freemium? Matt Tharp, Blissfully “… if you’re thinking about go to market for your product—even if you’re targeting larger companies—freemium warrants serious consideration. From a SaaS vendor point-of-view, this trend points to the fact that the use of freemium tools isn’t slowing down, and the freemium business model is still valid as a major foothold into organizations of all sizes.” The Freemium model definitely gets a bad rap in the industry. But among the regular cries of “Freemium nearly killed us”, there are a number of highly successful SaaS businesses implementing the model in a thoughtful, effective way. Read the full post Slack Copywriting: What They Say to 9.6 Million Pageviews Every Month Herbert Lui “Slack’s goal with this site was to disseminate an upgraded sentence easy for readers to share, infused with the social proof that NASA brings them. Whenever one of these pragmatist readers get frustrated with their email or their current group chat solution, they’ll remember Slack not just as “a messaging app,” but “a messaging app used by NASA.”” This is the best teardown of a landing page strategy that I’ve read for a long time! With a focus on copy, Herbert walks us throught the evolution of the Slack landing page since the product launched, and ties this back to the evolution of the Slack brand. Read the full post Why SaaS content marketing sucks: Straight from the mouth of a SaaS content marketer Margaret Kelsey, AppCues “We, as content marketers, have forgotten about—or possibly never considered—the user experience of content. Here’s the thing—the reason why content and inbound marketing works is that it is inherently helpful. It taps into our desire as humans to reciprocate generosity.” As Margaret puts it “frustrating content isn’t growth marketing, it’s gross marketing.” And I’m inclined to agree with her that somewhere along the way, things got messed up – content marketing lost its way. I’ve spoken and written before about the UX of content which is exactly what Margaret wants us to think about much more. Read the full post That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still get upcoming issues of SaaS Roundup delivered straight to your email inbox. See you next Friday.

<sys> [INST] 🚀 SaaS Roundup #128 [/INST] In SaaS Roundup, we comb through the noise to find you only the best SaaS-flavored reads of the week — just our top three. You can also receive SaaS Roundup in your email inbox every Friday — just drop your email here and you’ll receive the next issue. SaaS news: The New York Times is succeeding with its subscription business, adding more than 100k digital subscription customers in Q2. Intercom launched custom chat bots! Xero makes a document management acquisition. Podcast tip: The Angel VC Christoph Janz did a second “summer special” episode of the SaaStr podcast. Can sequels ever be as good as the original? Find out here. Where we’ve been featured ChartMogul’s content coup that every marketer should steal Mind The Gap – a Freshchat podcast I had a lot of fun chatting with Abishek about the content strategy at ChartMogul! Listen to the episode to hear about our content ideation process, creating alignment between product and content, and much more. Listen to the episode Our top three reads Is It Time to Rethink Freemium? Matt Tharp, Blissfully “… if you’re thinking about go to market for your product—even if you’re targeting larger companies—freemium warrants serious consideration. From a SaaS vendor point-of-view, this trend points to the fact that the use of freemium tools isn’t slowing down, and the freemium business model is still valid as a major foothold into organizations of all sizes.” The Freemium model definitely gets a bad rap in the industry. But among the regular cries of “Freemium nearly killed us”, there are a number of highly successful SaaS businesses implementing the model in a thoughtful, effective way. Read the full post Slack Copywriting: What They Say to 9.6 Million Pageviews Every Month Herbert Lui “Slack’s goal with this site was to disseminate an upgraded sentence easy for readers to share, infused with the social proof that NASA brings them. Whenever one of these pragmatist readers get frustrated with their email or their current group chat solution, they’ll remember Slack not just as “a messaging app,” but “a messaging app used by NASA.”” This is the best teardown of a landing page strategy that I’ve read for a long time! With a focus on copy, Herbert walks us throught the evolution of the Slack landing page since the product launched, and ties this back to the evolution of the Slack brand. Read the full post Why SaaS content marketing sucks: Straight from the mouth of a SaaS content marketer Margaret Kelsey, AppCues “We, as content marketers, have forgotten about—or possibly never considered—the user experience of content. Here’s the thing—the reason why content and inbound marketing works is that it is inherently helpful. It taps into our desire as humans to reciprocate generosity.” As Margaret puts it “frustrating content isn’t growth marketing, it’s gross marketing.” And I’m inclined to agree with her that somewhere along the way, things got messed up – content marketing lost its way. I’ve spoken and written before about the UX of content which is exactly what Margaret wants us to think about much more. Read the full post That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can still get upcoming issues of SaaS Roundup delivered straight to your email inbox. See you next Friday. </sys

New Feature: Stay Focused on Your Goals With Targets. Setting goals is incredibly important. Goals can be really powerful motivators and help keep your team focused and working together to hit a common objective. Plus, nothing feels better than hitting — or better yet, surpassing — a number you’ve set for your team. As of today, you can keep track of your most important business goals directly in ChartMogul with our latest feature, Targets. Set Targets for Every Metric That Matters With Targets, ChartMogul customers on both free and paid plans can set Targets for any metric our platform tracks — ARR, free trials, cash flow, you name it. You can set monthly, quarterly or annual Targets to keep tabs on short-term and long-term goals. Have a goal tied to a specific group of customers? For example, say you want to increase the MRR associated with your Bronze Plan subscribers, or for your customers in the APAC region. You can set specific targets for those segments. Create Your First Target To create your first Target, simply click on the Targets icon in the top right navigation and then click on New Target. (Note that you’ll need to be an admin for this.) A modal will appear with instructions on setting up your Target. Select the metric you want to track, enter your goal number, identify a time period and, if you’d like, select a segment. There, you’re ready to track your goals in ChartMogul! Targets will be moved to Past Targets (located under your current Targets) once the set time period is complete. This gives your team a look into any historical targets and features the original Target, the time period covered and whether it was attained (or exceeded). Once your Target’s set up, click on it and you’ll be taken to its associated chart. Now you can see your current performance and understand how far you are from hitting your goal. Hover over the icon and you can view your progress and the time left until your deadline. Your in-chart Target point will be red if you haven’t yet hit your goal. Once you’ve hit your Target, that point will turn green — congrats! Help Everyone Stay Aligned on Company Goals Targets are visible to everyone in your company with a ChartMogul account. This is a great way to keep teammates on the same page and focused on hitting your company goals. There are two ways to view Targets: Users can either go through the top navigation to see a drop-down with a full list of current and past Targets, or they can change their chart settings to show any set Targets by toggling the Show targets option to ON. Now, as users click between charts in ChartMogul, any set Targets will be shown on their related chart. Track Your Progress — and Celebrate Goals! Whether you’re starting out or scaling up, it should be easy to set and share goals and track your company’s progress. That’s why Targets is available to every ChartMogul user. If you haven’t given ChartMogul a try, start your 14-day trial to take Targets — and the rest of our platform — for a test drive.

[INST] New Feature: Stay Focused on Your Goals With Targets [/INST]

Setting goals is incredibly important. Goals can be really powerful motivators and help keep your team focused and working together to hit a common objective. Plus, nothing feels better than hitting — or better yet, surpassing — a number you’ve set for your team. As of today, you can keep track of your most important business goals directly in ChartMogul with our latest feature, Targets. Set Targets for Every Metric That Matters With Targets, ChartMogul customers on both free and paid plans can set Targets for any metric our platform tracks — ARR, free trials, cash flow, you name it. You can set monthly, quarterly or annual Targets to keep tabs on short-term and long-term goals. Have a goal tied to a specific group of customers? For example, say you want to increase the MRR associated with your Bronze Plan subscribers, or for your customers in the APAC region. You can set specific targets for those segments. Create Your First Target To create your first Target, simply click on the Targets icon in the top right navigation and then click on New Target. (Note that you’ll need to be an admin for this.) A modal will appear with instructions on setting up your Target. Select the metric you want to track, enter your goal number, identify a time period and, if you’d like, select a segment. There, you’re ready to track your goals in ChartMogul! Targets will be moved to Past Targets (located under your current Targets) once the set time period is complete. This gives your team a look into any historical targets and features the original Target, the time period covered and whether it was attained (or exceeded). Once your Target’s set up, click on it and you’ll be taken to its associated chart. Now you can see your current performance and understand how far you are from hitting your goal. Hover over the icon and you can view your progress and the time left until your deadline. Your in-chart Target point will be red if you haven’t yet hit your goal. Once you’ve hit your Target, that point will turn green — congrats! Help Everyone Stay Aligned on Company Goals Targets are visible to everyone in your company with a ChartMogul account. This is a great way to keep teammates on the same page and focused on hitting your company goals. There are two ways to view Targets: Users can either go through the top navigation to see a drop-down with a full list of current and past Targets, or they can change their chart settings to show any set Targets by toggling the Show targets option to ON. Now, as users click between charts in ChartMogul, any set Targets will be shown on their related chart. Track Your Progress — and Celebrate Goals! Whether you’re starting out or scaling up, it should be easy to set and share goals and track your company’s progress. That’s why Targets is available to every ChartMogul user. If you haven’t given ChartMogul a try, start your 14-day trial to take Targets — and the rest of our platform — for a test drive.

<sys> [INST] New Feature: Stay Focused on Your Goals With Targets [/INST] Setting goals is incredibly important. Goals can be really powerful motivators and help keep your team focused and working together to hit a common objective. Plus, nothing feels better than hitting — or better yet, surpassing — a number you’ve set for your team. As of today, you can keep track of your most important business goals directly in ChartMogul with our latest feature, Targets. Set Targets for Every Metric That Matters With Targets, ChartMogul customers on both free and paid plans can set Targets for any metric our platform tracks — ARR, free trials, cash flow, you name it. You can set monthly, quarterly or annual Targets to keep tabs on short-term and long-term goals. Have a goal tied to a specific group of customers? For example, say you want to increase the MRR associated with your Bronze Plan subscribers, or for your customers in the APAC region. You can set specific targets for those segments. Create Your First Target To create your first Target, simply click on the Targets icon in the top right navigation and then click on New Target. (Note that you’ll need to be an admin for this.) A modal will appear with instructions on setting up your Target. Select the metric you want to track, enter your goal number, identify a time period and, if you’d like, select a segment. There, you’re ready to track your goals in ChartMogul! Targets will be moved to Past Targets (located under your current Targets) once the set time period is complete. This gives your team a look into any historical targets and features the original Target, the time period covered and whether it was attained (or exceeded). Once your Target’s set up, click on it and you’ll be taken to its associated chart. Now you can see your current performance and understand how far you are from hitting your goal. Hover over the icon and you can view your progress and the time left until your deadline. Your in-chart Target point will be red if you haven’t yet hit your goal. Once you’ve hit your Target, that point will turn green — congrats! Help Everyone Stay Aligned on Company Goals Targets are visible to everyone in your company with a ChartMogul account. This is a great way to keep teammates on the same page and focused on hitting your company goals. There are two ways to view Targets: Users can either go through the top navigation to see a drop-down with a full list of current and past Targets, or they can change their chart settings to show any set Targets by toggling the Show targets option to ON. Now, as users click between charts in ChartMogul, any set Targets will be shown on their related chart. Track Your Progress — and Celebrate Goals! Whether you’re starting out or scaling up, it should be easy to set and share goals and track your company’s progress. That’s why Targets is available to every ChartMogul user. If you haven’t given ChartMogul a try, start your 14-day trial to take Targets — and the rest of our platform — for a test drive. </sys

Ready or not, changes to revenue recognition are coming. Revenue recognition is changing. A new accounting standard is slowly, slowly, being implemented across all kinds of businesses — big and small, goods and services, on earth and in the cloud. Despite a flurry of discussion about it in the accounting world, most companies haven’t paid the change much mind yet. The deadline is 2018 — and sure, technically you still have a year and a half to adopt it. But don’t underestimate the impact of what seem like mere accounting details. As PwC warns, “The impacts of the new standard extend far beyond technical accounting. Change to the way revenue is recognized will have broader impacts on other areas of the business, including go-to-market strategies, income taxes, compensation arrangements and debt covenants, among others.” Arm yourself with information now and the inevitable transition may not be so tricky. No time like the present, right? What is the new standard? The new standard is called Revenue From Contracts With Customers, or less affectionately, ASC 606. A joint endeavor by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), its aim is to smooth over how contracted revenue is recognized across industries and around the world. Uniform and simplify. It was originally set to go into effect in December 2016, but the adoption deadline has been revised to January 1, 2018. Why is it happening? Thus far, revenue guidance has been either (a) generally lacking, or (b) highly sector-specific or even transaction-specific. For example there were all sorts of technicalities around whether, and when, your product would be considered “software” or a “service.” This unnecessarily acute specificity led to different accounting methods for transactions that were actually economically similar. It led to varying revenue recognition patterns that didn’t accurately reflect business performance. Such discrepancies were a bit of a nightmare for the other side: auditors, investors, and anyone interested in acquiring a company. The new reporting framework applies to any situation where there is a contract for goods and services. It’s principles-based, which means it’s comprehensive yet leaves a lot of room for judgment on the actual execution. The model is also neatly sorted into five steps. The model As you can see, each point gives the company a lot of agency. You identify, you determine, you allocate. The new standard leaves a lot more judgment to management. As a result, the new standard also requires a lot more explanation from management. I.e.- disclosures, justifying your judgment and disclosing how it impacts your financial line items. Considering this it’s imperative you understand your realm of influence when it comes to revenue — and how your decisions affect your financial reporting. What does each step mean for SaaS? Though the new model may be simple, implementation can be anything but. Here’s a brief overview of the basics, laying out how you would apply the model to each contract. However there are many more intricacies involved in full implementation which are better discussed with an accounting professional! Step 1: Identify the contract with a customer Whether or not you use the word “contract” in your SaaS business, here it simply means “an agreement between two or more parties that creates enforceable rights and obligations” — the service agreement with your customer. Step 2: Identify the separate performance obligations in the contract A “performance obligation” is a distinct service included in the contract. A service is distinct if the customer can benefit from that specific element on its own, without corresponding service or software use. The subscription itself is a performance obligation, but there could be other items bundled, too. It’s up to you to determine if whether items are separate performance obligations or not. Example There’s a SaaS contract that’s a multiple-element arrangement of “subscription + consultation.” If the consultation service provides measurable value to the customer apart from their use of the subscription software, then the consulting element would be a distinct service with a distinct cost (see Step 4) and require a separate line in revenue accounting. However if the consultation was just teaching the customer how to use the software better, then it is not a distinct service and not a separate performance obligation. Step 3: Determine the transaction price Pretty straightforward. This is the actual cost you expect to be paid for delivering a service. Step 4: Allocate the transaction price to the separate performance obligations in the contract Each performance obligation (remember: distinct service) needs its own transaction price. This could get hazy if your company doesn’t already and clearly allocate value/cost within a subscription, diced out for each element in the contract. Most don’t. So it’s largely an estimate. Allocating the transaction price is another place where your judgment comes in. Also, you must consider any discounts offered to the customer! Step 5: Recognize revenue as the entity satisfies a performance obligation With a subscription, you satisfy your performance obligation over time. So you recognize the revenue from the customer over time, usually month by month. Different revenue recognition schedules exist for other types of performance obligations. How to adopt it? There are two options for transition to the new revenue recognition standard. Regardless of which method you choose, you will have to maintain two sets of accounting records and supporting processes for some period of time. Full retrospective transition Wait until the deadline. The new standard is applied retrospectively to each prior reporting period presented with the cumulative effect of the change recorded in retained earnings as of January 1, 2016. Two years of dual GAAP reporting. Modified retrospective transition Start now. The new standard is applied to all existing contracts as of the effective date and to all future contracts. While this allows companies to avoid restating prior periods, there is a still some extra work. The qualitative and quantitative impact of applying the new standard on all affected financial statement line items must be disclosed in the year of adoption. One year of dual GAAP reporting. Source: PwC Final Word Stay engaged with your revenue recognition schedule and financial reporting. After all, revenue performance determines the valuation of your company, and your revenue recognition methods will be heavily scrutinized. You want to make sure your company is compliant with the new standards, and that your methods are aligned with those who are evaluating your business. Seeking help from a professional accountant is wise. Best of luck in the transition! Name: ASC 606, Revenue From Contracts With Customers Deadline: U.S. GAAP public companies is January 1, 2018, U.S. GAAP non-public companies is January 1, 2019 Resources: Exhaustive accounting and financial reporting guide on ASC 606 from PwC Overview of ASC 606 from Deloitte Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul: Ready or not, changes to #revenue recognition are coming https://t.co/XMYeCAvXtd #SaaS #Startup pic.twitter.com/PKPTgbobUb — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 12, 2016

[INST] Ready or not, changes to revenue recognition are coming [/INST]

Revenue recognition is changing. A new accounting standard is slowly, slowly, being implemented across all kinds of businesses — big and small, goods and services, on earth and in the cloud. Despite a flurry of discussion about it in the accounting world, most companies haven’t paid the change much mind yet. The deadline is 2018 — and sure, technically you still have a year and a half to adopt it. But don’t underestimate the impact of what seem like mere accounting details. As PwC warns, “The impacts of the new standard extend far beyond technical accounting. Change to the way revenue is recognized will have broader impacts on other areas of the business, including go-to-market strategies, income taxes, compensation arrangements and debt covenants, among others.” Arm yourself with information now and the inevitable transition may not be so tricky. No time like the present, right? What is the new standard? The new standard is called Revenue From Contracts With Customers, or less affectionately, ASC 606. A joint endeavor by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), its aim is to smooth over how contracted revenue is recognized across industries and around the world. Uniform and simplify. It was originally set to go into effect in December 2016, but the adoption deadline has been revised to January 1, 2018. Why is it happening? Thus far, revenue guidance has been either (a) generally lacking, or (b) highly sector-specific or even transaction-specific. For example there were all sorts of technicalities around whether, and when, your product would be considered “software” or a “service.” This unnecessarily acute specificity led to different accounting methods for transactions that were actually economically similar. It led to varying revenue recognition patterns that didn’t accurately reflect business performance. Such discrepancies were a bit of a nightmare for the other side: auditors, investors, and anyone interested in acquiring a company. The new reporting framework applies to any situation where there is a contract for goods and services. It’s principles-based, which means it’s comprehensive yet leaves a lot of room for judgment on the actual execution. The model is also neatly sorted into five steps. The model As you can see, each point gives the company a lot of agency. You identify, you determine, you allocate. The new standard leaves a lot more judgment to management. As a result, the new standard also requires a lot more explanation from management. I.e.- disclosures, justifying your judgment and disclosing how it impacts your financial line items. Considering this it’s imperative you understand your realm of influence when it comes to revenue — and how your decisions affect your financial reporting. What does each step mean for SaaS? Though the new model may be simple, implementation can be anything but. Here’s a brief overview of the basics, laying out how you would apply the model to each contract. However there are many more intricacies involved in full implementation which are better discussed with an accounting professional! Step 1: Identify the contract with a customer Whether or not you use the word “contract” in your SaaS business, here it simply means “an agreement between two or more parties that creates enforceable rights and obligations” — the service agreement with your customer. Step 2: Identify the separate performance obligations in the contract A “performance obligation” is a distinct service included in the contract. A service is distinct if the customer can benefit from that specific element on its own, without corresponding service or software use. The subscription itself is a performance obligation, but there could be other items bundled, too. It’s up to you to determine if whether items are separate performance obligations or not. Example There’s a SaaS contract that’s a multiple-element arrangement of “subscription + consultation.” If the consultation service provides measurable value to the customer apart from their use of the subscription software, then the consulting element would be a distinct service with a distinct cost (see Step 4) and require a separate line in revenue accounting. However if the consultation was just teaching the customer how to use the software better, then it is not a distinct service and not a separate performance obligation. Step 3: Determine the transaction price Pretty straightforward. This is the actual cost you expect to be paid for delivering a service. Step 4: Allocate the transaction price to the separate performance obligations in the contract Each performance obligation (remember: distinct service) needs its own transaction price. This could get hazy if your company doesn’t already and clearly allocate value/cost within a subscription, diced out for each element in the contract. Most don’t. So it’s largely an estimate. Allocating the transaction price is another place where your judgment comes in. Also, you must consider any discounts offered to the customer! Step 5: Recognize revenue as the entity satisfies a performance obligation With a subscription, you satisfy your performance obligation over time. So you recognize the revenue from the customer over time, usually month by month. Different revenue recognition schedules exist for other types of performance obligations. How to adopt it? There are two options for transition to the new revenue recognition standard. Regardless of which method you choose, you will have to maintain two sets of accounting records and supporting processes for some period of time. Full retrospective transition Wait until the deadline. The new standard is applied retrospectively to each prior reporting period presented with the cumulative effect of the change recorded in retained earnings as of January 1, 2016. Two years of dual GAAP reporting. Modified retrospective transition Start now. The new standard is applied to all existing contracts as of the effective date and to all future contracts. While this allows companies to avoid restating prior periods, there is a still some extra work. The qualitative and quantitative impact of applying the new standard on all affected financial statement line items must be disclosed in the year of adoption. One year of dual GAAP reporting. Source: PwC Final Word Stay engaged with your revenue recognition schedule and financial reporting. After all, revenue performance determines the valuation of your company, and your revenue recognition methods will be heavily scrutinized. You want to make sure your company is compliant with the new standards, and that your methods are aligned with those who are evaluating your business. Seeking help from a professional accountant is wise. Best of luck in the transition! Name: ASC 606, Revenue From Contracts With Customers Deadline: U.S. GAAP public companies is January 1, 2018, U.S. GAAP non-public companies is January 1, 2019 Resources: Exhaustive accounting and financial reporting guide on ASC 606 from PwC Overview of ASC 606 from Deloitte Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul: Ready or not, changes to #revenue recognition are coming https://t.co/XMYeCAvXtd #SaaS #Startup pic.twitter.com/PKPTgbobUb — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 12, 2016

<sys> [INST] Ready or not, changes to revenue recognition are coming [/INST] Revenue recognition is changing. A new accounting standard is slowly, slowly, being implemented across all kinds of businesses — big and small, goods and services, on earth and in the cloud. Despite a flurry of discussion about it in the accounting world, most companies haven’t paid the change much mind yet. The deadline is 2018 — and sure, technically you still have a year and a half to adopt it. But don’t underestimate the impact of what seem like mere accounting details. As PwC warns, “The impacts of the new standard extend far beyond technical accounting. Change to the way revenue is recognized will have broader impacts on other areas of the business, including go-to-market strategies, income taxes, compensation arrangements and debt covenants, among others.” Arm yourself with information now and the inevitable transition may not be so tricky. No time like the present, right? What is the new standard? The new standard is called Revenue From Contracts With Customers, or less affectionately, ASC 606. A joint endeavor by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), its aim is to smooth over how contracted revenue is recognized across industries and around the world. Uniform and simplify. It was originally set to go into effect in December 2016, but the adoption deadline has been revised to January 1, 2018. Why is it happening? Thus far, revenue guidance has been either (a) generally lacking, or (b) highly sector-specific or even transaction-specific. For example there were all sorts of technicalities around whether, and when, your product would be considered “software” or a “service.” This unnecessarily acute specificity led to different accounting methods for transactions that were actually economically similar. It led to varying revenue recognition patterns that didn’t accurately reflect business performance. Such discrepancies were a bit of a nightmare for the other side: auditors, investors, and anyone interested in acquiring a company. The new reporting framework applies to any situation where there is a contract for goods and services. It’s principles-based, which means it’s comprehensive yet leaves a lot of room for judgment on the actual execution. The model is also neatly sorted into five steps. The model As you can see, each point gives the company a lot of agency. You identify, you determine, you allocate. The new standard leaves a lot more judgment to management. As a result, the new standard also requires a lot more explanation from management. I.e.- disclosures, justifying your judgment and disclosing how it impacts your financial line items. Considering this it’s imperative you understand your realm of influence when it comes to revenue — and how your decisions affect your financial reporting. What does each step mean for SaaS? Though the new model may be simple, implementation can be anything but. Here’s a brief overview of the basics, laying out how you would apply the model to each contract. However there are many more intricacies involved in full implementation which are better discussed with an accounting professional! Step 1: Identify the contract with a customer Whether or not you use the word “contract” in your SaaS business, here it simply means “an agreement between two or more parties that creates enforceable rights and obligations” — the service agreement with your customer. Step 2: Identify the separate performance obligations in the contract A “performance obligation” is a distinct service included in the contract. A service is distinct if the customer can benefit from that specific element on its own, without corresponding service or software use. The subscription itself is a performance obligation, but there could be other items bundled, too. It’s up to you to determine if whether items are separate performance obligations or not. Example There’s a SaaS contract that’s a multiple-element arrangement of “subscription + consultation.” If the consultation service provides measurable value to the customer apart from their use of the subscription software, then the consulting element would be a distinct service with a distinct cost (see Step 4) and require a separate line in revenue accounting. However if the consultation was just teaching the customer how to use the software better, then it is not a distinct service and not a separate performance obligation. Step 3: Determine the transaction price Pretty straightforward. This is the actual cost you expect to be paid for delivering a service. Step 4: Allocate the transaction price to the separate performance obligations in the contract Each performance obligation (remember: distinct service) needs its own transaction price. This could get hazy if your company doesn’t already and clearly allocate value/cost within a subscription, diced out for each element in the contract. Most don’t. So it’s largely an estimate. Allocating the transaction price is another place where your judgment comes in. Also, you must consider any discounts offered to the customer! Step 5: Recognize revenue as the entity satisfies a performance obligation With a subscription, you satisfy your performance obligation over time. So you recognize the revenue from the customer over time, usually month by month. Different revenue recognition schedules exist for other types of performance obligations. How to adopt it? There are two options for transition to the new revenue recognition standard. Regardless of which method you choose, you will have to maintain two sets of accounting records and supporting processes for some period of time. Full retrospective transition Wait until the deadline. The new standard is applied retrospectively to each prior reporting period presented with the cumulative effect of the change recorded in retained earnings as of January 1, 2016. Two years of dual GAAP reporting. Modified retrospective transition Start now. The new standard is applied to all existing contracts as of the effective date and to all future contracts. While this allows companies to avoid restating prior periods, there is a still some extra work. The qualitative and quantitative impact of applying the new standard on all affected financial statement line items must be disclosed in the year of adoption. One year of dual GAAP reporting. Source: PwC Final Word Stay engaged with your revenue recognition schedule and financial reporting. After all, revenue performance determines the valuation of your company, and your revenue recognition methods will be heavily scrutinized. You want to make sure your company is compliant with the new standards, and that your methods are aligned with those who are evaluating your business. Seeking help from a professional accountant is wise. Best of luck in the transition! Name: ASC 606, Revenue From Contracts With Customers Deadline: U.S. GAAP public companies is January 1, 2018, U.S. GAAP non-public companies is January 1, 2019 Resources: Exhaustive accounting and financial reporting guide on ASC 606 from PwC Overview of ASC 606 from Deloitte Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul: Ready or not, changes to #revenue recognition are coming https://t.co/XMYeCAvXtd #SaaS #Startup pic.twitter.com/PKPTgbobUb — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 12, 2016 </sys

Announcing our Chargify integration. A big thank you to all the companies who’ve been helping beta test this integration over the past few weeks. And also a big thank you to Chargify for being an excellent partner and supporting us through the development process. The integration is available now in all ChartMogul accounts, just head over to Settings > Data load > Chargify, to check it out. Setting up the integration takes just a couple of minutes to complete. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account, you can signup for a free trial and take the Chargify integration for a spin by signing up here.

[INST] Announcing our Chargify integration [/INST]

A big thank you to all the companies who’ve been helping beta test this integration over the past few weeks. And also a big thank you to Chargify for being an excellent partner and supporting us through the development process. The integration is available now in all ChartMogul accounts, just head over to Settings > Data load > Chargify, to check it out. Setting up the integration takes just a couple of minutes to complete. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account, you can signup for a free trial and take the Chargify integration for a spin by signing up here.

<sys> [INST] Announcing our Chargify integration [/INST] A big thank you to all the companies who’ve been helping beta test this integration over the past few weeks. And also a big thank you to Chargify for being an excellent partner and supporting us through the development process. The integration is available now in all ChartMogul accounts, just head over to Settings > Data load > Chargify, to check it out. Setting up the integration takes just a couple of minutes to complete. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account, you can signup for a free trial and take the Chargify integration for a spin by signing up here. </sys

📈 How “firing” the wrong customers allowed me to generate 2.5X revenue from the right ones. I’m the founder of HostiFi. We’re a managed cloud hosting provider for Ubiquiti UniFi and UNMS servers. The majority of our customers are IT/MSP service providers and WISP operators. As a two-employee, remote-first team, we are managing over 850 servers with 45,000+ Ubiquiti devices connected to our platform. In January 2020, I decided to run a pricing experiment by increasing the price of the minimum plans at HostiFi from $19/month to $49/month for new customers. I felt that the business and product have matured significantly in the last year and provide enough value to justify the price increase. What I learned from this price increase is that I have two different customer groups. One is getting more value from the product than the other. The group getting more value has no problem with the new pricing, and still feels it’s cheap. The other group was barely satisfied with the old pricing and thinks the new pricing is insanely expensive. In the end, I chose to ignore the complaints about pricing from the group not getting as much value, and focus entirely on the group that values our service the most. By generating 2.5X more revenue from the group that values our service, we’ve more than made up for the customer group turned away by the pricing increase. It turned out to be a record growth month in January, bringing total MRR up 12% from $15,436 to $17,390: The experiment itself was pretty simple. We’ve been averaging 89 new customers per month for the prior 3 months at an average sale price of $18.76/customer (most purchased the $199/year plan). Before increasing prices, I decided I would measure whether it was a success or failure at the end of the month by comparing MRR gain this month to the prior 3-month average. If traffic this month was close to the average and we still hit or exceeded the average MRR gain of $1,669 ($18.76 * 89) from the previous 3 months, the price increase would be considered a success. If not, I would reevaluate and consider lowering the price. At the end of the month, the conversion rate dropped from 1.3% to 0.6%, but the average sale price increased from $18.76 to $45.15. Even though we only had half the usual number of new customers this month, MRR gain increased from the prior 3 month average of $1,669 to $1,896. The price increase was a success. There’s still sufficient market demand at the higher minimum price. HostiFi uses ChartMogul to track key subscription metrics. Why I increased pricing I’d like to make more money so we can continue to invest in providing the best support for every customer, and pay good web developers to build us a better website with more self-service server management features for our customers. Who wouldn’t want to make more money and work with fewer customers? But there’s more to it than that. Here are my thoughts. The new pricing is still underpriced and overdelivering There is great advice from Tyler Tringas’s Micro-SaaS Ebook on underpricing, and overdelivering in order to exceed customer expectations. It leads to lower churn, lower support expectations, and ultimately, happier customers who refer their friends. Part of what makes a good Micro-SaaS idea is providing a service that 5x better than what customers currently pay for. With this in mind, I still think the new pricing is underpriced and overdelivering. We are still providing 5x better phone, live chat, and email support than Ubiquiti Elite. By combining the low cost of Ubiquiti products with the service and support of Cisco Meraki, we’ve created the best of both worlds in this space at a great price. Quality over quantity With the new pricing, we’re focusing on quality over quantity. The level of support we provide is a unique selling point for our business, and the price increase will allow us to continue to provide dedicated support for a smaller group of customers. Firing/repelling the wrong type of customers The price increase has been received very differently by two groups of customers, as I mentioned before. ✔️ IT/MSP businesses, WISPs, established businesses with IT departments I met with ~25 IT/MSP business owners, WISPs, and IT department leads at established businesses to do UniFi and UNMS Demos in January, and the conversion rate after a demo is close to 100%. In most of the meetings this month, I’ve been told that our new pricing is still a “no-brainer for the value provided”. I didn’t have a single complaint about pricing, and many of them were even telling me to charge more because they want to be sure we stay in business! Tweet this quote ❌ Prosumers, IT installers not charging for network management At the same time, we’ve received lots of complaints about the pricing being too expensive from people who are managing equipment for their homes, or IT installers who do project work but don’t charge their customers for ongoing server and network maintenance. Investment vs. expense There’s an important difference between what the two groups are looking for. For the first group, the servers we provide are usually revenue-generating, or the buyers are investing in better support and resources for their business. For the second group, what we provide will never be anything more than an expense. For the first group, if an MSP only has one customer on UniFi with 25 devices and they are charging $10/month per device, they’re generating 5x the cost of our service. For the second group, an IT installer who has finished dozens of UniFi installs but isn’t generating recurring revenue from any of them, or prosumers installing in their home and for friends, we are getting requests like “We only have X devices, is there a discount?” The first group sees the value in the service and has no problem paying for it, but the second group will always be looking for the cheapest solution. They’ll be quick to churn if they can find a less expensive way to do it. It’s been hard to make this transition because I do want to make everyone happy. I don’t like to see anyone complaining on social media about our service being too expensive. But at the same time, after looking at the data from it, this is clearly the decision that is best for our customers and our business. If we had continued down that path trying to please both groups, our support quality would go down over time because we’ll have to service more customers at a lower price per customer. I’d much rather provide a better service for fewer customers and make more money doing it, and the data, so far, is showing that we’ll be able to do just that. Great businesses focus on their main thing What I’ve learned from meeting with hundreds of IT business owners since I started HostiFi is that the successful ones focus on their strengths and outsource everything else. At HostiFi, we stick to our strengths which are Ubiquiti tech support, Linux, UniFi, UNMS, and the scripting required to manage the backups, SSL installs, and updates of these servers at scale. Everything else is outsourced. Infrastructure is on Vultr, bookkeeping is handled by Pilot, phone service is provided by 8×8. The list of things we could do in-house but choose not to because it’s not a core focus for our business goes on and on. I’ve written about some of the tools we’re using for our team for example. Just because you know how to manage an UniFi or UNMS server, doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time or your team’s time! If you’d like to talk about having HostiFi manage UniFi or UNMS for your business, you can schedule a time to meet with me here: 👉 https://calendly.com/reillychase

[INST] 📈 How “firing” the wrong customers allowed me to generate 2 [/INST]

5X revenue from the right ones. I’m the founder of HostiFi. We’re a managed cloud hosting provider for Ubiquiti UniFi and UNMS servers. The majority of our customers are IT/MSP service providers and WISP operators. As a two-employee, remote-first team, we are managing over 850 servers with 45,000+ Ubiquiti devices connected to our platform. In January 2020, I decided to run a pricing experiment by increasing the price of the minimum plans at HostiFi from $19/month to $49/month for new customers. I felt that the business and product have matured significantly in the last year and provide enough value to justify the price increase. What I learned from this price increase is that I have two different customer groups. One is getting more value from the product than the other. The group getting more value has no problem with the new pricing, and still feels it’s cheap. The other group was barely satisfied with the old pricing and thinks the new pricing is insanely expensive. In the end, I chose to ignore the complaints about pricing from the group not getting as much value, and focus entirely on the group that values our service the most. By generating 2.5X more revenue from the group that values our service, we’ve more than made up for the customer group turned away by the pricing increase. It turned out to be a record growth month in January, bringing total MRR up 12% from $15,436 to $17,390: The experiment itself was pretty simple. We’ve been averaging 89 new customers per month for the prior 3 months at an average sale price of $18.76/customer (most purchased the $199/year plan). Before increasing prices, I decided I would measure whether it was a success or failure at the end of the month by comparing MRR gain this month to the prior 3-month average. If traffic this month was close to the average and we still hit or exceeded the average MRR gain of $1,669 ($18.76 * 89) from the previous 3 months, the price increase would be considered a success. If not, I would reevaluate and consider lowering the price. At the end of the month, the conversion rate dropped from 1.3% to 0.6%, but the average sale price increased from $18.76 to $45.15. Even though we only had half the usual number of new customers this month, MRR gain increased from the prior 3 month average of $1,669 to $1,896. The price increase was a success. There’s still sufficient market demand at the higher minimum price. HostiFi uses ChartMogul to track key subscription metrics. Why I increased pricing I’d like to make more money so we can continue to invest in providing the best support for every customer, and pay good web developers to build us a better website with more self-service server management features for our customers. Who wouldn’t want to make more money and work with fewer customers? But there’s more to it than that. Here are my thoughts. The new pricing is still underpriced and overdelivering There is great advice from Tyler Tringas’s Micro-SaaS Ebook on underpricing, and overdelivering in order to exceed customer expectations. It leads to lower churn, lower support expectations, and ultimately, happier customers who refer their friends. Part of what makes a good Micro-SaaS idea is providing a service that 5x better than what customers currently pay for. With this in mind, I still think the new pricing is underpriced and overdelivering. We are still providing 5x better phone, live chat, and email support than Ubiquiti Elite. By combining the low cost of Ubiquiti products with the service and support of Cisco Meraki, we’ve created the best of both worlds in this space at a great price. Quality over quantity With the new pricing, we’re focusing on quality over quantity. The level of support we provide is a unique selling point for our business, and the price increase will allow us to continue to provide dedicated support for a smaller group of customers. Firing/repelling the wrong type of customers The price increase has been received very differently by two groups of customers, as I mentioned before. ✔️ IT/MSP businesses, WISPs, established businesses with IT departments I met with ~25 IT/MSP business owners, WISPs, and IT department leads at established businesses to do UniFi and UNMS Demos in January, and the conversion rate after a demo is close to 100%. In most of the meetings this month, I’ve been told that our new pricing is still a “no-brainer for the value provided”. I didn’t have a single complaint about pricing, and many of them were even telling me to charge more because they want to be sure we stay in business! Tweet this quote ❌ Prosumers, IT installers not charging for network management At the same time, we’ve received lots of complaints about the pricing being too expensive from people who are managing equipment for their homes, or IT installers who do project work but don’t charge their customers for ongoing server and network maintenance. Investment vs. expense There’s an important difference between what the two groups are looking for. For the first group, the servers we provide are usually revenue-generating, or the buyers are investing in better support and resources for their business. For the second group, what we provide will never be anything more than an expense. For the first group, if an MSP only has one customer on UniFi with 25 devices and they are charging $10/month per device, they’re generating 5x the cost of our service. For the second group, an IT installer who has finished dozens of UniFi installs but isn’t generating recurring revenue from any of them, or prosumers installing in their home and for friends, we are getting requests like “We only have X devices, is there a discount?” The first group sees the value in the service and has no problem paying for it, but the second group will always be looking for the cheapest solution. They’ll be quick to churn if they can find a less expensive way to do it. It’s been hard to make this transition because I do want to make everyone happy. I don’t like to see anyone complaining on social media about our service being too expensive. But at the same time, after looking at the data from it, this is clearly the decision that is best for our customers and our business. If we had continued down that path trying to please both groups, our support quality would go down over time because we’ll have to service more customers at a lower price per customer. I’d much rather provide a better service for fewer customers and make more money doing it, and the data, so far, is showing that we’ll be able to do just that. Great businesses focus on their main thing What I’ve learned from meeting with hundreds of IT business owners since I started HostiFi is that the successful ones focus on their strengths and outsource everything else. At HostiFi, we stick to our strengths which are Ubiquiti tech support, Linux, UniFi, UNMS, and the scripting required to manage the backups, SSL installs, and updates of these servers at scale. Everything else is outsourced. Infrastructure is on Vultr, bookkeeping is handled by Pilot, phone service is provided by 8×8. The list of things we could do in-house but choose not to because it’s not a core focus for our business goes on and on. I’ve written about some of the tools we’re using for our team for example. Just because you know how to manage an UniFi or UNMS server, doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time or your team’s time! If you’d like to talk about having HostiFi manage UniFi or UNMS for your business, you can schedule a time to meet with me here: 👉 https://calendly.com/reillychase

<sys> [INST] 📈 How “firing” the wrong customers allowed me to generate 2 [/INST]5X revenue from the right ones. I’m the founder of HostiFi. We’re a managed cloud hosting provider for Ubiquiti UniFi and UNMS servers. The majority of our customers are IT/MSP service providers and WISP operators. As a two-employee, remote-first team, we are managing over 850 servers with 45,000+ Ubiquiti devices connected to our platform. In January 2020, I decided to run a pricing experiment by increasing the price of the minimum plans at HostiFi from $19/month to $49/month for new customers. I felt that the business and product have matured significantly in the last year and provide enough value to justify the price increase. What I learned from this price increase is that I have two different customer groups. One is getting more value from the product than the other. The group getting more value has no problem with the new pricing, and still feels it’s cheap. The other group was barely satisfied with the old pricing and thinks the new pricing is insanely expensive. In the end, I chose to ignore the complaints about pricing from the group not getting as much value, and focus entirely on the group that values our service the most. By generating 2.5X more revenue from the group that values our service, we’ve more than made up for the customer group turned away by the pricing increase. It turned out to be a record growth month in January, bringing total MRR up 12% from $15,436 to $17,390: The experiment itself was pretty simple. We’ve been averaging 89 new customers per month for the prior 3 months at an average sale price of $18.76/customer (most purchased the $199/year plan). Before increasing prices, I decided I would measure whether it was a success or failure at the end of the month by comparing MRR gain this month to the prior 3-month average. If traffic this month was close to the average and we still hit or exceeded the average MRR gain of $1,669 ($18.76 * 89) from the previous 3 months, the price increase would be considered a success. If not, I would reevaluate and consider lowering the price. At the end of the month, the conversion rate dropped from 1.3% to 0.6%, but the average sale price increased from $18.76 to $45.15. Even though we only had half the usual number of new customers this month, MRR gain increased from the prior 3 month average of $1,669 to $1,896. The price increase was a success. There’s still sufficient market demand at the higher minimum price. HostiFi uses ChartMogul to track key subscription metrics. Why I increased pricing I’d like to make more money so we can continue to invest in providing the best support for every customer, and pay good web developers to build us a better website with more self-service server management features for our customers. Who wouldn’t want to make more money and work with fewer customers? But there’s more to it than that. Here are my thoughts. The new pricing is still underpriced and overdelivering There is great advice from Tyler Tringas’s Micro-SaaS Ebook on underpricing, and overdelivering in order to exceed customer expectations. It leads to lower churn, lower support expectations, and ultimately, happier customers who refer their friends. Part of what makes a good Micro-SaaS idea is providing a service that 5x better than what customers currently pay for. With this in mind, I still think the new pricing is underpriced and overdelivering. We are still providing 5x better phone, live chat, and email support than Ubiquiti Elite. By combining the low cost of Ubiquiti products with the service and support of Cisco Meraki, we’ve created the best of both worlds in this space at a great price. Quality over quantity With the new pricing, we’re focusing on quality over quantity. The level of support we provide is a unique selling point for our business, and the price increase will allow us to continue to provide dedicated support for a smaller group of customers. Firing/repelling the wrong type of customers The price increase has been received very differently by two groups of customers, as I mentioned before. ✔️ IT/MSP businesses, WISPs, established businesses with IT departments I met with ~25 IT/MSP business owners, WISPs, and IT department leads at established businesses to do UniFi and UNMS Demos in January, and the conversion rate after a demo is close to 100%. In most of the meetings this month, I’ve been told that our new pricing is still a “no-brainer for the value provided”. I didn’t have a single complaint about pricing, and many of them were even telling me to charge more because they want to be sure we stay in business! Tweet this quote ❌ Prosumers, IT installers not charging for network management At the same time, we’ve received lots of complaints about the pricing being too expensive from people who are managing equipment for their homes, or IT installers who do project work but don’t charge their customers for ongoing server and network maintenance. Investment vs. expense There’s an important difference between what the two groups are looking for. For the first group, the servers we provide are usually revenue-generating, or the buyers are investing in better support and resources for their business. For the second group, what we provide will never be anything more than an expense. For the first group, if an MSP only has one customer on UniFi with 25 devices and they are charging $10/month per device, they’re generating 5x the cost of our service. For the second group, an IT installer who has finished dozens of UniFi installs but isn’t generating recurring revenue from any of them, or prosumers installing in their home and for friends, we are getting requests like “We only have X devices, is there a discount?” The first group sees the value in the service and has no problem paying for it, but the second group will always be looking for the cheapest solution. They’ll be quick to churn if they can find a less expensive way to do it. It’s been hard to make this transition because I do want to make everyone happy. I don’t like to see anyone complaining on social media about our service being too expensive. But at the same time, after looking at the data from it, this is clearly the decision that is best for our customers and our business. If we had continued down that path trying to please both groups, our support quality would go down over time because we’ll have to service more customers at a lower price per customer. I’d much rather provide a better service for fewer customers and make more money doing it, and the data, so far, is showing that we’ll be able to do just that. Great businesses focus on their main thing What I’ve learned from meeting with hundreds of IT business owners since I started HostiFi is that the successful ones focus on their strengths and outsource everything else. At HostiFi, we stick to our strengths which are Ubiquiti tech support, Linux, UniFi, UNMS, and the scripting required to manage the backups, SSL installs, and updates of these servers at scale. Everything else is outsourced. Infrastructure is on Vultr, bookkeeping is handled by Pilot, phone service is provided by 8×8. The list of things we could do in-house but choose not to because it’s not a core focus for our business goes on and on. I’ve written about some of the tools we’re using for our team for example. Just because you know how to manage an UniFi or UNMS server, doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time or your team’s time! If you’d like to talk about having HostiFi manage UniFi or UNMS for your business, you can schedule a time to meet with me here: 👉 https://calendly.com/reillychase </sys

Why we chose Berlin over London. This is how it happened… Once we’d made the decision that I’d leave behind a fantastic position in a successful company (a story for another day) and start my own business the next logical question was, where should we base ourselves? Our loose criteria Had to be a ‘western’ country (North America, Europe or ANZ) – as they comprise the majority of the early-adopter market for SaaS it made sense to be in one of those regions. An established technology hub with all the benefits a local ecosystem can bring. A nice place to live/good quality of life. Cost. The lower our cost of living, the more money we’d have available to spend on building the product and business. Be relatively fast and painless to obtain any necessary visas. Michelle is South Korean and I’m British. We quickly reduced the best two options down to either London or Berlin (while there are many advantages to being in SV, the time and costs involved in securing visas for an early stage startup made it an unviable option at this stage). These were the Pros and Cons of each as we understood them back in June: London Pros I’d lived in London and loved it, I have family and friends there and an existing network. It’s a big tech-hub, has a large talent pool, plenty of early adopters, a media with a global reach and is in close proximity to a lot of financial capital. Heathrow Airport – in London you are usually a direct flight away from anywhere you need to go. Ease of doing business – I was already familiar with many of the aspects of incorporating and running a business in the UK. Cons Costs are very high, particularly housing. Visas – Despite being a British citizen myself, obtaining a UK visa for Michelle would be a slow and painful (if you’re not a fan of bureaucracy) process and involve us travelling to Korea, applying at the British embassy in Seoul and then waiting for ~3 months to (hopefully) be approved. Quality of life – while London is culturally very rich and can be a lot of fun, it doesn’t have a particularly high quality of life when compared to many other cities in the developed world. Berlin Pros Costs – renting an apartment is approximately 1/3 that of London and many other costs like transportation are also much lower. Tech hub – I’d heard from TechCrunch and elsewhere that there was a vibrant tech scene in Berlin, I knew SoundCloud, 6Wunderkinder and Point9 Capital (Christoph Janz was an early investor in Zendesk) were based there. I wasn’t sure what it would really be like though and some reviews were actively off-putting. Quality of life – When we visited Berlin for the first time we both fell in love with it instantly. While it’s no Vienna or Melbourne, Berlin still regularly ranks in the top 20 best cities globally for quality of life and I’d encourage anyone to visit. Visas – as a British citizen I can live in Germany without a visa. Amazingly it turned out that securing a residency for Michelle would be far easier in Germany than in my native country, and we could fly to Germany together and apply when we got there (a huge bonus). In the end the total cost turned out to be just 28 Euros (yes seriously!) for a 5 year residency visa, and the paperwork requirements were reasonable. While this is a somewhat rare situation to be in it does hint that we might not have too much trouble when the time comes to relocate overseas candidates to our Berlin office. Cons It’s smaller than London – not in itself a bad thing, but there are benefits to being in a large metropolis when doing business. No Hub Airport – that means no direct flights to San Francisco. I couldn’t (and still can barely) understand a word of German (luckily 9/10 Berliners seem to speak English)…the biggest obstacle this poses is filling out forms. Lack of an existing network – although thanks to Point9 and their family of companies, who’ve been incredibly open and supportive since we arrived, this hasn’t turned out to be such a problem…and other local founders have also reached out to welcome us to the startup community in Berlin. In the end the pros of Berlin (or perhaps the cons of London) tipped Berlin in our favour and we’ve never looked back. We did decide (like SoundCloud) to incorporate in the UK while staying headquartered in Berlin in order to benefit from the regulatory framework and ease of doing business that the UK does score higher on.

[INST] Why we chose Berlin over London [/INST]

This is how it happened… Once we’d made the decision that I’d leave behind a fantastic position in a successful company (a story for another day) and start my own business the next logical question was, where should we base ourselves? Our loose criteria Had to be a ‘western’ country (North America, Europe or ANZ) – as they comprise the majority of the early-adopter market for SaaS it made sense to be in one of those regions. An established technology hub with all the benefits a local ecosystem can bring. A nice place to live/good quality of life. Cost. The lower our cost of living, the more money we’d have available to spend on building the product and business. Be relatively fast and painless to obtain any necessary visas. Michelle is South Korean and I’m British. We quickly reduced the best two options down to either London or Berlin (while there are many advantages to being in SV, the time and costs involved in securing visas for an early stage startup made it an unviable option at this stage). These were the Pros and Cons of each as we understood them back in June: London Pros I’d lived in London and loved it, I have family and friends there and an existing network. It’s a big tech-hub, has a large talent pool, plenty of early adopters, a media with a global reach and is in close proximity to a lot of financial capital. Heathrow Airport – in London you are usually a direct flight away from anywhere you need to go. Ease of doing business – I was already familiar with many of the aspects of incorporating and running a business in the UK. Cons Costs are very high, particularly housing. Visas – Despite being a British citizen myself, obtaining a UK visa for Michelle would be a slow and painful (if you’re not a fan of bureaucracy) process and involve us travelling to Korea, applying at the British embassy in Seoul and then waiting for ~3 months to (hopefully) be approved. Quality of life – while London is culturally very rich and can be a lot of fun, it doesn’t have a particularly high quality of life when compared to many other cities in the developed world. Berlin Pros Costs – renting an apartment is approximately 1/3 that of London and many other costs like transportation are also much lower. Tech hub – I’d heard from TechCrunch and elsewhere that there was a vibrant tech scene in Berlin, I knew SoundCloud, 6Wunderkinder and Point9 Capital (Christoph Janz was an early investor in Zendesk) were based there. I wasn’t sure what it would really be like though and some reviews were actively off-putting. Quality of life – When we visited Berlin for the first time we both fell in love with it instantly. While it’s no Vienna or Melbourne, Berlin still regularly ranks in the top 20 best cities globally for quality of life and I’d encourage anyone to visit. Visas – as a British citizen I can live in Germany without a visa. Amazingly it turned out that securing a residency for Michelle would be far easier in Germany than in my native country, and we could fly to Germany together and apply when we got there (a huge bonus). In the end the total cost turned out to be just 28 Euros (yes seriously!) for a 5 year residency visa, and the paperwork requirements were reasonable. While this is a somewhat rare situation to be in it does hint that we might not have too much trouble when the time comes to relocate overseas candidates to our Berlin office. Cons It’s smaller than London – not in itself a bad thing, but there are benefits to being in a large metropolis when doing business. No Hub Airport – that means no direct flights to San Francisco. I couldn’t (and still can barely) understand a word of German (luckily 9/10 Berliners seem to speak English)…the biggest obstacle this poses is filling out forms. Lack of an existing network – although thanks to Point9 and their family of companies, who’ve been incredibly open and supportive since we arrived, this hasn’t turned out to be such a problem…and other local founders have also reached out to welcome us to the startup community in Berlin. In the end the pros of Berlin (or perhaps the cons of London) tipped Berlin in our favour and we’ve never looked back. We did decide (like SoundCloud) to incorporate in the UK while staying headquartered in Berlin in order to benefit from the regulatory framework and ease of doing business that the UK does score higher on.

<sys> [INST] Why we chose Berlin over London [/INST] This is how it happened… Once we’d made the decision that I’d leave behind a fantastic position in a successful company (a story for another day) and start my own business the next logical question was, where should we base ourselves? Our loose criteria Had to be a ‘western’ country (North America, Europe or ANZ) – as they comprise the majority of the early-adopter market for SaaS it made sense to be in one of those regions. An established technology hub with all the benefits a local ecosystem can bring. A nice place to live/good quality of life. Cost. The lower our cost of living, the more money we’d have available to spend on building the product and business. Be relatively fast and painless to obtain any necessary visas. Michelle is South Korean and I’m British. We quickly reduced the best two options down to either London or Berlin (while there are many advantages to being in SV, the time and costs involved in securing visas for an early stage startup made it an unviable option at this stage). These were the Pros and Cons of each as we understood them back in June: London Pros I’d lived in London and loved it, I have family and friends there and an existing network. It’s a big tech-hub, has a large talent pool, plenty of early adopters, a media with a global reach and is in close proximity to a lot of financial capital. Heathrow Airport – in London you are usually a direct flight away from anywhere you need to go. Ease of doing business – I was already familiar with many of the aspects of incorporating and running a business in the UK. Cons Costs are very high, particularly housing. Visas – Despite being a British citizen myself, obtaining a UK visa for Michelle would be a slow and painful (if you’re not a fan of bureaucracy) process and involve us travelling to Korea, applying at the British embassy in Seoul and then waiting for ~3 months to (hopefully) be approved. Quality of life – while London is culturally very rich and can be a lot of fun, it doesn’t have a particularly high quality of life when compared to many other cities in the developed world. Berlin Pros Costs – renting an apartment is approximately 1/3 that of London and many other costs like transportation are also much lower. Tech hub – I’d heard from TechCrunch and elsewhere that there was a vibrant tech scene in Berlin, I knew SoundCloud, 6Wunderkinder and Point9 Capital (Christoph Janz was an early investor in Zendesk) were based there. I wasn’t sure what it would really be like though and some reviews were actively off-putting. Quality of life – When we visited Berlin for the first time we both fell in love with it instantly. While it’s no Vienna or Melbourne, Berlin still regularly ranks in the top 20 best cities globally for quality of life and I’d encourage anyone to visit. Visas – as a British citizen I can live in Germany without a visa. Amazingly it turned out that securing a residency for Michelle would be far easier in Germany than in my native country, and we could fly to Germany together and apply when we got there (a huge bonus). In the end the total cost turned out to be just 28 Euros (yes seriously!) for a 5 year residency visa, and the paperwork requirements were reasonable. While this is a somewhat rare situation to be in it does hint that we might not have too much trouble when the time comes to relocate overseas candidates to our Berlin office. Cons It’s smaller than London – not in itself a bad thing, but there are benefits to being in a large metropolis when doing business. No Hub Airport – that means no direct flights to San Francisco. I couldn’t (and still can barely) understand a word of German (luckily 9/10 Berliners seem to speak English)…the biggest obstacle this poses is filling out forms. Lack of an existing network – although thanks to Point9 and their family of companies, who’ve been incredibly open and supportive since we arrived, this hasn’t turned out to be such a problem…and other local founders have also reached out to welcome us to the startup community in Berlin. In the end the pros of Berlin (or perhaps the cons of London) tipped Berlin in our favour and we’ve never looked back. We did decide (like SoundCloud) to incorporate in the UK while staying headquartered in Berlin in order to benefit from the regulatory framework and ease of doing business that the UK does score higher on. </sys

Net Negative Churn in SaaS — Definition, Benchmarks & Tips. Churn, SaaS companies should avoid it like the plague. It’s a silent killer! But is the term churn always bad? Say hello to negative churn, churn’s much more friendly sister metric. You won’t avoid negative churn, in fact, you should do everything in your power to achieve it. If you’re looking for positive growth, you need negative churn. Net negative churn, or negative churn, is known as the holy grail of SaaS or “SaaS nirvana”. Churn, in general, is a key metric and health indicator for your SaaS business. Let’s take a look at negative churn, what it is, why it’s essential, and how to achieve it. We’ll also share the latest benchmarks on negative churn among SaaS businesses. Here are the topics we’ll cover in this post: What is churn? What is negative churn? Benchmark your churn metrics against 2100+ SaaS businesses How negative churn causes explosive growth How to achieve net negative revenue churn What is churn? A quick refresher To understand net negative churn we need to quickly define churn and how we calculate the metric. Skip this part if you are a churn master already. Churn is a health indicator of your existing subscriber base. In simple terms, churn is the rate at which customers or revenue is leaving your SaaS business. At a high level, you can look at churn in two ways: Customer churn — measures the rate at which customers are leaving your SaaS business Revenue churn — measures the rate at which revenue is leaving your SaaS business Calculating Churn: Customer Churn Rate = (Churned Customers) / (Customers at the start of the period) Gross Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) / (MRR at start of period) Net MRR Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) – (Expansion + Reactivation MRR) / (MRR at start of period) Understanding churn is fundamental to discussing net negative churn. If you want, you can learn more about churn basics and benchmarks on our blog. What is net negative churn? Simply put, negative churn is the good, and only, kind of churn you want. Negative net Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) churn exists when MRR gained from existing customers from expansion and reactivation exceeds the MRR lost from churn and contraction. Putting it frankly: customers you kept add more money than customers who left subtract. Net MRR Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) – (Expansion & Reactivation MRR) / (MRR at start of period) A quick example: let’s say a subscription SaaS business charges $10 a month per user seat. With 200 clients, their MRR stands at $2000. 50 clients churn, that’s $500 lost. But 20 clients add 3 user seats; adding $600 in revenue. Following the formula above: ($500 – $600) / $2000 = -0.05% Net Monthly Recurring Revenue Churn. In this example, despite experiencing a churn of 50 clients, there was still a gain of $100 in existing client expansion revenue. Benchmark your churn metrics against 2100+ SaaS businesses Wondering where you stand, churn-wise, amongst your SaaS peers? In our recent SaaS benchmarks report we analyzed data from over 2100 SaaS companies to derive insights about key metrics including churn rate. Here are two based on ARR and ARPA of SaaS companies. Compare churn rate by ARR range. Source: 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report Compare churn rate by monthly ARPA range. Source: 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report How negative churn causes explosive growth Negative churn is an indicator that your product is providing value to your ideal customer profiles and target audience. There’s no one size fits all solution for any product—churn is inevitable. Negative churn is about providing an amazing experience to the customers your product is made for. When you have negative churn, existing customers generate more money each month. If you’re looking at a cohort report, you should see cohorts increasing in value over time regardless of churn within that cohort. Source: Tomasz Tunguz Expansion revenue costs less than new logo acquisition. This is good news for your LTV:CAC ratio, CAC payback period, and of course LTV. Here are some more benefits: Revenue Growth Your business is growing its revenue base, even with some customer churn. Our analysis showed that 40% of businesses in the $15-30m ARR range had negative churn. Customer Retention Your business is successfully retaining and expanding its revenue with existing customers, leading to longer customer lifecycles, reduced churn, and increased revenue stability. Increased Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Satisfied and loyal customers who continue to use and expand their usage of your SaaS product contribute more revenue over their lifetime. Find out more about calculating LTV with negative churn. Cost Efficiency Reducing churn and expanding within the existing customer base can be more cost-effective, as it minimizes the need for extensive customer acquisition and campaigns. Positive Market Perception Your company’s reputation in the market is enhanced, attracting potential investors, retaining existing customers, reducing revenue churn, and serving as a competitive advantage. How to achieve net negative revenue churn Reduce existing customer churn It might be obvious, but that doesn’t mean reducing churn is a simple task. The reasons for churn can be hard to find and complex. That includes UX/UI, product adoption tactics, pricing, and even things as fundamental as core product and features. If you want to achieve net negative churn there’s no way around it: reducing churn is crucial. Facilitate expansion revenue in your pricing model How can your business achieve negative churn? By building a pricing model that has an expansion loop within it. This is the only sustainable way to get to negative churn. Pricing structures that expand with the customer are one way to head toward a negative churn rate. There are many ways to do this, some examples are using pricing tiers by revenue/sales, bandwidth/data usage, number of servers, or number of employees. Check out our SaaS pricing masterclass. Up-sell and cross-sell Make sure your existing customers are getting the most from your product. This means upgrades (that make sense for them) and seat expansion. This will all tie into your pricing strategy, what additional features will come with what price tiers, how many seats in a package, etc. Driving expansion Monthly Recurring Revenue from existing customers increases your chances of getting to a net negative churn rate. Customer success team If you’re not already, get serious about proactive customer success. Having a team dedicated to nurturing your customers is crucial. Your CS team are the people who will maintain relationships and make sure customers are achieving their goals with your product. Keeping an eye on product usage they will be able to tailor upsells that actually make sense to clients. More on churn How to Achieve Positive Growth with Negative Churn The Last SaaS Churn Guide You’ll Ever Need to Read This Downturn Is Different: How to Drive Retention and Mitigate Churn in 2023 (+Webinar)

[INST] Net Negative Churn in SaaS — Definition, Benchmarks & Tips [/INST]

Churn, SaaS companies should avoid it like the plague. It’s a silent killer! But is the term churn always bad? Say hello to negative churn, churn’s much more friendly sister metric. You won’t avoid negative churn, in fact, you should do everything in your power to achieve it. If you’re looking for positive growth, you need negative churn. Net negative churn, or negative churn, is known as the holy grail of SaaS or “SaaS nirvana”. Churn, in general, is a key metric and health indicator for your SaaS business. Let’s take a look at negative churn, what it is, why it’s essential, and how to achieve it. We’ll also share the latest benchmarks on negative churn among SaaS businesses. Here are the topics we’ll cover in this post: What is churn? What is negative churn? Benchmark your churn metrics against 2100+ SaaS businesses How negative churn causes explosive growth How to achieve net negative revenue churn What is churn? A quick refresher To understand net negative churn we need to quickly define churn and how we calculate the metric. Skip this part if you are a churn master already. Churn is a health indicator of your existing subscriber base. In simple terms, churn is the rate at which customers or revenue is leaving your SaaS business. At a high level, you can look at churn in two ways: Customer churn — measures the rate at which customers are leaving your SaaS business Revenue churn — measures the rate at which revenue is leaving your SaaS business Calculating Churn: Customer Churn Rate = (Churned Customers) / (Customers at the start of the period) Gross Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) / (MRR at start of period) Net MRR Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) – (Expansion + Reactivation MRR) / (MRR at start of period) Understanding churn is fundamental to discussing net negative churn. If you want, you can learn more about churn basics and benchmarks on our blog. What is net negative churn? Simply put, negative churn is the good, and only, kind of churn you want. Negative net Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) churn exists when MRR gained from existing customers from expansion and reactivation exceeds the MRR lost from churn and contraction. Putting it frankly: customers you kept add more money than customers who left subtract. Net MRR Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) – (Expansion & Reactivation MRR) / (MRR at start of period) A quick example: let’s say a subscription SaaS business charges $10 a month per user seat. With 200 clients, their MRR stands at $2000. 50 clients churn, that’s $500 lost. But 20 clients add 3 user seats; adding $600 in revenue. Following the formula above: ($500 – $600) / $2000 = -0.05% Net Monthly Recurring Revenue Churn. In this example, despite experiencing a churn of 50 clients, there was still a gain of $100 in existing client expansion revenue. Benchmark your churn metrics against 2100+ SaaS businesses Wondering where you stand, churn-wise, amongst your SaaS peers? In our recent SaaS benchmarks report we analyzed data from over 2100 SaaS companies to derive insights about key metrics including churn rate. Here are two based on ARR and ARPA of SaaS companies. Compare churn rate by ARR range. Source: 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report Compare churn rate by monthly ARPA range. Source: 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report How negative churn causes explosive growth Negative churn is an indicator that your product is providing value to your ideal customer profiles and target audience. There’s no one size fits all solution for any product—churn is inevitable. Negative churn is about providing an amazing experience to the customers your product is made for. When you have negative churn, existing customers generate more money each month. If you’re looking at a cohort report, you should see cohorts increasing in value over time regardless of churn within that cohort. Source: Tomasz Tunguz Expansion revenue costs less than new logo acquisition. This is good news for your LTV:CAC ratio, CAC payback period, and of course LTV. Here are some more benefits: Revenue Growth Your business is growing its revenue base, even with some customer churn. Our analysis showed that 40% of businesses in the $15-30m ARR range had negative churn. Customer Retention Your business is successfully retaining and expanding its revenue with existing customers, leading to longer customer lifecycles, reduced churn, and increased revenue stability. Increased Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Satisfied and loyal customers who continue to use and expand their usage of your SaaS product contribute more revenue over their lifetime. Find out more about calculating LTV with negative churn. Cost Efficiency Reducing churn and expanding within the existing customer base can be more cost-effective, as it minimizes the need for extensive customer acquisition and campaigns. Positive Market Perception Your company’s reputation in the market is enhanced, attracting potential investors, retaining existing customers, reducing revenue churn, and serving as a competitive advantage. How to achieve net negative revenue churn Reduce existing customer churn It might be obvious, but that doesn’t mean reducing churn is a simple task. The reasons for churn can be hard to find and complex. That includes UX/UI, product adoption tactics, pricing, and even things as fundamental as core product and features. If you want to achieve net negative churn there’s no way around it: reducing churn is crucial. Facilitate expansion revenue in your pricing model How can your business achieve negative churn? By building a pricing model that has an expansion loop within it. This is the only sustainable way to get to negative churn. Pricing structures that expand with the customer are one way to head toward a negative churn rate. There are many ways to do this, some examples are using pricing tiers by revenue/sales, bandwidth/data usage, number of servers, or number of employees. Check out our SaaS pricing masterclass. Up-sell and cross-sell Make sure your existing customers are getting the most from your product. This means upgrades (that make sense for them) and seat expansion. This will all tie into your pricing strategy, what additional features will come with what price tiers, how many seats in a package, etc. Driving expansion Monthly Recurring Revenue from existing customers increases your chances of getting to a net negative churn rate. Customer success team If you’re not already, get serious about proactive customer success. Having a team dedicated to nurturing your customers is crucial. Your CS team are the people who will maintain relationships and make sure customers are achieving their goals with your product. Keeping an eye on product usage they will be able to tailor upsells that actually make sense to clients. More on churn How to Achieve Positive Growth with Negative Churn The Last SaaS Churn Guide You’ll Ever Need to Read This Downturn Is Different: How to Drive Retention and Mitigate Churn in 2023 (+Webinar)

<sys> [INST] Net Negative Churn in SaaS — Definition, Benchmarks & Tips [/INST] Churn, SaaS companies should avoid it like the plague. It’s a silent killer! But is the term churn always bad? Say hello to negative churn, churn’s much more friendly sister metric. You won’t avoid negative churn, in fact, you should do everything in your power to achieve it. If you’re looking for positive growth, you need negative churn. Net negative churn, or negative churn, is known as the holy grail of SaaS or “SaaS nirvana”. Churn, in general, is a key metric and health indicator for your SaaS business. Let’s take a look at negative churn, what it is, why it’s essential, and how to achieve it. We’ll also share the latest benchmarks on negative churn among SaaS businesses. Here are the topics we’ll cover in this post: What is churn? What is negative churn? Benchmark your churn metrics against 2100+ SaaS businesses How negative churn causes explosive growth How to achieve net negative revenue churn What is churn? A quick refresher To understand net negative churn we need to quickly define churn and how we calculate the metric. Skip this part if you are a churn master already. Churn is a health indicator of your existing subscriber base. In simple terms, churn is the rate at which customers or revenue is leaving your SaaS business. At a high level, you can look at churn in two ways: Customer churn — measures the rate at which customers are leaving your SaaS business Revenue churn — measures the rate at which revenue is leaving your SaaS business Calculating Churn: Customer Churn Rate = (Churned Customers) / (Customers at the start of the period) Gross Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) / (MRR at start of period) Net MRR Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) – (Expansion + Reactivation MRR) / (MRR at start of period) Understanding churn is fundamental to discussing net negative churn. If you want, you can learn more about churn basics and benchmarks on our blog. What is net negative churn? Simply put, negative churn is the good, and only, kind of churn you want. Negative net Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) churn exists when MRR gained from existing customers from expansion and reactivation exceeds the MRR lost from churn and contraction. Putting it frankly: customers you kept add more money than customers who left subtract. Net MRR Churn Rate = (Churn + Contraction MRR) – (Expansion & Reactivation MRR) / (MRR at start of period) A quick example: let’s say a subscription SaaS business charges $10 a month per user seat. With 200 clients, their MRR stands at $2000. 50 clients churn, that’s $500 lost. But 20 clients add 3 user seats; adding $600 in revenue. Following the formula above: ($500 – $600) / $2000 = -0.05% Net Monthly Recurring Revenue Churn. In this example, despite experiencing a churn of 50 clients, there was still a gain of $100 in existing client expansion revenue. Benchmark your churn metrics against 2100+ SaaS businesses Wondering where you stand, churn-wise, amongst your SaaS peers? In our recent SaaS benchmarks report we analyzed data from over 2100 SaaS companies to derive insights about key metrics including churn rate. Here are two based on ARR and ARPA of SaaS companies. Compare churn rate by ARR range. Source: 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report Compare churn rate by monthly ARPA range. Source: 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report How negative churn causes explosive growth Negative churn is an indicator that your product is providing value to your ideal customer profiles and target audience. There’s no one size fits all solution for any product—churn is inevitable. Negative churn is about providing an amazing experience to the customers your product is made for. When you have negative churn, existing customers generate more money each month. If you’re looking at a cohort report, you should see cohorts increasing in value over time regardless of churn within that cohort. Source: Tomasz Tunguz Expansion revenue costs less than new logo acquisition. This is good news for your LTV:CAC ratio, CAC payback period, and of course LTV. Here are some more benefits: Revenue Growth Your business is growing its revenue base, even with some customer churn. Our analysis showed that 40% of businesses in the $15-30m ARR range had negative churn. Customer Retention Your business is successfully retaining and expanding its revenue with existing customers, leading to longer customer lifecycles, reduced churn, and increased revenue stability. Increased Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Satisfied and loyal customers who continue to use and expand their usage of your SaaS product contribute more revenue over their lifetime. Find out more about calculating LTV with negative churn. Cost Efficiency Reducing churn and expanding within the existing customer base can be more cost-effective, as it minimizes the need for extensive customer acquisition and campaigns. Positive Market Perception Your company’s reputation in the market is enhanced, attracting potential investors, retaining existing customers, reducing revenue churn, and serving as a competitive advantage. How to achieve net negative revenue churn Reduce existing customer churn It might be obvious, but that doesn’t mean reducing churn is a simple task. The reasons for churn can be hard to find and complex. That includes UX/UI, product adoption tactics, pricing, and even things as fundamental as core product and features. If you want to achieve net negative churn there’s no way around it: reducing churn is crucial. Facilitate expansion revenue in your pricing model How can your business achieve negative churn? By building a pricing model that has an expansion loop within it. This is the only sustainable way to get to negative churn. Pricing structures that expand with the customer are one way to head toward a negative churn rate. There are many ways to do this, some examples are using pricing tiers by revenue/sales, bandwidth/data usage, number of servers, or number of employees. Check out our SaaS pricing masterclass. Up-sell and cross-sell Make sure your existing customers are getting the most from your product. This means upgrades (that make sense for them) and seat expansion. This will all tie into your pricing strategy, what additional features will come with what price tiers, how many seats in a package, etc. Driving expansion Monthly Recurring Revenue from existing customers increases your chances of getting to a net negative churn rate. Customer success team If you’re not already, get serious about proactive customer success. Having a team dedicated to nurturing your customers is crucial. Your CS team are the people who will maintain relationships and make sure customers are achieving their goals with your product. Keeping an eye on product usage they will be able to tailor upsells that actually make sense to clients. More on churn How to Achieve Positive Growth with Negative Churn The Last SaaS Churn Guide You’ll Ever Need to Read This Downturn Is Different: How to Drive Retention and Mitigate Churn in 2023 (+Webinar) </sys

How to build a highly-engaged SaaS audience. Note: You can also find the full deck on SlideShare – although it’s easier to read the full transcript here on our blog. This is ChartMogul! We’re about 25 people and one Dachshund, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. I joined ChartMogul as the company’s first full-time hire, to build out the company’s content strategy. My background is in Product and Engineering, so I started out without much of an idea what that meant. This is our product vision. At ChartMogul, we want to help you build a better subscription business. This hasn’t really changed in the three years for which we’ve existed. So on day one of ChartMogul for me, we moved into our first office (or rather, room in an office). And I was looking for some guidance on how to move forwards with our Content strategy. I got this line from our Founder, Nick, which I didn’t think was particularly useful at the time… …and I was like ‘huh?’ What does that even mean? I really needed some practical advice on how to get started from scratch. …Well, not quite from scratch. You see, there was already this. The Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. Designed to simplify many of the complex metrics that exist in the SaaS space, and present them in a beautiful printable reference. Our Founder Nick had created this from a brainwave of an idea, and it was a big success. But other than gut feeling, we didn’t really know why. So my first steps were to try and deconstruct the success of this, to understand how we could replicate it in the future. So there were these five, big, existential questions we had back then. And we’ve learned a lot about most of them in the last two years — I want to take you through what we’ve learned building an audience for ChartMogul. And I’m going to start with number five. How do you become a thought leader in a particular space, when you’re just starting out and don’t have the knowledge you need to be an expert? The one thing we were blessed with at ChartMogul in the early days was a variety of interesting, vibrant customers who are all solving compelling problems in their space. They all have a story to tell, and in most cases they had far more experience and authority than we did. So the biggest decision we made here was to embrace those customers, and tell their stories and share their expertise rather than our own. We invested in some rich, detailed customer stories which shared untold stories of SaaS companies like LiveChat. There were so many things these folks had learned in building their own business that was interesting and useful to our own audience. We produced SaaS Open Mic, a podcast interview series with SaaS founders and thought leaders, to tell the more personal aspect of their stories. Clearly you need to put the work in and build your own ideas, thinking and strategy, but this helped us build a brand in the early days, before we really had any expertise in SaaS. Perhaps the question I’ve been asked the most on Content: How do you measure the success of your work? How do you know your significant investment is worthwhile? One huge problem here is that every platform we’re expected to publish and share to has its own definition of success. Upvotes, likes, shares, hearts… even claps(?!) But if you ignore the “advice” for a second, which one of these examples would you prefer to have? I know my answer. For us, our compass metric in Content is engagement. Why? Because regardless of how much traffic or views your content gets, engagement is a leading indicator of success. Pageviews are almost always skewed, but engagement metrics such as share rate are an indication that what you’re publishing resonates with your audience. …but, a word of warning: If you’re going to measure an engagement metric like “shares”, make sure you measure properly! For months we were measuring the percentage of users clicking the share widget on our blog. Turns out that represents less than 3% of the total shares. Oops. With this focus on engagement, you can stop chasing the “quick wins”, that might bring short spikes of attention, but absolutely nothing in the longer term… …and start focusing on engaging, evergreen content that compounds. This data represents a single article. Imagine adding another one of these every couple of weeks! Another argument for evergreen: These are the top posts on our blog right now. They are all over 1 year old(!) It’s like a huge, heavy wheel that you’re trying to get moving. In the beginning you’re putting in all this effort — far more than feels reasonable — and seeing hardly anything in terms of results. The wheel hardly moves. But when you finally start to pick up some speed, this thing has a huge amount of momentum and impact. And it’s very hard to stop! We have “big wheel” projects. Our podcast didn’t see much in the way of initial success. In fact, by most standards we probably should have killed it. But we proceeded to put energy into it, more out of a “gut feeling” that it’s the right thing to do than anything else. But that does raise the question — when should you give up on these projects that are driven by gut feeling? We’re still trying to answer this. But measuring engagement has been a nice way to see early indicators of success in projects that take time to grow. We saw great engagement in the podcast in the early days, and amazing feedback. How do you bring people back to your content, rather than stopping by once? One key answer to this has been recurring content. Our brains are wired to love routine. People love to get into a routine with a regular series — like a weekly article, for example. They build this expectation, which reinforces a positive sentiment every single time they come back and you have something new for them. Quora has been huge for us. We built a series based on SaaS questions on the platform. Today, Quora is the #1 referrer to the ChartMogul blog. Huge success, and we’re not even putting any new focus there at the moment. In today’s world, you need to push things to your audience, with permission. We’ve built a weekly newsletter series that people love — and they’ve given us permission to deliver it right to them every Friday. The permission part is important here, but making things as easy as possible for people by pushing things to them is key. How do you stand from the ocean of noise in your space? Everyone is blogging, publishing, shouting as loud as possible. How do you cut through that? Finding role models can really help your focus. We found the people that were doing an incredible job in our space of building outstanding, high-quality content. One of those is Intercom. We may never be able to match their editorial team and resources, but aspiring to their bar for quality helps give us direction and differentiate us. We think of Typeform as a role model too. This Star Wars guide to Net Promoter Score blew me away. Think how many articles on NPS exist out there — this one is 20x more memorable than any of them. We aspire to this. So we went out and did our own work, driven by curiosity. This was a piece I worked on after spending some time in China, where I wondered how the SaaS scene looked. So I spoke to some people, did some research and wrote up my findings. There are no metrics or obvious quantitative factors that would have led us to do this article. It’s purely driven by curiosity. Again, with this analysis we invested a huge amount of effort into the research and quality of the information. It was a massive undertaking such a small team as ours. But this is now the most successful post ever for us. We created a “wow” factor, such that people couldn’t ignore our work. So that leaves us with one remaining question, that I didn’t really have much of an answer to until recently. Why do we do this? What’s the purpose of Content for us? And what I realized is that to think about this, it makes sense to go back here — to our product. As I mentioned earlier, the goal of ChartMogul is to help people build a better subscription business. But why can’t this also be the goal for our content? Isn’t it natural that these two things should be aligned? When we’re producing all of these resources and educational tools, aren’t we just helping people build a better subscription business? And when we’re interviewing founders, and telling the stories of our customers, aren’t we also helping people build a better subscription business? And isn’t our industry-focused analysis helping people build a better subscription business? Our Content team is driven by curiosity. This quote from Matt sums up our attitude towards the work we do. And finally, our fall-back when we’re lacking direction of clarification in the data or feedback we get, this the direction from our Founder, Nick. He told me to: “Just create things you’re insanely proud of.” And that might not seem so useful at first – it didn’t to me – but when you’re lacking clarity, or need to check that the work you’re doing is leading you in the right direction, it’s the most reliable metric you can have.

[INST] How to build a highly-engaged SaaS audience [/INST]

Note: You can also find the full deck on SlideShare – although it’s easier to read the full transcript here on our blog. This is ChartMogul! We’re about 25 people and one Dachshund, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. I joined ChartMogul as the company’s first full-time hire, to build out the company’s content strategy. My background is in Product and Engineering, so I started out without much of an idea what that meant. This is our product vision. At ChartMogul, we want to help you build a better subscription business. This hasn’t really changed in the three years for which we’ve existed. So on day one of ChartMogul for me, we moved into our first office (or rather, room in an office). And I was looking for some guidance on how to move forwards with our Content strategy. I got this line from our Founder, Nick, which I didn’t think was particularly useful at the time… …and I was like ‘huh?’ What does that even mean? I really needed some practical advice on how to get started from scratch. …Well, not quite from scratch. You see, there was already this. The Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. Designed to simplify many of the complex metrics that exist in the SaaS space, and present them in a beautiful printable reference. Our Founder Nick had created this from a brainwave of an idea, and it was a big success. But other than gut feeling, we didn’t really know why. So my first steps were to try and deconstruct the success of this, to understand how we could replicate it in the future. So there were these five, big, existential questions we had back then. And we’ve learned a lot about most of them in the last two years — I want to take you through what we’ve learned building an audience for ChartMogul. And I’m going to start with number five. How do you become a thought leader in a particular space, when you’re just starting out and don’t have the knowledge you need to be an expert? The one thing we were blessed with at ChartMogul in the early days was a variety of interesting, vibrant customers who are all solving compelling problems in their space. They all have a story to tell, and in most cases they had far more experience and authority than we did. So the biggest decision we made here was to embrace those customers, and tell their stories and share their expertise rather than our own. We invested in some rich, detailed customer stories which shared untold stories of SaaS companies like LiveChat. There were so many things these folks had learned in building their own business that was interesting and useful to our own audience. We produced SaaS Open Mic, a podcast interview series with SaaS founders and thought leaders, to tell the more personal aspect of their stories. Clearly you need to put the work in and build your own ideas, thinking and strategy, but this helped us build a brand in the early days, before we really had any expertise in SaaS. Perhaps the question I’ve been asked the most on Content: How do you measure the success of your work? How do you know your significant investment is worthwhile? One huge problem here is that every platform we’re expected to publish and share to has its own definition of success. Upvotes, likes, shares, hearts… even claps(?!) But if you ignore the “advice” for a second, which one of these examples would you prefer to have? I know my answer. For us, our compass metric in Content is engagement. Why? Because regardless of how much traffic or views your content gets, engagement is a leading indicator of success. Pageviews are almost always skewed, but engagement metrics such as share rate are an indication that what you’re publishing resonates with your audience. …but, a word of warning: If you’re going to measure an engagement metric like “shares”, make sure you measure properly! For months we were measuring the percentage of users clicking the share widget on our blog. Turns out that represents less than 3% of the total shares. Oops. With this focus on engagement, you can stop chasing the “quick wins”, that might bring short spikes of attention, but absolutely nothing in the longer term… …and start focusing on engaging, evergreen content that compounds. This data represents a single article. Imagine adding another one of these every couple of weeks! Another argument for evergreen: These are the top posts on our blog right now. They are all over 1 year old(!) It’s like a huge, heavy wheel that you’re trying to get moving. In the beginning you’re putting in all this effort — far more than feels reasonable — and seeing hardly anything in terms of results. The wheel hardly moves. But when you finally start to pick up some speed, this thing has a huge amount of momentum and impact. And it’s very hard to stop! We have “big wheel” projects. Our podcast didn’t see much in the way of initial success. In fact, by most standards we probably should have killed it. But we proceeded to put energy into it, more out of a “gut feeling” that it’s the right thing to do than anything else. But that does raise the question — when should you give up on these projects that are driven by gut feeling? We’re still trying to answer this. But measuring engagement has been a nice way to see early indicators of success in projects that take time to grow. We saw great engagement in the podcast in the early days, and amazing feedback. How do you bring people back to your content, rather than stopping by once? One key answer to this has been recurring content. Our brains are wired to love routine. People love to get into a routine with a regular series — like a weekly article, for example. They build this expectation, which reinforces a positive sentiment every single time they come back and you have something new for them. Quora has been huge for us. We built a series based on SaaS questions on the platform. Today, Quora is the #1 referrer to the ChartMogul blog. Huge success, and we’re not even putting any new focus there at the moment. In today’s world, you need to push things to your audience, with permission. We’ve built a weekly newsletter series that people love — and they’ve given us permission to deliver it right to them every Friday. The permission part is important here, but making things as easy as possible for people by pushing things to them is key. How do you stand from the ocean of noise in your space? Everyone is blogging, publishing, shouting as loud as possible. How do you cut through that? Finding role models can really help your focus. We found the people that were doing an incredible job in our space of building outstanding, high-quality content. One of those is Intercom. We may never be able to match their editorial team and resources, but aspiring to their bar for quality helps give us direction and differentiate us. We think of Typeform as a role model too. This Star Wars guide to Net Promoter Score blew me away. Think how many articles on NPS exist out there — this one is 20x more memorable than any of them. We aspire to this. So we went out and did our own work, driven by curiosity. This was a piece I worked on after spending some time in China, where I wondered how the SaaS scene looked. So I spoke to some people, did some research and wrote up my findings. There are no metrics or obvious quantitative factors that would have led us to do this article. It’s purely driven by curiosity. Again, with this analysis we invested a huge amount of effort into the research and quality of the information. It was a massive undertaking such a small team as ours. But this is now the most successful post ever for us. We created a “wow” factor, such that people couldn’t ignore our work. So that leaves us with one remaining question, that I didn’t really have much of an answer to until recently. Why do we do this? What’s the purpose of Content for us? And what I realized is that to think about this, it makes sense to go back here — to our product. As I mentioned earlier, the goal of ChartMogul is to help people build a better subscription business. But why can’t this also be the goal for our content? Isn’t it natural that these two things should be aligned? When we’re producing all of these resources and educational tools, aren’t we just helping people build a better subscription business? And when we’re interviewing founders, and telling the stories of our customers, aren’t we also helping people build a better subscription business? And isn’t our industry-focused analysis helping people build a better subscription business? Our Content team is driven by curiosity. This quote from Matt sums up our attitude towards the work we do. And finally, our fall-back when we’re lacking direction of clarification in the data or feedback we get, this the direction from our Founder, Nick. He told me to: “Just create things you’re insanely proud of.” And that might not seem so useful at first – it didn’t to me – but when you’re lacking clarity, or need to check that the work you’re doing is leading you in the right direction, it’s the most reliable metric you can have.

<sys> [INST] How to build a highly-engaged SaaS audience [/INST] Note: You can also find the full deck on SlideShare – although it’s easier to read the full transcript here on our blog. This is ChartMogul! We’re about 25 people and one Dachshund, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. I joined ChartMogul as the company’s first full-time hire, to build out the company’s content strategy. My background is in Product and Engineering, so I started out without much of an idea what that meant. This is our product vision. At ChartMogul, we want to help you build a better subscription business. This hasn’t really changed in the three years for which we’ve existed. So on day one of ChartMogul for me, we moved into our first office (or rather, room in an office). And I was looking for some guidance on how to move forwards with our Content strategy. I got this line from our Founder, Nick, which I didn’t think was particularly useful at the time… …and I was like ‘huh?’ What does that even mean? I really needed some practical advice on how to get started from scratch. …Well, not quite from scratch. You see, there was already this. The Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. Designed to simplify many of the complex metrics that exist in the SaaS space, and present them in a beautiful printable reference. Our Founder Nick had created this from a brainwave of an idea, and it was a big success. But other than gut feeling, we didn’t really know why. So my first steps were to try and deconstruct the success of this, to understand how we could replicate it in the future. So there were these five, big, existential questions we had back then. And we’ve learned a lot about most of them in the last two years — I want to take you through what we’ve learned building an audience for ChartMogul. And I’m going to start with number five. How do you become a thought leader in a particular space, when you’re just starting out and don’t have the knowledge you need to be an expert? The one thing we were blessed with at ChartMogul in the early days was a variety of interesting, vibrant customers who are all solving compelling problems in their space. They all have a story to tell, and in most cases they had far more experience and authority than we did. So the biggest decision we made here was to embrace those customers, and tell their stories and share their expertise rather than our own. We invested in some rich, detailed customer stories which shared untold stories of SaaS companies like LiveChat. There were so many things these folks had learned in building their own business that was interesting and useful to our own audience. We produced SaaS Open Mic, a podcast interview series with SaaS founders and thought leaders, to tell the more personal aspect of their stories. Clearly you need to put the work in and build your own ideas, thinking and strategy, but this helped us build a brand in the early days, before we really had any expertise in SaaS. Perhaps the question I’ve been asked the most on Content: How do you measure the success of your work? How do you know your significant investment is worthwhile? One huge problem here is that every platform we’re expected to publish and share to has its own definition of success. Upvotes, likes, shares, hearts… even claps(?!) But if you ignore the “advice” for a second, which one of these examples would you prefer to have? I know my answer. For us, our compass metric in Content is engagement. Why? Because regardless of how much traffic or views your content gets, engagement is a leading indicator of success. Pageviews are almost always skewed, but engagement metrics such as share rate are an indication that what you’re publishing resonates with your audience. …but, a word of warning: If you’re going to measure an engagement metric like “shares”, make sure you measure properly! For months we were measuring the percentage of users clicking the share widget on our blog. Turns out that represents less than 3% of the total shares. Oops. With this focus on engagement, you can stop chasing the “quick wins”, that might bring short spikes of attention, but absolutely nothing in the longer term… …and start focusing on engaging, evergreen content that compounds. This data represents a single article. Imagine adding another one of these every couple of weeks! Another argument for evergreen: These are the top posts on our blog right now. They are all over 1 year old(!) It’s like a huge, heavy wheel that you’re trying to get moving. In the beginning you’re putting in all this effort — far more than feels reasonable — and seeing hardly anything in terms of results. The wheel hardly moves. But when you finally start to pick up some speed, this thing has a huge amount of momentum and impact. And it’s very hard to stop! We have “big wheel” projects. Our podcast didn’t see much in the way of initial success. In fact, by most standards we probably should have killed it. But we proceeded to put energy into it, more out of a “gut feeling” that it’s the right thing to do than anything else. But that does raise the question — when should you give up on these projects that are driven by gut feeling? We’re still trying to answer this. But measuring engagement has been a nice way to see early indicators of success in projects that take time to grow. We saw great engagement in the podcast in the early days, and amazing feedback. How do you bring people back to your content, rather than stopping by once? One key answer to this has been recurring content. Our brains are wired to love routine. People love to get into a routine with a regular series — like a weekly article, for example. They build this expectation, which reinforces a positive sentiment every single time they come back and you have something new for them. Quora has been huge for us. We built a series based on SaaS questions on the platform. Today, Quora is the #1 referrer to the ChartMogul blog. Huge success, and we’re not even putting any new focus there at the moment. In today’s world, you need to push things to your audience, with permission. We’ve built a weekly newsletter series that people love — and they’ve given us permission to deliver it right to them every Friday. The permission part is important here, but making things as easy as possible for people by pushing things to them is key. How do you stand from the ocean of noise in your space? Everyone is blogging, publishing, shouting as loud as possible. How do you cut through that? Finding role models can really help your focus. We found the people that were doing an incredible job in our space of building outstanding, high-quality content. One of those is Intercom. We may never be able to match their editorial team and resources, but aspiring to their bar for quality helps give us direction and differentiate us. We think of Typeform as a role model too. This Star Wars guide to Net Promoter Score blew me away. Think how many articles on NPS exist out there — this one is 20x more memorable than any of them. We aspire to this. So we went out and did our own work, driven by curiosity. This was a piece I worked on after spending some time in China, where I wondered how the SaaS scene looked. So I spoke to some people, did some research and wrote up my findings. There are no metrics or obvious quantitative factors that would have led us to do this article. It’s purely driven by curiosity. Again, with this analysis we invested a huge amount of effort into the research and quality of the information. It was a massive undertaking such a small team as ours. But this is now the most successful post ever for us. We created a “wow” factor, such that people couldn’t ignore our work. So that leaves us with one remaining question, that I didn’t really have much of an answer to until recently. Why do we do this? What’s the purpose of Content for us? And what I realized is that to think about this, it makes sense to go back here — to our product. As I mentioned earlier, the goal of ChartMogul is to help people build a better subscription business. But why can’t this also be the goal for our content? Isn’t it natural that these two things should be aligned? When we’re producing all of these resources and educational tools, aren’t we just helping people build a better subscription business? And when we’re interviewing founders, and telling the stories of our customers, aren’t we also helping people build a better subscription business? And isn’t our industry-focused analysis helping people build a better subscription business? Our Content team is driven by curiosity. This quote from Matt sums up our attitude towards the work we do. And finally, our fall-back when we’re lacking direction of clarification in the data or feedback we get, this the direction from our Founder, Nick. He told me to: “Just create things you’re insanely proud of.” And that might not seem so useful at first – it didn’t to me – but when you’re lacking clarity, or need to check that the work you’re doing is leading you in the right direction, it’s the most reliable metric you can have. </sys

Running a high performance, distributed success team. When I started to build the success team at ChartMogul over three and a half years ago, I knew that I wanted to build a distributed team from the get-go. We only had an office in Germany at the time. This often required us to work late into the night to serve our customers in the U.S. and beyond. Because our customer success team strives to be responsive, it was clear that we needed a presence on multiple continents. I needed to determine how to effectively evaluate our performance as a distributed team. These were some of the questions I was faced with: What key metrics should we track? What goals targets should we aim for? How can I motivate and communicate metrics to the team across time zones? Having the right key metrics in place and hitting or exceeding your targets creates a purpose-driven customer success culture and energizes your team. Your customers will thank you for it. Performance indicators to support your team’s mission When weeding through various blog post of SaaS and customer success thought leaders, I encountered numerous opinions about which metrics are most important to track and why. Every author made a good case for why a particular metric was important to their operation. It occurred to me that the best way to make the metrics we adopt relevant to our business was to relate them to our success team’s mission. Each metric should empower our team to deliver on our mission statement. And the metrics used should adapt over time with our team and our customers. Today our team mission reads: The Success team at ChartMogul aims to serve our customers throughout their entire lifecycle to get value out of our product. We do this by helping them to understand, trust, and use their data to make business decisions. Metrics should be role specific Today, our success team is split into three parts: Customer advocacy (frontline and tier 2 customer support) Solutions (success ops and enablement, technical documentation, and onboarding) Success management (key account retention, expansion, and education) Reflecting on our mission statement, we choose to measure the quality and speed of serving our customers (first reply time, next reply time, CSAT), product usage metrics (active users / monthly & weekly), and the value our customers realized, or did not realize with our product (NPS and MRR lost by churn reason). Next, we mapped out which of these were team level goals and which related to specific parts of the team. This helped make it clear who owned what and how specific goals related to one another. We came up with something like this: Establishing realistic goals and targets Once we had the right reports configured to track these metrics, we had a look at the historic averages to define targets. Here’s an example of how our advocacy frontline team set and attained an aspirational target for first reply time: In the early summer of 2018, we split our advocacy team into two teams: frontline and tier 2. Our frontline team covered 14-hours Monday to Friday from 9 am to 11 pm CET. Our historic first reply time average during business hours oscillated between 1.4 and 2.2 hours. We decided to set an SLA (Service Level Agreement) target of one (1) hour or less. In the month before we started, May 2018, our average first reply time during business hours was 2.09 hours. The following month, we nearly hit our target by achieving a 1.02 hours average first reply time. We reviewed what was still slowing us down and were able to get our response time to just 0.57 hours in July 2018. Our average first reply time has been under 1 hour ever since. Our SLA attainment is consistently at 95% or above. Average first reply time month over month What had seemed an aspirational goal just a year ago has become our new standard. Our customers have noticed too and comment about it in our NPS and CSAT surveys frequently: As always, Sarah was super informative and her responses were extremely prompt! From targets to team process To take this one step further, we then wrote an SLA policy for our advocacy team that defined our targets for our first reply time and next reply time for both our frontline and tier 2 advocates. Considering the size of our team (just 7), we were excited that we managed to consistently attain such a performance. Consistently hitting this target created a new standard of excellence resulting in an improved customer experience. In addition to setting targets for the primary metrics we were tracking, we also formulate MBO (management by objective) goals on a monthly and quarterly basis. MBOs help us grow organizationally as a team as we continue to achieve our high response and SLA standards. There are ongoing internal requirements to administer our tooling, develop, and evolve processes and to maintain our customer-facing help center. We use Trello to create a backlog of projects and to map the prioritized MBOs for each team. Evaluating and improving performance In order to evaluate our progress, we hold a monthly success roundup to look at the attainment of metrics and MBOs of the past month and to define next month’s goals. The targets and MBOs of our success management team are set on a quarterly basis as the initiatives of this team align better with longer time frames. We still evaluate the progress of these on a monthly basis in the monthly success roundup. Coordinating across time zones requires some flexibility — but we always like to connect and learn from one another. Each month, several team members take responsibility for presenting the month’s highlights and learnings. Reviewing this as a team helps us remain goal-oriented, celebrate victories, and share insights. A review of target attainments We share our NPS survey results, churn reasons, and active users per month/week with the rest of the company during our monthly town hall. This helps us demonstrate where other parts of the organization can influence customer success metrics. Choosing the right metrics relevant to your current stage as a business, setting ambitious targets and goals, and regularly evaluating your progress will enable you to run a high performance distributed success team. If you establish a standard of excellence, your team will be proud and your customers will rave.

[INST] Running a high performance, distributed success team [/INST]

When I started to build the success team at ChartMogul over three and a half years ago, I knew that I wanted to build a distributed team from the get-go. We only had an office in Germany at the time. This often required us to work late into the night to serve our customers in the U.S. and beyond. Because our customer success team strives to be responsive, it was clear that we needed a presence on multiple continents. I needed to determine how to effectively evaluate our performance as a distributed team. These were some of the questions I was faced with: What key metrics should we track? What goals targets should we aim for? How can I motivate and communicate metrics to the team across time zones? Having the right key metrics in place and hitting or exceeding your targets creates a purpose-driven customer success culture and energizes your team. Your customers will thank you for it. Performance indicators to support your team’s mission When weeding through various blog post of SaaS and customer success thought leaders, I encountered numerous opinions about which metrics are most important to track and why. Every author made a good case for why a particular metric was important to their operation. It occurred to me that the best way to make the metrics we adopt relevant to our business was to relate them to our success team’s mission. Each metric should empower our team to deliver on our mission statement. And the metrics used should adapt over time with our team and our customers. Today our team mission reads: The Success team at ChartMogul aims to serve our customers throughout their entire lifecycle to get value out of our product. We do this by helping them to understand, trust, and use their data to make business decisions. Metrics should be role specific Today, our success team is split into three parts: Customer advocacy (frontline and tier 2 customer support) Solutions (success ops and enablement, technical documentation, and onboarding) Success management (key account retention, expansion, and education) Reflecting on our mission statement, we choose to measure the quality and speed of serving our customers (first reply time, next reply time, CSAT), product usage metrics (active users / monthly & weekly), and the value our customers realized, or did not realize with our product (NPS and MRR lost by churn reason). Next, we mapped out which of these were team level goals and which related to specific parts of the team. This helped make it clear who owned what and how specific goals related to one another. We came up with something like this: Establishing realistic goals and targets Once we had the right reports configured to track these metrics, we had a look at the historic averages to define targets. Here’s an example of how our advocacy frontline team set and attained an aspirational target for first reply time: In the early summer of 2018, we split our advocacy team into two teams: frontline and tier 2. Our frontline team covered 14-hours Monday to Friday from 9 am to 11 pm CET. Our historic first reply time average during business hours oscillated between 1.4 and 2.2 hours. We decided to set an SLA (Service Level Agreement) target of one (1) hour or less. In the month before we started, May 2018, our average first reply time during business hours was 2.09 hours. The following month, we nearly hit our target by achieving a 1.02 hours average first reply time. We reviewed what was still slowing us down and were able to get our response time to just 0.57 hours in July 2018. Our average first reply time has been under 1 hour ever since. Our SLA attainment is consistently at 95% or above. Average first reply time month over month What had seemed an aspirational goal just a year ago has become our new standard. Our customers have noticed too and comment about it in our NPS and CSAT surveys frequently: As always, Sarah was super informative and her responses were extremely prompt! From targets to team process To take this one step further, we then wrote an SLA policy for our advocacy team that defined our targets for our first reply time and next reply time for both our frontline and tier 2 advocates. Considering the size of our team (just 7), we were excited that we managed to consistently attain such a performance. Consistently hitting this target created a new standard of excellence resulting in an improved customer experience. In addition to setting targets for the primary metrics we were tracking, we also formulate MBO (management by objective) goals on a monthly and quarterly basis. MBOs help us grow organizationally as a team as we continue to achieve our high response and SLA standards. There are ongoing internal requirements to administer our tooling, develop, and evolve processes and to maintain our customer-facing help center. We use Trello to create a backlog of projects and to map the prioritized MBOs for each team. Evaluating and improving performance In order to evaluate our progress, we hold a monthly success roundup to look at the attainment of metrics and MBOs of the past month and to define next month’s goals. The targets and MBOs of our success management team are set on a quarterly basis as the initiatives of this team align better with longer time frames. We still evaluate the progress of these on a monthly basis in the monthly success roundup. Coordinating across time zones requires some flexibility — but we always like to connect and learn from one another. Each month, several team members take responsibility for presenting the month’s highlights and learnings. Reviewing this as a team helps us remain goal-oriented, celebrate victories, and share insights. A review of target attainments We share our NPS survey results, churn reasons, and active users per month/week with the rest of the company during our monthly town hall. This helps us demonstrate where other parts of the organization can influence customer success metrics. Choosing the right metrics relevant to your current stage as a business, setting ambitious targets and goals, and regularly evaluating your progress will enable you to run a high performance distributed success team. If you establish a standard of excellence, your team will be proud and your customers will rave.

<sys> [INST] Running a high performance, distributed success team [/INST] When I started to build the success team at ChartMogul over three and a half years ago, I knew that I wanted to build a distributed team from the get-go. We only had an office in Germany at the time. This often required us to work late into the night to serve our customers in the U.S. and beyond. Because our customer success team strives to be responsive, it was clear that we needed a presence on multiple continents. I needed to determine how to effectively evaluate our performance as a distributed team. These were some of the questions I was faced with: What key metrics should we track? What goals targets should we aim for? How can I motivate and communicate metrics to the team across time zones? Having the right key metrics in place and hitting or exceeding your targets creates a purpose-driven customer success culture and energizes your team. Your customers will thank you for it. Performance indicators to support your team’s mission When weeding through various blog post of SaaS and customer success thought leaders, I encountered numerous opinions about which metrics are most important to track and why. Every author made a good case for why a particular metric was important to their operation. It occurred to me that the best way to make the metrics we adopt relevant to our business was to relate them to our success team’s mission. Each metric should empower our team to deliver on our mission statement. And the metrics used should adapt over time with our team and our customers. Today our team mission reads: The Success team at ChartMogul aims to serve our customers throughout their entire lifecycle to get value out of our product. We do this by helping them to understand, trust, and use their data to make business decisions. Metrics should be role specific Today, our success team is split into three parts: Customer advocacy (frontline and tier 2 customer support) Solutions (success ops and enablement, technical documentation, and onboarding) Success management (key account retention, expansion, and education) Reflecting on our mission statement, we choose to measure the quality and speed of serving our customers (first reply time, next reply time, CSAT), product usage metrics (active users / monthly & weekly), and the value our customers realized, or did not realize with our product (NPS and MRR lost by churn reason). Next, we mapped out which of these were team level goals and which related to specific parts of the team. This helped make it clear who owned what and how specific goals related to one another. We came up with something like this: Establishing realistic goals and targets Once we had the right reports configured to track these metrics, we had a look at the historic averages to define targets. Here’s an example of how our advocacy frontline team set and attained an aspirational target for first reply time: In the early summer of 2018, we split our advocacy team into two teams: frontline and tier 2. Our frontline team covered 14-hours Monday to Friday from 9 am to 11 pm CET. Our historic first reply time average during business hours oscillated between 1.4 and 2.2 hours. We decided to set an SLA (Service Level Agreement) target of one (1) hour or less. In the month before we started, May 2018, our average first reply time during business hours was 2.09 hours. The following month, we nearly hit our target by achieving a 1.02 hours average first reply time. We reviewed what was still slowing us down and were able to get our response time to just 0.57 hours in July 2018. Our average first reply time has been under 1 hour ever since. Our SLA attainment is consistently at 95% or above. Average first reply time month over month What had seemed an aspirational goal just a year ago has become our new standard. Our customers have noticed too and comment about it in our NPS and CSAT surveys frequently: As always, Sarah was super informative and her responses were extremely prompt! From targets to team process To take this one step further, we then wrote an SLA policy for our advocacy team that defined our targets for our first reply time and next reply time for both our frontline and tier 2 advocates. Considering the size of our team (just 7), we were excited that we managed to consistently attain such a performance. Consistently hitting this target created a new standard of excellence resulting in an improved customer experience. In addition to setting targets for the primary metrics we were tracking, we also formulate MBO (management by objective) goals on a monthly and quarterly basis. MBOs help us grow organizationally as a team as we continue to achieve our high response and SLA standards. There are ongoing internal requirements to administer our tooling, develop, and evolve processes and to maintain our customer-facing help center. We use Trello to create a backlog of projects and to map the prioritized MBOs for each team. Evaluating and improving performance In order to evaluate our progress, we hold a monthly success roundup to look at the attainment of metrics and MBOs of the past month and to define next month’s goals. The targets and MBOs of our success management team are set on a quarterly basis as the initiatives of this team align better with longer time frames. We still evaluate the progress of these on a monthly basis in the monthly success roundup. Coordinating across time zones requires some flexibility — but we always like to connect and learn from one another. Each month, several team members take responsibility for presenting the month’s highlights and learnings. Reviewing this as a team helps us remain goal-oriented, celebrate victories, and share insights. A review of target attainments We share our NPS survey results, churn reasons, and active users per month/week with the rest of the company during our monthly town hall. This helps us demonstrate where other parts of the organization can influence customer success metrics. Choosing the right metrics relevant to your current stage as a business, setting ambitious targets and goals, and regularly evaluating your progress will enable you to run a high performance distributed success team. If you establish a standard of excellence, your team will be proud and your customers will rave. </sys

Convert More Leads with ChartMogul CRM. After years of using generic CRMs that are ill-suited for our product-led B2B SaaS model, we’re using ChartMogul CRM, the only CRM tailor-made for SaaS sales teams like us. We’re familiar with the problems modern SaaS companies face – we’ve spent the last 8 years helping them gain a better understanding of business dynamics with our Subscription Analytics Platform. The downside of traditional CRMs Like the majority of SaaS companies, we have a strong product-led growth (PLG) motion along with a traditional sales model—and this comes with its own set of challenges when it comes time to report on the health of business. Most CRMs just aren’t great at handling recurring revenue. Traditional CRMs, like the one we were using, forced us into keeping opportunity and subscription data in silos. We’d have to pull numbers from ChartMogul and our CRM in order to compile revenue reporting and see what’s driving monthly recurring revenue (MRR) up and to the right. Even comparing conversion rates in our self-serve funnel with our sales-led motion took a lot of Excel magic. Moreover, using multiple tools can make it difficult to maintain a consistent sales process. This means swivel-chairing between systems to answer questions about our history with a company when someone gets in touch. Who was their last point of contact and how did the call go? Is this new biz or a possible expansion opportunity? How much revenue do they already contribute? You see it can take a lot of time to plot the next steps. In my career, it feels like I’ve used every CRM out there. And there are a lot. I’ve helped implement Salesforce at dozens of business from my time working at a Salesforce implementation partner. I’ve ripped and replaced HubSpot, Close, Pipedrive, Zendesk Sell, and Act! to name a few. Building our own CRM We started thinking about building a CRM that we actually wanted to use. With powerful analytics that show performance across the entire customer journey—from lead acquisition through expansion. All the data would be in one place. We designed, built, and tested the new Customer Profile page, the Activity Stream (for emails, call logs, notes, etc), the Opportunity section and all the new charts and forecasts. We made it possible to connect your email account in order to send and receive emails. It took us just over a year to bring ChartMogul CRM to life. Leo, Deepak, Bianca, Ingmar, Nick, Me (Sara), Marvin, Anthony, Katarina, Jordan Drinking our own champagne The onboarding process for our team was pretty straightforward—we enabled ChartMogul CRM on our own account and gave seats to our sales team. Anyone using ChartMogul gets 3 CRM seats for free. We told them to note down any bugs or feedback in the corresponding Slack #channel so the product team could address them. The team used the CRM for 6 weeks before it was available publicly. We set up one primary sales pipeline with deal stages: Discovery, Evaluation, Negotiation, Closed Won, and Closed Lost. These stages are given an associated Win Likelihood and Forecast Category from which to derive proper forecasting. We also use a separate sales pipeline for expansion. All of our free trials and contacts are sent to ChartMogul from our data warehouse already, so there was no additional setup required. We simply had to start creating opportunities based on the contacts already present in ChartMogul, and start moving them through deal stages. Generally, if you store lead and trial data outside of your billing system (such as a database or the backend of your SaaS product) or, ChartMogul does not import leads and trials from your billing system (such as PayPal), you need to set up lead tracking and use the merge customers endpoint for accurate reporting. If you track your leads in your billing system, ChartMogul will import them automatically. To use the email client and start sending emails directly from ChartMogul, we simply needed to connect our accounts to Google in admin settings and we were ready to start communicating with prospects. We’re now two months into using ChartMogul CRM. We said goodbye to our old CRM and we’re not looking back. Unifying CRM and subscription analytics ChartMogul brings together the entire customer journey in one platform. You can discover how effective you are at acquiring customers, retaining them, and expanding their accounts. “As a salesperson, the most annoying thing you have to do is fight with your CRM all day. ChartMogul is different. Everything is already all there for you – because you’ve connected your billing system, you get all of your contacts, subscription data in your CRM automatically. So there’s no hassle about creating leads and maintaining those accounts. It’s pretty cool.” Leo, Account Executive You can learn more about getting set up here. Many CRMs don’t handle subscription data at all, which creates silos of information between your finance and sales teams. This also contributes to issues with data accuracy. Leo discusses some of his past experience working with CRMs: “Your CRM might have 5 different accounts that were created at some point and you never know which one was the right one or the most up-to-date. With ChartMogul it’s really easy – you see the whole history of the analytics and the billing side and it’s useful to look at everything at once instead of sorting it out through multiple contacts and messy data.” Focusing on the sales process Your CRM is supposed to be a workflow tool that helps your sales team move deals through the pipeline. Companies send all kinds of information to their CRMs and they often turn into Frankenstein systems that distract your team from what they should be working on – communicating with customers and working deals. The problem compounds when we consider that that data might not be up to date. If you need someplace to store all your data, you should send it to a data warehouse, and not your CRM. I don’t just manage the sales team, I also have my own revenue targets. Each day, I sort active opportunities by Opportunity value in ChartMogul CRM, and check to see if there are any updates. If I get an email from one of our large prospects and they’re ready to move forward on a monthly plan – instead of navigating away I can choose a template with instructions on how to upgrade their account right from ChartMogul. Our team has access to all the information they need to quickly make decisions about how to keep deals moving – all without having to leave the platform. Read more about workflow tools here and here. Account Executive Jordan said it best, “The fewer tools I have to use, the better.” Communicate with prospects and customers right from ChartMogul The commercial center at the heart of your B2B SaaS Generating pipeline might be top priority for your business right now, especially in this economic climate. But how do you know if you’re on the right track, and how can you set up processes to build on your success? During our weekly team meeting, we start by filtering Opportunities by close date and discuss each deal’s status and how we intend to get them over the finish line. Then we pull up the Forecast category report to see how on track we are to reach our monthly goals. Our company is building a recurring revenue machine – I want my reps to see that they’re committing revenue every month and ‘Committed’ opportunities help with that. Moreover, my reps are able to see if they’re on track to hit targets month in month out. ChartMogul CRM can also help sales leaders set realistic goals for their teams. I like to layer on geographic data and look at all new-biz in EMEA where a sales rep is involved. Then I can set the team’s quota to something a little more ambitious than average. Jordan reflects on past experiences, “Building reports in your CRM is typically a nightmare, especially if you’re working with recurring revenue. We even had to have our Data Analyst come in and help with the reporting at one point… In ChartMogul it’s simple to look at how much revenue we have in each stage of the funnel.” The price is right for scaling startups With ChartMogul CRM, you get 3 seats for free. Free tools can really make a difference for price-conscious startups. Leo mentioned in our discussion, “At the beginning of your SaaS journey, the CRM is a pretty hefty bill. Imagine onboarding a sales manager and some SDRs on top of that. Even if you get a discount for the first year, you’re looking at a big price tag after that. Maybe even 10% of your MRR.” Some of the popular CRMs in the market might offer you a startup discount, but they quickly ramp up in terms of cost and complexity. I’ve spoken to a lot of startups that might only do around $360k ARR, and they might be spending $50k per year on their CRM. Sooner or later investors will start asking you about retention rates, so you’ll need subscription analytics eventually. Why not have them both from the start? If you’re looking to bring all your lead, opportunity, and subscription data under one roof – and improve relationships with your prospects and customers, get started with ChartMogul CRM today for free. You can assign your CRM seats here.

[INST] Convert More Leads with ChartMogul CRM [/INST]

After years of using generic CRMs that are ill-suited for our product-led B2B SaaS model, we’re using ChartMogul CRM, the only CRM tailor-made for SaaS sales teams like us. We’re familiar with the problems modern SaaS companies face – we’ve spent the last 8 years helping them gain a better understanding of business dynamics with our Subscription Analytics Platform. The downside of traditional CRMs Like the majority of SaaS companies, we have a strong product-led growth (PLG) motion along with a traditional sales model—and this comes with its own set of challenges when it comes time to report on the health of business. Most CRMs just aren’t great at handling recurring revenue. Traditional CRMs, like the one we were using, forced us into keeping opportunity and subscription data in silos. We’d have to pull numbers from ChartMogul and our CRM in order to compile revenue reporting and see what’s driving monthly recurring revenue (MRR) up and to the right. Even comparing conversion rates in our self-serve funnel with our sales-led motion took a lot of Excel magic. Moreover, using multiple tools can make it difficult to maintain a consistent sales process. This means swivel-chairing between systems to answer questions about our history with a company when someone gets in touch. Who was their last point of contact and how did the call go? Is this new biz or a possible expansion opportunity? How much revenue do they already contribute? You see it can take a lot of time to plot the next steps. In my career, it feels like I’ve used every CRM out there. And there are a lot. I’ve helped implement Salesforce at dozens of business from my time working at a Salesforce implementation partner. I’ve ripped and replaced HubSpot, Close, Pipedrive, Zendesk Sell, and Act! to name a few. Building our own CRM We started thinking about building a CRM that we actually wanted to use. With powerful analytics that show performance across the entire customer journey—from lead acquisition through expansion. All the data would be in one place. We designed, built, and tested the new Customer Profile page, the Activity Stream (for emails, call logs, notes, etc), the Opportunity section and all the new charts and forecasts. We made it possible to connect your email account in order to send and receive emails. It took us just over a year to bring ChartMogul CRM to life. Leo, Deepak, Bianca, Ingmar, Nick, Me (Sara), Marvin, Anthony, Katarina, Jordan Drinking our own champagne The onboarding process for our team was pretty straightforward—we enabled ChartMogul CRM on our own account and gave seats to our sales team. Anyone using ChartMogul gets 3 CRM seats for free. We told them to note down any bugs or feedback in the corresponding Slack #channel so the product team could address them. The team used the CRM for 6 weeks before it was available publicly. We set up one primary sales pipeline with deal stages: Discovery, Evaluation, Negotiation, Closed Won, and Closed Lost. These stages are given an associated Win Likelihood and Forecast Category from which to derive proper forecasting. We also use a separate sales pipeline for expansion. All of our free trials and contacts are sent to ChartMogul from our data warehouse already, so there was no additional setup required. We simply had to start creating opportunities based on the contacts already present in ChartMogul, and start moving them through deal stages. Generally, if you store lead and trial data outside of your billing system (such as a database or the backend of your SaaS product) or, ChartMogul does not import leads and trials from your billing system (such as PayPal), you need to set up lead tracking and use the merge customers endpoint for accurate reporting. If you track your leads in your billing system, ChartMogul will import them automatically. To use the email client and start sending emails directly from ChartMogul, we simply needed to connect our accounts to Google in admin settings and we were ready to start communicating with prospects. We’re now two months into using ChartMogul CRM. We said goodbye to our old CRM and we’re not looking back. Unifying CRM and subscription analytics ChartMogul brings together the entire customer journey in one platform. You can discover how effective you are at acquiring customers, retaining them, and expanding their accounts. “As a salesperson, the most annoying thing you have to do is fight with your CRM all day. ChartMogul is different. Everything is already all there for you – because you’ve connected your billing system, you get all of your contacts, subscription data in your CRM automatically. So there’s no hassle about creating leads and maintaining those accounts. It’s pretty cool.” Leo, Account Executive You can learn more about getting set up here. Many CRMs don’t handle subscription data at all, which creates silos of information between your finance and sales teams. This also contributes to issues with data accuracy. Leo discusses some of his past experience working with CRMs: “Your CRM might have 5 different accounts that were created at some point and you never know which one was the right one or the most up-to-date. With ChartMogul it’s really easy – you see the whole history of the analytics and the billing side and it’s useful to look at everything at once instead of sorting it out through multiple contacts and messy data.” Focusing on the sales process Your CRM is supposed to be a workflow tool that helps your sales team move deals through the pipeline. Companies send all kinds of information to their CRMs and they often turn into Frankenstein systems that distract your team from what they should be working on – communicating with customers and working deals. The problem compounds when we consider that that data might not be up to date. If you need someplace to store all your data, you should send it to a data warehouse, and not your CRM. I don’t just manage the sales team, I also have my own revenue targets. Each day, I sort active opportunities by Opportunity value in ChartMogul CRM, and check to see if there are any updates. If I get an email from one of our large prospects and they’re ready to move forward on a monthly plan – instead of navigating away I can choose a template with instructions on how to upgrade their account right from ChartMogul. Our team has access to all the information they need to quickly make decisions about how to keep deals moving – all without having to leave the platform. Read more about workflow tools here and here. Account Executive Jordan said it best, “The fewer tools I have to use, the better.” Communicate with prospects and customers right from ChartMogul The commercial center at the heart of your B2B SaaS Generating pipeline might be top priority for your business right now, especially in this economic climate. But how do you know if you’re on the right track, and how can you set up processes to build on your success? During our weekly team meeting, we start by filtering Opportunities by close date and discuss each deal’s status and how we intend to get them over the finish line. Then we pull up the Forecast category report to see how on track we are to reach our monthly goals. Our company is building a recurring revenue machine – I want my reps to see that they’re committing revenue every month and ‘Committed’ opportunities help with that. Moreover, my reps are able to see if they’re on track to hit targets month in month out. ChartMogul CRM can also help sales leaders set realistic goals for their teams. I like to layer on geographic data and look at all new-biz in EMEA where a sales rep is involved. Then I can set the team’s quota to something a little more ambitious than average. Jordan reflects on past experiences, “Building reports in your CRM is typically a nightmare, especially if you’re working with recurring revenue. We even had to have our Data Analyst come in and help with the reporting at one point… In ChartMogul it’s simple to look at how much revenue we have in each stage of the funnel.” The price is right for scaling startups With ChartMogul CRM, you get 3 seats for free. Free tools can really make a difference for price-conscious startups. Leo mentioned in our discussion, “At the beginning of your SaaS journey, the CRM is a pretty hefty bill. Imagine onboarding a sales manager and some SDRs on top of that. Even if you get a discount for the first year, you’re looking at a big price tag after that. Maybe even 10% of your MRR.” Some of the popular CRMs in the market might offer you a startup discount, but they quickly ramp up in terms of cost and complexity. I’ve spoken to a lot of startups that might only do around $360k ARR, and they might be spending $50k per year on their CRM. Sooner or later investors will start asking you about retention rates, so you’ll need subscription analytics eventually. Why not have them both from the start? If you’re looking to bring all your lead, opportunity, and subscription data under one roof – and improve relationships with your prospects and customers, get started with ChartMogul CRM today for free. You can assign your CRM seats here.

<sys> [INST] Convert More Leads with ChartMogul CRM [/INST] After years of using generic CRMs that are ill-suited for our product-led B2B SaaS model, we’re using ChartMogul CRM, the only CRM tailor-made for SaaS sales teams like us. We’re familiar with the problems modern SaaS companies face – we’ve spent the last 8 years helping them gain a better understanding of business dynamics with our Subscription Analytics Platform. The downside of traditional CRMs Like the majority of SaaS companies, we have a strong product-led growth (PLG) motion along with a traditional sales model—and this comes with its own set of challenges when it comes time to report on the health of business. Most CRMs just aren’t great at handling recurring revenue. Traditional CRMs, like the one we were using, forced us into keeping opportunity and subscription data in silos. We’d have to pull numbers from ChartMogul and our CRM in order to compile revenue reporting and see what’s driving monthly recurring revenue (MRR) up and to the right. Even comparing conversion rates in our self-serve funnel with our sales-led motion took a lot of Excel magic. Moreover, using multiple tools can make it difficult to maintain a consistent sales process. This means swivel-chairing between systems to answer questions about our history with a company when someone gets in touch. Who was their last point of contact and how did the call go? Is this new biz or a possible expansion opportunity? How much revenue do they already contribute? You see it can take a lot of time to plot the next steps. In my career, it feels like I’ve used every CRM out there. And there are a lot. I’ve helped implement Salesforce at dozens of business from my time working at a Salesforce implementation partner. I’ve ripped and replaced HubSpot, Close, Pipedrive, Zendesk Sell, and Act! to name a few. Building our own CRM We started thinking about building a CRM that we actually wanted to use. With powerful analytics that show performance across the entire customer journey—from lead acquisition through expansion. All the data would be in one place. We designed, built, and tested the new Customer Profile page, the Activity Stream (for emails, call logs, notes, etc), the Opportunity section and all the new charts and forecasts. We made it possible to connect your email account in order to send and receive emails. It took us just over a year to bring ChartMogul CRM to life. Leo, Deepak, Bianca, Ingmar, Nick, Me (Sara), Marvin, Anthony, Katarina, Jordan Drinking our own champagne The onboarding process for our team was pretty straightforward—we enabled ChartMogul CRM on our own account and gave seats to our sales team. Anyone using ChartMogul gets 3 CRM seats for free. We told them to note down any bugs or feedback in the corresponding Slack #channel so the product team could address them. The team used the CRM for 6 weeks before it was available publicly. We set up one primary sales pipeline with deal stages: Discovery, Evaluation, Negotiation, Closed Won, and Closed Lost. These stages are given an associated Win Likelihood and Forecast Category from which to derive proper forecasting. We also use a separate sales pipeline for expansion. All of our free trials and contacts are sent to ChartMogul from our data warehouse already, so there was no additional setup required. We simply had to start creating opportunities based on the contacts already present in ChartMogul, and start moving them through deal stages. Generally, if you store lead and trial data outside of your billing system (such as a database or the backend of your SaaS product) or, ChartMogul does not import leads and trials from your billing system (such as PayPal), you need to set up lead tracking and use the merge customers endpoint for accurate reporting. If you track your leads in your billing system, ChartMogul will import them automatically. To use the email client and start sending emails directly from ChartMogul, we simply needed to connect our accounts to Google in admin settings and we were ready to start communicating with prospects. We’re now two months into using ChartMogul CRM. We said goodbye to our old CRM and we’re not looking back. Unifying CRM and subscription analytics ChartMogul brings together the entire customer journey in one platform. You can discover how effective you are at acquiring customers, retaining them, and expanding their accounts. “As a salesperson, the most annoying thing you have to do is fight with your CRM all day. ChartMogul is different. Everything is already all there for you – because you’ve connected your billing system, you get all of your contacts, subscription data in your CRM automatically. So there’s no hassle about creating leads and maintaining those accounts. It’s pretty cool.” Leo, Account Executive You can learn more about getting set up here. Many CRMs don’t handle subscription data at all, which creates silos of information between your finance and sales teams. This also contributes to issues with data accuracy. Leo discusses some of his past experience working with CRMs: “Your CRM might have 5 different accounts that were created at some point and you never know which one was the right one or the most up-to-date. With ChartMogul it’s really easy – you see the whole history of the analytics and the billing side and it’s useful to look at everything at once instead of sorting it out through multiple contacts and messy data.” Focusing on the sales process Your CRM is supposed to be a workflow tool that helps your sales team move deals through the pipeline. Companies send all kinds of information to their CRMs and they often turn into Frankenstein systems that distract your team from what they should be working on – communicating with customers and working deals. The problem compounds when we consider that that data might not be up to date. If you need someplace to store all your data, you should send it to a data warehouse, and not your CRM. I don’t just manage the sales team, I also have my own revenue targets. Each day, I sort active opportunities by Opportunity value in ChartMogul CRM, and check to see if there are any updates. If I get an email from one of our large prospects and they’re ready to move forward on a monthly plan – instead of navigating away I can choose a template with instructions on how to upgrade their account right from ChartMogul. Our team has access to all the information they need to quickly make decisions about how to keep deals moving – all without having to leave the platform. Read more about workflow tools here and here. Account Executive Jordan said it best, “The fewer tools I have to use, the better.” Communicate with prospects and customers right from ChartMogul The commercial center at the heart of your B2B SaaS Generating pipeline might be top priority for your business right now, especially in this economic climate. But how do you know if you’re on the right track, and how can you set up processes to build on your success? During our weekly team meeting, we start by filtering Opportunities by close date and discuss each deal’s status and how we intend to get them over the finish line. Then we pull up the Forecast category report to see how on track we are to reach our monthly goals. Our company is building a recurring revenue machine – I want my reps to see that they’re committing revenue every month and ‘Committed’ opportunities help with that. Moreover, my reps are able to see if they’re on track to hit targets month in month out. ChartMogul CRM can also help sales leaders set realistic goals for their teams. I like to layer on geographic data and look at all new-biz in EMEA where a sales rep is involved. Then I can set the team’s quota to something a little more ambitious than average. Jordan reflects on past experiences, “Building reports in your CRM is typically a nightmare, especially if you’re working with recurring revenue. We even had to have our Data Analyst come in and help with the reporting at one point… In ChartMogul it’s simple to look at how much revenue we have in each stage of the funnel.” The price is right for scaling startups With ChartMogul CRM, you get 3 seats for free. Free tools can really make a difference for price-conscious startups. Leo mentioned in our discussion, “At the beginning of your SaaS journey, the CRM is a pretty hefty bill. Imagine onboarding a sales manager and some SDRs on top of that. Even if you get a discount for the first year, you’re looking at a big price tag after that. Maybe even 10% of your MRR.” Some of the popular CRMs in the market might offer you a startup discount, but they quickly ramp up in terms of cost and complexity. I’ve spoken to a lot of startups that might only do around $360k ARR, and they might be spending $50k per year on their CRM. Sooner or later investors will start asking you about retention rates, so you’ll need subscription analytics eventually. Why not have them both from the start? If you’re looking to bring all your lead, opportunity, and subscription data under one roof – and improve relationships with your prospects and customers, get started with ChartMogul CRM today for free. You can assign your CRM seats here. </sys

Jukely: Solving live music discovery with subscriptions. “For Jukely, it’s still a series of experiments… you don’t know when something will catch on.” Jukely is a subscription for going to concerts. For a monthly fee you can go to unlimited live concerts — even every night of the week, if you can handle such a schedule. “Go out with us every night.” – now that’s a compelling headline. (source: jukely.com) Bora Celik, founder and CEO has a background in the music events scene, having put on a lot of concerts in the past – as well as being a software engineer. The music events scene is a tough segment to crack — many startups have tried and failed along the way, trying to use technology to change the way people consume live music. So why is Jukely equipped to succeed where others haven’t? “When you don’t have the fear of failure, it kind of becomes mediocre.” I took away a lot from this conversation that can be applied to any subscription business — SaaS included. Bora has a thirst for constantly experimenting and adapting the product — which he sees as a constant work-in-progress. In our chat, we covered: How Bora approached pricing the product (hint: Just talk to people) How his experience putting on live events helped build the product His compass metric “Consumer Happiness Index” (and what it means) Why he’ll never be done experimenting and iterating on Jukely His advice to people building other subscription businesses …and much more! Listen to the full interview below and don’t forget to subscribe on Soundcloud or iTunes.

[INST] Jukely: Solving live music discovery with subscriptions [/INST]

“For Jukely, it’s still a series of experiments… you don’t know when something will catch on.” Jukely is a subscription for going to concerts. For a monthly fee you can go to unlimited live concerts — even every night of the week, if you can handle such a schedule. “Go out with us every night.” – now that’s a compelling headline. (source: jukely.com) Bora Celik, founder and CEO has a background in the music events scene, having put on a lot of concerts in the past – as well as being a software engineer. The music events scene is a tough segment to crack — many startups have tried and failed along the way, trying to use technology to change the way people consume live music. So why is Jukely equipped to succeed where others haven’t? “When you don’t have the fear of failure, it kind of becomes mediocre.” I took away a lot from this conversation that can be applied to any subscription business — SaaS included. Bora has a thirst for constantly experimenting and adapting the product — which he sees as a constant work-in-progress. In our chat, we covered: How Bora approached pricing the product (hint: Just talk to people) How his experience putting on live events helped build the product His compass metric “Consumer Happiness Index” (and what it means) Why he’ll never be done experimenting and iterating on Jukely His advice to people building other subscription businesses …and much more! Listen to the full interview below and don’t forget to subscribe on Soundcloud or iTunes.

<sys> [INST] Jukely: Solving live music discovery with subscriptions [/INST] “For Jukely, it’s still a series of experiments… you don’t know when something will catch on.” Jukely is a subscription for going to concerts. For a monthly fee you can go to unlimited live concerts — even every night of the week, if you can handle such a schedule. “Go out with us every night.” – now that’s a compelling headline. (source: jukely.com) Bora Celik, founder and CEO has a background in the music events scene, having put on a lot of concerts in the past – as well as being a software engineer. The music events scene is a tough segment to crack — many startups have tried and failed along the way, trying to use technology to change the way people consume live music. So why is Jukely equipped to succeed where others haven’t? “When you don’t have the fear of failure, it kind of becomes mediocre.” I took away a lot from this conversation that can be applied to any subscription business — SaaS included. Bora has a thirst for constantly experimenting and adapting the product — which he sees as a constant work-in-progress. In our chat, we covered: How Bora approached pricing the product (hint: Just talk to people) How his experience putting on live events helped build the product His compass metric “Consumer Happiness Index” (and what it means) Why he’ll never be done experimenting and iterating on Jukely His advice to people building other subscription businesses …and much more! Listen to the full interview below and don’t forget to subscribe on Soundcloud or iTunes. </sys

SaaS Q&A: How to convert free trial users to paying customers?. Converting free trial users to paying customers comes down to two objectives: Getting your trial users to the “aha” moment as soon as possible Providing a frictionless experience, all the way through And both of these objectives live within the principle of customer success during the onboarding process. So let’s discuss each of these in a bit more depth — how they play into your customer onboarding process as a whole, and how they lead your users to seeing the value in your service. Source: blog.intercom.io. Intercom summarizes user feedback at the end of a free trial: Did they see the value or did they not? Get them to the “aha” moment ASAP The “aha” moment is when a user sees the value of your service. They get it; it clicks. For example, for us at ChartMogul, it’s when a user imports their business data. Once they do that, they can actually, literally, see the benefits of our analytics software. Determine your product’s aha moment You can start by determining the product features that are core to seeing value. To do this you can look at data to find: Which app features are being used most frequently or fully Which documentation pages or parts of your knowledge base are being read again and again Which emails have the highest open rates and look at what features are discussed within Or… to go old school, just have a conversation with your paying customers. Ask which features made the buying decision for them. Get users active immediately According to CrazyEgg, if a customer is active within 3 days, then they are 4x more likely to convert. So, the point is to get the user to start actually using it, even just the first step. How? Through helpful content and communication that guides them through your product. Onboarding content should highlight benefits and features associated with long-term success. It should be brief and promote their own intuitive learning. Find the right medium for your company. Demo videos, webinars, automated email campaigns? Perhaps even providing a personal demo for an individual user. Provide a frictionless experience The first part of this is managing their expectations. Don’t oversell your features or overpromise results. Disillusionment rips a huge hole in your conversion funnel; it’s a sure-fire way for users to drop out. Let them know what to expect during the trial. Are you going to send them emails throughout with information and tips? (Yes.) Let them know. That way they won’t be annoyed or feel spammed, they’ll feel more inclined to actually open the email — and who knows, they may be looking forward to them. Disillusionment rips a huge hole in your conversion funnel; it’s a sure-fire way for users to drop out. Tweet this quote Here are some other things you can do: At free trial signup Don’t require a credit card Condensed sign-up forms: keep it short and sweet. ie- Require just an email at first. Clear call to action, with an explanation of what will happen next. Give your users certainty about what will happen when they submit, and they’ll be more likely to click that button. Early communication that introduces the product. Greet them with a personalized (and automated) email directly after signup, or even a phone call. Throughout free trial Action-based, behavior-based communication with users. Don’t switch on a time sequence schedule that emails users on Day X, Day Y, and Day Z. The one-size-fits-all approach is drastically less effective here. “If you’re still sending emails based on a timed sequence instead of triggered by actual user behavior, you’re 100 percent doing it wrong.” – Lincoln Murphy You can still automate the communication, but design it so that user behavior triggers certain emails, emails that prompt them to the next logical step in your app, to the next plateau where they will see even more value. In this way, you assist heavily engaged users and also re-engage idle accounts that are at risk of falling into the void. Extra tips: Make these emails personalized. Use the customer’s name and sign off with your own name, as well. This helps build trust. A/B test the emails to see what works best. And if a users fall inactive? Follow these tips on how to engage mid-trial users. End of free trial As the free trial winds to a close… Create a sense of urgency to upgrade to a paid plan. Simply remind them that the days are numbered, or go as far as to offer a special feature or discount if they sign up. The upgrade workflow should be ridiculously clear and simple. As Chargify says, “the upgrade path should be no more than one or two clicks away.” Include an “Upgrade” Call To Action within the app itself during their trial period. Make the button prominent, eye-catching. This is a constant reminder that the user could enjoy the product beyond the remaining number of days. Appcues does this in their trial workflow, as Chargify pointed out: Design your pricing page so that each plan is clearly distinguished, with cost and features easy to grasp. If you’d like to learn more about pricing pages, my colleague completed an awesome analysis of pricing pages in the SaaS space. Well worth a read: 5 key learnings from analyzing top B2B SaaS pricing pages And when a user doesn’t convert by the end of the free trial, try the following: Offer a free trial extension, even just seven days. Accompany this offer with a request for feedback: “Why weren’t they ready to purchase? Is there anything unclear? How can you help?” Also follow this up with pointed emails to get them to an “aha” moment, as they clearly haven’t reached one yet. Take this opportunity to really put the value of the product in front of them. Again, you have the chance to re-engage and convert the users who weren’t successful in the free trial. And you also get invaluable feedback that can help you refine your product roadmap and improve the trial experience moving forward. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? Share and follow! NEW — SaaS Q&A: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? https://t.co/jIfReqQoZp #SaaS #Conversion pic.twitter.com/6sNdbBB5Lq — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 2, 2016

[INST] SaaS Q&A: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? [/INST]

Converting free trial users to paying customers comes down to two objectives: Getting your trial users to the “aha” moment as soon as possible Providing a frictionless experience, all the way through And both of these objectives live within the principle of customer success during the onboarding process. So let’s discuss each of these in a bit more depth — how they play into your customer onboarding process as a whole, and how they lead your users to seeing the value in your service. Source: blog.intercom.io. Intercom summarizes user feedback at the end of a free trial: Did they see the value or did they not? Get them to the “aha” moment ASAP The “aha” moment is when a user sees the value of your service. They get it; it clicks. For example, for us at ChartMogul, it’s when a user imports their business data. Once they do that, they can actually, literally, see the benefits of our analytics software. Determine your product’s aha moment You can start by determining the product features that are core to seeing value. To do this you can look at data to find: Which app features are being used most frequently or fully Which documentation pages or parts of your knowledge base are being read again and again Which emails have the highest open rates and look at what features are discussed within Or… to go old school, just have a conversation with your paying customers. Ask which features made the buying decision for them. Get users active immediately According to CrazyEgg, if a customer is active within 3 days, then they are 4x more likely to convert. So, the point is to get the user to start actually using it, even just the first step. How? Through helpful content and communication that guides them through your product. Onboarding content should highlight benefits and features associated with long-term success. It should be brief and promote their own intuitive learning. Find the right medium for your company. Demo videos, webinars, automated email campaigns? Perhaps even providing a personal demo for an individual user. Provide a frictionless experience The first part of this is managing their expectations. Don’t oversell your features or overpromise results. Disillusionment rips a huge hole in your conversion funnel; it’s a sure-fire way for users to drop out. Let them know what to expect during the trial. Are you going to send them emails throughout with information and tips? (Yes.) Let them know. That way they won’t be annoyed or feel spammed, they’ll feel more inclined to actually open the email — and who knows, they may be looking forward to them. Disillusionment rips a huge hole in your conversion funnel; it’s a sure-fire way for users to drop out. Tweet this quote Here are some other things you can do: At free trial signup Don’t require a credit card Condensed sign-up forms: keep it short and sweet. ie- Require just an email at first. Clear call to action, with an explanation of what will happen next. Give your users certainty about what will happen when they submit, and they’ll be more likely to click that button. Early communication that introduces the product. Greet them with a personalized (and automated) email directly after signup, or even a phone call. Throughout free trial Action-based, behavior-based communication with users. Don’t switch on a time sequence schedule that emails users on Day X, Day Y, and Day Z. The one-size-fits-all approach is drastically less effective here. “If you’re still sending emails based on a timed sequence instead of triggered by actual user behavior, you’re 100 percent doing it wrong.” – Lincoln Murphy You can still automate the communication, but design it so that user behavior triggers certain emails, emails that prompt them to the next logical step in your app, to the next plateau where they will see even more value. In this way, you assist heavily engaged users and also re-engage idle accounts that are at risk of falling into the void. Extra tips: Make these emails personalized. Use the customer’s name and sign off with your own name, as well. This helps build trust. A/B test the emails to see what works best. And if a users fall inactive? Follow these tips on how to engage mid-trial users. End of free trial As the free trial winds to a close… Create a sense of urgency to upgrade to a paid plan. Simply remind them that the days are numbered, or go as far as to offer a special feature or discount if they sign up. The upgrade workflow should be ridiculously clear and simple. As Chargify says, “the upgrade path should be no more than one or two clicks away.” Include an “Upgrade” Call To Action within the app itself during their trial period. Make the button prominent, eye-catching. This is a constant reminder that the user could enjoy the product beyond the remaining number of days. Appcues does this in their trial workflow, as Chargify pointed out: Design your pricing page so that each plan is clearly distinguished, with cost and features easy to grasp. If you’d like to learn more about pricing pages, my colleague completed an awesome analysis of pricing pages in the SaaS space. Well worth a read: 5 key learnings from analyzing top B2B SaaS pricing pages And when a user doesn’t convert by the end of the free trial, try the following: Offer a free trial extension, even just seven days. Accompany this offer with a request for feedback: “Why weren’t they ready to purchase? Is there anything unclear? How can you help?” Also follow this up with pointed emails to get them to an “aha” moment, as they clearly haven’t reached one yet. Take this opportunity to really put the value of the product in front of them. Again, you have the chance to re-engage and convert the users who weren’t successful in the free trial. And you also get invaluable feedback that can help you refine your product roadmap and improve the trial experience moving forward. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? Share and follow! NEW — SaaS Q&A: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? https://t.co/jIfReqQoZp #SaaS #Conversion pic.twitter.com/6sNdbBB5Lq — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 2, 2016

<sys> [INST] SaaS Q&A: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? [/INST] Converting free trial users to paying customers comes down to two objectives: Getting your trial users to the “aha” moment as soon as possible Providing a frictionless experience, all the way through And both of these objectives live within the principle of customer success during the onboarding process. So let’s discuss each of these in a bit more depth — how they play into your customer onboarding process as a whole, and how they lead your users to seeing the value in your service. Source: blog.intercom.io. Intercom summarizes user feedback at the end of a free trial: Did they see the value or did they not? Get them to the “aha” moment ASAP The “aha” moment is when a user sees the value of your service. They get it; it clicks. For example, for us at ChartMogul, it’s when a user imports their business data. Once they do that, they can actually, literally, see the benefits of our analytics software. Determine your product’s aha moment You can start by determining the product features that are core to seeing value. To do this you can look at data to find: Which app features are being used most frequently or fully Which documentation pages or parts of your knowledge base are being read again and again Which emails have the highest open rates and look at what features are discussed within Or… to go old school, just have a conversation with your paying customers. Ask which features made the buying decision for them. Get users active immediately According to CrazyEgg, if a customer is active within 3 days, then they are 4x more likely to convert. So, the point is to get the user to start actually using it, even just the first step. How? Through helpful content and communication that guides them through your product. Onboarding content should highlight benefits and features associated with long-term success. It should be brief and promote their own intuitive learning. Find the right medium for your company. Demo videos, webinars, automated email campaigns? Perhaps even providing a personal demo for an individual user. Provide a frictionless experience The first part of this is managing their expectations. Don’t oversell your features or overpromise results. Disillusionment rips a huge hole in your conversion funnel; it’s a sure-fire way for users to drop out. Let them know what to expect during the trial. Are you going to send them emails throughout with information and tips? (Yes.) Let them know. That way they won’t be annoyed or feel spammed, they’ll feel more inclined to actually open the email — and who knows, they may be looking forward to them. Disillusionment rips a huge hole in your conversion funnel; it’s a sure-fire way for users to drop out. Tweet this quote Here are some other things you can do: At free trial signup Don’t require a credit card Condensed sign-up forms: keep it short and sweet. ie- Require just an email at first. Clear call to action, with an explanation of what will happen next. Give your users certainty about what will happen when they submit, and they’ll be more likely to click that button. Early communication that introduces the product. Greet them with a personalized (and automated) email directly after signup, or even a phone call. Throughout free trial Action-based, behavior-based communication with users. Don’t switch on a time sequence schedule that emails users on Day X, Day Y, and Day Z. The one-size-fits-all approach is drastically less effective here. “If you’re still sending emails based on a timed sequence instead of triggered by actual user behavior, you’re 100 percent doing it wrong.” – Lincoln Murphy You can still automate the communication, but design it so that user behavior triggers certain emails, emails that prompt them to the next logical step in your app, to the next plateau where they will see even more value. In this way, you assist heavily engaged users and also re-engage idle accounts that are at risk of falling into the void. Extra tips: Make these emails personalized. Use the customer’s name and sign off with your own name, as well. This helps build trust. A/B test the emails to see what works best. And if a users fall inactive? Follow these tips on how to engage mid-trial users. End of free trial As the free trial winds to a close… Create a sense of urgency to upgrade to a paid plan. Simply remind them that the days are numbered, or go as far as to offer a special feature or discount if they sign up. The upgrade workflow should be ridiculously clear and simple. As Chargify says, “the upgrade path should be no more than one or two clicks away.” Include an “Upgrade” Call To Action within the app itself during their trial period. Make the button prominent, eye-catching. This is a constant reminder that the user could enjoy the product beyond the remaining number of days. Appcues does this in their trial workflow, as Chargify pointed out: Design your pricing page so that each plan is clearly distinguished, with cost and features easy to grasp. If you’d like to learn more about pricing pages, my colleague completed an awesome analysis of pricing pages in the SaaS space. Well worth a read: 5 key learnings from analyzing top B2B SaaS pricing pages And when a user doesn’t convert by the end of the free trial, try the following: Offer a free trial extension, even just seven days. Accompany this offer with a request for feedback: “Why weren’t they ready to purchase? Is there anything unclear? How can you help?” Also follow this up with pointed emails to get them to an “aha” moment, as they clearly haven’t reached one yet. Take this opportunity to really put the value of the product in front of them. Again, you have the chance to re-engage and convert the users who weren’t successful in the free trial. And you also get invaluable feedback that can help you refine your product roadmap and improve the trial experience moving forward. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? Share and follow! NEW — SaaS Q&A: How to convert free trial users to paying customers? https://t.co/jIfReqQoZp #SaaS #Conversion pic.twitter.com/6sNdbBB5Lq — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 2, 2016 </sys

Building a churn prediction machine, part one. Leading and lagging indicators of churn Every metric and measurement you have is measuring a specific snapshot — a single event in a long funnel. Every one of these snapshots can be useful when measuring your business, if you implement and use them for the right decisions. Depending on where the event happens in the timeline, we refer to it as a leading indicator or a lagging indicator. A leading indicator is an artefact that occurs ahead of the event. In the case of churn, it happens before the churn actually occurs. A lagging indicator is more of a side-effect – a measurable artefact that happens after the event. In the case of churn, it’s basically anything that we measure after the customer has churned. Of course, when we’re talking about predicting (and preventing) churn, it’s useless to be looking at lagging indicators like revenue. We may be able to spot trends in churn by looking at churn rate over time — identifying a spike in churn rate can definitely suggest a problem that needs to be investigated. While this can be useful, it’s usually best to measure as far “up” the funnel as possible towards the earlier indicators of churn. However… there is a trade-off here. The further up the funnel you get, the less accurate the indicator. Where lagging indicators are always 100% accurate (the even has already happened with 100% certainty), leading indicators can never be 100% accurate — with these we’re trying to predict or anticipate something that hasn’t yet happened. As an example, even if a customer visits the cancel page 20 times in quick succession, you can’t be 100% certain that they’ll churn (although it’s admittedly a very strong indication that they might). Leading indicators for churn prediction Clearly, when it comes to measuring churn indicators, there’s not much of a problem on the lagging side. Churn rate, MRR, cash flow etc. can all be measured and analyzed with tools (like ChartMogul!) to give you an accurate picture of the health your business. Measuring leading indicators presents more of a challenge though — mainly because the metrics are so varied, and require different sources and types of data. Here are some relatively easy ways you can do this: Incomplete onboarding: You should have the data for this in your own back-end. You could either pull it from your database, or use a product analytics solution to gauge feature usage. Inactivity in-app: Tools like Intercom allow you to measure the activity of your users. They even provide a built-in segment labelled Slipping away that’s based on this kind of activity. Negative comment on social: Social media monitoring tools are your friend for this kind of data! Check out something like Agorapulse, Mention or Brand24. Low NPS score: This one’s the easiest to measure. Use whatever system you’re using for NPS surveys! Visit cancel page: Web analytics can work here, but you might struggle to identify the user with something like Google Analytics. Again, some product analytics solution such as Mixpanel can help you here. If you looked through the measurement methods above, you can probably already see a problem with this approach. Each one requires a different data source, tool or type of measurement. Because of this, it’s not so easy to get some form of “churn risk” calculation in a single place. Secondly, churn risk is not a binary measurement. The risk that a single customer will churn lies somewhere on a scale between 0 and 1. This means that it makes sense to build some kind of “certainty” score from more than one of these metrics. Levelling up your leading indicators Churn is hard to predict, but when you look at multiple indicators together, you can get a much more accurate prediction. For example, if a customer: Leaves a low NPS score …you would probably put them at a moderate risk of churn. But the level of certainty is pretty low. However, if you know that a customer: Leaves a low NPS score Visits the cancel page Never finished their onboarding …I think you’d agree that the churn risk is much more certain, and much higher. In the case that these three things happen, we should really set off some loud alarm bells to investigate and find out what went wrong! The problem In a perfect world we’d have a constantly-updated churn risk score for every customer that’s based on metrics from across different web properties and social media. This enables a proactive approach to predicting and preventing churn, rather than reacting to limited signals when it’s already too late. All the data exists for this, so what’s holding us back? Given the different tools and systems involved, it’s hard to access and work with this data in any single place. We either need SaaS tools to get much better at talking to each other, or we need an all-in-one solution. At ChartMogul we love connecting systems using platforms like Zapier, but such a churn risk solution would planning and architecting, given the complexity and number of data sources involved. But imagine a world where we can build an automated churn risk score based on a combination of all the above data and more! Over the next weeks I’ll be experimenting with methods for putting together my own Churn Prediction Machine, and I’ll share them with you here on the ChartMogul blog. Stay tuned! Are you already solving this for your business? How do you predict churn? Let us know in the comments below — we’d love to get your input!

[INST] Building a churn prediction machine, part one [/INST]

Leading and lagging indicators of churn Every metric and measurement you have is measuring a specific snapshot — a single event in a long funnel. Every one of these snapshots can be useful when measuring your business, if you implement and use them for the right decisions. Depending on where the event happens in the timeline, we refer to it as a leading indicator or a lagging indicator. A leading indicator is an artefact that occurs ahead of the event. In the case of churn, it happens before the churn actually occurs. A lagging indicator is more of a side-effect – a measurable artefact that happens after the event. In the case of churn, it’s basically anything that we measure after the customer has churned. Of course, when we’re talking about predicting (and preventing) churn, it’s useless to be looking at lagging indicators like revenue. We may be able to spot trends in churn by looking at churn rate over time — identifying a spike in churn rate can definitely suggest a problem that needs to be investigated. While this can be useful, it’s usually best to measure as far “up” the funnel as possible towards the earlier indicators of churn. However… there is a trade-off here. The further up the funnel you get, the less accurate the indicator. Where lagging indicators are always 100% accurate (the even has already happened with 100% certainty), leading indicators can never be 100% accurate — with these we’re trying to predict or anticipate something that hasn’t yet happened. As an example, even if a customer visits the cancel page 20 times in quick succession, you can’t be 100% certain that they’ll churn (although it’s admittedly a very strong indication that they might). Leading indicators for churn prediction Clearly, when it comes to measuring churn indicators, there’s not much of a problem on the lagging side. Churn rate, MRR, cash flow etc. can all be measured and analyzed with tools (like ChartMogul!) to give you an accurate picture of the health your business. Measuring leading indicators presents more of a challenge though — mainly because the metrics are so varied, and require different sources and types of data. Here are some relatively easy ways you can do this: Incomplete onboarding: You should have the data for this in your own back-end. You could either pull it from your database, or use a product analytics solution to gauge feature usage. Inactivity in-app: Tools like Intercom allow you to measure the activity of your users. They even provide a built-in segment labelled Slipping away that’s based on this kind of activity. Negative comment on social: Social media monitoring tools are your friend for this kind of data! Check out something like Agorapulse, Mention or Brand24. Low NPS score: This one’s the easiest to measure. Use whatever system you’re using for NPS surveys! Visit cancel page: Web analytics can work here, but you might struggle to identify the user with something like Google Analytics. Again, some product analytics solution such as Mixpanel can help you here. If you looked through the measurement methods above, you can probably already see a problem with this approach. Each one requires a different data source, tool or type of measurement. Because of this, it’s not so easy to get some form of “churn risk” calculation in a single place. Secondly, churn risk is not a binary measurement. The risk that a single customer will churn lies somewhere on a scale between 0 and 1. This means that it makes sense to build some kind of “certainty” score from more than one of these metrics. Levelling up your leading indicators Churn is hard to predict, but when you look at multiple indicators together, you can get a much more accurate prediction. For example, if a customer: Leaves a low NPS score …you would probably put them at a moderate risk of churn. But the level of certainty is pretty low. However, if you know that a customer: Leaves a low NPS score Visits the cancel page Never finished their onboarding …I think you’d agree that the churn risk is much more certain, and much higher. In the case that these three things happen, we should really set off some loud alarm bells to investigate and find out what went wrong! The problem In a perfect world we’d have a constantly-updated churn risk score for every customer that’s based on metrics from across different web properties and social media. This enables a proactive approach to predicting and preventing churn, rather than reacting to limited signals when it’s already too late. All the data exists for this, so what’s holding us back? Given the different tools and systems involved, it’s hard to access and work with this data in any single place. We either need SaaS tools to get much better at talking to each other, or we need an all-in-one solution. At ChartMogul we love connecting systems using platforms like Zapier, but such a churn risk solution would planning and architecting, given the complexity and number of data sources involved. But imagine a world where we can build an automated churn risk score based on a combination of all the above data and more! Over the next weeks I’ll be experimenting with methods for putting together my own Churn Prediction Machine, and I’ll share them with you here on the ChartMogul blog. Stay tuned! Are you already solving this for your business? How do you predict churn? Let us know in the comments below — we’d love to get your input!

<sys> [INST] Building a churn prediction machine, part one [/INST] Leading and lagging indicators of churn Every metric and measurement you have is measuring a specific snapshot — a single event in a long funnel. Every one of these snapshots can be useful when measuring your business, if you implement and use them for the right decisions. Depending on where the event happens in the timeline, we refer to it as a leading indicator or a lagging indicator. A leading indicator is an artefact that occurs ahead of the event. In the case of churn, it happens before the churn actually occurs. A lagging indicator is more of a side-effect – a measurable artefact that happens after the event. In the case of churn, it’s basically anything that we measure after the customer has churned. Of course, when we’re talking about predicting (and preventing) churn, it’s useless to be looking at lagging indicators like revenue. We may be able to spot trends in churn by looking at churn rate over time — identifying a spike in churn rate can definitely suggest a problem that needs to be investigated. While this can be useful, it’s usually best to measure as far “up” the funnel as possible towards the earlier indicators of churn. However… there is a trade-off here. The further up the funnel you get, the less accurate the indicator. Where lagging indicators are always 100% accurate (the even has already happened with 100% certainty), leading indicators can never be 100% accurate — with these we’re trying to predict or anticipate something that hasn’t yet happened. As an example, even if a customer visits the cancel page 20 times in quick succession, you can’t be 100% certain that they’ll churn (although it’s admittedly a very strong indication that they might). Leading indicators for churn prediction Clearly, when it comes to measuring churn indicators, there’s not much of a problem on the lagging side. Churn rate, MRR, cash flow etc. can all be measured and analyzed with tools (like ChartMogul!) to give you an accurate picture of the health your business. Measuring leading indicators presents more of a challenge though — mainly because the metrics are so varied, and require different sources and types of data. Here are some relatively easy ways you can do this: Incomplete onboarding: You should have the data for this in your own back-end. You could either pull it from your database, or use a product analytics solution to gauge feature usage. Inactivity in-app: Tools like Intercom allow you to measure the activity of your users. They even provide a built-in segment labelled Slipping away that’s based on this kind of activity. Negative comment on social: Social media monitoring tools are your friend for this kind of data! Check out something like Agorapulse, Mention or Brand24. Low NPS score: This one’s the easiest to measure. Use whatever system you’re using for NPS surveys! Visit cancel page: Web analytics can work here, but you might struggle to identify the user with something like Google Analytics. Again, some product analytics solution such as Mixpanel can help you here. If you looked through the measurement methods above, you can probably already see a problem with this approach. Each one requires a different data source, tool or type of measurement. Because of this, it’s not so easy to get some form of “churn risk” calculation in a single place. Secondly, churn risk is not a binary measurement. The risk that a single customer will churn lies somewhere on a scale between 0 and 1. This means that it makes sense to build some kind of “certainty” score from more than one of these metrics. Levelling up your leading indicators Churn is hard to predict, but when you look at multiple indicators together, you can get a much more accurate prediction. For example, if a customer: Leaves a low NPS score …you would probably put them at a moderate risk of churn. But the level of certainty is pretty low. However, if you know that a customer: Leaves a low NPS score Visits the cancel page Never finished their onboarding …I think you’d agree that the churn risk is much more certain, and much higher. In the case that these three things happen, we should really set off some loud alarm bells to investigate and find out what went wrong! The problem In a perfect world we’d have a constantly-updated churn risk score for every customer that’s based on metrics from across different web properties and social media. This enables a proactive approach to predicting and preventing churn, rather than reacting to limited signals when it’s already too late. All the data exists for this, so what’s holding us back? Given the different tools and systems involved, it’s hard to access and work with this data in any single place. We either need SaaS tools to get much better at talking to each other, or we need an all-in-one solution. At ChartMogul we love connecting systems using platforms like Zapier, but such a churn risk solution would planning and architecting, given the complexity and number of data sources involved. But imagine a world where we can build an automated churn risk score based on a combination of all the above data and more! Over the next weeks I’ll be experimenting with methods for putting together my own Churn Prediction Machine, and I’ll share them with you here on the ChartMogul blog. Stay tuned! Are you already solving this for your business? How do you predict churn? Let us know in the comments below — we’d love to get your input! </sys

How to pour your money down the drain with CAC & LTV. The 1:3 ratio rule One of the most widely-accepted uses of LTV as a metric, is to balance acquisition cost (CAC) against it, thus growing sustainably. The rule that most people follow is a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3, i.e. as long as your LTV is at least 3x the amount you’re spending on acquiring a single customer, you’re probably safe. Right? To elaborate, if my LTV is estimated to be $1000, then spending $300 to acquire a single customer should be okay, because on average I’d expect to see back $1000 in lifetime revenue from each customer. Even better, if I find a way to scale my paid acquisition at that cost then I basically have a money-printing machine! Right? The huge problem with this method There’s a giant hole in this method of “balancing” CAC against LTV, leading you to pour money into user acquisition that you may never see back. You’re basing this calculation on a global LTV estimate. That is, the LTV across all of your customers, including those who’ve signed up through word of mouth, content, outbound sales — everything. But the customers you’re spending money to acquire obviously represent a specific acquisition channel. What’s the LTV of this channel? It may be that paid customers have a much lower LTV than those acquired through word of mouth, for example. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that paid customers DO have a generally lower LTV than other channels. Furthermore, as you scale your paid acquisition efforts, this problem may in effect compound as you expand to wider and lower-quality audiences to reach the volume you need. These audiences may have an even lower LTV. Before you know it, you might be confidently spending $300 per customer, for a channel whose CAC:LTV is nowhere near the suggested ratio of 1:3. Your money-printing machine has just turned into a money-shredding machine. Segmenting metrics is essential There is a way to avoid this problem: Stop looking at your global LTV. If you segment LTV by acquisition channel, you’ll have a far more detailed picture of the value of your customers, in turn allowing you to invest in paid acquisition channels with a greater level of confidence than ever before. In summary: If you’re trying to balance your paid acquisition spend, make sure you look at the LTV of that acquisition channel — or at the very least, the LTV of customers you’ve paid to acquire. ChartMogul segments your metrics You can do all of the above with ChartMogul. With Segmentation you can pipe in acquisition channel data from another platform (or manually), and use this to create custom segments to apply right across the platform, like so:

[INST] How to pour your money down the drain with CAC & LTV [/INST]

The 1:3 ratio rule One of the most widely-accepted uses of LTV as a metric, is to balance acquisition cost (CAC) against it, thus growing sustainably. The rule that most people follow is a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3, i.e. as long as your LTV is at least 3x the amount you’re spending on acquiring a single customer, you’re probably safe. Right? To elaborate, if my LTV is estimated to be $1000, then spending $300 to acquire a single customer should be okay, because on average I’d expect to see back $1000 in lifetime revenue from each customer. Even better, if I find a way to scale my paid acquisition at that cost then I basically have a money-printing machine! Right? The huge problem with this method There’s a giant hole in this method of “balancing” CAC against LTV, leading you to pour money into user acquisition that you may never see back. You’re basing this calculation on a global LTV estimate. That is, the LTV across all of your customers, including those who’ve signed up through word of mouth, content, outbound sales — everything. But the customers you’re spending money to acquire obviously represent a specific acquisition channel. What’s the LTV of this channel? It may be that paid customers have a much lower LTV than those acquired through word of mouth, for example. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that paid customers DO have a generally lower LTV than other channels. Furthermore, as you scale your paid acquisition efforts, this problem may in effect compound as you expand to wider and lower-quality audiences to reach the volume you need. These audiences may have an even lower LTV. Before you know it, you might be confidently spending $300 per customer, for a channel whose CAC:LTV is nowhere near the suggested ratio of 1:3. Your money-printing machine has just turned into a money-shredding machine. Segmenting metrics is essential There is a way to avoid this problem: Stop looking at your global LTV. If you segment LTV by acquisition channel, you’ll have a far more detailed picture of the value of your customers, in turn allowing you to invest in paid acquisition channels with a greater level of confidence than ever before. In summary: If you’re trying to balance your paid acquisition spend, make sure you look at the LTV of that acquisition channel — or at the very least, the LTV of customers you’ve paid to acquire. ChartMogul segments your metrics You can do all of the above with ChartMogul. With Segmentation you can pipe in acquisition channel data from another platform (or manually), and use this to create custom segments to apply right across the platform, like so:

<sys> [INST] How to pour your money down the drain with CAC & LTV [/INST] The 1:3 ratio rule One of the most widely-accepted uses of LTV as a metric, is to balance acquisition cost (CAC) against it, thus growing sustainably. The rule that most people follow is a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3, i.e. as long as your LTV is at least 3x the amount you’re spending on acquiring a single customer, you’re probably safe. Right? To elaborate, if my LTV is estimated to be $1000, then spending $300 to acquire a single customer should be okay, because on average I’d expect to see back $1000 in lifetime revenue from each customer. Even better, if I find a way to scale my paid acquisition at that cost then I basically have a money-printing machine! Right? The huge problem with this method There’s a giant hole in this method of “balancing” CAC against LTV, leading you to pour money into user acquisition that you may never see back. You’re basing this calculation on a global LTV estimate. That is, the LTV across all of your customers, including those who’ve signed up through word of mouth, content, outbound sales — everything. But the customers you’re spending money to acquire obviously represent a specific acquisition channel. What’s the LTV of this channel? It may be that paid customers have a much lower LTV than those acquired through word of mouth, for example. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that paid customers DO have a generally lower LTV than other channels. Furthermore, as you scale your paid acquisition efforts, this problem may in effect compound as you expand to wider and lower-quality audiences to reach the volume you need. These audiences may have an even lower LTV. Before you know it, you might be confidently spending $300 per customer, for a channel whose CAC:LTV is nowhere near the suggested ratio of 1:3. Your money-printing machine has just turned into a money-shredding machine. Segmenting metrics is essential There is a way to avoid this problem: Stop looking at your global LTV. If you segment LTV by acquisition channel, you’ll have a far more detailed picture of the value of your customers, in turn allowing you to invest in paid acquisition channels with a greater level of confidence than ever before. In summary: If you’re trying to balance your paid acquisition spend, make sure you look at the LTV of that acquisition channel — or at the very least, the LTV of customers you’ve paid to acquire. ChartMogul segments your metrics You can do all of the above with ChartMogul. With Segmentation you can pipe in acquisition channel data from another platform (or manually), and use this to create custom segments to apply right across the platform, like so: </sys

Introducing the ChartMogul GO Client. The ChartMogul Platform At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. Toward that goal, we currently offer a set of APIs to ease integration with our platform and cover every functionality: Import API allows you to push your billing data to ChartMogul from anywhere, and start analyzing your subscription revenue. Enrichment API lets you push additional customer metadata to ChartMogul, for use with our Segmentation features. Metrics API gives you access to your SaaS metrics and analytics data – to put ChartMogul’s insights wherever it’s most valuable for your team. These APIs are for you to use and create unique value for your business. Since they form the basis of all integrations with ChartMogul, we too consume these APIs and maintain them on our end. In our commitment to making ChartMogul the most powerful platform for subscription businesses, we regularly build and release new tools and plugins for our customers. For example, you can import spreadsheet data directly (and swiftly) to ChartMogul via our Google Sheets app. Having launched our Ruby, Node.js, and PHP client libraries earlier, we’re now very excited to announce our GO client library! The ChartMogul GO client The GO client wraps up the complete functionality of all three ChartMogul APIs, giving you a single, abstracted way to interact with the ChartMogul platform. While you’ll always be able to communicate directly with each API, there are a number of benefits to using our client library: You don’t need to worry about handling raw API requests and responses. You can interact with ChartMogul using naming conventions that are on the same level as ChartMogul, i.e. Invoices, Plans, etc. You can get up and running much more quickly, and save developer time. The library will be maintained and updated to reflect new functionality as it’s launched. The GO client library is fully open source. We encourage the developer community to suggest improvements or raise issues, so that we can maintain the best possible implementation for you. Big thanks and props to Petr Kopac for helping us build this library. Check out the project on GitHub if you want to have a look around. Get started To set up and install the library, check the GitHub project and its README file: Full documentation and code examples for usage will be available on our Developer Hub very soon, but until then you can find everything you need, including a full list of supported methods, parameters, and errors in the project’s README. Can you make a client library for [X]? The GO client is our fourth client library for the ChartMogul platform. We have plans for more languages and frameworks in the pipeline. If there’s something specific that would make your life easier when interacting with ChartMogul, let us know via email so we can prioritize accordingly!

[INST] Introducing the ChartMogul GO Client [/INST]

The ChartMogul Platform At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. Toward that goal, we currently offer a set of APIs to ease integration with our platform and cover every functionality: Import API allows you to push your billing data to ChartMogul from anywhere, and start analyzing your subscription revenue. Enrichment API lets you push additional customer metadata to ChartMogul, for use with our Segmentation features. Metrics API gives you access to your SaaS metrics and analytics data – to put ChartMogul’s insights wherever it’s most valuable for your team. These APIs are for you to use and create unique value for your business. Since they form the basis of all integrations with ChartMogul, we too consume these APIs and maintain them on our end. In our commitment to making ChartMogul the most powerful platform for subscription businesses, we regularly build and release new tools and plugins for our customers. For example, you can import spreadsheet data directly (and swiftly) to ChartMogul via our Google Sheets app. Having launched our Ruby, Node.js, and PHP client libraries earlier, we’re now very excited to announce our GO client library! The ChartMogul GO client The GO client wraps up the complete functionality of all three ChartMogul APIs, giving you a single, abstracted way to interact with the ChartMogul platform. While you’ll always be able to communicate directly with each API, there are a number of benefits to using our client library: You don’t need to worry about handling raw API requests and responses. You can interact with ChartMogul using naming conventions that are on the same level as ChartMogul, i.e. Invoices, Plans, etc. You can get up and running much more quickly, and save developer time. The library will be maintained and updated to reflect new functionality as it’s launched. The GO client library is fully open source. We encourage the developer community to suggest improvements or raise issues, so that we can maintain the best possible implementation for you. Big thanks and props to Petr Kopac for helping us build this library. Check out the project on GitHub if you want to have a look around. Get started To set up and install the library, check the GitHub project and its README file: Full documentation and code examples for usage will be available on our Developer Hub very soon, but until then you can find everything you need, including a full list of supported methods, parameters, and errors in the project’s README. Can you make a client library for [X]? The GO client is our fourth client library for the ChartMogul platform. We have plans for more languages and frameworks in the pipeline. If there’s something specific that would make your life easier when interacting with ChartMogul, let us know via email so we can prioritize accordingly!

<sys> [INST] Introducing the ChartMogul GO Client [/INST] The ChartMogul Platform At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. Toward that goal, we currently offer a set of APIs to ease integration with our platform and cover every functionality: Import API allows you to push your billing data to ChartMogul from anywhere, and start analyzing your subscription revenue. Enrichment API lets you push additional customer metadata to ChartMogul, for use with our Segmentation features. Metrics API gives you access to your SaaS metrics and analytics data – to put ChartMogul’s insights wherever it’s most valuable for your team. These APIs are for you to use and create unique value for your business. Since they form the basis of all integrations with ChartMogul, we too consume these APIs and maintain them on our end. In our commitment to making ChartMogul the most powerful platform for subscription businesses, we regularly build and release new tools and plugins for our customers. For example, you can import spreadsheet data directly (and swiftly) to ChartMogul via our Google Sheets app. Having launched our Ruby, Node.js, and PHP client libraries earlier, we’re now very excited to announce our GO client library! The ChartMogul GO client The GO client wraps up the complete functionality of all three ChartMogul APIs, giving you a single, abstracted way to interact with the ChartMogul platform. While you’ll always be able to communicate directly with each API, there are a number of benefits to using our client library: You don’t need to worry about handling raw API requests and responses. You can interact with ChartMogul using naming conventions that are on the same level as ChartMogul, i.e. Invoices, Plans, etc. You can get up and running much more quickly, and save developer time. The library will be maintained and updated to reflect new functionality as it’s launched. The GO client library is fully open source. We encourage the developer community to suggest improvements or raise issues, so that we can maintain the best possible implementation for you. Big thanks and props to Petr Kopac for helping us build this library. Check out the project on GitHub if you want to have a look around. Get started To set up and install the library, check the GitHub project and its README file: Full documentation and code examples for usage will be available on our Developer Hub very soon, but until then you can find everything you need, including a full list of supported methods, parameters, and errors in the project’s README. Can you make a client library for [X]? The GO client is our fourth client library for the ChartMogul platform. We have plans for more languages and frameworks in the pipeline. If there’s something specific that would make your life easier when interacting with ChartMogul, let us know via email so we can prioritize accordingly! </sys

Lessons from Christoph Janz and Nick Franklin at Mogul I/O Berlin. Berlin was our biggest Mogul I/O event so far — thanks to everyone who came out to hear the talks, enjoy the discussion and see an excellent fireside chat between Nick Franklin and Christoph Janz. Participants: Christoph Janz (@chrija) — Managing Partner, Point Nine Capital Nick Franklin (@Nick_Franklin) — CEO, ChartMogul The following is a summary of Nick and Christoph’s discussion — key takeaways and lessons alongside a selection of insightful quotes. Let’s dive in! On what it takes for SaaS startups to get venture capital funding today “If you want to raise capital from a VC fund then it only makes sense if you really have the ambition and a very strong desire to do something really really big.” It’s helpful to understand the VC perspective if you’re trying to raise money. The nature of the VC model means that every investment they make needs to have the potential to deliver a huge, outsized return — most companies fail, especially at the seed stage. So what are Christoph and his team at Point Nine Capital really looking for? He explained that Most VCs want a business that can get to $100M annual recurring revenue and still have a good growth rate when they get there. According to Christoph, a key decision founders need to make is whether they really want to sign up for such a journey, or if bootstrapping with the goal of profitability and more freedom of choice is a better option. “If you’ve raised a couple of million euros, you’ve signed up for something pretty big and have some responsibility.” Founder-investor fit is a big component of the decision-making process in venture capital. Ambitions and interest need to be strongly aligned. On top of this, there are many other factors that Christoph and his team would look at. You can see these in the SaaS funding napkin — it gives a good idea of what the table stakes are for growth. “For us as an early stage investor, oftentimes there aren’t a lot of relevant metrics yet, so by the time a company comes to us with a pitch or to discuss funding … it’s a bit more qualitative than quantitative.” On the importance of dominating your niche “I think it’s probably the right approach for most companies to dominate a niche, because you get all kinds of benefits if you’re a big fish in a small pond.” Nick posed the question to Christoph: Is the commonly referenced strategy of focusing on and dominating a niche before expanding to a larger audience something that still makes sense today? It’s a strategy often touted by other prominent SaaS VCs like Jason Lemkin of SaaStr. It’s important to know that not every successful SaaS business took this approach, but according to Christoph it’s much easier to drive word of mouth if your target customers are closer to each other by “some kind of affinity”. What’s more important though, is your plan for breaking out of that initial niche when you really need to expand your target market. “If you do that then you need to know what comes after that, and after that. It should be clear how you’re planning to expand your total addressable market (TAM).” Market expansion can take several forms, such as increasing wallet share of your current customer segment, adding other market segments on top or expanding internationally. So as Christoph explains, you have to have a good reconciliation between focusing on something small in the short term but still having that big plan in the long term. But how do you evaluate the size of your total addressable market? It’s not so easy and many businesses fail at this. “Some of the most amazing companies in the world didn’t have any quantifiable TAM when they started.” At earlier stages of the evolution of B2B SaaS, oftentimes products would be replacing existing on-premise software so it was easier to get an idea of market size. Nowadays, it can be harder for businesses to reach meaningful numbers. Christoph recommends thinking about the number of target users in your segment and then look at average revenue per user (ARPU) and doing the calculations from there. On creating a moat Should SaaS startups aim to create a moat, making their business more defensible? This was the question presented by Nick. But according to Christoph, there’s actually a discrepancy between the VC and entrepreneur views on this. “I think if you’re at zero revenue or 500K revenue there’s probably nothing that worries you less than your defensibility … you have a million other things to figure out and the last thing you want to worry about is ‘how do I become defensible if Salesforce wants to buy me at $400–500M, how can I avoid that?'” In other words, building a moat is probably not something you want to even think about at the early stage — focus on growth, and the defensibility will become a topic further down the line. Christoph explained that investors have to ask these questions because they’re looking for those gigantic outcomes that VC demands. “Having a great product or the best product, being able to iterate really fast, having an excellent execution all around the company goes quite a long way.” And finally, an example: Zendesk is now at around $500M ARR. They now have a very strong moat that comes from data and the platform they’ve built. But looking back, it’s not at all clear that it would have had an impact when they were at smaller scale. On increasing transparency in venture capital Point Nine recently announced three big changes to the way they run financing rounds: If a company raises seed with Point Nine, they guarantee that they’ll do a pro rata if you go on to raise a series A round They published a term sheet template which they commit to using They also shared a simplified due diligence checklist to be used in the fundraising process Nick asked what the the goal of these announcements is. The answer? Fundraising generally sucks for founders, and the team at Point Nine are making moves to simplify the whole experience: “It can suck for founders if nobody wants to invest … but there are elements of why it sucks that can be addressed and don’t have to be that way, like term sheets for example. There’s absolutely no point in having a 10-page term sheet with all kinds of complicated provisions for a 500k seed investment.” The same applies for due diligence — it doesn’t make sense to fill in dozens of pages for such an early stage company, to minimize any potential downside for highly unlikely events. The pledge to participate in any series A investment was not such an easy decision, however. Clearly this could lead to situation where they’re forced to invest but they don’t want to. A lot of thought was put into this decision. “Even if the seed investors are probably going to participate, there’s still some doubt — having the certainty adds a lot of peace of mind [for founders].” Overall, Christoph strongly believe that these changes make Point Nine more competitive over VCs with less friendly terms. Since the announcement was made there’s been lots of positive feedback from both founders and LPs. On how startups should be using data today “I think the table stakes have gone up in the sense that if in 2018 you’re not on top of these metrics, I’m less patient — there’s no excuse for not knowing this.” Christoph started out at a time when good, actionable data wasn’t abundant in most startups. Or it was at least far more difficult to capture data and put it to good use. “At that time on a daily basis we’d talk to SaaS companies and the way they presented their metrics, at least for us, was confusing because there were no standards and no clear definitions so it wasn’t quite clear what they were talking about.” But measuring and understanding data today is paramount for knowing if a business is moving in the right direction (at a high level) and where any focus on improvement should be. “For me it’s always been important to look at metrics for all kinds of probably obvious reasons — you want to know what works and what doesn’t work, and try to fix what doesn’t work and double down on what does work.” On shifting from linear to exponential growth “Usually, year-on-year growth rates go down. It’s very hard to keep them up for a number of years.” Nick stated that the reality of startup growth often doesn’t match the extremes we see discussed and analyzed in the public domain. A lot of growth trajectories lie somewhere in a sort of no-man’s land, between linear and “hockey stick” exponential. So what does it take for businesses to find that explosive, exponential growth if they don’t have it already? Christoph weighed in on just how rare this is: “I think true exponential growth over longer periods of time is exceedingly rare because, by definition, it has to be viral … Pretty much nobody has exponential growth unless they have a viral product like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype.” There is one B2B SaaS business that’s doing an incredible job of standing out from the crowd, though: “The only B2B SaaS where I’ve seen true exponential growth is Typeform, because it has a viral loop built in. Every time someone sees a Typeform there’s a small button at the bottom that says ‘create your own Typeform’.” And of course, this isn’t by chance — according to Christoph, the team at Typeform has been constantly making adjustments to the product to tweak their “K-factor” (a measure of virality) and really encourage that virality. Nick and Christoph discussed some other cases where companies have been able to change their growth trajectory, for one of three key reasons: They suddenly hit product-market fit They find a new sales channel that works exceptionally well They unlock the ability to sell to much bigger customers However, this looks more like a step-change than truly exponential growth. Calendly is another example of a product with some virality built in — you send the invite and the user sees a link to create their own. Dropbox and Slack are other good examples. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the team at Point Nine Capital for hosting us and to Christoph for taking the time to share his insights into the rapidly changing landscapes of SaaS and venture capital. If you attended one of our recent Mogul I/O events, thank you for making it as fun as it was! We’re looking for feedback so that we can evolve and improve the event in the future. What would you like to see more of? What would you like us to change? Email support@chartmogul.com and let the team know!

[INST] Lessons from Christoph Janz and Nick Franklin at Mogul I/O Berlin [/INST]

Berlin was our biggest Mogul I/O event so far — thanks to everyone who came out to hear the talks, enjoy the discussion and see an excellent fireside chat between Nick Franklin and Christoph Janz. Participants: Christoph Janz (@chrija) — Managing Partner, Point Nine Capital Nick Franklin (@Nick_Franklin) — CEO, ChartMogul The following is a summary of Nick and Christoph’s discussion — key takeaways and lessons alongside a selection of insightful quotes. Let’s dive in! On what it takes for SaaS startups to get venture capital funding today “If you want to raise capital from a VC fund then it only makes sense if you really have the ambition and a very strong desire to do something really really big.” It’s helpful to understand the VC perspective if you’re trying to raise money. The nature of the VC model means that every investment they make needs to have the potential to deliver a huge, outsized return — most companies fail, especially at the seed stage. So what are Christoph and his team at Point Nine Capital really looking for? He explained that Most VCs want a business that can get to $100M annual recurring revenue and still have a good growth rate when they get there. According to Christoph, a key decision founders need to make is whether they really want to sign up for such a journey, or if bootstrapping with the goal of profitability and more freedom of choice is a better option. “If you’ve raised a couple of million euros, you’ve signed up for something pretty big and have some responsibility.” Founder-investor fit is a big component of the decision-making process in venture capital. Ambitions and interest need to be strongly aligned. On top of this, there are many other factors that Christoph and his team would look at. You can see these in the SaaS funding napkin — it gives a good idea of what the table stakes are for growth. “For us as an early stage investor, oftentimes there aren’t a lot of relevant metrics yet, so by the time a company comes to us with a pitch or to discuss funding … it’s a bit more qualitative than quantitative.” On the importance of dominating your niche “I think it’s probably the right approach for most companies to dominate a niche, because you get all kinds of benefits if you’re a big fish in a small pond.” Nick posed the question to Christoph: Is the commonly referenced strategy of focusing on and dominating a niche before expanding to a larger audience something that still makes sense today? It’s a strategy often touted by other prominent SaaS VCs like Jason Lemkin of SaaStr. It’s important to know that not every successful SaaS business took this approach, but according to Christoph it’s much easier to drive word of mouth if your target customers are closer to each other by “some kind of affinity”. What’s more important though, is your plan for breaking out of that initial niche when you really need to expand your target market. “If you do that then you need to know what comes after that, and after that. It should be clear how you’re planning to expand your total addressable market (TAM).” Market expansion can take several forms, such as increasing wallet share of your current customer segment, adding other market segments on top or expanding internationally. So as Christoph explains, you have to have a good reconciliation between focusing on something small in the short term but still having that big plan in the long term. But how do you evaluate the size of your total addressable market? It’s not so easy and many businesses fail at this. “Some of the most amazing companies in the world didn’t have any quantifiable TAM when they started.” At earlier stages of the evolution of B2B SaaS, oftentimes products would be replacing existing on-premise software so it was easier to get an idea of market size. Nowadays, it can be harder for businesses to reach meaningful numbers. Christoph recommends thinking about the number of target users in your segment and then look at average revenue per user (ARPU) and doing the calculations from there. On creating a moat Should SaaS startups aim to create a moat, making their business more defensible? This was the question presented by Nick. But according to Christoph, there’s actually a discrepancy between the VC and entrepreneur views on this. “I think if you’re at zero revenue or 500K revenue there’s probably nothing that worries you less than your defensibility … you have a million other things to figure out and the last thing you want to worry about is ‘how do I become defensible if Salesforce wants to buy me at $400–500M, how can I avoid that?'” In other words, building a moat is probably not something you want to even think about at the early stage — focus on growth, and the defensibility will become a topic further down the line. Christoph explained that investors have to ask these questions because they’re looking for those gigantic outcomes that VC demands. “Having a great product or the best product, being able to iterate really fast, having an excellent execution all around the company goes quite a long way.” And finally, an example: Zendesk is now at around $500M ARR. They now have a very strong moat that comes from data and the platform they’ve built. But looking back, it’s not at all clear that it would have had an impact when they were at smaller scale. On increasing transparency in venture capital Point Nine recently announced three big changes to the way they run financing rounds: If a company raises seed with Point Nine, they guarantee that they’ll do a pro rata if you go on to raise a series A round They published a term sheet template which they commit to using They also shared a simplified due diligence checklist to be used in the fundraising process Nick asked what the the goal of these announcements is. The answer? Fundraising generally sucks for founders, and the team at Point Nine are making moves to simplify the whole experience: “It can suck for founders if nobody wants to invest … but there are elements of why it sucks that can be addressed and don’t have to be that way, like term sheets for example. There’s absolutely no point in having a 10-page term sheet with all kinds of complicated provisions for a 500k seed investment.” The same applies for due diligence — it doesn’t make sense to fill in dozens of pages for such an early stage company, to minimize any potential downside for highly unlikely events. The pledge to participate in any series A investment was not such an easy decision, however. Clearly this could lead to situation where they’re forced to invest but they don’t want to. A lot of thought was put into this decision. “Even if the seed investors are probably going to participate, there’s still some doubt — having the certainty adds a lot of peace of mind [for founders].” Overall, Christoph strongly believe that these changes make Point Nine more competitive over VCs with less friendly terms. Since the announcement was made there’s been lots of positive feedback from both founders and LPs. On how startups should be using data today “I think the table stakes have gone up in the sense that if in 2018 you’re not on top of these metrics, I’m less patient — there’s no excuse for not knowing this.” Christoph started out at a time when good, actionable data wasn’t abundant in most startups. Or it was at least far more difficult to capture data and put it to good use. “At that time on a daily basis we’d talk to SaaS companies and the way they presented their metrics, at least for us, was confusing because there were no standards and no clear definitions so it wasn’t quite clear what they were talking about.” But measuring and understanding data today is paramount for knowing if a business is moving in the right direction (at a high level) and where any focus on improvement should be. “For me it’s always been important to look at metrics for all kinds of probably obvious reasons — you want to know what works and what doesn’t work, and try to fix what doesn’t work and double down on what does work.” On shifting from linear to exponential growth “Usually, year-on-year growth rates go down. It’s very hard to keep them up for a number of years.” Nick stated that the reality of startup growth often doesn’t match the extremes we see discussed and analyzed in the public domain. A lot of growth trajectories lie somewhere in a sort of no-man’s land, between linear and “hockey stick” exponential. So what does it take for businesses to find that explosive, exponential growth if they don’t have it already? Christoph weighed in on just how rare this is: “I think true exponential growth over longer periods of time is exceedingly rare because, by definition, it has to be viral … Pretty much nobody has exponential growth unless they have a viral product like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype.” There is one B2B SaaS business that’s doing an incredible job of standing out from the crowd, though: “The only B2B SaaS where I’ve seen true exponential growth is Typeform, because it has a viral loop built in. Every time someone sees a Typeform there’s a small button at the bottom that says ‘create your own Typeform’.” And of course, this isn’t by chance — according to Christoph, the team at Typeform has been constantly making adjustments to the product to tweak their “K-factor” (a measure of virality) and really encourage that virality. Nick and Christoph discussed some other cases where companies have been able to change their growth trajectory, for one of three key reasons: They suddenly hit product-market fit They find a new sales channel that works exceptionally well They unlock the ability to sell to much bigger customers However, this looks more like a step-change than truly exponential growth. Calendly is another example of a product with some virality built in — you send the invite and the user sees a link to create their own. Dropbox and Slack are other good examples. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the team at Point Nine Capital for hosting us and to Christoph for taking the time to share his insights into the rapidly changing landscapes of SaaS and venture capital. If you attended one of our recent Mogul I/O events, thank you for making it as fun as it was! We’re looking for feedback so that we can evolve and improve the event in the future. What would you like to see more of? What would you like us to change? Email support@chartmogul.com and let the team know!

<sys> [INST] Lessons from Christoph Janz and Nick Franklin at Mogul I/O Berlin [/INST] Berlin was our biggest Mogul I/O event so far — thanks to everyone who came out to hear the talks, enjoy the discussion and see an excellent fireside chat between Nick Franklin and Christoph Janz. Participants: Christoph Janz (@chrija) — Managing Partner, Point Nine Capital Nick Franklin (@Nick_Franklin) — CEO, ChartMogul The following is a summary of Nick and Christoph’s discussion — key takeaways and lessons alongside a selection of insightful quotes. Let’s dive in! On what it takes for SaaS startups to get venture capital funding today “If you want to raise capital from a VC fund then it only makes sense if you really have the ambition and a very strong desire to do something really really big.” It’s helpful to understand the VC perspective if you’re trying to raise money. The nature of the VC model means that every investment they make needs to have the potential to deliver a huge, outsized return — most companies fail, especially at the seed stage. So what are Christoph and his team at Point Nine Capital really looking for? He explained that Most VCs want a business that can get to $100M annual recurring revenue and still have a good growth rate when they get there. According to Christoph, a key decision founders need to make is whether they really want to sign up for such a journey, or if bootstrapping with the goal of profitability and more freedom of choice is a better option. “If you’ve raised a couple of million euros, you’ve signed up for something pretty big and have some responsibility.” Founder-investor fit is a big component of the decision-making process in venture capital. Ambitions and interest need to be strongly aligned. On top of this, there are many other factors that Christoph and his team would look at. You can see these in the SaaS funding napkin — it gives a good idea of what the table stakes are for growth. “For us as an early stage investor, oftentimes there aren’t a lot of relevant metrics yet, so by the time a company comes to us with a pitch or to discuss funding … it’s a bit more qualitative than quantitative.” On the importance of dominating your niche “I think it’s probably the right approach for most companies to dominate a niche, because you get all kinds of benefits if you’re a big fish in a small pond.” Nick posed the question to Christoph: Is the commonly referenced strategy of focusing on and dominating a niche before expanding to a larger audience something that still makes sense today? It’s a strategy often touted by other prominent SaaS VCs like Jason Lemkin of SaaStr. It’s important to know that not every successful SaaS business took this approach, but according to Christoph it’s much easier to drive word of mouth if your target customers are closer to each other by “some kind of affinity”. What’s more important though, is your plan for breaking out of that initial niche when you really need to expand your target market. “If you do that then you need to know what comes after that, and after that. It should be clear how you’re planning to expand your total addressable market (TAM).” Market expansion can take several forms, such as increasing wallet share of your current customer segment, adding other market segments on top or expanding internationally. So as Christoph explains, you have to have a good reconciliation between focusing on something small in the short term but still having that big plan in the long term. But how do you evaluate the size of your total addressable market? It’s not so easy and many businesses fail at this. “Some of the most amazing companies in the world didn’t have any quantifiable TAM when they started.” At earlier stages of the evolution of B2B SaaS, oftentimes products would be replacing existing on-premise software so it was easier to get an idea of market size. Nowadays, it can be harder for businesses to reach meaningful numbers. Christoph recommends thinking about the number of target users in your segment and then look at average revenue per user (ARPU) and doing the calculations from there. On creating a moat Should SaaS startups aim to create a moat, making their business more defensible? This was the question presented by Nick. But according to Christoph, there’s actually a discrepancy between the VC and entrepreneur views on this. “I think if you’re at zero revenue or 500K revenue there’s probably nothing that worries you less than your defensibility … you have a million other things to figure out and the last thing you want to worry about is ‘how do I become defensible if Salesforce wants to buy me at $400–500M, how can I avoid that?'” In other words, building a moat is probably not something you want to even think about at the early stage — focus on growth, and the defensibility will become a topic further down the line. Christoph explained that investors have to ask these questions because they’re looking for those gigantic outcomes that VC demands. “Having a great product or the best product, being able to iterate really fast, having an excellent execution all around the company goes quite a long way.” And finally, an example: Zendesk is now at around $500M ARR. They now have a very strong moat that comes from data and the platform they’ve built. But looking back, it’s not at all clear that it would have had an impact when they were at smaller scale. On increasing transparency in venture capital Point Nine recently announced three big changes to the way they run financing rounds: If a company raises seed with Point Nine, they guarantee that they’ll do a pro rata if you go on to raise a series A round They published a term sheet template which they commit to using They also shared a simplified due diligence checklist to be used in the fundraising process Nick asked what the the goal of these announcements is. The answer? Fundraising generally sucks for founders, and the team at Point Nine are making moves to simplify the whole experience: “It can suck for founders if nobody wants to invest … but there are elements of why it sucks that can be addressed and don’t have to be that way, like term sheets for example. There’s absolutely no point in having a 10-page term sheet with all kinds of complicated provisions for a 500k seed investment.” The same applies for due diligence — it doesn’t make sense to fill in dozens of pages for such an early stage company, to minimize any potential downside for highly unlikely events. The pledge to participate in any series A investment was not such an easy decision, however. Clearly this could lead to situation where they’re forced to invest but they don’t want to. A lot of thought was put into this decision. “Even if the seed investors are probably going to participate, there’s still some doubt — having the certainty adds a lot of peace of mind [for founders].” Overall, Christoph strongly believe that these changes make Point Nine more competitive over VCs with less friendly terms. Since the announcement was made there’s been lots of positive feedback from both founders and LPs. On how startups should be using data today “I think the table stakes have gone up in the sense that if in 2018 you’re not on top of these metrics, I’m less patient — there’s no excuse for not knowing this.” Christoph started out at a time when good, actionable data wasn’t abundant in most startups. Or it was at least far more difficult to capture data and put it to good use. “At that time on a daily basis we’d talk to SaaS companies and the way they presented their metrics, at least for us, was confusing because there were no standards and no clear definitions so it wasn’t quite clear what they were talking about.” But measuring and understanding data today is paramount for knowing if a business is moving in the right direction (at a high level) and where any focus on improvement should be. “For me it’s always been important to look at metrics for all kinds of probably obvious reasons — you want to know what works and what doesn’t work, and try to fix what doesn’t work and double down on what does work.” On shifting from linear to exponential growth “Usually, year-on-year growth rates go down. It’s very hard to keep them up for a number of years.” Nick stated that the reality of startup growth often doesn’t match the extremes we see discussed and analyzed in the public domain. A lot of growth trajectories lie somewhere in a sort of no-man’s land, between linear and “hockey stick” exponential. So what does it take for businesses to find that explosive, exponential growth if they don’t have it already? Christoph weighed in on just how rare this is: “I think true exponential growth over longer periods of time is exceedingly rare because, by definition, it has to be viral … Pretty much nobody has exponential growth unless they have a viral product like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype.” There is one B2B SaaS business that’s doing an incredible job of standing out from the crowd, though: “The only B2B SaaS where I’ve seen true exponential growth is Typeform, because it has a viral loop built in. Every time someone sees a Typeform there’s a small button at the bottom that says ‘create your own Typeform’.” And of course, this isn’t by chance — according to Christoph, the team at Typeform has been constantly making adjustments to the product to tweak their “K-factor” (a measure of virality) and really encourage that virality. Nick and Christoph discussed some other cases where companies have been able to change their growth trajectory, for one of three key reasons: They suddenly hit product-market fit They find a new sales channel that works exceptionally well They unlock the ability to sell to much bigger customers However, this looks more like a step-change than truly exponential growth. Calendly is another example of a product with some virality built in — you send the invite and the user sees a link to create their own. Dropbox and Slack are other good examples. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the team at Point Nine Capital for hosting us and to Christoph for taking the time to share his insights into the rapidly changing landscapes of SaaS and venture capital. If you attended one of our recent Mogul I/O events, thank you for making it as fun as it was! We’re looking for feedback so that we can evolve and improve the event in the future. What would you like to see more of? What would you like us to change? Email support@chartmogul.com and let the team know! </sys

SaaS Open Mic: Murat Mutlu, founder of Marvel. Update: We’re now on iTunes! Great news! The SaaS Open Mic series is now listed on iTunes Podcasts – you can find it by searching in your preferred podcast app, or by clicking this link. Introducing Marvel Marvel is a prototyping app that greatly simplifies the process of getting app ideas turned into functional UX prototypes in lightning speed, with user interaction, animations and even user testing. Announced to the world around 2 years ago in a Designer News thread, Marvel, at least in the beginning, was a side project which solved a problem Murat faced with his work: How can I use the design mockups already in my Dropbox folder, to quickly put together a prototype that “feels” real? It seems many other designers, entrepreneurs and product people had the same needs too – Marvel is now a full-scale business, with paid subscriptions offering additional features for businesses. In many ways, Murat is one of the few trailblazers of the designer-founder background, having spent much of his career focused on agency-based design projects (yet always working on the next big side project in parallel). This combination leads to a founder who is aggressively product-focused (and who is likely to remain so) compared to many other founders in the SaaS space. In our chat, we discuss: Turning a small side project into a full-scale business, and identifying the right time to do this Why freemium is important for some SaaS products The importance of a great user experience in the Enterprise space London (and why it’s definitely not Silicon Valley) Check out the full interview below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly email to catch future episodes of SaaS Open Mic!

[INST] SaaS Open Mic: Murat Mutlu, founder of Marvel [/INST]

Update: We’re now on iTunes! Great news! The SaaS Open Mic series is now listed on iTunes Podcasts – you can find it by searching in your preferred podcast app, or by clicking this link. Introducing Marvel Marvel is a prototyping app that greatly simplifies the process of getting app ideas turned into functional UX prototypes in lightning speed, with user interaction, animations and even user testing. Announced to the world around 2 years ago in a Designer News thread, Marvel, at least in the beginning, was a side project which solved a problem Murat faced with his work: How can I use the design mockups already in my Dropbox folder, to quickly put together a prototype that “feels” real? It seems many other designers, entrepreneurs and product people had the same needs too – Marvel is now a full-scale business, with paid subscriptions offering additional features for businesses. In many ways, Murat is one of the few trailblazers of the designer-founder background, having spent much of his career focused on agency-based design projects (yet always working on the next big side project in parallel). This combination leads to a founder who is aggressively product-focused (and who is likely to remain so) compared to many other founders in the SaaS space. In our chat, we discuss: Turning a small side project into a full-scale business, and identifying the right time to do this Why freemium is important for some SaaS products The importance of a great user experience in the Enterprise space London (and why it’s definitely not Silicon Valley) Check out the full interview below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly email to catch future episodes of SaaS Open Mic!

<sys> [INST] SaaS Open Mic: Murat Mutlu, founder of Marvel [/INST] Update: We’re now on iTunes! Great news! The SaaS Open Mic series is now listed on iTunes Podcasts – you can find it by searching in your preferred podcast app, or by clicking this link. Introducing Marvel Marvel is a prototyping app that greatly simplifies the process of getting app ideas turned into functional UX prototypes in lightning speed, with user interaction, animations and even user testing. Announced to the world around 2 years ago in a Designer News thread, Marvel, at least in the beginning, was a side project which solved a problem Murat faced with his work: How can I use the design mockups already in my Dropbox folder, to quickly put together a prototype that “feels” real? It seems many other designers, entrepreneurs and product people had the same needs too – Marvel is now a full-scale business, with paid subscriptions offering additional features for businesses. In many ways, Murat is one of the few trailblazers of the designer-founder background, having spent much of his career focused on agency-based design projects (yet always working on the next big side project in parallel). This combination leads to a founder who is aggressively product-focused (and who is likely to remain so) compared to many other founders in the SaaS space. In our chat, we discuss: Turning a small side project into a full-scale business, and identifying the right time to do this Why freemium is important for some SaaS products The importance of a great user experience in the Enterprise space London (and why it’s definitely not Silicon Valley) Check out the full interview below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly email to catch future episodes of SaaS Open Mic! </sys

Cash flow planning 101 for SaaS startups. Why should you care? “MRR is not the same as cash in your bank account.” When building a subscription business, it’s easy to get carried away with all the metrics surrounding it: MRR, Churn Rate, ARPA… they’re all useful for certain scenarios, and we should all be measuring them. But SaaS metrics don’t cover the cash flow aspect of your business, which is a vital component of, well… keeping the business afloat. It’s that important. MRR is not the same as cash in your bank account, so in order to understand your financial standing you need to do some additional planning. Ideally, you’d hire someone to take care of the cash flow side of your business — a CFO or Finance Director with prior experience. But, especially in the early days of a business, that’s not practical or realistic. With the help of Martin (ChartMogul’s resident finance expert), we’ve put this quick guide together. First of all, I wanted to get Martin’s take on the importance of financial planning: “Thorough financial planning helps us to prepare for the uncertainty the future holds, thus allowing us to quickly react to changes and make faster decisions to stay on track. Without financial planning, we wouldn’t even know the track that we want to stay on.” 2 definitions you need to know Finance is full of acronyms; there’s no avoiding them. Here are two we use in this article: OPEX: Operational expenditure GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – a set of guidelines issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Rule #1: Cash flow planning is NOT accounting There are some key differences between cash flow (or liquidity) planning and accounting. In fact, your accounting numbers are likely to vary greatly from any cashflow planning you do; this doesn’t mean that both are not useful, however. When it comes to financial accounting: “Financial accountancy is governed by both local and international accounting standards. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is the standard framework of guidelines for financial accounting used in any given jurisdiction. It includes the standards, conventions and rules that accountants follow… in the preparation of financial statements.” For a startup, accounting is essentially the practice of complying with various aspects of the law when it comes to reporting and recording a business’s financial transactions. Conversely, when we look at cash flow planning: “Cash flow forecasting is important because if a business runs out of cash and is not able to obtain new finance, it will become insolvent. Cash flow is the life-blood of all businesses—particularly start-ups and small enterprises.” In summary, cash flow planning has a more immediate practical benefit — the efficient operation of your business. 4 things a simple cashflow planning process can do for you 1. Visualize your burn rate and runway VC-funded startups, by definition, are running on limited resources, with a looming deadline when they’ll run out of cash. Whether you like being reminded of this intimidating deadline or not, it’s important to know what your runway looks like so you can plan expenses accordingly. 2. Simulate different cash flow scenarios The good, the bad, AND the ugly. It’s a good idea to simulate each one of these scenarios in order to plan for the future. The goal of this exercise is to reduce uncertainty and have a plan for handling a range of different situations. As humans we’re optimists, pre-disposed to assume the best-case outcome. Scenario planning helps you visualize those other cases too. 3. Optimize expenses across the company When you lay all your expenses out in a spreadsheet (or even better — use automated expense management), you’re likely to pick up on obvious things that don’t make sense. Like the fact that you’re paying for individual licenses when you could upgrade to a business plan for a tool. These things are almost invisible otherwise. 4. Increase forecasting accuracy More accurate forecasting allows all-round greater confidence in making decisions, reporting business performance to investors and planning expenses for the coming months. Doubt slows down decisions, and decisions are one thing startups can’t afford to take slowly. Common mistakes in cash flow planning Timing confusion When does your money actually come in and when does it go out? For some businesses, monthly planning might not be granular enough. For us, most of the money we collect in one month is deposited into our account at the beginning of the following month (so money from February comes in early March). If you pay anything annually (like a SaaS invoice or insurance), this needs to be considered in the OPEX plan. Over-optimism (Always assuming the best case) As I mentioned above, humans are optimists. We always want to see (and believe in) the best outcome from any scenario. Overly-optimistic planning is very common, especially when it comes to OPEX — there is basically always a surprise expense that you need to cover. Adding in an additional buffer for these unexpected expenses is usually a good idea. Scenario planning helps you predict the outcomes of a range of events, while still shooting for the best one. Forgetting growth in costs Planned increase in headcount is an obvious component of any financial plan. But there are other costs associated to such growth that are often forgotten — some minor, others more serious: Minor: Plan expansion in SaaS tools such as Zendesk, Slack, Google Apps Medium: Salary raises & bonuses for existing staff, increase in travel budget Major (potentially): Office expansion or migration, increase in advertising budget, increased headcount in non-core positions (finance, ops, HR) Lack of detail It’s tempting to avoid the hassle of planning everything in fine detail, and lumping such smaller details into a line called something like “Misc. SaaS: 4000 USD / month”. While this may feel okay, all of the real benefits of proper planning silently disappear. To make matters worse, the output still feels like proper planning — you’re not likely to consider the accuracy when making decisions based on predicted scenarios. Dangerous! The ChartMogul process Cash flow planning at ChartMogul comprises three main elements: Expense tracking Scenario planning Revenue tracking The tools we use Candis.io (focused on the German market – alternatives include tools like Quickbooks, Kashflow, Xero) Candis saves a lot of time with expense tracking, simplifying a lot of the process of tracking expenses by: Auto-importing transactions from credit cards, bank accounts, paypal etc. as well as receipts from emails and manual uploads. Auto-matching of transactions with receipts. Preparing accounting in accordance with German GAAP (Relevant to German companies only) Candis does some smart OCR on your invoices to pull out the relevant details. (source: http://candis.io) Microsoft Excel Because what else? Google Sheets and other tools have come a long way in terms of more advanced functionality for finance professionals, but Excel still remains the CFO’s tool of choice for its better macro and pivot table support. Our close-of-month workflow The following process happens at the end of each calendar month: Bulk export the month’s expenses from candis.io Import CSV into an Excel sheet Cleanup of the CSV file and classification of expenses Copy and paste into the Excel Financial Planning template (see below) Run Excel macro to update pivot tables and consolidate expenses Try our scenario planning template This Excel template is a slightly simplified version of what we use at ChartMogul to make business decisions with greater confidence. You can download it for free here in .xlxs format (no email required): Download template How to use the template First, fill in the global parameters at the top of the sheet: First month: The starting month for the planning Markup for expenses: A % buffer to allow for unexpected monthly expenses. Tip: Try to plan OPEX in as much detail as possible throughout, so that any buffer is encapsulated here, and only here. Cash collection rate: An estimated % of gross MRR collected as cash. MRR is not a reflection of actual cash in the bank, due to things like annual payments, billing system fees and other irregularities. For the first scenario, fill in the scenario parameters: Scenario name: e.g. “Best case” or “Plan A” EITHER Revenue growth MoM in $ OR Revenue growth MoM in %: Enter the expected monthly revenue growth for this scenario. Then fill in the required fields in the scenario: Cash in accounts – beginning of month: Fill in the first cell only (it’s calculated from the 2nd cell) Expenses – Actual or as Planned: Fill in each month’s expenses, according to actual expenses or, for future months, planned expenses. MRR / Revenue – Actual or as Planned: Fill in the first cell only to represent your starting MRR. Manual adjustments: This row exists to add any costs or adjustments that aren’t included in the plan. This could be cash collection fluctuations or smaller inflows of cash. You can also use it to quickly look at how planned hires affect the company’s cash flow. Once this is complete, repeat for up to two additional scenarios you’d like to plan — this could be your “middle case” and “worst case”, or something else more specific to your business strategy. Got each scenario planned out? Great! Now you should take a look at the projected Cash in account chart below, which will look something like this: How we use the output First things first: Take a look at the numbers. Do they seem sensible to you? If they clearly don’t line up or feel right, you’ll need to look back into the expenses and try to understand where things went wrong. Secondly: Now we’re getting to the fun part (no, really). Typically what we do from here is take a look at the manual adjustments. It’s this row where we can play with different mini scenarios, and quickly get an output estimate of the impact of different events on our future cash flow. Use the manual adjustments for: Cash collection adjustments: If your cash collection turns out higher or lower than expected, you’ll want to tweak it manually here to reflect reality. Different hiring scenarios: Want to see how that all-important first VP hire would impact your plan? Or perhaps whether you could grow your Inbound team before raising the next round? The manual adjustments row is your friend. Funding: For major planning around funding rounds, you’ll want to break out into an entirely different model (stay tuned, we might cover this in the future…) but for a quick estimate you could add funding here too. Smaller forms of cash inflow: Government grants or loans, or other forms of financial support can also be added here to give a quick sense of their impact. Join the discussion! Are you doing your cash flow planning differently? Did you find a great way to simulate scenarios without getting too deep into macros and pivot tables? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to hear your ideas or feedback.

[INST] Cash flow planning 101 for SaaS startups [/INST]

Why should you care? “MRR is not the same as cash in your bank account.” When building a subscription business, it’s easy to get carried away with all the metrics surrounding it: MRR, Churn Rate, ARPA… they’re all useful for certain scenarios, and we should all be measuring them. But SaaS metrics don’t cover the cash flow aspect of your business, which is a vital component of, well… keeping the business afloat. It’s that important. MRR is not the same as cash in your bank account, so in order to understand your financial standing you need to do some additional planning. Ideally, you’d hire someone to take care of the cash flow side of your business — a CFO or Finance Director with prior experience. But, especially in the early days of a business, that’s not practical or realistic. With the help of Martin (ChartMogul’s resident finance expert), we’ve put this quick guide together. First of all, I wanted to get Martin’s take on the importance of financial planning: “Thorough financial planning helps us to prepare for the uncertainty the future holds, thus allowing us to quickly react to changes and make faster decisions to stay on track. Without financial planning, we wouldn’t even know the track that we want to stay on.” 2 definitions you need to know Finance is full of acronyms; there’s no avoiding them. Here are two we use in this article: OPEX: Operational expenditure GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – a set of guidelines issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Rule #1: Cash flow planning is NOT accounting There are some key differences between cash flow (or liquidity) planning and accounting. In fact, your accounting numbers are likely to vary greatly from any cashflow planning you do; this doesn’t mean that both are not useful, however. When it comes to financial accounting: “Financial accountancy is governed by both local and international accounting standards. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is the standard framework of guidelines for financial accounting used in any given jurisdiction. It includes the standards, conventions and rules that accountants follow… in the preparation of financial statements.” For a startup, accounting is essentially the practice of complying with various aspects of the law when it comes to reporting and recording a business’s financial transactions. Conversely, when we look at cash flow planning: “Cash flow forecasting is important because if a business runs out of cash and is not able to obtain new finance, it will become insolvent. Cash flow is the life-blood of all businesses—particularly start-ups and small enterprises.” In summary, cash flow planning has a more immediate practical benefit — the efficient operation of your business. 4 things a simple cashflow planning process can do for you 1. Visualize your burn rate and runway VC-funded startups, by definition, are running on limited resources, with a looming deadline when they’ll run out of cash. Whether you like being reminded of this intimidating deadline or not, it’s important to know what your runway looks like so you can plan expenses accordingly. 2. Simulate different cash flow scenarios The good, the bad, AND the ugly. It’s a good idea to simulate each one of these scenarios in order to plan for the future. The goal of this exercise is to reduce uncertainty and have a plan for handling a range of different situations. As humans we’re optimists, pre-disposed to assume the best-case outcome. Scenario planning helps you visualize those other cases too. 3. Optimize expenses across the company When you lay all your expenses out in a spreadsheet (or even better — use automated expense management), you’re likely to pick up on obvious things that don’t make sense. Like the fact that you’re paying for individual licenses when you could upgrade to a business plan for a tool. These things are almost invisible otherwise. 4. Increase forecasting accuracy More accurate forecasting allows all-round greater confidence in making decisions, reporting business performance to investors and planning expenses for the coming months. Doubt slows down decisions, and decisions are one thing startups can’t afford to take slowly. Common mistakes in cash flow planning Timing confusion When does your money actually come in and when does it go out? For some businesses, monthly planning might not be granular enough. For us, most of the money we collect in one month is deposited into our account at the beginning of the following month (so money from February comes in early March). If you pay anything annually (like a SaaS invoice or insurance), this needs to be considered in the OPEX plan. Over-optimism (Always assuming the best case) As I mentioned above, humans are optimists. We always want to see (and believe in) the best outcome from any scenario. Overly-optimistic planning is very common, especially when it comes to OPEX — there is basically always a surprise expense that you need to cover. Adding in an additional buffer for these unexpected expenses is usually a good idea. Scenario planning helps you predict the outcomes of a range of events, while still shooting for the best one. Forgetting growth in costs Planned increase in headcount is an obvious component of any financial plan. But there are other costs associated to such growth that are often forgotten — some minor, others more serious: Minor: Plan expansion in SaaS tools such as Zendesk, Slack, Google Apps Medium: Salary raises & bonuses for existing staff, increase in travel budget Major (potentially): Office expansion or migration, increase in advertising budget, increased headcount in non-core positions (finance, ops, HR) Lack of detail It’s tempting to avoid the hassle of planning everything in fine detail, and lumping such smaller details into a line called something like “Misc. SaaS: 4000 USD / month”. While this may feel okay, all of the real benefits of proper planning silently disappear. To make matters worse, the output still feels like proper planning — you’re not likely to consider the accuracy when making decisions based on predicted scenarios. Dangerous! The ChartMogul process Cash flow planning at ChartMogul comprises three main elements: Expense tracking Scenario planning Revenue tracking The tools we use Candis.io (focused on the German market – alternatives include tools like Quickbooks, Kashflow, Xero) Candis saves a lot of time with expense tracking, simplifying a lot of the process of tracking expenses by: Auto-importing transactions from credit cards, bank accounts, paypal etc. as well as receipts from emails and manual uploads. Auto-matching of transactions with receipts. Preparing accounting in accordance with German GAAP (Relevant to German companies only) Candis does some smart OCR on your invoices to pull out the relevant details. (source: http://candis.io) Microsoft Excel Because what else? Google Sheets and other tools have come a long way in terms of more advanced functionality for finance professionals, but Excel still remains the CFO’s tool of choice for its better macro and pivot table support. Our close-of-month workflow The following process happens at the end of each calendar month: Bulk export the month’s expenses from candis.io Import CSV into an Excel sheet Cleanup of the CSV file and classification of expenses Copy and paste into the Excel Financial Planning template (see below) Run Excel macro to update pivot tables and consolidate expenses Try our scenario planning template This Excel template is a slightly simplified version of what we use at ChartMogul to make business decisions with greater confidence. You can download it for free here in .xlxs format (no email required): Download template How to use the template First, fill in the global parameters at the top of the sheet: First month: The starting month for the planning Markup for expenses: A % buffer to allow for unexpected monthly expenses. Tip: Try to plan OPEX in as much detail as possible throughout, so that any buffer is encapsulated here, and only here. Cash collection rate: An estimated % of gross MRR collected as cash. MRR is not a reflection of actual cash in the bank, due to things like annual payments, billing system fees and other irregularities. For the first scenario, fill in the scenario parameters: Scenario name: e.g. “Best case” or “Plan A” EITHER Revenue growth MoM in $ OR Revenue growth MoM in %: Enter the expected monthly revenue growth for this scenario. Then fill in the required fields in the scenario: Cash in accounts – beginning of month: Fill in the first cell only (it’s calculated from the 2nd cell) Expenses – Actual or as Planned: Fill in each month’s expenses, according to actual expenses or, for future months, planned expenses. MRR / Revenue – Actual or as Planned: Fill in the first cell only to represent your starting MRR. Manual adjustments: This row exists to add any costs or adjustments that aren’t included in the plan. This could be cash collection fluctuations or smaller inflows of cash. You can also use it to quickly look at how planned hires affect the company’s cash flow. Once this is complete, repeat for up to two additional scenarios you’d like to plan — this could be your “middle case” and “worst case”, or something else more specific to your business strategy. Got each scenario planned out? Great! Now you should take a look at the projected Cash in account chart below, which will look something like this: How we use the output First things first: Take a look at the numbers. Do they seem sensible to you? If they clearly don’t line up or feel right, you’ll need to look back into the expenses and try to understand where things went wrong. Secondly: Now we’re getting to the fun part (no, really). Typically what we do from here is take a look at the manual adjustments. It’s this row where we can play with different mini scenarios, and quickly get an output estimate of the impact of different events on our future cash flow. Use the manual adjustments for: Cash collection adjustments: If your cash collection turns out higher or lower than expected, you’ll want to tweak it manually here to reflect reality. Different hiring scenarios: Want to see how that all-important first VP hire would impact your plan? Or perhaps whether you could grow your Inbound team before raising the next round? The manual adjustments row is your friend. Funding: For major planning around funding rounds, you’ll want to break out into an entirely different model (stay tuned, we might cover this in the future…) but for a quick estimate you could add funding here too. Smaller forms of cash inflow: Government grants or loans, or other forms of financial support can also be added here to give a quick sense of their impact. Join the discussion! Are you doing your cash flow planning differently? Did you find a great way to simulate scenarios without getting too deep into macros and pivot tables? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to hear your ideas or feedback.

<sys> [INST] Cash flow planning 101 for SaaS startups [/INST] Why should you care? “MRR is not the same as cash in your bank account.” When building a subscription business, it’s easy to get carried away with all the metrics surrounding it: MRR, Churn Rate, ARPA… they’re all useful for certain scenarios, and we should all be measuring them. But SaaS metrics don’t cover the cash flow aspect of your business, which is a vital component of, well… keeping the business afloat. It’s that important. MRR is not the same as cash in your bank account, so in order to understand your financial standing you need to do some additional planning. Ideally, you’d hire someone to take care of the cash flow side of your business — a CFO or Finance Director with prior experience. But, especially in the early days of a business, that’s not practical or realistic. With the help of Martin (ChartMogul’s resident finance expert), we’ve put this quick guide together. First of all, I wanted to get Martin’s take on the importance of financial planning: “Thorough financial planning helps us to prepare for the uncertainty the future holds, thus allowing us to quickly react to changes and make faster decisions to stay on track. Without financial planning, we wouldn’t even know the track that we want to stay on.” 2 definitions you need to know Finance is full of acronyms; there’s no avoiding them. Here are two we use in this article: OPEX: Operational expenditure GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – a set of guidelines issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Rule #1: Cash flow planning is NOT accounting There are some key differences between cash flow (or liquidity) planning and accounting. In fact, your accounting numbers are likely to vary greatly from any cashflow planning you do; this doesn’t mean that both are not useful, however. When it comes to financial accounting: “Financial accountancy is governed by both local and international accounting standards. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is the standard framework of guidelines for financial accounting used in any given jurisdiction. It includes the standards, conventions and rules that accountants follow… in the preparation of financial statements.” For a startup, accounting is essentially the practice of complying with various aspects of the law when it comes to reporting and recording a business’s financial transactions. Conversely, when we look at cash flow planning: “Cash flow forecasting is important because if a business runs out of cash and is not able to obtain new finance, it will become insolvent. Cash flow is the life-blood of all businesses—particularly start-ups and small enterprises.” In summary, cash flow planning has a more immediate practical benefit — the efficient operation of your business. 4 things a simple cashflow planning process can do for you 1. Visualize your burn rate and runway VC-funded startups, by definition, are running on limited resources, with a looming deadline when they’ll run out of cash. Whether you like being reminded of this intimidating deadline or not, it’s important to know what your runway looks like so you can plan expenses accordingly. 2. Simulate different cash flow scenarios The good, the bad, AND the ugly. It’s a good idea to simulate each one of these scenarios in order to plan for the future. The goal of this exercise is to reduce uncertainty and have a plan for handling a range of different situations. As humans we’re optimists, pre-disposed to assume the best-case outcome. Scenario planning helps you visualize those other cases too. 3. Optimize expenses across the company When you lay all your expenses out in a spreadsheet (or even better — use automated expense management), you’re likely to pick up on obvious things that don’t make sense. Like the fact that you’re paying for individual licenses when you could upgrade to a business plan for a tool. These things are almost invisible otherwise. 4. Increase forecasting accuracy More accurate forecasting allows all-round greater confidence in making decisions, reporting business performance to investors and planning expenses for the coming months. Doubt slows down decisions, and decisions are one thing startups can’t afford to take slowly. Common mistakes in cash flow planning Timing confusion When does your money actually come in and when does it go out? For some businesses, monthly planning might not be granular enough. For us, most of the money we collect in one month is deposited into our account at the beginning of the following month (so money from February comes in early March). If you pay anything annually (like a SaaS invoice or insurance), this needs to be considered in the OPEX plan. Over-optimism (Always assuming the best case) As I mentioned above, humans are optimists. We always want to see (and believe in) the best outcome from any scenario. Overly-optimistic planning is very common, especially when it comes to OPEX — there is basically always a surprise expense that you need to cover. Adding in an additional buffer for these unexpected expenses is usually a good idea. Scenario planning helps you predict the outcomes of a range of events, while still shooting for the best one. Forgetting growth in costs Planned increase in headcount is an obvious component of any financial plan. But there are other costs associated to such growth that are often forgotten — some minor, others more serious: Minor: Plan expansion in SaaS tools such as Zendesk, Slack, Google Apps Medium: Salary raises & bonuses for existing staff, increase in travel budget Major (potentially): Office expansion or migration, increase in advertising budget, increased headcount in non-core positions (finance, ops, HR) Lack of detail It’s tempting to avoid the hassle of planning everything in fine detail, and lumping such smaller details into a line called something like “Misc. SaaS: 4000 USD / month”. While this may feel okay, all of the real benefits of proper planning silently disappear. To make matters worse, the output still feels like proper planning — you’re not likely to consider the accuracy when making decisions based on predicted scenarios. Dangerous! The ChartMogul process Cash flow planning at ChartMogul comprises three main elements: Expense tracking Scenario planning Revenue tracking The tools we use Candis.io (focused on the German market – alternatives include tools like Quickbooks, Kashflow, Xero) Candis saves a lot of time with expense tracking, simplifying a lot of the process of tracking expenses by: Auto-importing transactions from credit cards, bank accounts, paypal etc. as well as receipts from emails and manual uploads. Auto-matching of transactions with receipts. Preparing accounting in accordance with German GAAP (Relevant to German companies only) Candis does some smart OCR on your invoices to pull out the relevant details. (source: http://candis.io) Microsoft Excel Because what else? Google Sheets and other tools have come a long way in terms of more advanced functionality for finance professionals, but Excel still remains the CFO’s tool of choice for its better macro and pivot table support. Our close-of-month workflow The following process happens at the end of each calendar month: Bulk export the month’s expenses from candis.io Import CSV into an Excel sheet Cleanup of the CSV file and classification of expenses Copy and paste into the Excel Financial Planning template (see below) Run Excel macro to update pivot tables and consolidate expenses Try our scenario planning template This Excel template is a slightly simplified version of what we use at ChartMogul to make business decisions with greater confidence. You can download it for free here in .xlxs format (no email required): Download template How to use the template First, fill in the global parameters at the top of the sheet: First month: The starting month for the planning Markup for expenses: A % buffer to allow for unexpected monthly expenses. Tip: Try to plan OPEX in as much detail as possible throughout, so that any buffer is encapsulated here, and only here. Cash collection rate: An estimated % of gross MRR collected as cash. MRR is not a reflection of actual cash in the bank, due to things like annual payments, billing system fees and other irregularities. For the first scenario, fill in the scenario parameters: Scenario name: e.g. “Best case” or “Plan A” EITHER Revenue growth MoM in $ OR Revenue growth MoM in %: Enter the expected monthly revenue growth for this scenario. Then fill in the required fields in the scenario: Cash in accounts – beginning of month: Fill in the first cell only (it’s calculated from the 2nd cell) Expenses – Actual or as Planned: Fill in each month’s expenses, according to actual expenses or, for future months, planned expenses. MRR / Revenue – Actual or as Planned: Fill in the first cell only to represent your starting MRR. Manual adjustments: This row exists to add any costs or adjustments that aren’t included in the plan. This could be cash collection fluctuations or smaller inflows of cash. You can also use it to quickly look at how planned hires affect the company’s cash flow. Once this is complete, repeat for up to two additional scenarios you’d like to plan — this could be your “middle case” and “worst case”, or something else more specific to your business strategy. Got each scenario planned out? Great! Now you should take a look at the projected Cash in account chart below, which will look something like this: How we use the output First things first: Take a look at the numbers. Do they seem sensible to you? If they clearly don’t line up or feel right, you’ll need to look back into the expenses and try to understand where things went wrong. Secondly: Now we’re getting to the fun part (no, really). Typically what we do from here is take a look at the manual adjustments. It’s this row where we can play with different mini scenarios, and quickly get an output estimate of the impact of different events on our future cash flow. Use the manual adjustments for: Cash collection adjustments: If your cash collection turns out higher or lower than expected, you’ll want to tweak it manually here to reflect reality. Different hiring scenarios: Want to see how that all-important first VP hire would impact your plan? Or perhaps whether you could grow your Inbound team before raising the next round? The manual adjustments row is your friend. Funding: For major planning around funding rounds, you’ll want to break out into an entirely different model (stay tuned, we might cover this in the future…) but for a quick estimate you could add funding here too. Smaller forms of cash inflow: Government grants or loans, or other forms of financial support can also be added here to give a quick sense of their impact. Join the discussion! Are you doing your cash flow planning differently? Did you find a great way to simulate scenarios without getting too deep into macros and pivot tables? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to hear your ideas or feedback. </sys

SaaS Q&A: What are good, low-cost B2B marketing strategies for a startup?. They say that great products should sell themselves. Actually Peter Drucker said this: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Your marketing should make your target customer base aware of your product, get an audience around it, so the product is able to sell itself with ease. First step of any B2B marketing strategy Any marketing strategies you choose should be guided by this key factor: are you selling to small companies or enterprise? It’s important you identify which segment(s) of the market you’re targeting. The difference between small companies and enterprise determines a lot when it comes to your marketing strategy: What the people at the business do What their problems and pain points are The product features they’ll value The channels they hang out in, e.g. where you should market yourself Thinking through all of these elements will help you develop your positioning in the market. Possible next steps: marketing strategies to consider Now for some low-cost marketing tactics for you, an early-stage B2B SaaS startup. Offer a free trial. This may seem like a no-brainer these days but is worth mentioning anyway. There are many variations of the “free trial,” so which type is up to you, but the main point is that it’s F-R-E-E. Potential customers don’t have to think long to decide whether they want to try it out. So you have acquired them into your funnel, they’ve onboarded, and all you need then is a strategy for converting them to paid customers. That part is key! Word of mouth. Never to be underestimated, it’s an invaluable form of marketing. People in your network and your company’s early adopters could turn into brand ambassadors, spreading personal recommendations. Of course this requires a great product and customer service to match. It may also require creating and expanding your network in the first place. And how to do that? Well, networking! Attend relevant events that are well-targeted to your customer base, and hustle, hustle, hustle. Demo video on your site. The buying decision process for SaaS products is very short. You have a few minutes to persuasively demonstrate how your service is not only the best solution for their problem, but also worth the cost. To prove its value. A very effective way to do this is to feature a short video, 2-3 minutes, on your website, explaining your product and how best to use it. SEO/SEM. Though a hot topic and widely recommended, this particular tactic comes with a caveat. It’s worth the cost if people out there are actively searching for a solution like the one you provide. Ie- If there are obvious traffic keyboards you can buy. But if your company is offering one of those solutions that people don’t yet know they need, then hold off on paid search marketing. Content Marketing. Your product is a service, so your content should be a service, too — it should be educational and useful, with an aim to inform and instruct. Provide information, commentary, and insights into your customers’ industry. Teach them ways to tackle their challenges and solve their problems — including, of course, how they can use your product to do so. It doesn’t all need to be in blog form, though that is usually a company’s content foundation. Many SaaS companies are venturing into video and podcasts, as well. Once you’ve identified these happy customers from #2, the ones who spread positive word-of-mouth about you, consider featuring their company as a customer testimonial. A customer case study. Write a story about their business journey and how they found success with your product. Participate in online communities that are relevant to your target customers. Where do they hang out online? Are they here on Quora? Go there and get in on conversations. Share your content where you can within those conversations. You’ll emerge as a trusted voice in the space and also expose your brand to new audiences. Of course, a crucial part of any marketing strategy is to track and measure its effectiveness so that you can keep optimizing. That way you ensure you are investing your precious resources, like energy and cash, into the right channels in the right ways. On a related note, you can also take a look at this to learn about customer acquisition strategies you can try from day one. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: What are examples of good and low cost marketing strategies for a new b2b SaaS startup? Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul— SaaS Q&A: Good, low-cost B2B marketing strategies for a startup? https://t.co/bSoir6sEI8 #SaaS pic.twitter.com/uyKPExc4Ow — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 21, 2016

[INST] SaaS Q&A: What are good, low-cost B2B marketing strategies for a startup? [/INST]

They say that great products should sell themselves. Actually Peter Drucker said this: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Your marketing should make your target customer base aware of your product, get an audience around it, so the product is able to sell itself with ease. First step of any B2B marketing strategy Any marketing strategies you choose should be guided by this key factor: are you selling to small companies or enterprise? It’s important you identify which segment(s) of the market you’re targeting. The difference between small companies and enterprise determines a lot when it comes to your marketing strategy: What the people at the business do What their problems and pain points are The product features they’ll value The channels they hang out in, e.g. where you should market yourself Thinking through all of these elements will help you develop your positioning in the market. Possible next steps: marketing strategies to consider Now for some low-cost marketing tactics for you, an early-stage B2B SaaS startup. Offer a free trial. This may seem like a no-brainer these days but is worth mentioning anyway. There are many variations of the “free trial,” so which type is up to you, but the main point is that it’s F-R-E-E. Potential customers don’t have to think long to decide whether they want to try it out. So you have acquired them into your funnel, they’ve onboarded, and all you need then is a strategy for converting them to paid customers. That part is key! Word of mouth. Never to be underestimated, it’s an invaluable form of marketing. People in your network and your company’s early adopters could turn into brand ambassadors, spreading personal recommendations. Of course this requires a great product and customer service to match. It may also require creating and expanding your network in the first place. And how to do that? Well, networking! Attend relevant events that are well-targeted to your customer base, and hustle, hustle, hustle. Demo video on your site. The buying decision process for SaaS products is very short. You have a few minutes to persuasively demonstrate how your service is not only the best solution for their problem, but also worth the cost. To prove its value. A very effective way to do this is to feature a short video, 2-3 minutes, on your website, explaining your product and how best to use it. SEO/SEM. Though a hot topic and widely recommended, this particular tactic comes with a caveat. It’s worth the cost if people out there are actively searching for a solution like the one you provide. Ie- If there are obvious traffic keyboards you can buy. But if your company is offering one of those solutions that people don’t yet know they need, then hold off on paid search marketing. Content Marketing. Your product is a service, so your content should be a service, too — it should be educational and useful, with an aim to inform and instruct. Provide information, commentary, and insights into your customers’ industry. Teach them ways to tackle their challenges and solve their problems — including, of course, how they can use your product to do so. It doesn’t all need to be in blog form, though that is usually a company’s content foundation. Many SaaS companies are venturing into video and podcasts, as well. Once you’ve identified these happy customers from #2, the ones who spread positive word-of-mouth about you, consider featuring their company as a customer testimonial. A customer case study. Write a story about their business journey and how they found success with your product. Participate in online communities that are relevant to your target customers. Where do they hang out online? Are they here on Quora? Go there and get in on conversations. Share your content where you can within those conversations. You’ll emerge as a trusted voice in the space and also expose your brand to new audiences. Of course, a crucial part of any marketing strategy is to track and measure its effectiveness so that you can keep optimizing. That way you ensure you are investing your precious resources, like energy and cash, into the right channels in the right ways. On a related note, you can also take a look at this to learn about customer acquisition strategies you can try from day one. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: What are examples of good and low cost marketing strategies for a new b2b SaaS startup? Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul— SaaS Q&A: Good, low-cost B2B marketing strategies for a startup? https://t.co/bSoir6sEI8 #SaaS pic.twitter.com/uyKPExc4Ow — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 21, 2016

<sys> [INST] SaaS Q&A: What are good, low-cost B2B marketing strategies for a startup? [/INST] They say that great products should sell themselves. Actually Peter Drucker said this: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Your marketing should make your target customer base aware of your product, get an audience around it, so the product is able to sell itself with ease. First step of any B2B marketing strategy Any marketing strategies you choose should be guided by this key factor: are you selling to small companies or enterprise? It’s important you identify which segment(s) of the market you’re targeting. The difference between small companies and enterprise determines a lot when it comes to your marketing strategy: What the people at the business do What their problems and pain points are The product features they’ll value The channels they hang out in, e.g. where you should market yourself Thinking through all of these elements will help you develop your positioning in the market. Possible next steps: marketing strategies to consider Now for some low-cost marketing tactics for you, an early-stage B2B SaaS startup. Offer a free trial. This may seem like a no-brainer these days but is worth mentioning anyway. There are many variations of the “free trial,” so which type is up to you, but the main point is that it’s F-R-E-E. Potential customers don’t have to think long to decide whether they want to try it out. So you have acquired them into your funnel, they’ve onboarded, and all you need then is a strategy for converting them to paid customers. That part is key! Word of mouth. Never to be underestimated, it’s an invaluable form of marketing. People in your network and your company’s early adopters could turn into brand ambassadors, spreading personal recommendations. Of course this requires a great product and customer service to match. It may also require creating and expanding your network in the first place. And how to do that? Well, networking! Attend relevant events that are well-targeted to your customer base, and hustle, hustle, hustle. Demo video on your site. The buying decision process for SaaS products is very short. You have a few minutes to persuasively demonstrate how your service is not only the best solution for their problem, but also worth the cost. To prove its value. A very effective way to do this is to feature a short video, 2-3 minutes, on your website, explaining your product and how best to use it. SEO/SEM. Though a hot topic and widely recommended, this particular tactic comes with a caveat. It’s worth the cost if people out there are actively searching for a solution like the one you provide. Ie- If there are obvious traffic keyboards you can buy. But if your company is offering one of those solutions that people don’t yet know they need, then hold off on paid search marketing. Content Marketing. Your product is a service, so your content should be a service, too — it should be educational and useful, with an aim to inform and instruct. Provide information, commentary, and insights into your customers’ industry. Teach them ways to tackle their challenges and solve their problems — including, of course, how they can use your product to do so. It doesn’t all need to be in blog form, though that is usually a company’s content foundation. Many SaaS companies are venturing into video and podcasts, as well. Once you’ve identified these happy customers from #2, the ones who spread positive word-of-mouth about you, consider featuring their company as a customer testimonial. A customer case study. Write a story about their business journey and how they found success with your product. Participate in online communities that are relevant to your target customers. Where do they hang out online? Are they here on Quora? Go there and get in on conversations. Share your content where you can within those conversations. You’ll emerge as a trusted voice in the space and also expose your brand to new audiences. Of course, a crucial part of any marketing strategy is to track and measure its effectiveness so that you can keep optimizing. That way you ensure you are investing your precious resources, like energy and cash, into the right channels in the right ways. On a related note, you can also take a look at this to learn about customer acquisition strategies you can try from day one. This answer was originally published on Quora. View the original thread here: What are examples of good and low cost marketing strategies for a new b2b SaaS startup? Share and follow! NEW on @ChartMogul— SaaS Q&A: Good, low-cost B2B marketing strategies for a startup? https://t.co/bSoir6sEI8 #SaaS pic.twitter.com/uyKPExc4Ow — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) April 21, 2016 </sys

What to do when your SaaS product is down. Salesforce was down. Okay, not all of Salesforce — but enough of it and for long enough that everyone at least heard about the great NA14 failure from friends or newsfeeds, if they hadn’t experienced it directly in their work. Do you know what you would do if your SaaS product went down? Do you have any protocol or processes in place if technical disaster hit? Your business may not be so big as to worry about press write-ups or internet memes about a product failure — and your failure may not garner its own hashtag — but the situation can be just as much of a crisis for you and your customers. Such a scenario affects almost every team at the company, some more than others. And when all various functional teams have to jump into action to address the same problem in different ways, it’s truly a test of organization, communication, and efficiency. To help with this, here’s a quick game plan for each arm of the business, with some extra tips about how your business can handle failure aftermath and future prevention. First things first Ideally your dev team should notice any service disruptions before you hear from your customers. This requires you to have the right monitoring in place, but that’s not always the case, so… When customers report a service issue, check your product on various devices, browsers, and connections before doing anything else. See if the issue is isolated, if it’s local rather than global. Then proceed accordingly. Tips around communication Proactive. Proactive. Proactive. Communicate early and often with both your customers and your teammates. Take ownership. Admit the failure. Don’t try to explain it away or pass off responsibility. Don’t layer your message with glossy jargon or marketing speak. That’s just more irritating to your customers, and this is a crucial moment to maintain their trust. Honest and transparent. This doesn’t mean give every detail. It just means be clear about the situation — your product is not working — and share what you can about what you do and don’t know. Stay consistent. The best way to retain your customers’ trust throughout the resolution process is to provide a clear, consistent message. What you’re saying on Twitter should align with what Customer Success says on the phone. Otherwise you risk appearing disorganized (or incompetent) in the face of customers who are already questioning your product. Don’t give false hopes. It’s best not to provide precise ETAs for fixes to avoid setting false expectations and worsening the customer experience. Instead stick to what you reasonably expect, such as “in the next few hours” or “by the end of the day.” Game plans CEO Speak up. A personal apology from the CEO can go a long way with customers. After all, the CEO is the face of the business. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff responded to countless tweets about the NA14 failure, looping in his cofounder Parker Harris as well. Put someone in charge. Assign someone to lead all internal management of the issue. Communication and coordination runs through this one person, keeping the resolution process streamlined and less chaotic. Side-story: The “Incident Commander” There are more parallels between a server outage and a fire-based emergency than you think. Image source: victorops.com Hi, Ed here. Let me tell you about Incident Commanders. An Incident Commander is traditionally a role which is assigned in an emergency response situation (e.g. fire, natural disaster) to coordinate all aspects of operations. See Wikipedia At a company I used to work at, we adapted the role for emergency response to issues with our software platform – a platform that was mission-critical in nature, with any down-time causing significant economic loss to the business and clients. As soon as a problem had been identified and raised as such, an incident commander was assigned from a pool of volunteers by the CTO. From this point, the person became responsible for: Documenting and reporting the problem accurately Acting as the central point of communication for all internal teams involved in the issue Giving updates to the management team on progress towards resolving the issue Recruiting any people required to work on the solution Having this central role owning all communication meant that the people involved in fixing the problem could focus on doing just that – fixing the problem. It also sped up important decisions, particularly when teams who don’t traditionally communicate closely were required to collaborate. Customer Success and Support Be at the ready. Stay available for incoming messages from customers, with a full understanding of the nature of the problem. Constantly align with Dev. There should be constant updates between CS and Dev, like a feedback loop. CS needs to let Dev know what customers are experiencing and observing, and Dev needs to provide CS with possible workarounds, updates, and any other information to relay to antsy customers. Help customers through it. Suggest other things the customer can do in the meantime. If there’s any part of the product that still offers value, remind the customer how they can use it. Sales If Sales reps rely on your live product during demos or scheduled calls with potential customers, they will need to postpone these. The sales team should be kept informed, but otherwise doesn’t play much of a role in managing the situation. Marketing Take to social media. The marketing team should alert followers about the situation and also respond to every incoming message. It’s probably better to use an “operations” Twitter to handle this, like we have at ChartMogul or like Salesforce has used throughout the NA14 crash. You don’t want to shout that your product is down — contain that message to your existing customers. Push it to another channel that’s more relevant, like this specific Twitter feed, and don’t interrupt your normal content. Just a snapshot of the feed for @asksalesforce, Salesforce’s alternative Twitter account for support issues. Help customers through it. Just like customer support, relay any workarounds available. Suggest other things the customer can do in the meantime. If there’s any part of the product that still offers value, remind the customer how they can use it. Pause paid advertising. If the failure persists, it may be worth considering pausing any paid campaigns that direct people to your product. For example if there’s an issue with your sign-up page, you might want to hold off any efforts that drive people to that page. Product Identify and prioritize a fix. Determine the best course of action and coordinate with the engineering team to execute it. Do you want to run with a quick hot fix, or develop something longer term? Do you want to completely change a feature, or should you rollback a feature that you recently deployed? Lead further investigation. Assess the damage from the product failure. Was any data lost? If so, what and how much? Engineering The team’s mission here is pretty obvious. Conducting triage to find the problem, working with Product to classify and prioritize it, and then actually executing the solution. The Aftermath Follow up with customers. On both social media and with anyone who contacted the business via phone or email. Salesforce did a thorough job of this once NA14 was back up and running. Salesforce attempted to satisfy some unhappy customers by following up with extra-mile customer service. They even followed up with customers who did not even mention them directly but instead tweeted the hashtag, #NA14. Figure out if there needs to be compensation. This depends on the scenario and the damage caused, but might particularly come up in conversation if your company is B2B. Business customers have to deal with their own aftermath from any service interruptions their own customers experienced. Share what you’ve learned. Gather everyone who was involved with the service disruption to share what they learned from the experience. Come out with a clear set of actions that need to be taken to prevent it happening twice. Prevention and Preparedness Here are a few things you can put in place now: 1. Status page Create a place on your site where people can check the service status of your product. First and foremost, a status page serves as a resource for customers. Your business appears professional and (at least somewhat) in control. Then, because customers can continuously check the site for updates instead of calling you, there is some relief for your customer support team. Salesforce continuously redirected customers to their status page, which is branded as “Salesforce Trust”. It greets you with an overview of service and security. And the actual system status page provides a timeline bar of service updates, as well as a more technical breakdown of which exact segments are experiencing trouble. You can see that the NA14 service has been down for at least the previous 24 hours, resuming some ability in the last 3-4. The more technical view displays blips and breakdowns of service in different hubs. 2. Operations Twitter account As mentioned above, an operations- or support-centric Twitter account can help you communicate during product emergencies. Let your customers know about this channel by advertising the handle in the following places: In the bio of your official Twitter account On your Support page As a footnote on Customer Support tickets or emails On your status page 3. A crisis manager, or your version of an Incident Commander That’s the “disaster preparedness” plan we have to offer, inspired by the events at Salesforce. Have you been in this situation? Any tips or advice that we didn’t think of? Let us know in the comments! Share and follow NEW on @ChartMogul: What to do when your product is down — https://t.co/dodSlBk6Vx #NA14 #SaaS #SOS pic.twitter.com/a2Se1kYLUh — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 12, 2016

[INST] What to do when your SaaS product is down [/INST]

Salesforce was down. Okay, not all of Salesforce — but enough of it and for long enough that everyone at least heard about the great NA14 failure from friends or newsfeeds, if they hadn’t experienced it directly in their work. Do you know what you would do if your SaaS product went down? Do you have any protocol or processes in place if technical disaster hit? Your business may not be so big as to worry about press write-ups or internet memes about a product failure — and your failure may not garner its own hashtag — but the situation can be just as much of a crisis for you and your customers. Such a scenario affects almost every team at the company, some more than others. And when all various functional teams have to jump into action to address the same problem in different ways, it’s truly a test of organization, communication, and efficiency. To help with this, here’s a quick game plan for each arm of the business, with some extra tips about how your business can handle failure aftermath and future prevention. First things first Ideally your dev team should notice any service disruptions before you hear from your customers. This requires you to have the right monitoring in place, but that’s not always the case, so… When customers report a service issue, check your product on various devices, browsers, and connections before doing anything else. See if the issue is isolated, if it’s local rather than global. Then proceed accordingly. Tips around communication Proactive. Proactive. Proactive. Communicate early and often with both your customers and your teammates. Take ownership. Admit the failure. Don’t try to explain it away or pass off responsibility. Don’t layer your message with glossy jargon or marketing speak. That’s just more irritating to your customers, and this is a crucial moment to maintain their trust. Honest and transparent. This doesn’t mean give every detail. It just means be clear about the situation — your product is not working — and share what you can about what you do and don’t know. Stay consistent. The best way to retain your customers’ trust throughout the resolution process is to provide a clear, consistent message. What you’re saying on Twitter should align with what Customer Success says on the phone. Otherwise you risk appearing disorganized (or incompetent) in the face of customers who are already questioning your product. Don’t give false hopes. It’s best not to provide precise ETAs for fixes to avoid setting false expectations and worsening the customer experience. Instead stick to what you reasonably expect, such as “in the next few hours” or “by the end of the day.” Game plans CEO Speak up. A personal apology from the CEO can go a long way with customers. After all, the CEO is the face of the business. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff responded to countless tweets about the NA14 failure, looping in his cofounder Parker Harris as well. Put someone in charge. Assign someone to lead all internal management of the issue. Communication and coordination runs through this one person, keeping the resolution process streamlined and less chaotic. Side-story: The “Incident Commander” There are more parallels between a server outage and a fire-based emergency than you think. Image source: victorops.com Hi, Ed here. Let me tell you about Incident Commanders. An Incident Commander is traditionally a role which is assigned in an emergency response situation (e.g. fire, natural disaster) to coordinate all aspects of operations. See Wikipedia At a company I used to work at, we adapted the role for emergency response to issues with our software platform – a platform that was mission-critical in nature, with any down-time causing significant economic loss to the business and clients. As soon as a problem had been identified and raised as such, an incident commander was assigned from a pool of volunteers by the CTO. From this point, the person became responsible for: Documenting and reporting the problem accurately Acting as the central point of communication for all internal teams involved in the issue Giving updates to the management team on progress towards resolving the issue Recruiting any people required to work on the solution Having this central role owning all communication meant that the people involved in fixing the problem could focus on doing just that – fixing the problem. It also sped up important decisions, particularly when teams who don’t traditionally communicate closely were required to collaborate. Customer Success and Support Be at the ready. Stay available for incoming messages from customers, with a full understanding of the nature of the problem. Constantly align with Dev. There should be constant updates between CS and Dev, like a feedback loop. CS needs to let Dev know what customers are experiencing and observing, and Dev needs to provide CS with possible workarounds, updates, and any other information to relay to antsy customers. Help customers through it. Suggest other things the customer can do in the meantime. If there’s any part of the product that still offers value, remind the customer how they can use it. Sales If Sales reps rely on your live product during demos or scheduled calls with potential customers, they will need to postpone these. The sales team should be kept informed, but otherwise doesn’t play much of a role in managing the situation. Marketing Take to social media. The marketing team should alert followers about the situation and also respond to every incoming message. It’s probably better to use an “operations” Twitter to handle this, like we have at ChartMogul or like Salesforce has used throughout the NA14 crash. You don’t want to shout that your product is down — contain that message to your existing customers. Push it to another channel that’s more relevant, like this specific Twitter feed, and don’t interrupt your normal content. Just a snapshot of the feed for @asksalesforce, Salesforce’s alternative Twitter account for support issues. Help customers through it. Just like customer support, relay any workarounds available. Suggest other things the customer can do in the meantime. If there’s any part of the product that still offers value, remind the customer how they can use it. Pause paid advertising. If the failure persists, it may be worth considering pausing any paid campaigns that direct people to your product. For example if there’s an issue with your sign-up page, you might want to hold off any efforts that drive people to that page. Product Identify and prioritize a fix. Determine the best course of action and coordinate with the engineering team to execute it. Do you want to run with a quick hot fix, or develop something longer term? Do you want to completely change a feature, or should you rollback a feature that you recently deployed? Lead further investigation. Assess the damage from the product failure. Was any data lost? If so, what and how much? Engineering The team’s mission here is pretty obvious. Conducting triage to find the problem, working with Product to classify and prioritize it, and then actually executing the solution. The Aftermath Follow up with customers. On both social media and with anyone who contacted the business via phone or email. Salesforce did a thorough job of this once NA14 was back up and running. Salesforce attempted to satisfy some unhappy customers by following up with extra-mile customer service. They even followed up with customers who did not even mention them directly but instead tweeted the hashtag, #NA14. Figure out if there needs to be compensation. This depends on the scenario and the damage caused, but might particularly come up in conversation if your company is B2B. Business customers have to deal with their own aftermath from any service interruptions their own customers experienced. Share what you’ve learned. Gather everyone who was involved with the service disruption to share what they learned from the experience. Come out with a clear set of actions that need to be taken to prevent it happening twice. Prevention and Preparedness Here are a few things you can put in place now: 1. Status page Create a place on your site where people can check the service status of your product. First and foremost, a status page serves as a resource for customers. Your business appears professional and (at least somewhat) in control. Then, because customers can continuously check the site for updates instead of calling you, there is some relief for your customer support team. Salesforce continuously redirected customers to their status page, which is branded as “Salesforce Trust”. It greets you with an overview of service and security. And the actual system status page provides a timeline bar of service updates, as well as a more technical breakdown of which exact segments are experiencing trouble. You can see that the NA14 service has been down for at least the previous 24 hours, resuming some ability in the last 3-4. The more technical view displays blips and breakdowns of service in different hubs. 2. Operations Twitter account As mentioned above, an operations- or support-centric Twitter account can help you communicate during product emergencies. Let your customers know about this channel by advertising the handle in the following places: In the bio of your official Twitter account On your Support page As a footnote on Customer Support tickets or emails On your status page 3. A crisis manager, or your version of an Incident Commander That’s the “disaster preparedness” plan we have to offer, inspired by the events at Salesforce. Have you been in this situation? Any tips or advice that we didn’t think of? Let us know in the comments! Share and follow NEW on @ChartMogul: What to do when your product is down — https://t.co/dodSlBk6Vx #NA14 #SaaS #SOS pic.twitter.com/a2Se1kYLUh — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 12, 2016

<sys> [INST] What to do when your SaaS product is down [/INST] Salesforce was down. Okay, not all of Salesforce — but enough of it and for long enough that everyone at least heard about the great NA14 failure from friends or newsfeeds, if they hadn’t experienced it directly in their work. Do you know what you would do if your SaaS product went down? Do you have any protocol or processes in place if technical disaster hit? Your business may not be so big as to worry about press write-ups or internet memes about a product failure — and your failure may not garner its own hashtag — but the situation can be just as much of a crisis for you and your customers. Such a scenario affects almost every team at the company, some more than others. And when all various functional teams have to jump into action to address the same problem in different ways, it’s truly a test of organization, communication, and efficiency. To help with this, here’s a quick game plan for each arm of the business, with some extra tips about how your business can handle failure aftermath and future prevention. First things first Ideally your dev team should notice any service disruptions before you hear from your customers. This requires you to have the right monitoring in place, but that’s not always the case, so… When customers report a service issue, check your product on various devices, browsers, and connections before doing anything else. See if the issue is isolated, if it’s local rather than global. Then proceed accordingly. Tips around communication Proactive. Proactive. Proactive. Communicate early and often with both your customers and your teammates. Take ownership. Admit the failure. Don’t try to explain it away or pass off responsibility. Don’t layer your message with glossy jargon or marketing speak. That’s just more irritating to your customers, and this is a crucial moment to maintain their trust. Honest and transparent. This doesn’t mean give every detail. It just means be clear about the situation — your product is not working — and share what you can about what you do and don’t know. Stay consistent. The best way to retain your customers’ trust throughout the resolution process is to provide a clear, consistent message. What you’re saying on Twitter should align with what Customer Success says on the phone. Otherwise you risk appearing disorganized (or incompetent) in the face of customers who are already questioning your product. Don’t give false hopes. It’s best not to provide precise ETAs for fixes to avoid setting false expectations and worsening the customer experience. Instead stick to what you reasonably expect, such as “in the next few hours” or “by the end of the day.” Game plans CEO Speak up. A personal apology from the CEO can go a long way with customers. After all, the CEO is the face of the business. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff responded to countless tweets about the NA14 failure, looping in his cofounder Parker Harris as well. Put someone in charge. Assign someone to lead all internal management of the issue. Communication and coordination runs through this one person, keeping the resolution process streamlined and less chaotic. Side-story: The “Incident Commander” There are more parallels between a server outage and a fire-based emergency than you think. Image source: victorops.com Hi, Ed here. Let me tell you about Incident Commanders. An Incident Commander is traditionally a role which is assigned in an emergency response situation (e.g. fire, natural disaster) to coordinate all aspects of operations. See Wikipedia At a company I used to work at, we adapted the role for emergency response to issues with our software platform – a platform that was mission-critical in nature, with any down-time causing significant economic loss to the business and clients. As soon as a problem had been identified and raised as such, an incident commander was assigned from a pool of volunteers by the CTO. From this point, the person became responsible for: Documenting and reporting the problem accurately Acting as the central point of communication for all internal teams involved in the issue Giving updates to the management team on progress towards resolving the issue Recruiting any people required to work on the solution Having this central role owning all communication meant that the people involved in fixing the problem could focus on doing just that – fixing the problem. It also sped up important decisions, particularly when teams who don’t traditionally communicate closely were required to collaborate. Customer Success and Support Be at the ready. Stay available for incoming messages from customers, with a full understanding of the nature of the problem. Constantly align with Dev. There should be constant updates between CS and Dev, like a feedback loop. CS needs to let Dev know what customers are experiencing and observing, and Dev needs to provide CS with possible workarounds, updates, and any other information to relay to antsy customers. Help customers through it. Suggest other things the customer can do in the meantime. If there’s any part of the product that still offers value, remind the customer how they can use it. Sales If Sales reps rely on your live product during demos or scheduled calls with potential customers, they will need to postpone these. The sales team should be kept informed, but otherwise doesn’t play much of a role in managing the situation. Marketing Take to social media. The marketing team should alert followers about the situation and also respond to every incoming message. It’s probably better to use an “operations” Twitter to handle this, like we have at ChartMogul or like Salesforce has used throughout the NA14 crash. You don’t want to shout that your product is down — contain that message to your existing customers. Push it to another channel that’s more relevant, like this specific Twitter feed, and don’t interrupt your normal content. Just a snapshot of the feed for @asksalesforce, Salesforce’s alternative Twitter account for support issues. Help customers through it. Just like customer support, relay any workarounds available. Suggest other things the customer can do in the meantime. If there’s any part of the product that still offers value, remind the customer how they can use it. Pause paid advertising. If the failure persists, it may be worth considering pausing any paid campaigns that direct people to your product. For example if there’s an issue with your sign-up page, you might want to hold off any efforts that drive people to that page. Product Identify and prioritize a fix. Determine the best course of action and coordinate with the engineering team to execute it. Do you want to run with a quick hot fix, or develop something longer term? Do you want to completely change a feature, or should you rollback a feature that you recently deployed? Lead further investigation. Assess the damage from the product failure. Was any data lost? If so, what and how much? Engineering The team’s mission here is pretty obvious. Conducting triage to find the problem, working with Product to classify and prioritize it, and then actually executing the solution. The Aftermath Follow up with customers. On both social media and with anyone who contacted the business via phone or email. Salesforce did a thorough job of this once NA14 was back up and running. Salesforce attempted to satisfy some unhappy customers by following up with extra-mile customer service. They even followed up with customers who did not even mention them directly but instead tweeted the hashtag, #NA14. Figure out if there needs to be compensation. This depends on the scenario and the damage caused, but might particularly come up in conversation if your company is B2B. Business customers have to deal with their own aftermath from any service interruptions their own customers experienced. Share what you’ve learned. Gather everyone who was involved with the service disruption to share what they learned from the experience. Come out with a clear set of actions that need to be taken to prevent it happening twice. Prevention and Preparedness Here are a few things you can put in place now: 1. Status page Create a place on your site where people can check the service status of your product. First and foremost, a status page serves as a resource for customers. Your business appears professional and (at least somewhat) in control. Then, because customers can continuously check the site for updates instead of calling you, there is some relief for your customer support team. Salesforce continuously redirected customers to their status page, which is branded as “Salesforce Trust”. It greets you with an overview of service and security. And the actual system status page provides a timeline bar of service updates, as well as a more technical breakdown of which exact segments are experiencing trouble. You can see that the NA14 service has been down for at least the previous 24 hours, resuming some ability in the last 3-4. The more technical view displays blips and breakdowns of service in different hubs. 2. Operations Twitter account As mentioned above, an operations- or support-centric Twitter account can help you communicate during product emergencies. Let your customers know about this channel by advertising the handle in the following places: In the bio of your official Twitter account On your Support page As a footnote on Customer Support tickets or emails On your status page 3. A crisis manager, or your version of an Incident Commander That’s the “disaster preparedness” plan we have to offer, inspired by the events at Salesforce. Have you been in this situation? Any tips or advice that we didn’t think of? Let us know in the comments! Share and follow NEW on @ChartMogul: What to do when your product is down — https://t.co/dodSlBk6Vx #NA14 #SaaS #SOS pic.twitter.com/a2Se1kYLUh — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 12, 2016 </sys

The SaaS Event Strategy For In-Person Events. Sponsoring events like SaaStr or SaaStock is one of the cornerstones and highlights of our in-person event strategy each year. Why? Our ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are SaaS companies. We know that our customers, partners, and prospects are going to be roaming the halls of conferences like these. However, the decision to sponsor a conference is not easy. A sponsorship is a huge time and financial investment. We consider carefully which events we could and should invest in. In this post, I’ll share our approach to sponsoring in-person events in 2023, in particular, how we measure ROI and overall success of event sponsorships. Jump to the topic that interests you most: Are in-person events worth it? LTV is key to calculating ROI of in-person conference sponsorships Attract as many eyeballs as possible to your activities Engagement is a measure of long-term success Are in-person events worth it? We’ve always been proponents of in-person events. We’ve been attending and sponsoring key industry events since the inception of ChartMogul. There’s a few reasons for that. ChartMogul is a fully distributed team. We’ve got offices in Toronto, Berlin and Seoul, but most of the company is working from home or in different coworking spaces all over the world. That means that we cherish every opportunity we get to meet in person as a team. Businesses are built on meaningful relationships. Some of them can be started online, absolutely. But when you dig deeper, there’s nothing better than developing relationships in person. In sales, it’s easier to book a demo with a person that remembers you from an event, that you had a beer with, that you showed your baby pictures to and vice versa. Whatever it was! In marketing, talking to a customer about doing a case study or testimonial comes naturally in-person. In partnerships, speaking face-to-face, you can show enthusiasm about connecting for a webinar or a co-marketing campaign. In account management, your customers will be so much more open to giving you honest feedback if they met you in person, and saw how tall you are. At SaaStr in London this year, our team was able to start and build upon existing relationships with the SaaS community. We met hundreds of customers, prospects, partners, and many more folks in the SaaS community. https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1666086139248398343?s=20 10 team members were able to join us — a fraction of the whole ChartMogul team. Evaluating the success of sponsoring an event Determining the value of event sponsorship is one of the most important aspects of our strategy. It’s a mix of metrics and priorities that we continually refine and reevaluate but at the end of the day we always come back to the fundamentals: ROI, brand awareness, and engagement. LTV is key to calculating ROI of in-person conference sponsorships Let’s start with ROI. Return on Investment is the most common way to asses event success. After all, you want to make sure that your business is not operating at a loss. If you consider the cost of the booth, travel, accommodation, swag, time of the team that was invested, etc. sponsoring an event costs upwards of $80k. Easy. So what’s the difference between attending and sponsoring an event? Well, all the conversations you can have at the booth and the contacts you can make. And that translates directly to revenue and ROI. Another term I heard for this is “booth math”. Here’s how we do our “booth math”. In our experience, it’s possible to have about 2-3 conversations per team member per hour during a show. On average of course, some hours are busier than others. For example, let’s say your team is able to have 400 conversations in total during the event. Let’s assume 150 of them were ICP leads, 50 of them you got to engage with your product after the event, 20 converted into customers. Another assumption: your LTV is $10k. So on average, a customer will bring in $10k over the course of their subscription. If that’s the case, the you have to multiply your 20 converted customers by $10k. That’s 200k! That’s well above the initial investment. Considering LTV, the math could work for you! Here’s a picture of our wonderful team having a million conversations per hour. And we loved it! However! And a big disclaimer here. If you only measure ROI from pure revenue numbers, you might set yourself up for disappointment. Attract as many eyeballs as possible to your on-site activities The second dimension we measure our success by is brand awareness. The best conference sponsors stand out from the crowd. Conference attendees are already split between talks, meetings, chats, meals, and activities. So conference sponsors need to offer something memorable. What is memorable? When you reach out to them after the event, do you have a hook that they’ll remember? At one of the last conferences, we had a t-shirt with the number 83,334 on it. Asking folks if they knew what it meant was our “soft opener”. Some responded right away: 83,334 MRR x12 is $1M ARR. They felt proud! If they didn’t know, we’d explain it. And they felt well-informed. https://twitter.com/carlyjchalmers/status/1442885423777214469?s=20 So start conversations with something engaging, ask open-ended questions, and be an active listener. I personally believe that if you talk more than you listen, you’re doing it wrong. Also, make sure you provide value. This year we printed a summary version of our SaaS Benchmarks Report 2023. Inside attendees could find key SaaS insights and benchmark their own company’s metrics against over 2,000 SaaS businesses. In terms of brand awareness we look at all the conversations we had, all the meetup attendees, talks, workshops, dinners, and happy hours. Also, how much buzz were we able to create online, and how many new eyeballs are on us because of the event. It’s hard to quantify, but there are some ways to do it. Conversations, impressions, pageviews, etc. At SaaStr in London, we had a pleasant surprise. Jason Lemkin’s key presentation featured our insights from the Benchmarks Report. There’s no better brand awareness than this. Thanks, SaaStr! Engagement: it’s a measure of long-term success Awareness and impressions are useful. Leads and revenue and fabulous. However, they’re not standalone measures of success Our long-term success depends on building meaningful relationships with folks from all corners of SaaS. We go to events to build deeper relationships with people in the SaaS industry. Engaging with partners We use SaaStr as an opportunity to connect with partners. For example, the companies that we have an integration with, and with the companies that we have commonalities with. A measure of success for us is how many partners we engaged with and were able to build relationships with. Engaging with existing customers We also consider existing customers. We all know that SaaS businesses have been struggling with new business these days. Growth has been slowing down. As a result, retention should be on all of our minds. So to keep our retention and expansion numbers high, we go to events. We measure success at events by looking at how many existing customers we met, how many customer meetings we were able to book for our account manager, and how much feedback we received and can pass on to the product team. Nick Franklin, ChartMogul CEO, speaking at the GTM Leaders dinner, London. Create your one in-person event strategy So, to recap. First of all, you need to know if and why sponsoring events is relevant and useful for your business. Every company is different, so make sure you know your “why”. Our success at ChartMogul relies on 3 pillars: ROI, brand awareness, and engagement. Your pillars might be different. Just remember to keep them in mind when implementing your tactics. There’s no point investing in elaborate booth activation tactics if they don’t contribute to your goals. Create your own event strategy and you’ll be set up for success. See you at the next SaaS event!

[INST] The SaaS Event Strategy For In-Person Events [/INST]

Sponsoring events like SaaStr or SaaStock is one of the cornerstones and highlights of our in-person event strategy each year. Why? Our ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are SaaS companies. We know that our customers, partners, and prospects are going to be roaming the halls of conferences like these. However, the decision to sponsor a conference is not easy. A sponsorship is a huge time and financial investment. We consider carefully which events we could and should invest in. In this post, I’ll share our approach to sponsoring in-person events in 2023, in particular, how we measure ROI and overall success of event sponsorships. Jump to the topic that interests you most: Are in-person events worth it? LTV is key to calculating ROI of in-person conference sponsorships Attract as many eyeballs as possible to your activities Engagement is a measure of long-term success Are in-person events worth it? We’ve always been proponents of in-person events. We’ve been attending and sponsoring key industry events since the inception of ChartMogul. There’s a few reasons for that. ChartMogul is a fully distributed team. We’ve got offices in Toronto, Berlin and Seoul, but most of the company is working from home or in different coworking spaces all over the world. That means that we cherish every opportunity we get to meet in person as a team. Businesses are built on meaningful relationships. Some of them can be started online, absolutely. But when you dig deeper, there’s nothing better than developing relationships in person. In sales, it’s easier to book a demo with a person that remembers you from an event, that you had a beer with, that you showed your baby pictures to and vice versa. Whatever it was! In marketing, talking to a customer about doing a case study or testimonial comes naturally in-person. In partnerships, speaking face-to-face, you can show enthusiasm about connecting for a webinar or a co-marketing campaign. In account management, your customers will be so much more open to giving you honest feedback if they met you in person, and saw how tall you are. At SaaStr in London this year, our team was able to start and build upon existing relationships with the SaaS community. We met hundreds of customers, prospects, partners, and many more folks in the SaaS community. https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1666086139248398343?s=20 10 team members were able to join us — a fraction of the whole ChartMogul team. Evaluating the success of sponsoring an event Determining the value of event sponsorship is one of the most important aspects of our strategy. It’s a mix of metrics and priorities that we continually refine and reevaluate but at the end of the day we always come back to the fundamentals: ROI, brand awareness, and engagement. LTV is key to calculating ROI of in-person conference sponsorships Let’s start with ROI. Return on Investment is the most common way to asses event success. After all, you want to make sure that your business is not operating at a loss. If you consider the cost of the booth, travel, accommodation, swag, time of the team that was invested, etc. sponsoring an event costs upwards of $80k. Easy. So what’s the difference between attending and sponsoring an event? Well, all the conversations you can have at the booth and the contacts you can make. And that translates directly to revenue and ROI. Another term I heard for this is “booth math”. Here’s how we do our “booth math”. In our experience, it’s possible to have about 2-3 conversations per team member per hour during a show. On average of course, some hours are busier than others. For example, let’s say your team is able to have 400 conversations in total during the event. Let’s assume 150 of them were ICP leads, 50 of them you got to engage with your product after the event, 20 converted into customers. Another assumption: your LTV is $10k. So on average, a customer will bring in $10k over the course of their subscription. If that’s the case, the you have to multiply your 20 converted customers by $10k. That’s 200k! That’s well above the initial investment. Considering LTV, the math could work for you! Here’s a picture of our wonderful team having a million conversations per hour. And we loved it! However! And a big disclaimer here. If you only measure ROI from pure revenue numbers, you might set yourself up for disappointment. Attract as many eyeballs as possible to your on-site activities The second dimension we measure our success by is brand awareness. The best conference sponsors stand out from the crowd. Conference attendees are already split between talks, meetings, chats, meals, and activities. So conference sponsors need to offer something memorable. What is memorable? When you reach out to them after the event, do you have a hook that they’ll remember? At one of the last conferences, we had a t-shirt with the number 83,334 on it. Asking folks if they knew what it meant was our “soft opener”. Some responded right away: 83,334 MRR x12 is $1M ARR. They felt proud! If they didn’t know, we’d explain it. And they felt well-informed. https://twitter.com/carlyjchalmers/status/1442885423777214469?s=20 So start conversations with something engaging, ask open-ended questions, and be an active listener. I personally believe that if you talk more than you listen, you’re doing it wrong. Also, make sure you provide value. This year we printed a summary version of our SaaS Benchmarks Report 2023. Inside attendees could find key SaaS insights and benchmark their own company’s metrics against over 2,000 SaaS businesses. In terms of brand awareness we look at all the conversations we had, all the meetup attendees, talks, workshops, dinners, and happy hours. Also, how much buzz were we able to create online, and how many new eyeballs are on us because of the event. It’s hard to quantify, but there are some ways to do it. Conversations, impressions, pageviews, etc. At SaaStr in London, we had a pleasant surprise. Jason Lemkin’s key presentation featured our insights from the Benchmarks Report. There’s no better brand awareness than this. Thanks, SaaStr! Engagement: it’s a measure of long-term success Awareness and impressions are useful. Leads and revenue and fabulous. However, they’re not standalone measures of success Our long-term success depends on building meaningful relationships with folks from all corners of SaaS. We go to events to build deeper relationships with people in the SaaS industry. Engaging with partners We use SaaStr as an opportunity to connect with partners. For example, the companies that we have an integration with, and with the companies that we have commonalities with. A measure of success for us is how many partners we engaged with and were able to build relationships with. Engaging with existing customers We also consider existing customers. We all know that SaaS businesses have been struggling with new business these days. Growth has been slowing down. As a result, retention should be on all of our minds. So to keep our retention and expansion numbers high, we go to events. We measure success at events by looking at how many existing customers we met, how many customer meetings we were able to book for our account manager, and how much feedback we received and can pass on to the product team. Nick Franklin, ChartMogul CEO, speaking at the GTM Leaders dinner, London. Create your one in-person event strategy So, to recap. First of all, you need to know if and why sponsoring events is relevant and useful for your business. Every company is different, so make sure you know your “why”. Our success at ChartMogul relies on 3 pillars: ROI, brand awareness, and engagement. Your pillars might be different. Just remember to keep them in mind when implementing your tactics. There’s no point investing in elaborate booth activation tactics if they don’t contribute to your goals. Create your own event strategy and you’ll be set up for success. See you at the next SaaS event!

<sys> [INST] The SaaS Event Strategy For In-Person Events [/INST] Sponsoring events like SaaStr or SaaStock is one of the cornerstones and highlights of our in-person event strategy each year. Why? Our ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are SaaS companies. We know that our customers, partners, and prospects are going to be roaming the halls of conferences like these. However, the decision to sponsor a conference is not easy. A sponsorship is a huge time and financial investment. We consider carefully which events we could and should invest in. In this post, I’ll share our approach to sponsoring in-person events in 2023, in particular, how we measure ROI and overall success of event sponsorships. Jump to the topic that interests you most: Are in-person events worth it? LTV is key to calculating ROI of in-person conference sponsorships Attract as many eyeballs as possible to your activities Engagement is a measure of long-term success Are in-person events worth it? We’ve always been proponents of in-person events. We’ve been attending and sponsoring key industry events since the inception of ChartMogul. There’s a few reasons for that. ChartMogul is a fully distributed team. We’ve got offices in Toronto, Berlin and Seoul, but most of the company is working from home or in different coworking spaces all over the world. That means that we cherish every opportunity we get to meet in person as a team. Businesses are built on meaningful relationships. Some of them can be started online, absolutely. But when you dig deeper, there’s nothing better than developing relationships in person. In sales, it’s easier to book a demo with a person that remembers you from an event, that you had a beer with, that you showed your baby pictures to and vice versa. Whatever it was! In marketing, talking to a customer about doing a case study or testimonial comes naturally in-person. In partnerships, speaking face-to-face, you can show enthusiasm about connecting for a webinar or a co-marketing campaign. In account management, your customers will be so much more open to giving you honest feedback if they met you in person, and saw how tall you are. At SaaStr in London this year, our team was able to start and build upon existing relationships with the SaaS community. We met hundreds of customers, prospects, partners, and many more folks in the SaaS community. https://twitter.com/Nick_Franklin/status/1666086139248398343?s=20 10 team members were able to join us — a fraction of the whole ChartMogul team. Evaluating the success of sponsoring an event Determining the value of event sponsorship is one of the most important aspects of our strategy. It’s a mix of metrics and priorities that we continually refine and reevaluate but at the end of the day we always come back to the fundamentals: ROI, brand awareness, and engagement. LTV is key to calculating ROI of in-person conference sponsorships Let’s start with ROI. Return on Investment is the most common way to asses event success. After all, you want to make sure that your business is not operating at a loss. If you consider the cost of the booth, travel, accommodation, swag, time of the team that was invested, etc. sponsoring an event costs upwards of $80k. Easy. So what’s the difference between attending and sponsoring an event? Well, all the conversations you can have at the booth and the contacts you can make. And that translates directly to revenue and ROI. Another term I heard for this is “booth math”. Here’s how we do our “booth math”. In our experience, it’s possible to have about 2-3 conversations per team member per hour during a show. On average of course, some hours are busier than others. For example, let’s say your team is able to have 400 conversations in total during the event. Let’s assume 150 of them were ICP leads, 50 of them you got to engage with your product after the event, 20 converted into customers. Another assumption: your LTV is $10k. So on average, a customer will bring in $10k over the course of their subscription. If that’s the case, the you have to multiply your 20 converted customers by $10k. That’s 200k! That’s well above the initial investment. Considering LTV, the math could work for you! Here’s a picture of our wonderful team having a million conversations per hour. And we loved it! However! And a big disclaimer here. If you only measure ROI from pure revenue numbers, you might set yourself up for disappointment. Attract as many eyeballs as possible to your on-site activities The second dimension we measure our success by is brand awareness. The best conference sponsors stand out from the crowd. Conference attendees are already split between talks, meetings, chats, meals, and activities. So conference sponsors need to offer something memorable. What is memorable? When you reach out to them after the event, do you have a hook that they’ll remember? At one of the last conferences, we had a t-shirt with the number 83,334 on it. Asking folks if they knew what it meant was our “soft opener”. Some responded right away: 83,334 MRR x12 is $1M ARR. They felt proud! If they didn’t know, we’d explain it. And they felt well-informed. https://twitter.com/carlyjchalmers/status/1442885423777214469?s=20 So start conversations with something engaging, ask open-ended questions, and be an active listener. I personally believe that if you talk more than you listen, you’re doing it wrong. Also, make sure you provide value. This year we printed a summary version of our SaaS Benchmarks Report 2023. Inside attendees could find key SaaS insights and benchmark their own company’s metrics against over 2,000 SaaS businesses. In terms of brand awareness we look at all the conversations we had, all the meetup attendees, talks, workshops, dinners, and happy hours. Also, how much buzz were we able to create online, and how many new eyeballs are on us because of the event. It’s hard to quantify, but there are some ways to do it. Conversations, impressions, pageviews, etc. At SaaStr in London, we had a pleasant surprise. Jason Lemkin’s key presentation featured our insights from the Benchmarks Report. There’s no better brand awareness than this. Thanks, SaaStr! Engagement: it’s a measure of long-term success Awareness and impressions are useful. Leads and revenue and fabulous. However, they’re not standalone measures of success Our long-term success depends on building meaningful relationships with folks from all corners of SaaS. We go to events to build deeper relationships with people in the SaaS industry. Engaging with partners We use SaaStr as an opportunity to connect with partners. For example, the companies that we have an integration with, and with the companies that we have commonalities with. A measure of success for us is how many partners we engaged with and were able to build relationships with. Engaging with existing customers We also consider existing customers. We all know that SaaS businesses have been struggling with new business these days. Growth has been slowing down. As a result, retention should be on all of our minds. So to keep our retention and expansion numbers high, we go to events. We measure success at events by looking at how many existing customers we met, how many customer meetings we were able to book for our account manager, and how much feedback we received and can pass on to the product team. Nick Franklin, ChartMogul CEO, speaking at the GTM Leaders dinner, London. Create your one in-person event strategy So, to recap. First of all, you need to know if and why sponsoring events is relevant and useful for your business. Every company is different, so make sure you know your “why”. Our success at ChartMogul relies on 3 pillars: ROI, brand awareness, and engagement. Your pillars might be different. Just remember to keep them in mind when implementing your tactics. There’s no point investing in elaborate booth activation tactics if they don’t contribute to your goals. Create your own event strategy and you’ll be set up for success. See you at the next SaaS event! </sys

How DocRaptor uses CSV Import to get a complete picture of their revenue. James is a partner at Expected Behavior where he helps make and market Instrumental, a real-time application monitoring platform, and DocRaptor, an HTML to PDF API. Incomplete data sucks. It leads to many poor decisions. Standard subscription revenue is easily analyzed with ChartMogul – but that revenue never tells the full story. At Instrumental, enterprise clients often pay via check or wire transfer. At DocRaptor, Heroku deposits revenue from our HTML-to-PDF add-on directly into our bank account. Fortunately, we can add this revenue to ChartMogul with their recently released CSV import feature. Every month, we download Heroku’s revenue report and run a Ruby script that converts it to ChartMogul’s import format. It’s a manual process, but still better than the crazy Excel spreadsheets we used before ChartMogul. Based on this expanded view into our business’ performance, we’ve prioritized extending our Heroku add-on into other cloud platform marketplaces. We were going to neglect an easy opportunity to expand our business simply because we didn’t see the financial impact in our spreadsheets. If you’ve got revenue sitting outside of ChartMogul, take an afternoon, write a conversion script, and get complete visibility. It’ll take less time than you think and the ChartMogul team is always eager to assist.

[INST] How DocRaptor uses CSV Import to get a complete picture of their revenue [/INST]

James is a partner at Expected Behavior where he helps make and market Instrumental, a real-time application monitoring platform, and DocRaptor, an HTML to PDF API. Incomplete data sucks. It leads to many poor decisions. Standard subscription revenue is easily analyzed with ChartMogul – but that revenue never tells the full story. At Instrumental, enterprise clients often pay via check or wire transfer. At DocRaptor, Heroku deposits revenue from our HTML-to-PDF add-on directly into our bank account. Fortunately, we can add this revenue to ChartMogul with their recently released CSV import feature. Every month, we download Heroku’s revenue report and run a Ruby script that converts it to ChartMogul’s import format. It’s a manual process, but still better than the crazy Excel spreadsheets we used before ChartMogul. Based on this expanded view into our business’ performance, we’ve prioritized extending our Heroku add-on into other cloud platform marketplaces. We were going to neglect an easy opportunity to expand our business simply because we didn’t see the financial impact in our spreadsheets. If you’ve got revenue sitting outside of ChartMogul, take an afternoon, write a conversion script, and get complete visibility. It’ll take less time than you think and the ChartMogul team is always eager to assist.

<sys> [INST] How DocRaptor uses CSV Import to get a complete picture of their revenue [/INST] James is a partner at Expected Behavior where he helps make and market Instrumental, a real-time application monitoring platform, and DocRaptor, an HTML to PDF API. Incomplete data sucks. It leads to many poor decisions. Standard subscription revenue is easily analyzed with ChartMogul – but that revenue never tells the full story. At Instrumental, enterprise clients often pay via check or wire transfer. At DocRaptor, Heroku deposits revenue from our HTML-to-PDF add-on directly into our bank account. Fortunately, we can add this revenue to ChartMogul with their recently released CSV import feature. Every month, we download Heroku’s revenue report and run a Ruby script that converts it to ChartMogul’s import format. It’s a manual process, but still better than the crazy Excel spreadsheets we used before ChartMogul. Based on this expanded view into our business’ performance, we’ve prioritized extending our Heroku add-on into other cloud platform marketplaces. We were going to neglect an easy opportunity to expand our business simply because we didn’t see the financial impact in our spreadsheets. If you’ve got revenue sitting outside of ChartMogul, take an afternoon, write a conversion script, and get complete visibility. It’ll take less time than you think and the ChartMogul team is always eager to assist. </sys

The one thing worse than a low NPS score. David Apple (Typeform’s Dir. Customer Success) gave a great presentation recently on how they do Net Promotor Score (NPS) at Typeform. One thing that caught my eye was how they’re piping the NPS scores as tags into ChartMogul and then using the Segmentation features to slice up and compare their Net MRR Churn Rate by NPS score. As expected the promotors had a better net revenue churn rate than the detractors, but the most interesting thing was that the customers who didn’t respond to the survey at all had a much worse churn rate than even the customers who gave a negative score (between zero and six). “Someone who gives us a low score on the NPS is still less likely to churn than someone who didn’t respond at all” – David Apple Go directly to 11:18 to see the bit on ChartMogul (but I recommend watching the whole video which is full of great knowledge): A quick reminder on NPS We covered some details on Net Promoter Score (NPS) in our Customer Success Cheat Sheet. Download a free copy if you want a great overview of the topic. NPS has been proven as a leading indicator of growth, and is used widely as a benchmark against which businesses compare them- selves. An NPS survey asks all customers a single question: How likely are you to recommend [your product] to someone else? The customer can respond with a numeric score between zero and ten:

[INST] The one thing worse than a low NPS score [/INST]

David Apple (Typeform’s Dir. Customer Success) gave a great presentation recently on how they do Net Promotor Score (NPS) at Typeform. One thing that caught my eye was how they’re piping the NPS scores as tags into ChartMogul and then using the Segmentation features to slice up and compare their Net MRR Churn Rate by NPS score. As expected the promotors had a better net revenue churn rate than the detractors, but the most interesting thing was that the customers who didn’t respond to the survey at all had a much worse churn rate than even the customers who gave a negative score (between zero and six). “Someone who gives us a low score on the NPS is still less likely to churn than someone who didn’t respond at all” – David Apple Go directly to 11:18 to see the bit on ChartMogul (but I recommend watching the whole video which is full of great knowledge): A quick reminder on NPS We covered some details on Net Promoter Score (NPS) in our Customer Success Cheat Sheet. Download a free copy if you want a great overview of the topic. NPS has been proven as a leading indicator of growth, and is used widely as a benchmark against which businesses compare them- selves. An NPS survey asks all customers a single question: How likely are you to recommend [your product] to someone else? The customer can respond with a numeric score between zero and ten:

<sys> [INST] The one thing worse than a low NPS score [/INST] David Apple (Typeform’s Dir. Customer Success) gave a great presentation recently on how they do Net Promotor Score (NPS) at Typeform. One thing that caught my eye was how they’re piping the NPS scores as tags into ChartMogul and then using the Segmentation features to slice up and compare their Net MRR Churn Rate by NPS score. As expected the promotors had a better net revenue churn rate than the detractors, but the most interesting thing was that the customers who didn’t respond to the survey at all had a much worse churn rate than even the customers who gave a negative score (between zero and six). “Someone who gives us a low score on the NPS is still less likely to churn than someone who didn’t respond at all” – David Apple Go directly to 11:18 to see the bit on ChartMogul (but I recommend watching the whole video which is full of great knowledge): A quick reminder on NPS We covered some details on Net Promoter Score (NPS) in our Customer Success Cheat Sheet. Download a free copy if you want a great overview of the topic. NPS has been proven as a leading indicator of growth, and is used widely as a benchmark against which businesses compare them- selves. An NPS survey asks all customers a single question: How likely are you to recommend [your product] to someone else? The customer can respond with a numeric score between zero and ten: </sys

New on the iOS App: Log in with a QR Code, Share Charts, and Support for Multiple Accounts.. The ChartMogul iOS app got a refresh. You can share individual charts, add a widget with your ARR, and invite all your team members to use the app securely. Additionally, if you’re a VC with multiple ChartMogul accounts, you can easily swipe between dashboards. Here’s what’s new in the iOS app. All users can access the app via secure QR login When we initially launched the iPhone app, only admins were able to use it. Thanks to the recent upgrade to API access management, we can now offer universal access to all ChartMogul users via a secure QR login. Anyone with a ChartMogul account can create a read-only API key, scan the QR code and get access to the metrics of the organizations they are part of. These are the charts you’re able to see in the app: Monthly Recurring Revenue Annual Run Rate Subscribers Share your charts Long-press on one of the charts to share it. You can choose from many options, whether you want to share it in a private message or publicly on social media. Many of you build and grow your companies in public and share ChartMogul charts on social media. Now, you can do it directly from the app in just a few taps. Some Sunday fun… ChartMogul went from $0 to >$65K ARR in <2months, and >$100K ARR in <3 months. We haven’t historically shared our revenue numbers. However, here’s a glimpse at our first 2 months in business (early 2015). We won our first paying customer on Jan 6th 2015. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/YbbEKfQgU3 — Nick Franklin (@Nick_Franklin) September 5, 2021 Today @microacquire hit $1m/ARR. Our 2022 goal is $10m in revenue. Thanks for everyone’s support. Truly means a lot to me and my team. We look forward to helping 1000s of entrepreneurs get acquired all across the globe. For the love of startups! 🤘 pic.twitter.com/kKsyX8zggL — Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) October 15, 2021 Get the widget and keep your ARR on your home screen If you’re as into your SaaS metrics as we are, you can even add a ChartMogul widget to your home screen and check progress without even opening the app. You’ll see your ARR and the growth trend over the last 30 days right on your home screen. Swipe between accounts with the VC feature We created this last feature with VCs in mind. You can view multiple ChartMogul dashboards within the same app. Just add the additional ChartMogul accounts and swipe between your dashboards. Scan the QR code to get started Update your app or download it from the App Store to get started, and keep your subscription metrics handy at all times. To add a ChartMogul account to your app, go to your account in the browser, navigate to your user profile by clicking “Profile” > “View profile” and add a new read-only API key. Next, click on the QR code. Now, using the app, tap on the three dots in the upper right corner and click “Add account”. Your new account will show up immediately after scanning the code. Just scan the QR code on the top of this blog post, and you’ll be ready to take your metrics on the road.

[INST] New on the iOS App: Log in with a QR Code, Share Charts, and Support for Multiple Accounts [/INST]

. The ChartMogul iOS app got a refresh. You can share individual charts, add a widget with your ARR, and invite all your team members to use the app securely. Additionally, if you’re a VC with multiple ChartMogul accounts, you can easily swipe between dashboards. Here’s what’s new in the iOS app. All users can access the app via secure QR login When we initially launched the iPhone app, only admins were able to use it. Thanks to the recent upgrade to API access management, we can now offer universal access to all ChartMogul users via a secure QR login. Anyone with a ChartMogul account can create a read-only API key, scan the QR code and get access to the metrics of the organizations they are part of. These are the charts you’re able to see in the app: Monthly Recurring Revenue Annual Run Rate Subscribers Share your charts Long-press on one of the charts to share it. You can choose from many options, whether you want to share it in a private message or publicly on social media. Many of you build and grow your companies in public and share ChartMogul charts on social media. Now, you can do it directly from the app in just a few taps. Some Sunday fun… ChartMogul went from $0 to >$65K ARR in <2months, and >$100K ARR in <3 months. We haven’t historically shared our revenue numbers. However, here’s a glimpse at our first 2 months in business (early 2015). We won our first paying customer on Jan 6th 2015. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/YbbEKfQgU3 — Nick Franklin (@Nick_Franklin) September 5, 2021 Today @microacquire hit $1m/ARR. Our 2022 goal is $10m in revenue. Thanks for everyone’s support. Truly means a lot to me and my team. We look forward to helping 1000s of entrepreneurs get acquired all across the globe. For the love of startups! 🤘 pic.twitter.com/kKsyX8zggL — Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) October 15, 2021 Get the widget and keep your ARR on your home screen If you’re as into your SaaS metrics as we are, you can even add a ChartMogul widget to your home screen and check progress without even opening the app. You’ll see your ARR and the growth trend over the last 30 days right on your home screen. Swipe between accounts with the VC feature We created this last feature with VCs in mind. You can view multiple ChartMogul dashboards within the same app. Just add the additional ChartMogul accounts and swipe between your dashboards. Scan the QR code to get started Update your app or download it from the App Store to get started, and keep your subscription metrics handy at all times. To add a ChartMogul account to your app, go to your account in the browser, navigate to your user profile by clicking “Profile” > “View profile” and add a new read-only API key. Next, click on the QR code. Now, using the app, tap on the three dots in the upper right corner and click “Add account”. Your new account will show up immediately after scanning the code. Just scan the QR code on the top of this blog post, and you’ll be ready to take your metrics on the road.

<sys> [INST] New on the iOS App: Log in with a QR Code, Share Charts, and Support for Multiple Accounts [/INST]. The ChartMogul iOS app got a refresh. You can share individual charts, add a widget with your ARR, and invite all your team members to use the app securely. Additionally, if you’re a VC with multiple ChartMogul accounts, you can easily swipe between dashboards. Here’s what’s new in the iOS app. All users can access the app via secure QR login When we initially launched the iPhone app, only admins were able to use it. Thanks to the recent upgrade to API access management, we can now offer universal access to all ChartMogul users via a secure QR login. Anyone with a ChartMogul account can create a read-only API key, scan the QR code and get access to the metrics of the organizations they are part of. These are the charts you’re able to see in the app: Monthly Recurring Revenue Annual Run Rate Subscribers Share your charts Long-press on one of the charts to share it. You can choose from many options, whether you want to share it in a private message or publicly on social media. Many of you build and grow your companies in public and share ChartMogul charts on social media. Now, you can do it directly from the app in just a few taps. Some Sunday fun… ChartMogul went from $0 to >$65K ARR in <2months, and >$100K ARR in <3 months. We haven’t historically shared our revenue numbers. However, here’s a glimpse at our first 2 months in business (early 2015). We won our first paying customer on Jan 6th 2015. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/YbbEKfQgU3 — Nick Franklin (@Nick_Franklin) September 5, 2021 Today @microacquire hit $1m/ARR. Our 2022 goal is $10m in revenue. Thanks for everyone’s support. Truly means a lot to me and my team. We look forward to helping 1000s of entrepreneurs get acquired all across the globe. For the love of startups! 🤘 pic.twitter.com/kKsyX8zggL — Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) October 15, 2021 Get the widget and keep your ARR on your home screen If you’re as into your SaaS metrics as we are, you can even add a ChartMogul widget to your home screen and check progress without even opening the app. You’ll see your ARR and the growth trend over the last 30 days right on your home screen. Swipe between accounts with the VC feature We created this last feature with VCs in mind. You can view multiple ChartMogul dashboards within the same app. Just add the additional ChartMogul accounts and swipe between your dashboards. Scan the QR code to get started Update your app or download it from the App Store to get started, and keep your subscription metrics handy at all times. To add a ChartMogul account to your app, go to your account in the browser, navigate to your user profile by clicking “Profile” > “View profile” and add a new read-only API key. Next, click on the QR code. Now, using the app, tap on the three dots in the upper right corner and click “Add account”. Your new account will show up immediately after scanning the code. Just scan the QR code on the top of this blog post, and you’ll be ready to take your metrics on the road. </sys

What do investors look for in a SaaS startup?. I was lucky enough to be at SaaStock, a B2B SaaS conference in Dublin this past September. There was a big presence of SaaS investors, and one of the final sessions was a panel discussion with five different VCs: Mike Chalfen – Co-founder and Partner at Mosaic Ventures Gil Dibner – Venture Syndicate Lead, Angelist Syndicate Sitar Teli – Partner, Connect Ventures Conor Stanley – Founder, Tribal.vc Jos White – Notion Capital I took scrupulous notes and am happy to get to share them with you. I’ve sprinkled in other first-hand insight from my colleague Ed Shelley’s interview with Pietro Bezza, a co-founder and managing partner of Connect Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in London. And I rounded it out with some classic advice from David Skok. First, it’s important to keep in mind that specific focus will vary from VC to VC. “Some will swing between Product, Market, and Team” – Pietro Bezza But there are underlying themes that indicate what’s on any investor’s radar. Let’s get to it! Product When considering early stage investment, investors for a product that is “solving a real problem, with clear potential for PMF, and a big enough market to promise a big opportunity.” (Sitar Teli at SaaStock.) Sitar’s colleague, Pietro Bezza, expanded on that. Connect Ventures expects more of the product: “Product must be the answer to every strategic puzzle. It should be the foundation of solving the problem the founders want to tackle, but also it should be the answer for growth, for hiring strategy. And it should be the start of the company but also the growth engine.” Also, it’s not enough to adequately address the market’s need. Investors also want to see differentiation. What sets you apart from the competition? At SaaStock VCs discussed the technology at the foundation of your product, and also the design. “Technology is what differentiates from competition. Execution really matters, but you can hire for that. Technology is the only weapon.” – Gil Dibner “It’s key to understand UX design… I’d say that design and UX are fundamental. It’s not something you can copy; it’s part of the founders view of life. If it’s not part of the founder’s view of life, then it’s not part of the company’s view of life. Design and UX can be as differentiating as technology.” – Sitar Teli Founder Investors look for founders who have a unique insight into the market or the problem they’re solving. David Skok mentions this repeatedly, and Pietro Bezza mentioned something similar in our interview with him. Bezza called it “Founder-Market Fit.” It doesn’t require years of experience, domain expertise, or having the right professional network. Rather it’s about an intimate knowledge of the space and the need — plus an attuned, innovative perspective on how to solve it. In an era when markets shift and innovation cycles quickly, companies need to be agile in their response. “Technology companies keep surfing on all the changes. And only someone who really has a bond with the market can reimagine a product solution with great UX — that’s the key.” – Bezza That’s Founder-Market Fit. Of course, investors want to see drive, energy, and passion. The most appealing form and ferocity of these will vary from VC to VC. At Connect Ventures, they look for mission-driven founders. “Only someone who is mission-driven can expand the boundaries of their sector over time and go after big things.” – Bezza Other qualities? Solutions-oriented, not just wanting to build a company or explore an idea. “Strong opinions, loosely held”: Someone who will fight for what they think, but is also open to other points of view. Someone who will (and wants to) learn. Vision As in, have one. Think big — envision your idea after funding, at scale, going global. What kind of impact will your company have on the industry, on the world? But not only that, also be able to express this vision pointedly and persuasively. It seems investors don’t hear that enough! “I’d like to see a founder better articulate their vision — crisply, in a way that’s easy to grasp. It sounds simple, but actually it’s remarkable how few can do that in a way that is clear and compelling.” – Conor Stanley Other investors agreed. The vision is what sells them, because it is the vision — the big picture — that is enticing. Sitar went on to explain it’s especially important to articulate this vision during fundraising meetings — perhaps just as important as stressing numbers and performance metrics. “In meetings to raise, founders focus too much on KPIs and metrics. It’s not exciting. You can see the growth of the company, but not how it will impact or change the market. Big impactful things lead to the biggest returns. If you pitch metrics and not vision, it’s hard to get excited.” – Teli SaaS Metrics There are two so-called metrics that Connect Ventures typically looks at before an investment. Customer/user engagement Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) “In the end, MRR doesn’t lie. It encapsulates everything — what’s the ARPA? What’s your ability to expand with a certain customer and add an upsell? And on the negative, it shows your ability to retain your customers and where you have unhealthy churn.” – Pietro Bezza It’s not just static MRR that is important to investors. Even more important are the trajectory and the velocity of your revenue growth. “In Series A, revenue is a general reference point, not a deciding factor.” – Jos White “The pace of growth matters more than the number.” – Mike Chalfen Business Keep it lean! David Skok listed “capital efficiency” as one of his top 6 qualities he looks for in a new investment. Sitar also touched on this point at SaaStock: “Unfortunately, leanness erodes as a company grows. As you have the money, you spend it. And then you built a fat business and the next round you raise needs to be even bigger. Yes, I think you need to raise money to scale, but I don’t think you need to raise as much as some companies do today.” This answer originally appeared on Quora. View the original thread here: What do investors look for in a B2B startup?

[INST] What do investors look for in a SaaS startup? [/INST]

I was lucky enough to be at SaaStock, a B2B SaaS conference in Dublin this past September. There was a big presence of SaaS investors, and one of the final sessions was a panel discussion with five different VCs: Mike Chalfen – Co-founder and Partner at Mosaic Ventures Gil Dibner – Venture Syndicate Lead, Angelist Syndicate Sitar Teli – Partner, Connect Ventures Conor Stanley – Founder, Tribal.vc Jos White – Notion Capital I took scrupulous notes and am happy to get to share them with you. I’ve sprinkled in other first-hand insight from my colleague Ed Shelley’s interview with Pietro Bezza, a co-founder and managing partner of Connect Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in London. And I rounded it out with some classic advice from David Skok. First, it’s important to keep in mind that specific focus will vary from VC to VC. “Some will swing between Product, Market, and Team” – Pietro Bezza But there are underlying themes that indicate what’s on any investor’s radar. Let’s get to it! Product When considering early stage investment, investors for a product that is “solving a real problem, with clear potential for PMF, and a big enough market to promise a big opportunity.” (Sitar Teli at SaaStock.) Sitar’s colleague, Pietro Bezza, expanded on that. Connect Ventures expects more of the product: “Product must be the answer to every strategic puzzle. It should be the foundation of solving the problem the founders want to tackle, but also it should be the answer for growth, for hiring strategy. And it should be the start of the company but also the growth engine.” Also, it’s not enough to adequately address the market’s need. Investors also want to see differentiation. What sets you apart from the competition? At SaaStock VCs discussed the technology at the foundation of your product, and also the design. “Technology is what differentiates from competition. Execution really matters, but you can hire for that. Technology is the only weapon.” – Gil Dibner “It’s key to understand UX design… I’d say that design and UX are fundamental. It’s not something you can copy; it’s part of the founders view of life. If it’s not part of the founder’s view of life, then it’s not part of the company’s view of life. Design and UX can be as differentiating as technology.” – Sitar Teli Founder Investors look for founders who have a unique insight into the market or the problem they’re solving. David Skok mentions this repeatedly, and Pietro Bezza mentioned something similar in our interview with him. Bezza called it “Founder-Market Fit.” It doesn’t require years of experience, domain expertise, or having the right professional network. Rather it’s about an intimate knowledge of the space and the need — plus an attuned, innovative perspective on how to solve it. In an era when markets shift and innovation cycles quickly, companies need to be agile in their response. “Technology companies keep surfing on all the changes. And only someone who really has a bond with the market can reimagine a product solution with great UX — that’s the key.” – Bezza That’s Founder-Market Fit. Of course, investors want to see drive, energy, and passion. The most appealing form and ferocity of these will vary from VC to VC. At Connect Ventures, they look for mission-driven founders. “Only someone who is mission-driven can expand the boundaries of their sector over time and go after big things.” – Bezza Other qualities? Solutions-oriented, not just wanting to build a company or explore an idea. “Strong opinions, loosely held”: Someone who will fight for what they think, but is also open to other points of view. Someone who will (and wants to) learn. Vision As in, have one. Think big — envision your idea after funding, at scale, going global. What kind of impact will your company have on the industry, on the world? But not only that, also be able to express this vision pointedly and persuasively. It seems investors don’t hear that enough! “I’d like to see a founder better articulate their vision — crisply, in a way that’s easy to grasp. It sounds simple, but actually it’s remarkable how few can do that in a way that is clear and compelling.” – Conor Stanley Other investors agreed. The vision is what sells them, because it is the vision — the big picture — that is enticing. Sitar went on to explain it’s especially important to articulate this vision during fundraising meetings — perhaps just as important as stressing numbers and performance metrics. “In meetings to raise, founders focus too much on KPIs and metrics. It’s not exciting. You can see the growth of the company, but not how it will impact or change the market. Big impactful things lead to the biggest returns. If you pitch metrics and not vision, it’s hard to get excited.” – Teli SaaS Metrics There are two so-called metrics that Connect Ventures typically looks at before an investment. Customer/user engagement Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) “In the end, MRR doesn’t lie. It encapsulates everything — what’s the ARPA? What’s your ability to expand with a certain customer and add an upsell? And on the negative, it shows your ability to retain your customers and where you have unhealthy churn.” – Pietro Bezza It’s not just static MRR that is important to investors. Even more important are the trajectory and the velocity of your revenue growth. “In Series A, revenue is a general reference point, not a deciding factor.” – Jos White “The pace of growth matters more than the number.” – Mike Chalfen Business Keep it lean! David Skok listed “capital efficiency” as one of his top 6 qualities he looks for in a new investment. Sitar also touched on this point at SaaStock: “Unfortunately, leanness erodes as a company grows. As you have the money, you spend it. And then you built a fat business and the next round you raise needs to be even bigger. Yes, I think you need to raise money to scale, but I don’t think you need to raise as much as some companies do today.” This answer originally appeared on Quora. View the original thread here: What do investors look for in a B2B startup?

<sys> [INST] What do investors look for in a SaaS startup? [/INST] I was lucky enough to be at SaaStock, a B2B SaaS conference in Dublin this past September. There was a big presence of SaaS investors, and one of the final sessions was a panel discussion with five different VCs: Mike Chalfen – Co-founder and Partner at Mosaic Ventures Gil Dibner – Venture Syndicate Lead, Angelist Syndicate Sitar Teli – Partner, Connect Ventures Conor Stanley – Founder, Tribal.vc Jos White – Notion Capital I took scrupulous notes and am happy to get to share them with you. I’ve sprinkled in other first-hand insight from my colleague Ed Shelley’s interview with Pietro Bezza, a co-founder and managing partner of Connect Ventures, an early-stage VC firm in London. And I rounded it out with some classic advice from David Skok. First, it’s important to keep in mind that specific focus will vary from VC to VC. “Some will swing between Product, Market, and Team” – Pietro Bezza But there are underlying themes that indicate what’s on any investor’s radar. Let’s get to it! Product When considering early stage investment, investors for a product that is “solving a real problem, with clear potential for PMF, and a big enough market to promise a big opportunity.” (Sitar Teli at SaaStock.) Sitar’s colleague, Pietro Bezza, expanded on that. Connect Ventures expects more of the product: “Product must be the answer to every strategic puzzle. It should be the foundation of solving the problem the founders want to tackle, but also it should be the answer for growth, for hiring strategy. And it should be the start of the company but also the growth engine.” Also, it’s not enough to adequately address the market’s need. Investors also want to see differentiation. What sets you apart from the competition? At SaaStock VCs discussed the technology at the foundation of your product, and also the design. “Technology is what differentiates from competition. Execution really matters, but you can hire for that. Technology is the only weapon.” – Gil Dibner “It’s key to understand UX design… I’d say that design and UX are fundamental. It’s not something you can copy; it’s part of the founders view of life. If it’s not part of the founder’s view of life, then it’s not part of the company’s view of life. Design and UX can be as differentiating as technology.” – Sitar Teli Founder Investors look for founders who have a unique insight into the market or the problem they’re solving. David Skok mentions this repeatedly, and Pietro Bezza mentioned something similar in our interview with him. Bezza called it “Founder-Market Fit.” It doesn’t require years of experience, domain expertise, or having the right professional network. Rather it’s about an intimate knowledge of the space and the need — plus an attuned, innovative perspective on how to solve it. In an era when markets shift and innovation cycles quickly, companies need to be agile in their response. “Technology companies keep surfing on all the changes. And only someone who really has a bond with the market can reimagine a product solution with great UX — that’s the key.” – Bezza That’s Founder-Market Fit. Of course, investors want to see drive, energy, and passion. The most appealing form and ferocity of these will vary from VC to VC. At Connect Ventures, they look for mission-driven founders. “Only someone who is mission-driven can expand the boundaries of their sector over time and go after big things.” – Bezza Other qualities? Solutions-oriented, not just wanting to build a company or explore an idea. “Strong opinions, loosely held”: Someone who will fight for what they think, but is also open to other points of view. Someone who will (and wants to) learn. Vision As in, have one. Think big — envision your idea after funding, at scale, going global. What kind of impact will your company have on the industry, on the world? But not only that, also be able to express this vision pointedly and persuasively. It seems investors don’t hear that enough! “I’d like to see a founder better articulate their vision — crisply, in a way that’s easy to grasp. It sounds simple, but actually it’s remarkable how few can do that in a way that is clear and compelling.” – Conor Stanley Other investors agreed. The vision is what sells them, because it is the vision — the big picture — that is enticing. Sitar went on to explain it’s especially important to articulate this vision during fundraising meetings — perhaps just as important as stressing numbers and performance metrics. “In meetings to raise, founders focus too much on KPIs and metrics. It’s not exciting. You can see the growth of the company, but not how it will impact or change the market. Big impactful things lead to the biggest returns. If you pitch metrics and not vision, it’s hard to get excited.” – Teli SaaS Metrics There are two so-called metrics that Connect Ventures typically looks at before an investment. Customer/user engagement Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) “In the end, MRR doesn’t lie. It encapsulates everything — what’s the ARPA? What’s your ability to expand with a certain customer and add an upsell? And on the negative, it shows your ability to retain your customers and where you have unhealthy churn.” – Pietro Bezza It’s not just static MRR that is important to investors. Even more important are the trajectory and the velocity of your revenue growth. “In Series A, revenue is a general reference point, not a deciding factor.” – Jos White “The pace of growth matters more than the number.” – Mike Chalfen Business Keep it lean! David Skok listed “capital efficiency” as one of his top 6 qualities he looks for in a new investment. Sitar also touched on this point at SaaStock: “Unfortunately, leanness erodes as a company grows. As you have the money, you spend it. And then you built a fat business and the next round you raise needs to be even bigger. Yes, I think you need to raise money to scale, but I don’t think you need to raise as much as some companies do today.” This answer originally appeared on Quora. View the original thread here: What do investors look for in a B2B startup? </sys

Customer Profiles and Lists for Individualised Metrics and Subscription History. While we love new and interesting ways to display data, a simple list is oftentimes the best visualisation option. Customer lists let you filter, sort and search a complete list of your customers. Customer profiles give you key metrics on each individual customer, a list of their active and past subscriptions, and a complete history of their subscription activity. Both new features are now live on all ChartMogul plans. If you have any questions about either of these features please leave a comment on this post or email support@chartmogul.com

[INST] Customer Profiles and Lists for Individualised Metrics and Subscription History [/INST]

While we love new and interesting ways to display data, a simple list is oftentimes the best visualisation option. Customer lists let you filter, sort and search a complete list of your customers. Customer profiles give you key metrics on each individual customer, a list of their active and past subscriptions, and a complete history of their subscription activity. Both new features are now live on all ChartMogul plans. If you have any questions about either of these features please leave a comment on this post or email support@chartmogul.com

<sys> [INST] Customer Profiles and Lists for Individualised Metrics and Subscription History [/INST] While we love new and interesting ways to display data, a simple list is oftentimes the best visualisation option. Customer lists let you filter, sort and search a complete list of your customers. Customer profiles give you key metrics on each individual customer, a list of their active and past subscriptions, and a complete history of their subscription activity. Both new features are now live on all ChartMogul plans. If you have any questions about either of these features please leave a comment on this post or email support@chartmogul.com </sys

5 SaaS-Focused Podcast Episodes to Expand Your Mind. In the SaaS space there’s also some excellent and insightful podcast-based content, if you know where to find it. So here are the top shows we think you should subscribe to, as well as specific episode recommendations to get you off to a good SaaS-focused start. 1. a16z Podcast a16z is the podcast brought to you by Andreessen Horowitz, the rockstar venture capitalist firm with an investment portfolio to die for. The a16z podcast contains a wealth of insights you can use to grow your business, but I recommend you start with the episode: “Why SaaS revenue is more valuable than traditional sales” This episode essentially outlines the core benefits of a SaaS business, and why subscription revenue based products are booming. Recommended Episode 2. The SaaS Revolution Show (SaaScribe) SaaScribe is quickly becoming a vast channel full of great content – interviews with SaaS founders, industry insights and the latest news. Their podcast, The SaaS Revolution Show is no different. Recommended Episode This episode features an interview with Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer of Hubspot. Listen to this to get a number of insights into how he helped grow Hubspot from virtually zero to a SaaS behemoth. 3. Customer Success Radio (Tom Krackeler & Rachel English) Customer Success Radio is – you guessed it – focused on everything related to Customer Success. It’s brought to you by Frontleaf (now owned by Zuora). The episodes are all 20-25 mins in length, great for a quick listen on your commute. Recommended Episode Listen to episode 10, an interview with Customer Success evangelist Lincoln Murphy. Lincoln always has a ton of input when it comes to how Customer Success can be used as a tool to drive retention and user experience – his passion on the topic is infectious. 4. The Startup Chat (Steli Efti & Hiten Shah) Anyone running a SaaS business should be well versed with the highly prevalent personalities of Steli Efti and Hiten Shah. Steli co-founded Close.io, a SaaS for Inside Sales communication, and helps startups all over the world rock their sales process. Hiten co-founded KISSmetrics, a widely used web analytics platform. They are two of the biggest profiles in the B2B SaaS space, and between them they offer a fountain of knowledge on startups, as well as ton of infectious enthusiasm and anecdotes – twice a week! Recommended Episode Check out Episode 14, which is focused around sending cold email, and techniques for being more successful at this practice. 5. Ramp (Cara Hogan, InsightSquared) Cara Hogan of InsightSquared runs Ramp, an excellent podcast focused on SaaS, from more of a data-driven and analytics approach. There are some interviews with numerous thought leaders, and if you want to get highly in-depth and take away some improvements for your business then you shouldn’t miss any of them! Recommended Episode It’s got to be the Key Metrics for SaaS Success episode, featuring Jason Lemkin. Get up to speed on the SaaS metrics you should be measuring, with the co-founder and CEO of Storm Ventures.

[INST] 5 SaaS-Focused Podcast Episodes to Expand Your Mind [/INST]

In the SaaS space there’s also some excellent and insightful podcast-based content, if you know where to find it. So here are the top shows we think you should subscribe to, as well as specific episode recommendations to get you off to a good SaaS-focused start. 1. a16z Podcast a16z is the podcast brought to you by Andreessen Horowitz, the rockstar venture capitalist firm with an investment portfolio to die for. The a16z podcast contains a wealth of insights you can use to grow your business, but I recommend you start with the episode: “Why SaaS revenue is more valuable than traditional sales” This episode essentially outlines the core benefits of a SaaS business, and why subscription revenue based products are booming. Recommended Episode 2. The SaaS Revolution Show (SaaScribe) SaaScribe is quickly becoming a vast channel full of great content – interviews with SaaS founders, industry insights and the latest news. Their podcast, The SaaS Revolution Show is no different. Recommended Episode This episode features an interview with Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer of Hubspot. Listen to this to get a number of insights into how he helped grow Hubspot from virtually zero to a SaaS behemoth. 3. Customer Success Radio (Tom Krackeler & Rachel English) Customer Success Radio is – you guessed it – focused on everything related to Customer Success. It’s brought to you by Frontleaf (now owned by Zuora). The episodes are all 20-25 mins in length, great for a quick listen on your commute. Recommended Episode Listen to episode 10, an interview with Customer Success evangelist Lincoln Murphy. Lincoln always has a ton of input when it comes to how Customer Success can be used as a tool to drive retention and user experience – his passion on the topic is infectious. 4. The Startup Chat (Steli Efti & Hiten Shah) Anyone running a SaaS business should be well versed with the highly prevalent personalities of Steli Efti and Hiten Shah. Steli co-founded Close.io, a SaaS for Inside Sales communication, and helps startups all over the world rock their sales process. Hiten co-founded KISSmetrics, a widely used web analytics platform. They are two of the biggest profiles in the B2B SaaS space, and between them they offer a fountain of knowledge on startups, as well as ton of infectious enthusiasm and anecdotes – twice a week! Recommended Episode Check out Episode 14, which is focused around sending cold email, and techniques for being more successful at this practice. 5. Ramp (Cara Hogan, InsightSquared) Cara Hogan of InsightSquared runs Ramp, an excellent podcast focused on SaaS, from more of a data-driven and analytics approach. There are some interviews with numerous thought leaders, and if you want to get highly in-depth and take away some improvements for your business then you shouldn’t miss any of them! Recommended Episode It’s got to be the Key Metrics for SaaS Success episode, featuring Jason Lemkin. Get up to speed on the SaaS metrics you should be measuring, with the co-founder and CEO of Storm Ventures.

<sys> [INST] 5 SaaS-Focused Podcast Episodes to Expand Your Mind [/INST] In the SaaS space there’s also some excellent and insightful podcast-based content, if you know where to find it. So here are the top shows we think you should subscribe to, as well as specific episode recommendations to get you off to a good SaaS-focused start. 1. a16z Podcast a16z is the podcast brought to you by Andreessen Horowitz, the rockstar venture capitalist firm with an investment portfolio to die for. The a16z podcast contains a wealth of insights you can use to grow your business, but I recommend you start with the episode: “Why SaaS revenue is more valuable than traditional sales” This episode essentially outlines the core benefits of a SaaS business, and why subscription revenue based products are booming. Recommended Episode 2. The SaaS Revolution Show (SaaScribe) SaaScribe is quickly becoming a vast channel full of great content – interviews with SaaS founders, industry insights and the latest news. Their podcast, The SaaS Revolution Show is no different. Recommended Episode This episode features an interview with Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer of Hubspot. Listen to this to get a number of insights into how he helped grow Hubspot from virtually zero to a SaaS behemoth. 3. Customer Success Radio (Tom Krackeler & Rachel English) Customer Success Radio is – you guessed it – focused on everything related to Customer Success. It’s brought to you by Frontleaf (now owned by Zuora). The episodes are all 20-25 mins in length, great for a quick listen on your commute. Recommended Episode Listen to episode 10, an interview with Customer Success evangelist Lincoln Murphy. Lincoln always has a ton of input when it comes to how Customer Success can be used as a tool to drive retention and user experience – his passion on the topic is infectious. 4. The Startup Chat (Steli Efti & Hiten Shah) Anyone running a SaaS business should be well versed with the highly prevalent personalities of Steli Efti and Hiten Shah. Steli co-founded Close.io, a SaaS for Inside Sales communication, and helps startups all over the world rock their sales process. Hiten co-founded KISSmetrics, a widely used web analytics platform. They are two of the biggest profiles in the B2B SaaS space, and between them they offer a fountain of knowledge on startups, as well as ton of infectious enthusiasm and anecdotes – twice a week! Recommended Episode Check out Episode 14, which is focused around sending cold email, and techniques for being more successful at this practice. 5. Ramp (Cara Hogan, InsightSquared) Cara Hogan of InsightSquared runs Ramp, an excellent podcast focused on SaaS, from more of a data-driven and analytics approach. There are some interviews with numerous thought leaders, and if you want to get highly in-depth and take away some improvements for your business then you shouldn’t miss any of them! Recommended Episode It’s got to be the Key Metrics for SaaS Success episode, featuring Jason Lemkin. Get up to speed on the SaaS metrics you should be measuring, with the co-founder and CEO of Storm Ventures. </sys

Tips & Tricks: Segment your SaaS metrics by product usage. Segmentation in ChartMogul is completely flexible, allowing you to get the view of your data you want to see. One key application of this is discovering how product usage impacts metrics such as Customer Retention Rate, Trial-to-paid conversion rate and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Segmenting your metrics by product usage enables you to measure the correlation between user actions in your product (e.g. feature usage, login frequency, etc) and subscription metrics such as MRR. This also lets you compare how certain features or actions impact your conversion and retention rates. This article shows you how to achieve this, and is split into two parts: Tracking product usage Segmenting metrics by product usage Tracking product usage Note: Unless you’re already tracking product usage on your website, you may need a developer to help you set this up. How to capture product usage data You can track product usage with a number of analytics tools such as Kissmetrics, Intercom, Mixpanel (and many more). By adding product usage attributes to customers in ChartMogul, you can see the impact of product usage and features on metrics such as MRR, LTV, Customer Churn rate, and Net Cash Flow. You may already be tracking customer product usage in other software such as Segment or Intercom. In which case, you could use Zapier to send product events directly to ChartMogul as customer attributes. Tip: Learn how to add attributes to your customers in the ChartMogul Help Center. If you’re not already collecting customer-level product usage, you’ll need some help from a developer to start tracking customer attributes. You can track product usage using Ahoy.js, Purser.js, or with a custom script. You can add attributes to customers using the ChartMogul Enrichment API. You might find it useful to refer to the following article: Tracking marketing attributes with Purser JS. Pushing the data to ChartMogul Switching to hypothetical mode, lets say you run a subscription video on-demand (VOD) platform like Netflix and you wanted to answer the following question: Who is more likely to churn: Customers who watch House of Cards, or customers who watch Daredevil? To do this, you could track whether customers had watched either of the shows and push add an attribute into ChartMogul to represent that. For example, if a customer watched House of Cards, you could add the attribute ‘watched house of cards = true’ to the customer in ChartMogul. Once you’ve added an attribute to a customer in ChartMogul, it will appear on their customer profile, and in the ‘All Filters’ drop-down menu: Segmenting metrics by product usage Once you have added product usage attributes to your customers, it’s time to filter and segment your metrics in ChartMogul and get a view of your customers that’s specific to in-product actions. Viewing trial-to-paid conversion rate by product action You can analyze and improve your Trial-to-paid conversion rate by finding common in-app actions usually taken by leads who converted to paid. These actions are effectively conversion indicators you can use to optimize aspects of your product, like the onboarding experience. Using the method described above, add onboarding-related boolean attributes to your leads and customers, such as ‘created_account’, ‘invited_team_mates’, ‘imported_data’. These will be specific to your product. For example, Twitter might add the attributes ‘sent_first_tweet’ and ‘followed_5_people’ to their users. To see if a product action leads to a higher trial-to-paid conversion rate, follow these steps: In ChartMogul go to your Trial-to-paid conversion rate chart Click Add filter and select Invited team mates > is > true Click New segment and then click Add filter and select Invited team mates > is > false In the example below we can see that leads that invited team members were almost twice as likely to convert to paid. By adding onboarding attributes specific to your product, you can learn which actions are most frequently associated with leads that convert into paying customers. Viewing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) by feature usage You can see which features are associated with a higher LTV to drive future product development. If customers that use a particular feature set have a much higher LTV, this might indicate that expanding on the feature would increase revenue. Alternatively, driving wider adoption of this feature set might increase the LTV for your wider customer base. As before, using the method described above, add feature usage related attributes to your customers. For example, Twitter might add the attributes ‘number of times tweeted’ (integer) and ‘heavy user of direct messages’ (boolean) to their users. To see if feature usage is associated with a higher LTV, follow these steps: In ChartMogul go to your LTV chart Click Add filter and select (e.g.) Number of times used stories > greater than > 10 Click New segment and then click Add filter and select (e.g.) Number of times used stories > equal to or less than > 10 You can also define whether a customer is a heavy user of stories as a boolean (true/false) attribute. In the example below we can see that customers that are heavy users of the Messenger feature have a higher LTV than customers who use the Stories feature. By driving for a higher feature adoption of the Messenger feature, it’s possible that the LTV for your entire customer base would increase. What we learned In the examples above, we’ve seen that: Leads who invited other team members into our product are far more likely to convert to paid customers. Customers who heavily use our “Messenger” feature have a higher LTV than customers who use the “Stories” feature. Both of these insights can clearly contribute towards decisions around the product — particularly the onboarding experience and adoption of specific features. Next steps Now that we’ve built segments based around product usage, there’s a wealth insights waiting to be discovered. It could be incredibly useful to look at: The impact on churn rate generated by the adoption of a new feature A cohort analysis showing the retention over time of “power” users compared to other users. The MRR of customers who are not engaged with the product (and are therefore at risk of churn) As soon as you’re sending detailed product usage data to ChartMogul, all of the above analyses are quick and simple to achieve. Share your analysis Do you have a particular analysis in ChartMogul that has helped gain unique insights? Do you think it could help other users? Please send it to us at support@chartmogul.com.

[INST] Tips & Tricks: Segment your SaaS metrics by product usage [/INST]

Segmentation in ChartMogul is completely flexible, allowing you to get the view of your data you want to see. One key application of this is discovering how product usage impacts metrics such as Customer Retention Rate, Trial-to-paid conversion rate and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Segmenting your metrics by product usage enables you to measure the correlation between user actions in your product (e.g. feature usage, login frequency, etc) and subscription metrics such as MRR. This also lets you compare how certain features or actions impact your conversion and retention rates. This article shows you how to achieve this, and is split into two parts: Tracking product usage Segmenting metrics by product usage Tracking product usage Note: Unless you’re already tracking product usage on your website, you may need a developer to help you set this up. How to capture product usage data You can track product usage with a number of analytics tools such as Kissmetrics, Intercom, Mixpanel (and many more). By adding product usage attributes to customers in ChartMogul, you can see the impact of product usage and features on metrics such as MRR, LTV, Customer Churn rate, and Net Cash Flow. You may already be tracking customer product usage in other software such as Segment or Intercom. In which case, you could use Zapier to send product events directly to ChartMogul as customer attributes. Tip: Learn how to add attributes to your customers in the ChartMogul Help Center. If you’re not already collecting customer-level product usage, you’ll need some help from a developer to start tracking customer attributes. You can track product usage using Ahoy.js, Purser.js, or with a custom script. You can add attributes to customers using the ChartMogul Enrichment API. You might find it useful to refer to the following article: Tracking marketing attributes with Purser JS. Pushing the data to ChartMogul Switching to hypothetical mode, lets say you run a subscription video on-demand (VOD) platform like Netflix and you wanted to answer the following question: Who is more likely to churn: Customers who watch House of Cards, or customers who watch Daredevil? To do this, you could track whether customers had watched either of the shows and push add an attribute into ChartMogul to represent that. For example, if a customer watched House of Cards, you could add the attribute ‘watched house of cards = true’ to the customer in ChartMogul. Once you’ve added an attribute to a customer in ChartMogul, it will appear on their customer profile, and in the ‘All Filters’ drop-down menu: Segmenting metrics by product usage Once you have added product usage attributes to your customers, it’s time to filter and segment your metrics in ChartMogul and get a view of your customers that’s specific to in-product actions. Viewing trial-to-paid conversion rate by product action You can analyze and improve your Trial-to-paid conversion rate by finding common in-app actions usually taken by leads who converted to paid. These actions are effectively conversion indicators you can use to optimize aspects of your product, like the onboarding experience. Using the method described above, add onboarding-related boolean attributes to your leads and customers, such as ‘created_account’, ‘invited_team_mates’, ‘imported_data’. These will be specific to your product. For example, Twitter might add the attributes ‘sent_first_tweet’ and ‘followed_5_people’ to their users. To see if a product action leads to a higher trial-to-paid conversion rate, follow these steps: In ChartMogul go to your Trial-to-paid conversion rate chart Click Add filter and select Invited team mates > is > true Click New segment and then click Add filter and select Invited team mates > is > false In the example below we can see that leads that invited team members were almost twice as likely to convert to paid. By adding onboarding attributes specific to your product, you can learn which actions are most frequently associated with leads that convert into paying customers. Viewing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) by feature usage You can see which features are associated with a higher LTV to drive future product development. If customers that use a particular feature set have a much higher LTV, this might indicate that expanding on the feature would increase revenue. Alternatively, driving wider adoption of this feature set might increase the LTV for your wider customer base. As before, using the method described above, add feature usage related attributes to your customers. For example, Twitter might add the attributes ‘number of times tweeted’ (integer) and ‘heavy user of direct messages’ (boolean) to their users. To see if feature usage is associated with a higher LTV, follow these steps: In ChartMogul go to your LTV chart Click Add filter and select (e.g.) Number of times used stories > greater than > 10 Click New segment and then click Add filter and select (e.g.) Number of times used stories > equal to or less than > 10 You can also define whether a customer is a heavy user of stories as a boolean (true/false) attribute. In the example below we can see that customers that are heavy users of the Messenger feature have a higher LTV than customers who use the Stories feature. By driving for a higher feature adoption of the Messenger feature, it’s possible that the LTV for your entire customer base would increase. What we learned In the examples above, we’ve seen that: Leads who invited other team members into our product are far more likely to convert to paid customers. Customers who heavily use our “Messenger” feature have a higher LTV than customers who use the “Stories” feature. Both of these insights can clearly contribute towards decisions around the product — particularly the onboarding experience and adoption of specific features. Next steps Now that we’ve built segments based around product usage, there’s a wealth insights waiting to be discovered. It could be incredibly useful to look at: The impact on churn rate generated by the adoption of a new feature A cohort analysis showing the retention over time of “power” users compared to other users. The MRR of customers who are not engaged with the product (and are therefore at risk of churn) As soon as you’re sending detailed product usage data to ChartMogul, all of the above analyses are quick and simple to achieve. Share your analysis Do you have a particular analysis in ChartMogul that has helped gain unique insights? Do you think it could help other users? Please send it to us at support@chartmogul.com.

<sys> [INST] Tips & Tricks: Segment your SaaS metrics by product usage [/INST] Segmentation in ChartMogul is completely flexible, allowing you to get the view of your data you want to see. One key application of this is discovering how product usage impacts metrics such as Customer Retention Rate, Trial-to-paid conversion rate and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Segmenting your metrics by product usage enables you to measure the correlation between user actions in your product (e.g. feature usage, login frequency, etc) and subscription metrics such as MRR. This also lets you compare how certain features or actions impact your conversion and retention rates. This article shows you how to achieve this, and is split into two parts: Tracking product usage Segmenting metrics by product usage Tracking product usage Note: Unless you’re already tracking product usage on your website, you may need a developer to help you set this up. How to capture product usage data You can track product usage with a number of analytics tools such as Kissmetrics, Intercom, Mixpanel (and many more). By adding product usage attributes to customers in ChartMogul, you can see the impact of product usage and features on metrics such as MRR, LTV, Customer Churn rate, and Net Cash Flow. You may already be tracking customer product usage in other software such as Segment or Intercom. In which case, you could use Zapier to send product events directly to ChartMogul as customer attributes. Tip: Learn how to add attributes to your customers in the ChartMogul Help Center. If you’re not already collecting customer-level product usage, you’ll need some help from a developer to start tracking customer attributes. You can track product usage using Ahoy.js, Purser.js, or with a custom script. You can add attributes to customers using the ChartMogul Enrichment API. You might find it useful to refer to the following article: Tracking marketing attributes with Purser JS. Pushing the data to ChartMogul Switching to hypothetical mode, lets say you run a subscription video on-demand (VOD) platform like Netflix and you wanted to answer the following question: Who is more likely to churn: Customers who watch House of Cards, or customers who watch Daredevil? To do this, you could track whether customers had watched either of the shows and push add an attribute into ChartMogul to represent that. For example, if a customer watched House of Cards, you could add the attribute ‘watched house of cards = true’ to the customer in ChartMogul. Once you’ve added an attribute to a customer in ChartMogul, it will appear on their customer profile, and in the ‘All Filters’ drop-down menu: Segmenting metrics by product usage Once you have added product usage attributes to your customers, it’s time to filter and segment your metrics in ChartMogul and get a view of your customers that’s specific to in-product actions. Viewing trial-to-paid conversion rate by product action You can analyze and improve your Trial-to-paid conversion rate by finding common in-app actions usually taken by leads who converted to paid. These actions are effectively conversion indicators you can use to optimize aspects of your product, like the onboarding experience. Using the method described above, add onboarding-related boolean attributes to your leads and customers, such as ‘created_account’, ‘invited_team_mates’, ‘imported_data’. These will be specific to your product. For example, Twitter might add the attributes ‘sent_first_tweet’ and ‘followed_5_people’ to their users. To see if a product action leads to a higher trial-to-paid conversion rate, follow these steps: In ChartMogul go to your Trial-to-paid conversion rate chart Click Add filter and select Invited team mates > is > true Click New segment and then click Add filter and select Invited team mates > is > false In the example below we can see that leads that invited team members were almost twice as likely to convert to paid. By adding onboarding attributes specific to your product, you can learn which actions are most frequently associated with leads that convert into paying customers. Viewing Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) by feature usage You can see which features are associated with a higher LTV to drive future product development. If customers that use a particular feature set have a much higher LTV, this might indicate that expanding on the feature would increase revenue. Alternatively, driving wider adoption of this feature set might increase the LTV for your wider customer base. As before, using the method described above, add feature usage related attributes to your customers. For example, Twitter might add the attributes ‘number of times tweeted’ (integer) and ‘heavy user of direct messages’ (boolean) to their users. To see if feature usage is associated with a higher LTV, follow these steps: In ChartMogul go to your LTV chart Click Add filter and select (e.g.) Number of times used stories > greater than > 10 Click New segment and then click Add filter and select (e.g.) Number of times used stories > equal to or less than > 10 You can also define whether a customer is a heavy user of stories as a boolean (true/false) attribute. In the example below we can see that customers that are heavy users of the Messenger feature have a higher LTV than customers who use the Stories feature. By driving for a higher feature adoption of the Messenger feature, it’s possible that the LTV for your entire customer base would increase. What we learned In the examples above, we’ve seen that: Leads who invited other team members into our product are far more likely to convert to paid customers. Customers who heavily use our “Messenger” feature have a higher LTV than customers who use the “Stories” feature. Both of these insights can clearly contribute towards decisions around the product — particularly the onboarding experience and adoption of specific features. Next steps Now that we’ve built segments based around product usage, there’s a wealth insights waiting to be discovered. It could be incredibly useful to look at: The impact on churn rate generated by the adoption of a new feature A cohort analysis showing the retention over time of “power” users compared to other users. The MRR of customers who are not engaged with the product (and are therefore at risk of churn) As soon as you’re sending detailed product usage data to ChartMogul, all of the above analyses are quick and simple to achieve. Share your analysis Do you have a particular analysis in ChartMogul that has helped gain unique insights? Do you think it could help other users? Please send it to us at support@chartmogul.com. </sys

SaaS landing pages in 2017: Our analysis of 100+ top businesses. By popular demand… Our last landing page analysis is still one the most popular articles on ChartMogul. Given that it’s been 18 months since we did that run-down of the state-of-play for SaaS websites, it’s definitely time to revisit the topic. Conventions and trends in website design change rapidly. Big businesses are expected to roll out redesigns to keep their site fresh every few months, while specific UX patterns or trends spread like wildfire throughout the industry once they’re proven to increase page performance (or rather, once someone has blogged about them). We included all of the 40+ companies from the previous analysis, as well as many more. This time the total is over 100 landing pages, each from the B2B SaaS industry — from smaller startups to big-name brands like Salesforce and Google. Why the fascination? Regardless of company size, product or target customer, the landing page is often a user’s first contact with your brand. Even if not, it’s always the canonical representation of your brand and your company’s offering. In an age of large-scale social platforms and advertising, your website is likely to be the one remaining web property over which you have complete control. You define the design, copy, layout and behavior of your site, and it’s for this reason that landing page design is such a huge consideration for every business. Unlike that sponsored post on Facebook or the article you published on Medium, you have the possibility to create a huge advantage through a compelling, convincing landing page that converts users to customers. So here it is – our updated 2017 landing page analysis! WARNING: This article is packed with statistics and findings. If it’s a little overwhelming, don’t worry — we’ll be unpacking some of these in the coming weeks. This post is split up into 8 parts, covering different aspects of B2B landing pages and each featuring examples: Navigation Page length & scrolling The Hero The Headline The Call To Action (CTA) Social Proof Video Other findings Browse the landing pages As before, you can find a collection of every landing page screenshot here on Pinterest: Part 1: Navigation Navigation is the backbone of any website. While there are a few different conventions for allowing users to navigate a site, in the world of B2B SaaS, people usually have a single expectation: It’s at the top, and flows from left to right. You wouldn’t think that this allows much room for creativity when designing a landing page, but the sites included in our study showed some interesting variations on the “norm”. Why it matters Navigation is how users orientate themselves when they first land on a website. It defines the core structure of the information presented — which in the case of most SaaS sites includes features of the product, pricing, details on the company itself, etc. What we learned Keep the structure simple The average number of navigation items in the menu remains identical from our 2015 analysis at 4.3. Keep the structure simple. There should be no reason to have more than 4-5 top-level navigational links. Things get more complex for multi-product companies, but most tend to include a “Products” menu item to accommodate this. Avoid hard-to-discover menus Don’t bury other pages in a ‘More’ item in the menu. This is completely blind for the user, who’s unlikely to click unless they know what to find there. Just 13% of landing pages included this “catch-all” item in the menu. Looking for a good alternative? Including a sitemap at the bottom of the page is a good idea, and helps human navigation as well as SEO. The majority of SaaS landing pages use a fixed (“sticky”) navigation menu. This reinforces a sense of the user’s location in the site structure at all times, and gives them a low-friction way out of the page they’re on, other than closing the tab. However, an increasing number of sites limited the number of navigation links while scrolling, some just displaying a signup button. This results in a Call To Action that’s always visible to the user — which is arguably a more elegant solution than spreading multiple CTA buttons down the length of the page. Example 1: Mapbox Mapbox reduces its navigation while scrolled to just two CTA buttons: Example 2: Pipedrive PipeDrive uses the hotly-debated “hamburger menu” for navigation (the user must click the three lines to open the nav menu). This was the only site in the whole study offering this style of navigation on desktop, although it’s far more common on mobile layouts. Perhaps their intention here is to reduce clutter and encourage visitors to scroll on the landing page? Less control for the user, more opportunity for the company to define and push users through the optimal navigational flow. Part 2: Page length & Scrolling Just as with our previous analysis, we analyzed the page length of each landing page — looking at what this means for user scrolling on a typical desktop screen resolution. Scrolling is not necessarily bad, however. Various studies have shown that scrolling is a more natural interaction for users — if it’s not clear what to do on a page, generally people will scroll down. Our study shows that companies take different approaches to spreading their content out, some opting for multiple small pages and others fitting all critical product information on the landing page itself. This year we have a different king of (short) page length: Slack! Here’s a visual overview of the page length data: Part 3: The Hero Why it matters If the landing page is the user’s first impression of your website, the hero section serves as the user’s first impression of your landing page. If you’re going to shock, wow or ultimately impress your visitor, this is the place you need to do it. What we learned Leverage humans 73% of the landing pages we analyzed showed people — many of these shown within the hero section. Human faces are proven to grab attention, and for a category like SaaS which is not inherently emotional in its nature, this is one of the most effective ways to convey or inspire emotion amongst visitors. Video is mainstream 53% of landing pages use video of some kind to convey product value to the user as quickly as possible. Videos are proven to be more engaging than images in certain contexts, so it makes sense that more businesses are leveraging the format, in spite of the high cost to create. Even in 2015, studies showed that 4X as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. In this year’s study, we saw this taking two forms: A big ‘play’ button over the image to get users into the product video as smoothly as possible. A silent video background on the hero section, previewing the full product video (which users could choose to play). Showcase your customers For the first time, we saw customers showcased in the Hero section, rather than visuals from the product or company itself. This is an interesting strategy which really brings case studies and customer success stories to the forefront. If the product itself isn’t inherently visual (i.e. API-based), leveraging your customers could be a great way to boost user engagement on your site. Example 1: New Relic New Relic has embraced their customer brands in a big way, in the hero. And when you have a brand as big as MLB in your customer base, why wouldn’t you? Example 2: Vend Vend’s intentions are clear here — video-first. The oversized play button is incredibly enticing, and probably the first click for many visitors to the site. Part 4: The Headline No hero is complete without an accompanying headline. The headline (usually one sentence) is basically your initial product pitch, and needs to grab attention in the same way that the image does. So how do you grab attention with copy? We saw a few different strategies in our analysis: Simply state what your product is, e.g. “Simple design, prototyping and collaboration.” (Marvel) State what your customer can do with your product, e.g. “Get ready to sell Smarter, Better, Faster.” (Zoho CRM) State something aspirational and/or provocative to grab attention, e.g. “Powering Subscription Success” (Recurly) (NEW) Outline the problem your product solves, e.g. “Help desk software isn’t helpful anymore.” (Kayako) From our data, Number 2 is by far the most-used type of headline. In 2017 it’s common knowledge that telling people what your product does is less effective than telling them what they can do with your product. Or as was very eloquently stated: “People don’t buy products — they buy better versions of themselves.” (and just for tradition’s sake, here’s the over-used Mario analogy). What we learned The average headline length (6 words) remains almost unchanged from our last analysis. What we did see however, is some more creative uses of language and page design to stand out from what is widely-accepted as the standard for most sites. Here’s a word cloud representing frequency of words in all of the headlines in the analysis: Example 1: Asana I love this headline from Asana. At just three words, you’d think it would be too vague to convey the product’s true value (so many businesses end up with “grow your business”), but it still gives a sense of what Asana the product is about: Reducing friction, organizing teams to get work done. It also conveys all of this in a positive light — the notion of moving forward is always positive. Example 2: bridge Bridge are doing something that is increasingly popular in landing page headlines — they use animation to morph the headline and play on an overall theme that fits the value of their product. In this case, the value is “getting smarter” (it’s a learning platform) and they’re highlighting how each role does better at their job when they’re “smarter”. Slack jumped on this fairly early with their “A messaging app for _______ “ scrolling headline (which is no longer used). Part 5: The Call To Action (CTA) The Call To Action (CTA) is the one action that every single element on the landing page is trying to get your user to take. Clicking a CTA indicates that the user has made a choice — either that they want more information or they want to sign up — it’s represents a definite “win”. What we learned Given that the CTA is such a pivotal part of any landing page, it’s obviously the object of a lot of debate. The key decisions are: What text to use (hint: Over 90% are less than 5 words in length) What color to use (hint: Nearly 70% of all CTAs are green or blue) Where to place it (hint: Many sites duplicate the primary CTA or make it ‘sticky’) The above decisions, given so much multi-variant testing of sites today, are not as difficult as they used to be. For the text, the most successful CTAs reflect the action that the user is taking by clicking the button, as explicitly as possible (while also remaining brief in length). “Sign up” is not as explicit as “Sign up for free 2-week trial”. Don’t ignore the data CTA button color must be one of the most split-tested web page variables in history. Our data shows a very clear preference towards green or blue. Again, these are colors that are proven to have a positive effect on users, psychologically. Green is filled with positivity, while blue is calming: Use secondary CTAs for Enterprise In many ways, having a secondary CTA next to the main one breaks many of the rules of CTAs: “There should be one and only one action that the user can take.” What we’re seeing this year in SaaS is the rise of a second (usually less prominent) CTA next to the trial signup, allowing users to request a demo. The goal is to catch those users who are, for whatever reason, not ready to do a self-service signup, but want to have a discussion and see more of the product. Typically, enterprise customers are not likely to self-sign-up, so this strategy effectively adds an “I’m Enterprise – please sell to me in the way I’m accustomed to” button. Inline forms smooth the signup friction A bigger trend we see this years is the decision to bring part (or all) of the signup form onto the landing page, next to the CTA. In other words, the user needs to enter some information as well as clicking the button on the landing page. You’d think this adds friction, right? What businesses are discovering is that asking for some information upfront has the following effects: It takes some friction from the next steps of the signup, and adds it to the first step. This does make the initial CTA harder for users to complete, but it smooths out the signup flow — they’re less likely to be overwhelmed with a huge form further down the funnel. If the user drops out of the sign up flow, you at least have them as an email lead. This is huge! Similar to abandoned shopping carts in eCommerce, a user who’s filled out their email and clicked the initial CTA (only to close the tab) CLEARLY has a strong interest in your product. With this method, you’ve got that person’s email — and therefore a well-qualified lead that you know had strong intent to purchase. Nurture away! We found that the majority (over 60%) of CTAs with inline form fields had just one field — the email. Many sites also went to the other extreme of capturing probably all the information required on the landing page, with six, seven or more form fields. This has the benefit of giving the user their account right away, without any further steps. The main learning here? Designing a signup flow is a game of balancing friction. Take it away from one step, you’ll probably have to add it in another step. It’s worth questioning whether you need all those form fields at all, or whether you can capture the information in other ways. Example 1: Segment Very solid CTA from Segment — captures email upfront, specifically requests “work” email, and has a fallback “Request a demo” secondary CTA. Example 2: Zendesk Zendesk’s latest rebranding comes with a clean visual style, which is echoed in the sharp copywriting across the site. Notice that the “demo” option is actually the primary CTA here, with the trial signup relegated to second place. This without a doubt reflects a push to onboard bigger accounts through their sales process. Part 6: Social Proof Social proof comes in a few different forms on landing pages: Customer testimonials (quotes) Links to case studies / customer stories Customer logos Social media embeds The purpose of social proof on a SaaS website is to remove hesitation and promote confidence in the user. The presence of recognisable brands or highly-positive quotes tells the user that they’re in good company — “if THIS successful business I respect uses X, it must be a quality product!” The strongest form of referral is word-of-mouth, and if done right, social proof can feel just a step away from that in effectiveness. The problem, of course, is that with every hopeful SaaS business pasting the logos of successful companies across their landing page, users might develop “blindness” to this technique. What we learned We’re becoming logo blind Customer logos are now often placed without any explanation. This reflects people’s familiarity with the technique, making the assumption that these logos are in fact customers. A word of warning: Some businesses have been shown to “fake it before they make it” and flat out lie about their customer base. Putting logos without explanation or linking to more detailed information on the customer puts you into the category of potentially faking your social proof. Possibly as a result of this, more businesses are making social proof a much deeper experience for users — some companies are putting their customer stories front and center on the site, with accompanying videos, podcasts and case studies taking center stage — sometimes ahead of product information (See the New Relic example in the Hero section above). Example 1: User Testing User testing use a fairly-typical bar underneath the hero, featuring some strong customer brands. What they do incredibly well is link through to a full Customer page complete with compelling customer stories, which really reinforce how they help those businesses succeed. Example 2: Webflow The team at Webflow have done a great job of leveraging social proof — particularly from social media. The language is strong here too, telling users not to “take our word for it”, and to check out the real feedback from real people. Displaying tweets in a native-feeling UI rather than plain text quotes reinforces the feeling that these are real comments. Example 3: Zenefits Similarly to ProsperWorks, Zenefits is leveraging their customer base at the forefront of their landing page. No product screenshot here – just a big smiling Tope Awotona of Calendly! A quote would have been nice here. Part 7: Video All data points and research on the use of video in Marketing suggest that the format wins hands down against static images. It’s considerably more expensive to create than static imagery, but with improved tooling and technology, that cost is coming down, to the extent where most startups can create a professional-looking demo video. What we learned We saw an increase in the number of sites using some form of video on their landing page this year – from 46% in 2015 to 54%. We saw video used for: Silent video backgrounds for the hero section Product demo videos Company culture or vision videos (perhaps more useful for hiring?) Customer testimonials However, the biggest noticeable change with regards to video was the placement. Landing pages today are putting over-sized play buttons front and center in the hero section. This suggests that the video is intended to be the first element of interaction when the user arrives on the page. From a purely anecdotal perspective, this makes sense to me. If I visit the website for a product or service and there’s a video available on the page, I’ll usually jump straight to playing it. From a Marketing perspective, video is an incredibly information-dense medium. You can convey a whole product, company, vision in a 30 second video, where it would have taken you a 10-page website with 25 clicks and tons of scrolling to convey the same level of information. Warning: Video is nuanced. There are subtleties that you’ve got to get right, to give the impression you’re aiming for. There’s a knife edge between seeming inspiring and professional and being amateurish and arrogant. Example 1: ProdPad When you land on the ProdPad website, the play button is right there. It has no explanation, and that’s fine — we know exactly what’s going to happen when we click it. In this case, the resulting product video is well thought out, simple and uplifting. Example 2: Samepage Samepage uses video in a different way. Their full-width video background on the hero section doesn’t explain the product, and obviously doesn’t have sound. What it does (and quite effectively) is set the tone for the theme of the product — team collaboration. It’s also a more effective way of using human faces to engage the user (even more than static imagery). Part 8: Other findings Content belongs everywhere In 2017, content is leaking from the blog to other parts of company websites, including the landing page. An increasing number of businesses are using small sections of their landing page to highlight recent content (can be downloadables, articles, etc.). This has a couple of key benefits: Keeps the landing page feeling dynamic, if recent content is regularly updated Helps with lead capture (in the case of “lead magnet” content that requires email signup) Helps establish the business as more than just a “product”, but also a thought leader in the space. Here’s a brilliant example from Kayako. Their content gets a whole section on the landing page, demonstrating how they’re dedicated to helping educate people on the topic of customer service: Free trial vs. demo Product demos (whether video or in-person) feature much more prominently this year on landing pages. As mentioned in the Call To Action section, there’s often a secondary CTA button for booking a demo, alongside the trial signup. Sometimes there’s no trial at all — only a demo! Obviously this is closely tied to the product itself, and the segment of the market they’re selling to. It is interesting however to see that less than half of landing pages offer just a trial alone. Check out the data on this here: The death of the full screenshot? Our last study saw an overwhelming number of “device” screenshots, where the full product screenshot is wrapped in a sleek looking (usually Apple-esque) device such as a laptop or smartphone. One trend we’ve seen in this year’s landing pages moves away from full screenshots, and focuses on extracting small elements of the user interface to showcase individual features and interactions. The technique is often done in a stylistic way, to emphasise or even abstract away from the real interface. I’m sure they weren’t the first, but Slack popularized this with their trendy product video a couple of years back: …And now we see an increasing number of landing pages highlighting small interactions in their UI, in a more isolated way. For example, HootSuite: Appendix: Data points Mean number of nav bar items: 4.3 63% of sites use a fixed (sticky) navigation menu 30% of landing pages use a chat widget Mean headline length: 39 characters 46% of CTA include the word ‘free’ 44% of CTA use uppercase text 34% of CTA have an inline form element Median no. of inline form fields: 1 92% of CTA buttons are less than 5 words in length 88% of landing pages headlines are less than 10 words in length Mean number of customer logos: 6 73% of landing pages include photos of people 53% of sites are using video

[INST] SaaS landing pages in 2017: Our analysis of 100+ top businesses [/INST]

By popular demand… Our last landing page analysis is still one the most popular articles on ChartMogul. Given that it’s been 18 months since we did that run-down of the state-of-play for SaaS websites, it’s definitely time to revisit the topic. Conventions and trends in website design change rapidly. Big businesses are expected to roll out redesigns to keep their site fresh every few months, while specific UX patterns or trends spread like wildfire throughout the industry once they’re proven to increase page performance (or rather, once someone has blogged about them). We included all of the 40+ companies from the previous analysis, as well as many more. This time the total is over 100 landing pages, each from the B2B SaaS industry — from smaller startups to big-name brands like Salesforce and Google. Why the fascination? Regardless of company size, product or target customer, the landing page is often a user’s first contact with your brand. Even if not, it’s always the canonical representation of your brand and your company’s offering. In an age of large-scale social platforms and advertising, your website is likely to be the one remaining web property over which you have complete control. You define the design, copy, layout and behavior of your site, and it’s for this reason that landing page design is such a huge consideration for every business. Unlike that sponsored post on Facebook or the article you published on Medium, you have the possibility to create a huge advantage through a compelling, convincing landing page that converts users to customers. So here it is – our updated 2017 landing page analysis! WARNING: This article is packed with statistics and findings. If it’s a little overwhelming, don’t worry — we’ll be unpacking some of these in the coming weeks. This post is split up into 8 parts, covering different aspects of B2B landing pages and each featuring examples: Navigation Page length & scrolling The Hero The Headline The Call To Action (CTA) Social Proof Video Other findings Browse the landing pages As before, you can find a collection of every landing page screenshot here on Pinterest: Part 1: Navigation Navigation is the backbone of any website. While there are a few different conventions for allowing users to navigate a site, in the world of B2B SaaS, people usually have a single expectation: It’s at the top, and flows from left to right. You wouldn’t think that this allows much room for creativity when designing a landing page, but the sites included in our study showed some interesting variations on the “norm”. Why it matters Navigation is how users orientate themselves when they first land on a website. It defines the core structure of the information presented — which in the case of most SaaS sites includes features of the product, pricing, details on the company itself, etc. What we learned Keep the structure simple The average number of navigation items in the menu remains identical from our 2015 analysis at 4.3. Keep the structure simple. There should be no reason to have more than 4-5 top-level navigational links. Things get more complex for multi-product companies, but most tend to include a “Products” menu item to accommodate this. Avoid hard-to-discover menus Don’t bury other pages in a ‘More’ item in the menu. This is completely blind for the user, who’s unlikely to click unless they know what to find there. Just 13% of landing pages included this “catch-all” item in the menu. Looking for a good alternative? Including a sitemap at the bottom of the page is a good idea, and helps human navigation as well as SEO. The majority of SaaS landing pages use a fixed (“sticky”) navigation menu. This reinforces a sense of the user’s location in the site structure at all times, and gives them a low-friction way out of the page they’re on, other than closing the tab. However, an increasing number of sites limited the number of navigation links while scrolling, some just displaying a signup button. This results in a Call To Action that’s always visible to the user — which is arguably a more elegant solution than spreading multiple CTA buttons down the length of the page. Example 1: Mapbox Mapbox reduces its navigation while scrolled to just two CTA buttons: Example 2: Pipedrive PipeDrive uses the hotly-debated “hamburger menu” for navigation (the user must click the three lines to open the nav menu). This was the only site in the whole study offering this style of navigation on desktop, although it’s far more common on mobile layouts. Perhaps their intention here is to reduce clutter and encourage visitors to scroll on the landing page? Less control for the user, more opportunity for the company to define and push users through the optimal navigational flow. Part 2: Page length & Scrolling Just as with our previous analysis, we analyzed the page length of each landing page — looking at what this means for user scrolling on a typical desktop screen resolution. Scrolling is not necessarily bad, however. Various studies have shown that scrolling is a more natural interaction for users — if it’s not clear what to do on a page, generally people will scroll down. Our study shows that companies take different approaches to spreading their content out, some opting for multiple small pages and others fitting all critical product information on the landing page itself. This year we have a different king of (short) page length: Slack! Here’s a visual overview of the page length data: Part 3: The Hero Why it matters If the landing page is the user’s first impression of your website, the hero section serves as the user’s first impression of your landing page. If you’re going to shock, wow or ultimately impress your visitor, this is the place you need to do it. What we learned Leverage humans 73% of the landing pages we analyzed showed people — many of these shown within the hero section. Human faces are proven to grab attention, and for a category like SaaS which is not inherently emotional in its nature, this is one of the most effective ways to convey or inspire emotion amongst visitors. Video is mainstream 53% of landing pages use video of some kind to convey product value to the user as quickly as possible. Videos are proven to be more engaging than images in certain contexts, so it makes sense that more businesses are leveraging the format, in spite of the high cost to create. Even in 2015, studies showed that 4X as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. In this year’s study, we saw this taking two forms: A big ‘play’ button over the image to get users into the product video as smoothly as possible. A silent video background on the hero section, previewing the full product video (which users could choose to play). Showcase your customers For the first time, we saw customers showcased in the Hero section, rather than visuals from the product or company itself. This is an interesting strategy which really brings case studies and customer success stories to the forefront. If the product itself isn’t inherently visual (i.e. API-based), leveraging your customers could be a great way to boost user engagement on your site. Example 1: New Relic New Relic has embraced their customer brands in a big way, in the hero. And when you have a brand as big as MLB in your customer base, why wouldn’t you? Example 2: Vend Vend’s intentions are clear here — video-first. The oversized play button is incredibly enticing, and probably the first click for many visitors to the site. Part 4: The Headline No hero is complete without an accompanying headline. The headline (usually one sentence) is basically your initial product pitch, and needs to grab attention in the same way that the image does. So how do you grab attention with copy? We saw a few different strategies in our analysis: Simply state what your product is, e.g. “Simple design, prototyping and collaboration.” (Marvel) State what your customer can do with your product, e.g. “Get ready to sell Smarter, Better, Faster.” (Zoho CRM) State something aspirational and/or provocative to grab attention, e.g. “Powering Subscription Success” (Recurly) (NEW) Outline the problem your product solves, e.g. “Help desk software isn’t helpful anymore.” (Kayako) From our data, Number 2 is by far the most-used type of headline. In 2017 it’s common knowledge that telling people what your product does is less effective than telling them what they can do with your product. Or as was very eloquently stated: “People don’t buy products — they buy better versions of themselves.” (and just for tradition’s sake, here’s the over-used Mario analogy). What we learned The average headline length (6 words) remains almost unchanged from our last analysis. What we did see however, is some more creative uses of language and page design to stand out from what is widely-accepted as the standard for most sites. Here’s a word cloud representing frequency of words in all of the headlines in the analysis: Example 1: Asana I love this headline from Asana. At just three words, you’d think it would be too vague to convey the product’s true value (so many businesses end up with “grow your business”), but it still gives a sense of what Asana the product is about: Reducing friction, organizing teams to get work done. It also conveys all of this in a positive light — the notion of moving forward is always positive. Example 2: bridge Bridge are doing something that is increasingly popular in landing page headlines — they use animation to morph the headline and play on an overall theme that fits the value of their product. In this case, the value is “getting smarter” (it’s a learning platform) and they’re highlighting how each role does better at their job when they’re “smarter”. Slack jumped on this fairly early with their “A messaging app for _______ “ scrolling headline (which is no longer used). Part 5: The Call To Action (CTA) The Call To Action (CTA) is the one action that every single element on the landing page is trying to get your user to take. Clicking a CTA indicates that the user has made a choice — either that they want more information or they want to sign up — it’s represents a definite “win”. What we learned Given that the CTA is such a pivotal part of any landing page, it’s obviously the object of a lot of debate. The key decisions are: What text to use (hint: Over 90% are less than 5 words in length) What color to use (hint: Nearly 70% of all CTAs are green or blue) Where to place it (hint: Many sites duplicate the primary CTA or make it ‘sticky’) The above decisions, given so much multi-variant testing of sites today, are not as difficult as they used to be. For the text, the most successful CTAs reflect the action that the user is taking by clicking the button, as explicitly as possible (while also remaining brief in length). “Sign up” is not as explicit as “Sign up for free 2-week trial”. Don’t ignore the data CTA button color must be one of the most split-tested web page variables in history. Our data shows a very clear preference towards green or blue. Again, these are colors that are proven to have a positive effect on users, psychologically. Green is filled with positivity, while blue is calming: Use secondary CTAs for Enterprise In many ways, having a secondary CTA next to the main one breaks many of the rules of CTAs: “There should be one and only one action that the user can take.” What we’re seeing this year in SaaS is the rise of a second (usually less prominent) CTA next to the trial signup, allowing users to request a demo. The goal is to catch those users who are, for whatever reason, not ready to do a self-service signup, but want to have a discussion and see more of the product. Typically, enterprise customers are not likely to self-sign-up, so this strategy effectively adds an “I’m Enterprise – please sell to me in the way I’m accustomed to” button. Inline forms smooth the signup friction A bigger trend we see this years is the decision to bring part (or all) of the signup form onto the landing page, next to the CTA. In other words, the user needs to enter some information as well as clicking the button on the landing page. You’d think this adds friction, right? What businesses are discovering is that asking for some information upfront has the following effects: It takes some friction from the next steps of the signup, and adds it to the first step. This does make the initial CTA harder for users to complete, but it smooths out the signup flow — they’re less likely to be overwhelmed with a huge form further down the funnel. If the user drops out of the sign up flow, you at least have them as an email lead. This is huge! Similar to abandoned shopping carts in eCommerce, a user who’s filled out their email and clicked the initial CTA (only to close the tab) CLEARLY has a strong interest in your product. With this method, you’ve got that person’s email — and therefore a well-qualified lead that you know had strong intent to purchase. Nurture away! We found that the majority (over 60%) of CTAs with inline form fields had just one field — the email. Many sites also went to the other extreme of capturing probably all the information required on the landing page, with six, seven or more form fields. This has the benefit of giving the user their account right away, without any further steps. The main learning here? Designing a signup flow is a game of balancing friction. Take it away from one step, you’ll probably have to add it in another step. It’s worth questioning whether you need all those form fields at all, or whether you can capture the information in other ways. Example 1: Segment Very solid CTA from Segment — captures email upfront, specifically requests “work” email, and has a fallback “Request a demo” secondary CTA. Example 2: Zendesk Zendesk’s latest rebranding comes with a clean visual style, which is echoed in the sharp copywriting across the site. Notice that the “demo” option is actually the primary CTA here, with the trial signup relegated to second place. This without a doubt reflects a push to onboard bigger accounts through their sales process. Part 6: Social Proof Social proof comes in a few different forms on landing pages: Customer testimonials (quotes) Links to case studies / customer stories Customer logos Social media embeds The purpose of social proof on a SaaS website is to remove hesitation and promote confidence in the user. The presence of recognisable brands or highly-positive quotes tells the user that they’re in good company — “if THIS successful business I respect uses X, it must be a quality product!” The strongest form of referral is word-of-mouth, and if done right, social proof can feel just a step away from that in effectiveness. The problem, of course, is that with every hopeful SaaS business pasting the logos of successful companies across their landing page, users might develop “blindness” to this technique. What we learned We’re becoming logo blind Customer logos are now often placed without any explanation. This reflects people’s familiarity with the technique, making the assumption that these logos are in fact customers. A word of warning: Some businesses have been shown to “fake it before they make it” and flat out lie about their customer base. Putting logos without explanation or linking to more detailed information on the customer puts you into the category of potentially faking your social proof. Possibly as a result of this, more businesses are making social proof a much deeper experience for users — some companies are putting their customer stories front and center on the site, with accompanying videos, podcasts and case studies taking center stage — sometimes ahead of product information (See the New Relic example in the Hero section above). Example 1: User Testing User testing use a fairly-typical bar underneath the hero, featuring some strong customer brands. What they do incredibly well is link through to a full Customer page complete with compelling customer stories, which really reinforce how they help those businesses succeed. Example 2: Webflow The team at Webflow have done a great job of leveraging social proof — particularly from social media. The language is strong here too, telling users not to “take our word for it”, and to check out the real feedback from real people. Displaying tweets in a native-feeling UI rather than plain text quotes reinforces the feeling that these are real comments. Example 3: Zenefits Similarly to ProsperWorks, Zenefits is leveraging their customer base at the forefront of their landing page. No product screenshot here – just a big smiling Tope Awotona of Calendly! A quote would have been nice here. Part 7: Video All data points and research on the use of video in Marketing suggest that the format wins hands down against static images. It’s considerably more expensive to create than static imagery, but with improved tooling and technology, that cost is coming down, to the extent where most startups can create a professional-looking demo video. What we learned We saw an increase in the number of sites using some form of video on their landing page this year – from 46% in 2015 to 54%. We saw video used for: Silent video backgrounds for the hero section Product demo videos Company culture or vision videos (perhaps more useful for hiring?) Customer testimonials However, the biggest noticeable change with regards to video was the placement. Landing pages today are putting over-sized play buttons front and center in the hero section. This suggests that the video is intended to be the first element of interaction when the user arrives on the page. From a purely anecdotal perspective, this makes sense to me. If I visit the website for a product or service and there’s a video available on the page, I’ll usually jump straight to playing it. From a Marketing perspective, video is an incredibly information-dense medium. You can convey a whole product, company, vision in a 30 second video, where it would have taken you a 10-page website with 25 clicks and tons of scrolling to convey the same level of information. Warning: Video is nuanced. There are subtleties that you’ve got to get right, to give the impression you’re aiming for. There’s a knife edge between seeming inspiring and professional and being amateurish and arrogant. Example 1: ProdPad When you land on the ProdPad website, the play button is right there. It has no explanation, and that’s fine — we know exactly what’s going to happen when we click it. In this case, the resulting product video is well thought out, simple and uplifting. Example 2: Samepage Samepage uses video in a different way. Their full-width video background on the hero section doesn’t explain the product, and obviously doesn’t have sound. What it does (and quite effectively) is set the tone for the theme of the product — team collaboration. It’s also a more effective way of using human faces to engage the user (even more than static imagery). Part 8: Other findings Content belongs everywhere In 2017, content is leaking from the blog to other parts of company websites, including the landing page. An increasing number of businesses are using small sections of their landing page to highlight recent content (can be downloadables, articles, etc.). This has a couple of key benefits: Keeps the landing page feeling dynamic, if recent content is regularly updated Helps with lead capture (in the case of “lead magnet” content that requires email signup) Helps establish the business as more than just a “product”, but also a thought leader in the space. Here’s a brilliant example from Kayako. Their content gets a whole section on the landing page, demonstrating how they’re dedicated to helping educate people on the topic of customer service: Free trial vs. demo Product demos (whether video or in-person) feature much more prominently this year on landing pages. As mentioned in the Call To Action section, there’s often a secondary CTA button for booking a demo, alongside the trial signup. Sometimes there’s no trial at all — only a demo! Obviously this is closely tied to the product itself, and the segment of the market they’re selling to. It is interesting however to see that less than half of landing pages offer just a trial alone. Check out the data on this here: The death of the full screenshot? Our last study saw an overwhelming number of “device” screenshots, where the full product screenshot is wrapped in a sleek looking (usually Apple-esque) device such as a laptop or smartphone. One trend we’ve seen in this year’s landing pages moves away from full screenshots, and focuses on extracting small elements of the user interface to showcase individual features and interactions. The technique is often done in a stylistic way, to emphasise or even abstract away from the real interface. I’m sure they weren’t the first, but Slack popularized this with their trendy product video a couple of years back: …And now we see an increasing number of landing pages highlighting small interactions in their UI, in a more isolated way. For example, HootSuite: Appendix: Data points Mean number of nav bar items: 4.3 63% of sites use a fixed (sticky) navigation menu 30% of landing pages use a chat widget Mean headline length: 39 characters 46% of CTA include the word ‘free’ 44% of CTA use uppercase text 34% of CTA have an inline form element Median no. of inline form fields: 1 92% of CTA buttons are less than 5 words in length 88% of landing pages headlines are less than 10 words in length Mean number of customer logos: 6 73% of landing pages include photos of people 53% of sites are using video

<sys> [INST] SaaS landing pages in 2017: Our analysis of 100+ top businesses [/INST] By popular demand… Our last landing page analysis is still one the most popular articles on ChartMogul. Given that it’s been 18 months since we did that run-down of the state-of-play for SaaS websites, it’s definitely time to revisit the topic. Conventions and trends in website design change rapidly. Big businesses are expected to roll out redesigns to keep their site fresh every few months, while specific UX patterns or trends spread like wildfire throughout the industry once they’re proven to increase page performance (or rather, once someone has blogged about them). We included all of the 40+ companies from the previous analysis, as well as many more. This time the total is over 100 landing pages, each from the B2B SaaS industry — from smaller startups to big-name brands like Salesforce and Google. Why the fascination? Regardless of company size, product or target customer, the landing page is often a user’s first contact with your brand. Even if not, it’s always the canonical representation of your brand and your company’s offering. In an age of large-scale social platforms and advertising, your website is likely to be the one remaining web property over which you have complete control. You define the design, copy, layout and behavior of your site, and it’s for this reason that landing page design is such a huge consideration for every business. Unlike that sponsored post on Facebook or the article you published on Medium, you have the possibility to create a huge advantage through a compelling, convincing landing page that converts users to customers. So here it is – our updated 2017 landing page analysis! WARNING: This article is packed with statistics and findings. If it’s a little overwhelming, don’t worry — we’ll be unpacking some of these in the coming weeks. This post is split up into 8 parts, covering different aspects of B2B landing pages and each featuring examples: Navigation Page length & scrolling The Hero The Headline The Call To Action (CTA) Social Proof Video Other findings Browse the landing pages As before, you can find a collection of every landing page screenshot here on Pinterest: Part 1: Navigation Navigation is the backbone of any website. While there are a few different conventions for allowing users to navigate a site, in the world of B2B SaaS, people usually have a single expectation: It’s at the top, and flows from left to right. You wouldn’t think that this allows much room for creativity when designing a landing page, but the sites included in our study showed some interesting variations on the “norm”. Why it matters Navigation is how users orientate themselves when they first land on a website. It defines the core structure of the information presented — which in the case of most SaaS sites includes features of the product, pricing, details on the company itself, etc. What we learned Keep the structure simple The average number of navigation items in the menu remains identical from our 2015 analysis at 4.3. Keep the structure simple. There should be no reason to have more than 4-5 top-level navigational links. Things get more complex for multi-product companies, but most tend to include a “Products” menu item to accommodate this. Avoid hard-to-discover menus Don’t bury other pages in a ‘More’ item in the menu. This is completely blind for the user, who’s unlikely to click unless they know what to find there. Just 13% of landing pages included this “catch-all” item in the menu. Looking for a good alternative? Including a sitemap at the bottom of the page is a good idea, and helps human navigation as well as SEO. The majority of SaaS landing pages use a fixed (“sticky”) navigation menu. This reinforces a sense of the user’s location in the site structure at all times, and gives them a low-friction way out of the page they’re on, other than closing the tab. However, an increasing number of sites limited the number of navigation links while scrolling, some just displaying a signup button. This results in a Call To Action that’s always visible to the user — which is arguably a more elegant solution than spreading multiple CTA buttons down the length of the page. Example 1: Mapbox Mapbox reduces its navigation while scrolled to just two CTA buttons: Example 2: Pipedrive PipeDrive uses the hotly-debated “hamburger menu” for navigation (the user must click the three lines to open the nav menu). This was the only site in the whole study offering this style of navigation on desktop, although it’s far more common on mobile layouts. Perhaps their intention here is to reduce clutter and encourage visitors to scroll on the landing page? Less control for the user, more opportunity for the company to define and push users through the optimal navigational flow. Part 2: Page length & Scrolling Just as with our previous analysis, we analyzed the page length of each landing page — looking at what this means for user scrolling on a typical desktop screen resolution. Scrolling is not necessarily bad, however. Various studies have shown that scrolling is a more natural interaction for users — if it’s not clear what to do on a page, generally people will scroll down. Our study shows that companies take different approaches to spreading their content out, some opting for multiple small pages and others fitting all critical product information on the landing page itself. This year we have a different king of (short) page length: Slack! Here’s a visual overview of the page length data: Part 3: The Hero Why it matters If the landing page is the user’s first impression of your website, the hero section serves as the user’s first impression of your landing page. If you’re going to shock, wow or ultimately impress your visitor, this is the place you need to do it. What we learned Leverage humans 73% of the landing pages we analyzed showed people — many of these shown within the hero section. Human faces are proven to grab attention, and for a category like SaaS which is not inherently emotional in its nature, this is one of the most effective ways to convey or inspire emotion amongst visitors. Video is mainstream 53% of landing pages use video of some kind to convey product value to the user as quickly as possible. Videos are proven to be more engaging than images in certain contexts, so it makes sense that more businesses are leveraging the format, in spite of the high cost to create. Even in 2015, studies showed that 4X as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. In this year’s study, we saw this taking two forms: A big ‘play’ button over the image to get users into the product video as smoothly as possible. A silent video background on the hero section, previewing the full product video (which users could choose to play). Showcase your customers For the first time, we saw customers showcased in the Hero section, rather than visuals from the product or company itself. This is an interesting strategy which really brings case studies and customer success stories to the forefront. If the product itself isn’t inherently visual (i.e. API-based), leveraging your customers could be a great way to boost user engagement on your site. Example 1: New Relic New Relic has embraced their customer brands in a big way, in the hero. And when you have a brand as big as MLB in your customer base, why wouldn’t you? Example 2: Vend Vend’s intentions are clear here — video-first. The oversized play button is incredibly enticing, and probably the first click for many visitors to the site. Part 4: The Headline No hero is complete without an accompanying headline. The headline (usually one sentence) is basically your initial product pitch, and needs to grab attention in the same way that the image does. So how do you grab attention with copy? We saw a few different strategies in our analysis: Simply state what your product is, e.g. “Simple design, prototyping and collaboration.” (Marvel) State what your customer can do with your product, e.g. “Get ready to sell Smarter, Better, Faster.” (Zoho CRM) State something aspirational and/or provocative to grab attention, e.g. “Powering Subscription Success” (Recurly) (NEW) Outline the problem your product solves, e.g. “Help desk software isn’t helpful anymore.” (Kayako) From our data, Number 2 is by far the most-used type of headline. In 2017 it’s common knowledge that telling people what your product does is less effective than telling them what they can do with your product. Or as was very eloquently stated: “People don’t buy products — they buy better versions of themselves.” (and just for tradition’s sake, here’s the over-used Mario analogy). What we learned The average headline length (6 words) remains almost unchanged from our last analysis. What we did see however, is some more creative uses of language and page design to stand out from what is widely-accepted as the standard for most sites. Here’s a word cloud representing frequency of words in all of the headlines in the analysis: Example 1: Asana I love this headline from Asana. At just three words, you’d think it would be too vague to convey the product’s true value (so many businesses end up with “grow your business”), but it still gives a sense of what Asana the product is about: Reducing friction, organizing teams to get work done. It also conveys all of this in a positive light — the notion of moving forward is always positive. Example 2: bridge Bridge are doing something that is increasingly popular in landing page headlines — they use animation to morph the headline and play on an overall theme that fits the value of their product. In this case, the value is “getting smarter” (it’s a learning platform) and they’re highlighting how each role does better at their job when they’re “smarter”. Slack jumped on this fairly early with their “A messaging app for _______ “ scrolling headline (which is no longer used). Part 5: The Call To Action (CTA) The Call To Action (CTA) is the one action that every single element on the landing page is trying to get your user to take. Clicking a CTA indicates that the user has made a choice — either that they want more information or they want to sign up — it’s represents a definite “win”. What we learned Given that the CTA is such a pivotal part of any landing page, it’s obviously the object of a lot of debate. The key decisions are: What text to use (hint: Over 90% are less than 5 words in length) What color to use (hint: Nearly 70% of all CTAs are green or blue) Where to place it (hint: Many sites duplicate the primary CTA or make it ‘sticky’) The above decisions, given so much multi-variant testing of sites today, are not as difficult as they used to be. For the text, the most successful CTAs reflect the action that the user is taking by clicking the button, as explicitly as possible (while also remaining brief in length). “Sign up” is not as explicit as “Sign up for free 2-week trial”. Don’t ignore the data CTA button color must be one of the most split-tested web page variables in history. Our data shows a very clear preference towards green or blue. Again, these are colors that are proven to have a positive effect on users, psychologically. Green is filled with positivity, while blue is calming: Use secondary CTAs for Enterprise In many ways, having a secondary CTA next to the main one breaks many of the rules of CTAs: “There should be one and only one action that the user can take.” What we’re seeing this year in SaaS is the rise of a second (usually less prominent) CTA next to the trial signup, allowing users to request a demo. The goal is to catch those users who are, for whatever reason, not ready to do a self-service signup, but want to have a discussion and see more of the product. Typically, enterprise customers are not likely to self-sign-up, so this strategy effectively adds an “I’m Enterprise – please sell to me in the way I’m accustomed to” button. Inline forms smooth the signup friction A bigger trend we see this years is the decision to bring part (or all) of the signup form onto the landing page, next to the CTA. In other words, the user needs to enter some information as well as clicking the button on the landing page. You’d think this adds friction, right? What businesses are discovering is that asking for some information upfront has the following effects: It takes some friction from the next steps of the signup, and adds it to the first step. This does make the initial CTA harder for users to complete, but it smooths out the signup flow — they’re less likely to be overwhelmed with a huge form further down the funnel. If the user drops out of the sign up flow, you at least have them as an email lead. This is huge! Similar to abandoned shopping carts in eCommerce, a user who’s filled out their email and clicked the initial CTA (only to close the tab) CLEARLY has a strong interest in your product. With this method, you’ve got that person’s email — and therefore a well-qualified lead that you know had strong intent to purchase. Nurture away! We found that the majority (over 60%) of CTAs with inline form fields had just one field — the email. Many sites also went to the other extreme of capturing probably all the information required on the landing page, with six, seven or more form fields. This has the benefit of giving the user their account right away, without any further steps. The main learning here? Designing a signup flow is a game of balancing friction. Take it away from one step, you’ll probably have to add it in another step. It’s worth questioning whether you need all those form fields at all, or whether you can capture the information in other ways. Example 1: Segment Very solid CTA from Segment — captures email upfront, specifically requests “work” email, and has a fallback “Request a demo” secondary CTA. Example 2: Zendesk Zendesk’s latest rebranding comes with a clean visual style, which is echoed in the sharp copywriting across the site. Notice that the “demo” option is actually the primary CTA here, with the trial signup relegated to second place. This without a doubt reflects a push to onboard bigger accounts through their sales process. Part 6: Social Proof Social proof comes in a few different forms on landing pages: Customer testimonials (quotes) Links to case studies / customer stories Customer logos Social media embeds The purpose of social proof on a SaaS website is to remove hesitation and promote confidence in the user. The presence of recognisable brands or highly-positive quotes tells the user that they’re in good company — “if THIS successful business I respect uses X, it must be a quality product!” The strongest form of referral is word-of-mouth, and if done right, social proof can feel just a step away from that in effectiveness. The problem, of course, is that with every hopeful SaaS business pasting the logos of successful companies across their landing page, users might develop “blindness” to this technique. What we learned We’re becoming logo blind Customer logos are now often placed without any explanation. This reflects people’s familiarity with the technique, making the assumption that these logos are in fact customers. A word of warning: Some businesses have been shown to “fake it before they make it” and flat out lie about their customer base. Putting logos without explanation or linking to more detailed information on the customer puts you into the category of potentially faking your social proof. Possibly as a result of this, more businesses are making social proof a much deeper experience for users — some companies are putting their customer stories front and center on the site, with accompanying videos, podcasts and case studies taking center stage — sometimes ahead of product information (See the New Relic example in the Hero section above). Example 1: User Testing User testing use a fairly-typical bar underneath the hero, featuring some strong customer brands. What they do incredibly well is link through to a full Customer page complete with compelling customer stories, which really reinforce how they help those businesses succeed. Example 2: Webflow The team at Webflow have done a great job of leveraging social proof — particularly from social media. The language is strong here too, telling users not to “take our word for it”, and to check out the real feedback from real people. Displaying tweets in a native-feeling UI rather than plain text quotes reinforces the feeling that these are real comments. Example 3: Zenefits Similarly to ProsperWorks, Zenefits is leveraging their customer base at the forefront of their landing page. No product screenshot here – just a big smiling Tope Awotona of Calendly! A quote would have been nice here. Part 7: Video All data points and research on the use of video in Marketing suggest that the format wins hands down against static images. It’s considerably more expensive to create than static imagery, but with improved tooling and technology, that cost is coming down, to the extent where most startups can create a professional-looking demo video. What we learned We saw an increase in the number of sites using some form of video on their landing page this year – from 46% in 2015 to 54%. We saw video used for: Silent video backgrounds for the hero section Product demo videos Company culture or vision videos (perhaps more useful for hiring?) Customer testimonials However, the biggest noticeable change with regards to video was the placement. Landing pages today are putting over-sized play buttons front and center in the hero section. This suggests that the video is intended to be the first element of interaction when the user arrives on the page. From a purely anecdotal perspective, this makes sense to me. If I visit the website for a product or service and there’s a video available on the page, I’ll usually jump straight to playing it. From a Marketing perspective, video is an incredibly information-dense medium. You can convey a whole product, company, vision in a 30 second video, where it would have taken you a 10-page website with 25 clicks and tons of scrolling to convey the same level of information. Warning: Video is nuanced. There are subtleties that you’ve got to get right, to give the impression you’re aiming for. There’s a knife edge between seeming inspiring and professional and being amateurish and arrogant. Example 1: ProdPad When you land on the ProdPad website, the play button is right there. It has no explanation, and that’s fine — we know exactly what’s going to happen when we click it. In this case, the resulting product video is well thought out, simple and uplifting. Example 2: Samepage Samepage uses video in a different way. Their full-width video background on the hero section doesn’t explain the product, and obviously doesn’t have sound. What it does (and quite effectively) is set the tone for the theme of the product — team collaboration. It’s also a more effective way of using human faces to engage the user (even more than static imagery). Part 8: Other findings Content belongs everywhere In 2017, content is leaking from the blog to other parts of company websites, including the landing page. An increasing number of businesses are using small sections of their landing page to highlight recent content (can be downloadables, articles, etc.). This has a couple of key benefits: Keeps the landing page feeling dynamic, if recent content is regularly updated Helps with lead capture (in the case of “lead magnet” content that requires email signup) Helps establish the business as more than just a “product”, but also a thought leader in the space. Here’s a brilliant example from Kayako. Their content gets a whole section on the landing page, demonstrating how they’re dedicated to helping educate people on the topic of customer service: Free trial vs. demo Product demos (whether video or in-person) feature much more prominently this year on landing pages. As mentioned in the Call To Action section, there’s often a secondary CTA button for booking a demo, alongside the trial signup. Sometimes there’s no trial at all — only a demo! Obviously this is closely tied to the product itself, and the segment of the market they’re selling to. It is interesting however to see that less than half of landing pages offer just a trial alone. Check out the data on this here: The death of the full screenshot? Our last study saw an overwhelming number of “device” screenshots, where the full product screenshot is wrapped in a sleek looking (usually Apple-esque) device such as a laptop or smartphone. One trend we’ve seen in this year’s landing pages moves away from full screenshots, and focuses on extracting small elements of the user interface to showcase individual features and interactions. The technique is often done in a stylistic way, to emphasise or even abstract away from the real interface. I’m sure they weren’t the first, but Slack popularized this with their trendy product video a couple of years back: …And now we see an increasing number of landing pages highlighting small interactions in their UI, in a more isolated way. For example, HootSuite: Appendix: Data points Mean number of nav bar items: 4.3 63% of sites use a fixed (sticky) navigation menu 30% of landing pages use a chat widget Mean headline length: 39 characters 46% of CTA include the word ‘free’ 44% of CTA use uppercase text 34% of CTA have an inline form element Median no. of inline form fields: 1 92% of CTA buttons are less than 5 words in length 88% of landing pages headlines are less than 10 words in length Mean number of customer logos: 6 73% of landing pages include photos of people 53% of sites are using video </sys

LiveChat CMO on getting to 14K customers with no sales team. Introducing LiveChat Based out of Wrocław, Poland, the LiveChat team (now about 60 strong) really feels like a big family of sorts. Headquartered in a sprawling, old house close to the center of Western Poland’s largest city, it’s not hard to see how the company has developed a culture and environment that makes it one of the most desirable places for young Polish graduates to come and work. It was in this environment that I took some time to sit and chat with Szymon, the company’s CMO. Szymon has been with LiveChat since 2007, shortly before the decision was made to pivot from ‘traditional’ enterprise-focused, on-premise software product to a cloud-based SaaS. The LiveChat office, whilst now pretty much at capacity, is filled with small nooks, interesting spaces and antique features. Listen to the interview Szymon and I covered a range of topics, including: The struggles of moving to SaaS at a time when SaaS in Europe didn’t really exist Growing the product without any paid marketing or sales team(!) Maintaining company culture through growth The current resurgence of chat-based products, bots and what this means for LiveChat Listen to the full interview below, and don’t forget to subscribe to SaaS Open Mic on SoundCloud or iTunes to get each new episode delivered straight to you!

[INST] LiveChat CMO on getting to 14K customers with no sales team [/INST]

Introducing LiveChat Based out of Wrocław, Poland, the LiveChat team (now about 60 strong) really feels like a big family of sorts. Headquartered in a sprawling, old house close to the center of Western Poland’s largest city, it’s not hard to see how the company has developed a culture and environment that makes it one of the most desirable places for young Polish graduates to come and work. It was in this environment that I took some time to sit and chat with Szymon, the company’s CMO. Szymon has been with LiveChat since 2007, shortly before the decision was made to pivot from ‘traditional’ enterprise-focused, on-premise software product to a cloud-based SaaS. The LiveChat office, whilst now pretty much at capacity, is filled with small nooks, interesting spaces and antique features. Listen to the interview Szymon and I covered a range of topics, including: The struggles of moving to SaaS at a time when SaaS in Europe didn’t really exist Growing the product without any paid marketing or sales team(!) Maintaining company culture through growth The current resurgence of chat-based products, bots and what this means for LiveChat Listen to the full interview below, and don’t forget to subscribe to SaaS Open Mic on SoundCloud or iTunes to get each new episode delivered straight to you!

<sys> [INST] LiveChat CMO on getting to 14K customers with no sales team [/INST] Introducing LiveChat Based out of Wrocław, Poland, the LiveChat team (now about 60 strong) really feels like a big family of sorts. Headquartered in a sprawling, old house close to the center of Western Poland’s largest city, it’s not hard to see how the company has developed a culture and environment that makes it one of the most desirable places for young Polish graduates to come and work. It was in this environment that I took some time to sit and chat with Szymon, the company’s CMO. Szymon has been with LiveChat since 2007, shortly before the decision was made to pivot from ‘traditional’ enterprise-focused, on-premise software product to a cloud-based SaaS. The LiveChat office, whilst now pretty much at capacity, is filled with small nooks, interesting spaces and antique features. Listen to the interview Szymon and I covered a range of topics, including: The struggles of moving to SaaS at a time when SaaS in Europe didn’t really exist Growing the product without any paid marketing or sales team(!) Maintaining company culture through growth The current resurgence of chat-based products, bots and what this means for LiveChat Listen to the full interview below, and don’t forget to subscribe to SaaS Open Mic on SoundCloud or iTunes to get each new episode delivered straight to you! </sys

Dark Social: How GetSocial is exposing the “Private Share”. Dark Social and the black box of content marketing Dark Social is all the virality you cannot see. Invisible traffic to your site, driven from links pasted to a friend in WhatsApp, sent via SMS, dropped into a Slack chatroom. These personal, mobile referrals create the black box in a content marketer’s performance data. And that box is getting bigger. “Non-voice time spent on mobile devices is expected to grow by 403% in just 5 years while every other traditional medium will lose usage.” –GetSocial.io Most of today’s tracking services don’t capture social shares correctly. In analytic tools, these visits are lumped into the “direct traffic” bucket. The lack of reliable data and insight forces marketers to rely more on gut feeling than they should. While definitely necessary — good instincts are invaluable — the gut-feeling guide is obviously not scalable in a growth-focused world. It can also be… a little scary. Marketers need to be more empowered by the data. They need to know that traffic is a social referral, not direct. Furthermore, marketers need to understand the power of these social shares, as not all are created equal! One shared link might lead to some visits to the content, while another share might lead to… 10 more shares. The latter, that second-generation share, the referral share, is where virality happens. And that virality data isn’t available in most tools. The shift from public to private It’s not only the age of the mobile share, but also of the private share. “A few years ago it was normal, even for me, to read a piece of news, grab it, post it on my Facebook wall. Now sharing has evolved into a very private or semi-private conversation between 1-to-1 or 1-to-a few in a small group.” – João, CEO of GetSocial A lot of people are talking about this shift to private media, the growth of dark social. As an example, check out this pondering piece on Medium. But GetSocial.io is far ahead of the conversation, already providing a social sharing analytics solution that specifically tracks Dark Social. Their solution helps marketers orient themselves and understand how their content travels in a brand new landscape. We spoke with João Romão, CEO of GetSocial, about how they are solving this Dark Social problem. And how they found it in the first place. And how a young social analytics startup acquires a major brand such as Red Bull. João Romão, CEO of GetSocial. [source: startupship.org] GetSocial’s Origin Story (Spoiler alert: there’s a pivot) The early days Back in fall 2014 in Lisbon, GetSocial began as a marketing tools company for websites. The goal was to help websites increase their traffic: more subscribers, more shares, more followers… You know the drill. The tools they provided were pretty standard, such as share bars embedded in content. Quickly they realized what a competitive space they’d ventured into. Up against digital marketing giants like SumoMe, companies with the double whammy of vast resources and the ability to provide their product at a low price-point (or free!), João and his colleagues decided to reevaluate. What was driving these bigger companies? Not the tools they provided. No, it was moreso the third-party data behind the tools. With widgets on all customer websites, companies like AddThis accumulate massive amounts of (lucrative) data on user behavior. Holes in the data So, as GetSocial began onboarding bigger websites with more users, they refocused to help these customers solve a problem. But which problem? Like any good startup founder, João began asking his customers questions about how they do what they do. GetSocial asked simple things: What did you do today? What kind of social marketing activities do you do, and what’s missing? How are you tracking your traffic? And through that, they found knowledge gaps. Customers didn’t really understand what was driving their traffic and where their visitors were coming from. Dark Social: What happens beyond the share? GetSocial devised a solution: social sharing analytics. A solution that answers these questions: What happens beyond the initial share? How do shares drive traffic to our site? How is that traffic converting? And thus, the hallmark of GetSocial’s technology — tracking social sharing — was born. A main feature of their product is the ability to track copy-and-pasted shares and mobile browser shares. “We developed that with the idea in our minds that this was the common behavior. And what we later discovered, and are publishing a case from one of our customers, is that about 80% of shares are made from non-through buttons.” GetSocial’s social analytics dashboard. What’s happening today GetSocial is still a team of just four engineers, and ironically, no dedicated marketing team of their own! Their customer growth so far — to 81,000 websites — has been organic. Those customers include major brands as well as other business tools, such as lead generation platform Prospectify. GetSocial analytics have lead to great customer success, too — a case study on their blog is well worth a read, all about success unlocked through new dark social insights. Their product, a collection of fourteen different tools, continues to adapt to fit this new private sharing style. In April they announced widgets to share on any messaging app, be it WhatsApp, Viber, Slack, or straight to your SMS. And as for the business, they’re now attempting to master paid acquisition, so they can continue to grow in a way that’s repeatable and predictable. The team at GetSocial. The future of content marketing and where GetSocial fits Everyone is doing content marketing now. The channels are noisy, and it will get harder and harder to compete. The only way to ensure what you’re doing actually reaches anyone — triggers any kind of funnel activity — is for one of two things to happen: paid distribution or virality. “Making anything new is insufficient and inefficient out the gate because it’s unlikely that anyone will read it. There’s only two ways now for your content to be read: pay for it, or for it to go viral.” João believes that soon, paying for content promotion will be a necessity, not a trend. And if you’re paying for a service, you have to measure the results of it. That’s just good business sense. And to accurately measure the results, you need access to the dark social data that lurks beneath your typical traffic tool. GetSocial wants to take care of that for you. GetSocial allows you to: Stay aware of trending topics. Strategically publish or promote your content so it can ride a wave of virality. Evaluate where to invest your marketing budget. With paid distribution, which pieces do you choose to promote — and where? Maintain top quality content. As a result of better content performance from the two above, there’s no need to resort to clickbait to get more traffic and hit numbers. Ultimately, they want to provide a tool for the entire value chain of content marketing: from creation to paid distribution. They want to help marketers and social media managers at every step. Part of this is to use the data they have to fuel automated traffic acquisition. After the initial publishing and the subsequent analytics, GetSocial wants to automate what comes next — “like an intelligent Buffer,” João says. And beyond that, GetSocial could even take the reigns of paid distribution, automatically promoted posts at the right time in the right third-party networks to maximize reach and traffic. The city of Lisbon that GetSocial is lucky to call home. How ChartMogul is helping them get there So far, GetSocial has optimized their pricing plan in hopes of reducing churn. Running a freemium model, staying in tune with the pricing model and retention is crucial. João says he can check at regular intervals to see that churn rates have gone down since the switch. “By being able to analyze churn on a segment (per plan) level, we were able to bring down churn in one of the segments from about 12% to 0.5% — and in other from 6% to -4%.” Negative churn has got to feel good! On a routine basis, João can easily share all key subscription metrics with investors. They always ask for the same four, he says: MRR, Gross MRR Churn, LTV, and CAC. And occasionally, he emails updated cohort analysis to the board, straight from ChartMogul. “ChartMogul saves me a good amount of hours every other month, just preparing for the board meeting.” Whereas his old meeting prep workflow looked something like this: Input and configure data > Create pivot tables > Transform to charts > Add to Keynote His new workflow is: Open ChartMogul > Click the metric he wants > Click Print Screen To learn about the metrics mentioned above and more, check out our Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. ChartMogul also helps with the longer term shifts of the company. To realize their vision, GetSocial needs to continue growing. To get continue growing, they need to master paid acquisition. How to do that effectively? ChartMogul. Metrics. Segmentation. Thus far with organic growth, they’ve had no CAC to speak of and therefore didn’t need to pay too much attention to LTV. That changes now. ChartMogul will help them understand their own funnel, their own conversion data — just like they’re helping the marketers of the world. Interested what you would learn about your own site’s traffic with GetSocial? Get started and shed some light on your own Dark Social. And if you’re aiming to optimize and scale your own subscription business, sign up with ChartMogul. Connect your Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Chargify or PayPal accounts. Upload the manual data you have, pipe in customer attributes from Google Sheets (or via API) and start building a better subscription business. Share and follow! NEW: How @getsocial_io is exposing the “Private Share” — https://t.co/V1rkJU21Gv #Analytics #SaaS @joaoromaolx pic.twitter.com/2aMilSIEFy — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 9, 2016

[INST] Dark Social: How GetSocial is exposing the “Private Share” [/INST]

Dark Social and the black box of content marketing Dark Social is all the virality you cannot see. Invisible traffic to your site, driven from links pasted to a friend in WhatsApp, sent via SMS, dropped into a Slack chatroom. These personal, mobile referrals create the black box in a content marketer’s performance data. And that box is getting bigger. “Non-voice time spent on mobile devices is expected to grow by 403% in just 5 years while every other traditional medium will lose usage.” –GetSocial.io Most of today’s tracking services don’t capture social shares correctly. In analytic tools, these visits are lumped into the “direct traffic” bucket. The lack of reliable data and insight forces marketers to rely more on gut feeling than they should. While definitely necessary — good instincts are invaluable — the gut-feeling guide is obviously not scalable in a growth-focused world. It can also be… a little scary. Marketers need to be more empowered by the data. They need to know that traffic is a social referral, not direct. Furthermore, marketers need to understand the power of these social shares, as not all are created equal! One shared link might lead to some visits to the content, while another share might lead to… 10 more shares. The latter, that second-generation share, the referral share, is where virality happens. And that virality data isn’t available in most tools. The shift from public to private It’s not only the age of the mobile share, but also of the private share. “A few years ago it was normal, even for me, to read a piece of news, grab it, post it on my Facebook wall. Now sharing has evolved into a very private or semi-private conversation between 1-to-1 or 1-to-a few in a small group.” – João, CEO of GetSocial A lot of people are talking about this shift to private media, the growth of dark social. As an example, check out this pondering piece on Medium. But GetSocial.io is far ahead of the conversation, already providing a social sharing analytics solution that specifically tracks Dark Social. Their solution helps marketers orient themselves and understand how their content travels in a brand new landscape. We spoke with João Romão, CEO of GetSocial, about how they are solving this Dark Social problem. And how they found it in the first place. And how a young social analytics startup acquires a major brand such as Red Bull. João Romão, CEO of GetSocial. [source: startupship.org] GetSocial’s Origin Story (Spoiler alert: there’s a pivot) The early days Back in fall 2014 in Lisbon, GetSocial began as a marketing tools company for websites. The goal was to help websites increase their traffic: more subscribers, more shares, more followers… You know the drill. The tools they provided were pretty standard, such as share bars embedded in content. Quickly they realized what a competitive space they’d ventured into. Up against digital marketing giants like SumoMe, companies with the double whammy of vast resources and the ability to provide their product at a low price-point (or free!), João and his colleagues decided to reevaluate. What was driving these bigger companies? Not the tools they provided. No, it was moreso the third-party data behind the tools. With widgets on all customer websites, companies like AddThis accumulate massive amounts of (lucrative) data on user behavior. Holes in the data So, as GetSocial began onboarding bigger websites with more users, they refocused to help these customers solve a problem. But which problem? Like any good startup founder, João began asking his customers questions about how they do what they do. GetSocial asked simple things: What did you do today? What kind of social marketing activities do you do, and what’s missing? How are you tracking your traffic? And through that, they found knowledge gaps. Customers didn’t really understand what was driving their traffic and where their visitors were coming from. Dark Social: What happens beyond the share? GetSocial devised a solution: social sharing analytics. A solution that answers these questions: What happens beyond the initial share? How do shares drive traffic to our site? How is that traffic converting? And thus, the hallmark of GetSocial’s technology — tracking social sharing — was born. A main feature of their product is the ability to track copy-and-pasted shares and mobile browser shares. “We developed that with the idea in our minds that this was the common behavior. And what we later discovered, and are publishing a case from one of our customers, is that about 80% of shares are made from non-through buttons.” GetSocial’s social analytics dashboard. What’s happening today GetSocial is still a team of just four engineers, and ironically, no dedicated marketing team of their own! Their customer growth so far — to 81,000 websites — has been organic. Those customers include major brands as well as other business tools, such as lead generation platform Prospectify. GetSocial analytics have lead to great customer success, too — a case study on their blog is well worth a read, all about success unlocked through new dark social insights. Their product, a collection of fourteen different tools, continues to adapt to fit this new private sharing style. In April they announced widgets to share on any messaging app, be it WhatsApp, Viber, Slack, or straight to your SMS. And as for the business, they’re now attempting to master paid acquisition, so they can continue to grow in a way that’s repeatable and predictable. The team at GetSocial. The future of content marketing and where GetSocial fits Everyone is doing content marketing now. The channels are noisy, and it will get harder and harder to compete. The only way to ensure what you’re doing actually reaches anyone — triggers any kind of funnel activity — is for one of two things to happen: paid distribution or virality. “Making anything new is insufficient and inefficient out the gate because it’s unlikely that anyone will read it. There’s only two ways now for your content to be read: pay for it, or for it to go viral.” João believes that soon, paying for content promotion will be a necessity, not a trend. And if you’re paying for a service, you have to measure the results of it. That’s just good business sense. And to accurately measure the results, you need access to the dark social data that lurks beneath your typical traffic tool. GetSocial wants to take care of that for you. GetSocial allows you to: Stay aware of trending topics. Strategically publish or promote your content so it can ride a wave of virality. Evaluate where to invest your marketing budget. With paid distribution, which pieces do you choose to promote — and where? Maintain top quality content. As a result of better content performance from the two above, there’s no need to resort to clickbait to get more traffic and hit numbers. Ultimately, they want to provide a tool for the entire value chain of content marketing: from creation to paid distribution. They want to help marketers and social media managers at every step. Part of this is to use the data they have to fuel automated traffic acquisition. After the initial publishing and the subsequent analytics, GetSocial wants to automate what comes next — “like an intelligent Buffer,” João says. And beyond that, GetSocial could even take the reigns of paid distribution, automatically promoted posts at the right time in the right third-party networks to maximize reach and traffic. The city of Lisbon that GetSocial is lucky to call home. How ChartMogul is helping them get there So far, GetSocial has optimized their pricing plan in hopes of reducing churn. Running a freemium model, staying in tune with the pricing model and retention is crucial. João says he can check at regular intervals to see that churn rates have gone down since the switch. “By being able to analyze churn on a segment (per plan) level, we were able to bring down churn in one of the segments from about 12% to 0.5% — and in other from 6% to -4%.” Negative churn has got to feel good! On a routine basis, João can easily share all key subscription metrics with investors. They always ask for the same four, he says: MRR, Gross MRR Churn, LTV, and CAC. And occasionally, he emails updated cohort analysis to the board, straight from ChartMogul. “ChartMogul saves me a good amount of hours every other month, just preparing for the board meeting.” Whereas his old meeting prep workflow looked something like this: Input and configure data > Create pivot tables > Transform to charts > Add to Keynote His new workflow is: Open ChartMogul > Click the metric he wants > Click Print Screen To learn about the metrics mentioned above and more, check out our Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. ChartMogul also helps with the longer term shifts of the company. To realize their vision, GetSocial needs to continue growing. To get continue growing, they need to master paid acquisition. How to do that effectively? ChartMogul. Metrics. Segmentation. Thus far with organic growth, they’ve had no CAC to speak of and therefore didn’t need to pay too much attention to LTV. That changes now. ChartMogul will help them understand their own funnel, their own conversion data — just like they’re helping the marketers of the world. Interested what you would learn about your own site’s traffic with GetSocial? Get started and shed some light on your own Dark Social. And if you’re aiming to optimize and scale your own subscription business, sign up with ChartMogul. Connect your Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Chargify or PayPal accounts. Upload the manual data you have, pipe in customer attributes from Google Sheets (or via API) and start building a better subscription business. Share and follow! NEW: How @getsocial_io is exposing the “Private Share” — https://t.co/V1rkJU21Gv #Analytics #SaaS @joaoromaolx pic.twitter.com/2aMilSIEFy — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 9, 2016

<sys> [INST] Dark Social: How GetSocial is exposing the “Private Share” [/INST] Dark Social and the black box of content marketing Dark Social is all the virality you cannot see. Invisible traffic to your site, driven from links pasted to a friend in WhatsApp, sent via SMS, dropped into a Slack chatroom. These personal, mobile referrals create the black box in a content marketer’s performance data. And that box is getting bigger. “Non-voice time spent on mobile devices is expected to grow by 403% in just 5 years while every other traditional medium will lose usage.” –GetSocial.io Most of today’s tracking services don’t capture social shares correctly. In analytic tools, these visits are lumped into the “direct traffic” bucket. The lack of reliable data and insight forces marketers to rely more on gut feeling than they should. While definitely necessary — good instincts are invaluable — the gut-feeling guide is obviously not scalable in a growth-focused world. It can also be… a little scary. Marketers need to be more empowered by the data. They need to know that traffic is a social referral, not direct. Furthermore, marketers need to understand the power of these social shares, as not all are created equal! One shared link might lead to some visits to the content, while another share might lead to… 10 more shares. The latter, that second-generation share, the referral share, is where virality happens. And that virality data isn’t available in most tools. The shift from public to private It’s not only the age of the mobile share, but also of the private share. “A few years ago it was normal, even for me, to read a piece of news, grab it, post it on my Facebook wall. Now sharing has evolved into a very private or semi-private conversation between 1-to-1 or 1-to-a few in a small group.” – João, CEO of GetSocial A lot of people are talking about this shift to private media, the growth of dark social. As an example, check out this pondering piece on Medium. But GetSocial.io is far ahead of the conversation, already providing a social sharing analytics solution that specifically tracks Dark Social. Their solution helps marketers orient themselves and understand how their content travels in a brand new landscape. We spoke with João Romão, CEO of GetSocial, about how they are solving this Dark Social problem. And how they found it in the first place. And how a young social analytics startup acquires a major brand such as Red Bull. João Romão, CEO of GetSocial. [source: startupship.org] GetSocial’s Origin Story (Spoiler alert: there’s a pivot) The early days Back in fall 2014 in Lisbon, GetSocial began as a marketing tools company for websites. The goal was to help websites increase their traffic: more subscribers, more shares, more followers… You know the drill. The tools they provided were pretty standard, such as share bars embedded in content. Quickly they realized what a competitive space they’d ventured into. Up against digital marketing giants like SumoMe, companies with the double whammy of vast resources and the ability to provide their product at a low price-point (or free!), João and his colleagues decided to reevaluate. What was driving these bigger companies? Not the tools they provided. No, it was moreso the third-party data behind the tools. With widgets on all customer websites, companies like AddThis accumulate massive amounts of (lucrative) data on user behavior. Holes in the data So, as GetSocial began onboarding bigger websites with more users, they refocused to help these customers solve a problem. But which problem? Like any good startup founder, João began asking his customers questions about how they do what they do. GetSocial asked simple things: What did you do today? What kind of social marketing activities do you do, and what’s missing? How are you tracking your traffic? And through that, they found knowledge gaps. Customers didn’t really understand what was driving their traffic and where their visitors were coming from. Dark Social: What happens beyond the share? GetSocial devised a solution: social sharing analytics. A solution that answers these questions: What happens beyond the initial share? How do shares drive traffic to our site? How is that traffic converting? And thus, the hallmark of GetSocial’s technology — tracking social sharing — was born. A main feature of their product is the ability to track copy-and-pasted shares and mobile browser shares. “We developed that with the idea in our minds that this was the common behavior. And what we later discovered, and are publishing a case from one of our customers, is that about 80% of shares are made from non-through buttons.” GetSocial’s social analytics dashboard. What’s happening today GetSocial is still a team of just four engineers, and ironically, no dedicated marketing team of their own! Their customer growth so far — to 81,000 websites — has been organic. Those customers include major brands as well as other business tools, such as lead generation platform Prospectify. GetSocial analytics have lead to great customer success, too — a case study on their blog is well worth a read, all about success unlocked through new dark social insights. Their product, a collection of fourteen different tools, continues to adapt to fit this new private sharing style. In April they announced widgets to share on any messaging app, be it WhatsApp, Viber, Slack, or straight to your SMS. And as for the business, they’re now attempting to master paid acquisition, so they can continue to grow in a way that’s repeatable and predictable. The team at GetSocial. The future of content marketing and where GetSocial fits Everyone is doing content marketing now. The channels are noisy, and it will get harder and harder to compete. The only way to ensure what you’re doing actually reaches anyone — triggers any kind of funnel activity — is for one of two things to happen: paid distribution or virality. “Making anything new is insufficient and inefficient out the gate because it’s unlikely that anyone will read it. There’s only two ways now for your content to be read: pay for it, or for it to go viral.” João believes that soon, paying for content promotion will be a necessity, not a trend. And if you’re paying for a service, you have to measure the results of it. That’s just good business sense. And to accurately measure the results, you need access to the dark social data that lurks beneath your typical traffic tool. GetSocial wants to take care of that for you. GetSocial allows you to: Stay aware of trending topics. Strategically publish or promote your content so it can ride a wave of virality. Evaluate where to invest your marketing budget. With paid distribution, which pieces do you choose to promote — and where? Maintain top quality content. As a result of better content performance from the two above, there’s no need to resort to clickbait to get more traffic and hit numbers. Ultimately, they want to provide a tool for the entire value chain of content marketing: from creation to paid distribution. They want to help marketers and social media managers at every step. Part of this is to use the data they have to fuel automated traffic acquisition. After the initial publishing and the subsequent analytics, GetSocial wants to automate what comes next — “like an intelligent Buffer,” João says. And beyond that, GetSocial could even take the reigns of paid distribution, automatically promoted posts at the right time in the right third-party networks to maximize reach and traffic. The city of Lisbon that GetSocial is lucky to call home. How ChartMogul is helping them get there So far, GetSocial has optimized their pricing plan in hopes of reducing churn. Running a freemium model, staying in tune with the pricing model and retention is crucial. João says he can check at regular intervals to see that churn rates have gone down since the switch. “By being able to analyze churn on a segment (per plan) level, we were able to bring down churn in one of the segments from about 12% to 0.5% — and in other from 6% to -4%.” Negative churn has got to feel good! On a routine basis, João can easily share all key subscription metrics with investors. They always ask for the same four, he says: MRR, Gross MRR Churn, LTV, and CAC. And occasionally, he emails updated cohort analysis to the board, straight from ChartMogul. “ChartMogul saves me a good amount of hours every other month, just preparing for the board meeting.” Whereas his old meeting prep workflow looked something like this: Input and configure data > Create pivot tables > Transform to charts > Add to Keynote His new workflow is: Open ChartMogul > Click the metric he wants > Click Print Screen To learn about the metrics mentioned above and more, check out our Ultimate SaaS Metrics Cheat Sheet. ChartMogul also helps with the longer term shifts of the company. To realize their vision, GetSocial needs to continue growing. To get continue growing, they need to master paid acquisition. How to do that effectively? ChartMogul. Metrics. Segmentation. Thus far with organic growth, they’ve had no CAC to speak of and therefore didn’t need to pay too much attention to LTV. That changes now. ChartMogul will help them understand their own funnel, their own conversion data — just like they’re helping the marketers of the world. Interested what you would learn about your own site’s traffic with GetSocial? Get started and shed some light on your own Dark Social. And if you’re aiming to optimize and scale your own subscription business, sign up with ChartMogul. Connect your Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Chargify or PayPal accounts. Upload the manual data you have, pipe in customer attributes from Google Sheets (or via API) and start building a better subscription business. Share and follow! NEW: How @getsocial_io is exposing the “Private Share” — https://t.co/V1rkJU21Gv #Analytics #SaaS @joaoromaolx pic.twitter.com/2aMilSIEFy — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) May 9, 2016 </sys

Hiring Global Talent With Liina Laas of Deel. Deel, the payroll and compliance company, recently raised $425 million in series D at a valuation of $5.5 billion. Deel’s exponential growth comes as no surprise considering how remote work has boomed during the pandemic. My guest on this episode of SaaS Open Mic is Liina Laas, the Head of Expansion at Deel. She focuses on expansion in the Central and Eastern European regions. In our conversation, Liina and I looked at trends in hiring. We also talked about best practices for hiring global talent. The complexities of global hiring There’s no way to sugarcoat it, hiring people in different countries comes with a lot of headaches. You have to set up your own entity, register a foreign employer, hire a team of lawyers to look through the contracts, also, hire tax advisers and an accountant. There are plenty of legal complexities to consider. So why go through all that effort to hire people outside of your country base? Some companies are still scared of cultural differences. It’s time to get over those fears, because diversity does really, really move you forward. Liina Laas helps SaaS leaders and founders hire talent all over the world. She has been in the startup field for nearly a decade and is an advocate for diversity and remote work. Building an international team has become a given for more and more founders and leaders. Employee retention starts with onboarding It is currently an employee’s market rather than an employer’s market, according to Liina’s observations at Deel. People know that they can find a better offer when they’re good at their job. So to keep talented people, it’s not only about higher salaries. Liina explains how important it is to have a solid plan for hiring and onboarding, as part of the efforts to build a strong company culture. Going above and beyond for your employees is instrumental to a company’s success. One element that contributes to employee satisfaction is clarity of benefits and policies. For example, how many vacation days are there in Spain? How much tax do we have to pay? There are new challenges that employers face that they need to solve in order to keep employees. Some [companies] need a solution for their existing employees who have decided to move somewhere else. Once COVID happened, people realized that they can work remotely and choose where to live. (..) That is a problem that employers are facing. If they don’t want to lose their team members, they have to find a way how to employ them in the other country. On this episode of SaaS Open Mic What is the hotbed for technical talent right now? Creating a plan for hiring and onboarding new employees The minimum requirements to run a global team Going above and beyond for your employees

[INST] Hiring Global Talent With Liina Laas of Deel [/INST]

Deel, the payroll and compliance company, recently raised $425 million in series D at a valuation of $5.5 billion. Deel’s exponential growth comes as no surprise considering how remote work has boomed during the pandemic. My guest on this episode of SaaS Open Mic is Liina Laas, the Head of Expansion at Deel. She focuses on expansion in the Central and Eastern European regions. In our conversation, Liina and I looked at trends in hiring. We also talked about best practices for hiring global talent. The complexities of global hiring There’s no way to sugarcoat it, hiring people in different countries comes with a lot of headaches. You have to set up your own entity, register a foreign employer, hire a team of lawyers to look through the contracts, also, hire tax advisers and an accountant. There are plenty of legal complexities to consider. So why go through all that effort to hire people outside of your country base? Some companies are still scared of cultural differences. It’s time to get over those fears, because diversity does really, really move you forward. Liina Laas helps SaaS leaders and founders hire talent all over the world. She has been in the startup field for nearly a decade and is an advocate for diversity and remote work. Building an international team has become a given for more and more founders and leaders. Employee retention starts with onboarding It is currently an employee’s market rather than an employer’s market, according to Liina’s observations at Deel. People know that they can find a better offer when they’re good at their job. So to keep talented people, it’s not only about higher salaries. Liina explains how important it is to have a solid plan for hiring and onboarding, as part of the efforts to build a strong company culture. Going above and beyond for your employees is instrumental to a company’s success. One element that contributes to employee satisfaction is clarity of benefits and policies. For example, how many vacation days are there in Spain? How much tax do we have to pay? There are new challenges that employers face that they need to solve in order to keep employees. Some [companies] need a solution for their existing employees who have decided to move somewhere else. Once COVID happened, people realized that they can work remotely and choose where to live. (..) That is a problem that employers are facing. If they don’t want to lose their team members, they have to find a way how to employ them in the other country. On this episode of SaaS Open Mic What is the hotbed for technical talent right now? Creating a plan for hiring and onboarding new employees The minimum requirements to run a global team Going above and beyond for your employees

<sys> [INST] Hiring Global Talent With Liina Laas of Deel [/INST] Deel, the payroll and compliance company, recently raised $425 million in series D at a valuation of $5.5 billion. Deel’s exponential growth comes as no surprise considering how remote work has boomed during the pandemic. My guest on this episode of SaaS Open Mic is Liina Laas, the Head of Expansion at Deel. She focuses on expansion in the Central and Eastern European regions. In our conversation, Liina and I looked at trends in hiring. We also talked about best practices for hiring global talent. The complexities of global hiring There’s no way to sugarcoat it, hiring people in different countries comes with a lot of headaches. You have to set up your own entity, register a foreign employer, hire a team of lawyers to look through the contracts, also, hire tax advisers and an accountant. There are plenty of legal complexities to consider. So why go through all that effort to hire people outside of your country base? Some companies are still scared of cultural differences. It’s time to get over those fears, because diversity does really, really move you forward. Liina Laas helps SaaS leaders and founders hire talent all over the world. She has been in the startup field for nearly a decade and is an advocate for diversity and remote work. Building an international team has become a given for more and more founders and leaders. Employee retention starts with onboarding It is currently an employee’s market rather than an employer’s market, according to Liina’s observations at Deel. People know that they can find a better offer when they’re good at their job. So to keep talented people, it’s not only about higher salaries. Liina explains how important it is to have a solid plan for hiring and onboarding, as part of the efforts to build a strong company culture. Going above and beyond for your employees is instrumental to a company’s success. One element that contributes to employee satisfaction is clarity of benefits and policies. For example, how many vacation days are there in Spain? How much tax do we have to pay? There are new challenges that employers face that they need to solve in order to keep employees. Some [companies] need a solution for their existing employees who have decided to move somewhere else. Once COVID happened, people realized that they can work remotely and choose where to live. (..) That is a problem that employers are facing. If they don’t want to lose their team members, they have to find a way how to employ them in the other country. On this episode of SaaS Open Mic What is the hotbed for technical talent right now? Creating a plan for hiring and onboarding new employees The minimum requirements to run a global team Going above and beyond for your employees </sys

SaaS Open Mic: Product Management in a SaaS Business. Product Management touches many topics, processes and teams within a business. It’s often one of the most misunderstood yet pivotal roles when building and growing a successful business. I wanted to get some insights from Vinay on what his view and experience of product management is, having gained some perspective as a Product Manager in multiple businesses and scenarios. In this chat, we talk about: How to define Product Management and how the role fits into a SaaS business What companies should look for in their first product hire The challenges (and benefits) that the SaaS model imposes on product development Useful tools and processes for product managers The most important metric for Product Management How to maintain sharp focus in the face of multiple feature requests Listen to the full discussion below. If you want to get the latest episodes, other original and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox, don’t forget to sign up to our weekly SaaS Digest newsletter: [mc4wp_form id=”1472″] Recommended resources from this episode Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager (Andreessen Horowitz) The Basecamp books (Basecamp) The Goal (Eliyahu M. Goldratt) Trello (for managing projects) Slack (for communication)

[INST] SaaS Open Mic: Product Management in a SaaS Business [/INST]

Product Management touches many topics, processes and teams within a business. It’s often one of the most misunderstood yet pivotal roles when building and growing a successful business. I wanted to get some insights from Vinay on what his view and experience of product management is, having gained some perspective as a Product Manager in multiple businesses and scenarios. In this chat, we talk about: How to define Product Management and how the role fits into a SaaS business What companies should look for in their first product hire The challenges (and benefits) that the SaaS model imposes on product development Useful tools and processes for product managers The most important metric for Product Management How to maintain sharp focus in the face of multiple feature requests Listen to the full discussion below. If you want to get the latest episodes, other original and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox, don’t forget to sign up to our weekly SaaS Digest newsletter: [mc4wp_form id=”1472″] Recommended resources from this episode Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager (Andreessen Horowitz) The Basecamp books (Basecamp) The Goal (Eliyahu M. Goldratt) Trello (for managing projects) Slack (for communication)

<sys> [INST] SaaS Open Mic: Product Management in a SaaS Business [/INST] Product Management touches many topics, processes and teams within a business. It’s often one of the most misunderstood yet pivotal roles when building and growing a successful business. I wanted to get some insights from Vinay on what his view and experience of product management is, having gained some perspective as a Product Manager in multiple businesses and scenarios. In this chat, we talk about: How to define Product Management and how the role fits into a SaaS business What companies should look for in their first product hire The challenges (and benefits) that the SaaS model imposes on product development Useful tools and processes for product managers The most important metric for Product Management How to maintain sharp focus in the face of multiple feature requests Listen to the full discussion below. If you want to get the latest episodes, other original and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox, don’t forget to sign up to our weekly SaaS Digest newsletter: [mc4wp_form id=”1472″] Recommended resources from this episode Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager (Andreessen Horowitz) The Basecamp books (Basecamp) The Goal (Eliyahu M. Goldratt) Trello (for managing projects) Slack (for communication) </sys

The data literacy shortfall: Are we data-driven, or data-duped?. At ChartMogul, we believe in data literacy as a core component of any healthy business. We’ll be covering the topic in a number of ways over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for resources and guidance, including data vis input from industry experts! Don’t forget to sign up to our SaaS Roundup newsletter to make sure you get the latest articles from us. I remember being taught some form of data literacy at primary school (around age nine). We started to learn about how you could represent numbers with things like charts to show the relationship between different groups of data. Drawing a bar chart to compare the number of kids in class who like bananas to the number of kids who like apples — you get the idea. For the record, I was fully in the banana camp. 🍌 For years, modern businesses have used data and metrics in almost every decision they make. If you want to argue for more budget for your particular project, you’d better have some data to back up your reasoning. But more recently, the use of data shifted. Technology companies started to implement Machine Learning and AI algorithms in tech products, to find highly optimized solutions to big problems humans weren’t so good at. Machine Learning methods are by nature incredibly hungry for data — they require training on huge datasets to be effective, and there’s really no limit to what they can consume. The more data, the better. At this limitless scale, and with this technology, you can see why people are hailing data as the “new currency”. (XKCD: Machine Learning) Why not just measure everything? Fuelling this change even more, our ability to generate and gather data has increased greatly with the advent of the “Internet of Things”, always-on mobile broadband, and smartphones carrying more sensors than we’d ever dreamed of 20 years ago. Data storage is also ridiculously cheap, so why not gather all the data we can — even if there’s no immediate use for it? For professionals, there’s no escaping the numbers and statistics present in our working day, regardless of your role — Marketers, Salespeople, Engineers, etc. — these people all use data to make decisions and do their everyday work. So we are all surrounded by data. But are we equipped with the skills and knowledge required to make sense of it? Secondly, do the people using such data for storytelling have adequate skills for effectively communicating and visualizing data for their audience? Read more on data-driven culture in our article The Quantified SaaS: The dream of democratized data A recent article in Forbes stated the following: “Data in the hands of a few data experts can be powerful but data at the fingertips of many is truly transformational.” Which hints at the true potential of democratized data in business. If we really can empower everyone to gather, interpret and use data to their advantage, the benefits promise to be huge. In the Enterprise sector, the dream is just as compelling (perhaps unless you’re a data scientist): Kissing goodbye to the standalone BI team, and democratizing access to data that was at one point locked away behind layers of complex queries or software that required months of training. The death of the data warehouse is a welcome change in many agile fast-growing businesses. However, in the same Forbes article is the following statement: “The data literacy divide will impede organizations from reaping higher rewards from their data investments.” And here we reach the crux of the problem: Unlocking the power of data requires not only advanced technology but well-informed, data-literate people. And that’s where the gap is growing. What’s holding us back? Spoiler: It’s not the technology. To understand where we’re lacking, it’s worth clarifying what we mean by “data literacy”. There are a few different definitions, but here’s a simple one from Margaret Rouse of whatis.com: “Data literacy is the ability to derive meaningful information from data, just as literacy in general is the ability to derive information from the written word.” She goes on to describe the skills defining data literate people: Knowing what data is appropriate to use for a particular purpose. Interpreting data visualizations, such as graphs and charts. Thinking critically about information yielded by data analysis. Understanding data analytics tools and methods and when and where to use them. Recognizing when data is being misrepresented or used misleadingly. Communicating information about data to people lacking data literacy, an ability sometimes referred to as data storytelling. Every one of the above skills is used in businesses many times per day. We communicate in data, make decisions based on data, market ourselves with data. To lack these skills is to present a fundamental risk to information-driven businesses. The gap is growing There’s another problem. The rate at which the size and complexity of data sets used in business is growing far outpaces our rate of improvement at understanding such data. Big data moves us into the realm of numbers with more zeros than we’ve ever considered, let alone interpreted or analyzed. In other words, humans are becoming increasingly alienated from the technology they’ve helped to create, as our brains struggle to comprehend the latest concepts. That leaves just the PhD-level graduates who can truly work with such scale and complexity — individuals who are highly valuable, but rare and out of reach of many young businesses and startups. What can businesses do to address this? Firstly, as with so many company-wide initiatives, change is incredibly difficult without buy-in from the management level. Just as with efforts related to culture in the workplace, ethics or company vision, the management team needs to be fully onboard. Drive awareness of core skills Businesses can start with educating on the simple, practical skills required to use data in the workplace, including: What’s the best way to visualize this raw data? What story is this data visualization telling me? What’s the source of the data in this chart I’m looking at? Is this data biased in some way? Am I biased in some social or cognitive way, when I’m looking at this? Empower employees with the right tools Fortunately for us, there are a number of entrepreneurs out there who’ve made it their mission to tackle the issue of data literacy in business. The resulting products leverage data in such a way that it’s accessible to the entire company — rather than just the technical, data science or BI teams. Here are a few: Infogram makes it easy for anyone to make infographics and charts to tell stories about data: (source: http://infogr.am) Infogram Founder Uldis Leiterts has even given a TEDx talk on “The age of data literacy”. You can watch it here. ChartMogul (that’s us!) is used by people in almost every role across subscription businesses, to understand customers and make informed decisions. (source: http://chartmogul.com) Optimizely does a great job of educating its users on understanding the statistical data behind running experiments. Concepts like Statistical Significance are complex, but clearly explained in Optimizely’s product and documentation: (source: https://help.optimizely.com/Analyze_Results/Stats_Engine:_How_Optimizely_calculates_results_to_enable_business_decisions) Google does a lot of work to foster data literacy. Obviously tools like Google Analytics come to mind right away, but the company recently launched a micro tool to help storytellers show the relationship between two entities in a visual way, called Data Gif Maker. Anyone can quickly use Data Gif Maker to input data and receive a simple animated GIF to use in their content: (source: https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/make-your-own-data-gifs-our-new-too/) Towards a data literate future “Data literacy is built upon data democratization and the user experience. If a platform is difficult, it won’t be used. If a platform doesn’t serve all teams equally well, it will not be adopted across the organization. If a platform isn’t architected to bridge the gap between regular people and the data scientists creating the algorithms, then the era of data-driven anything will fail to materialize.” ~ H.O. Maycotte, Forbes Today, we live in a sort of “Wild West”, where the quality and validity of data storytelling online varies massively. Some outlets and news publications put a lot of effort into accessible data visualization that connects with people and conveys the facts in a compelling way: (source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/21/climate/how-americans-think-about-climate-change-in-six-maps.html) Unfortunately, in other cases publications seem to be out to use data to manipulate the population, through poorly-visualized data and clear bias: (source: mediamatters.org) As Infogram founder Uldis Leiterts highlighted in his TEDx talk, the world has an 85% literacy rate (that’s literacy, as in, people who can read). Given the rise of data as the lifeblood of our communication in business, journalism and everyday life, it’s probably time for us to reach towards an 85% data literacy rate too.

[INST] The data literacy shortfall: Are we data-driven, or data-duped? [/INST]

At ChartMogul, we believe in data literacy as a core component of any healthy business. We’ll be covering the topic in a number of ways over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for resources and guidance, including data vis input from industry experts! Don’t forget to sign up to our SaaS Roundup newsletter to make sure you get the latest articles from us. I remember being taught some form of data literacy at primary school (around age nine). We started to learn about how you could represent numbers with things like charts to show the relationship between different groups of data. Drawing a bar chart to compare the number of kids in class who like bananas to the number of kids who like apples — you get the idea. For the record, I was fully in the banana camp. 🍌 For years, modern businesses have used data and metrics in almost every decision they make. If you want to argue for more budget for your particular project, you’d better have some data to back up your reasoning. But more recently, the use of data shifted. Technology companies started to implement Machine Learning and AI algorithms in tech products, to find highly optimized solutions to big problems humans weren’t so good at. Machine Learning methods are by nature incredibly hungry for data — they require training on huge datasets to be effective, and there’s really no limit to what they can consume. The more data, the better. At this limitless scale, and with this technology, you can see why people are hailing data as the “new currency”. (XKCD: Machine Learning) Why not just measure everything? Fuelling this change even more, our ability to generate and gather data has increased greatly with the advent of the “Internet of Things”, always-on mobile broadband, and smartphones carrying more sensors than we’d ever dreamed of 20 years ago. Data storage is also ridiculously cheap, so why not gather all the data we can — even if there’s no immediate use for it? For professionals, there’s no escaping the numbers and statistics present in our working day, regardless of your role — Marketers, Salespeople, Engineers, etc. — these people all use data to make decisions and do their everyday work. So we are all surrounded by data. But are we equipped with the skills and knowledge required to make sense of it? Secondly, do the people using such data for storytelling have adequate skills for effectively communicating and visualizing data for their audience? Read more on data-driven culture in our article The Quantified SaaS: The dream of democratized data A recent article in Forbes stated the following: “Data in the hands of a few data experts can be powerful but data at the fingertips of many is truly transformational.” Which hints at the true potential of democratized data in business. If we really can empower everyone to gather, interpret and use data to their advantage, the benefits promise to be huge. In the Enterprise sector, the dream is just as compelling (perhaps unless you’re a data scientist): Kissing goodbye to the standalone BI team, and democratizing access to data that was at one point locked away behind layers of complex queries or software that required months of training. The death of the data warehouse is a welcome change in many agile fast-growing businesses. However, in the same Forbes article is the following statement: “The data literacy divide will impede organizations from reaping higher rewards from their data investments.” And here we reach the crux of the problem: Unlocking the power of data requires not only advanced technology but well-informed, data-literate people. And that’s where the gap is growing. What’s holding us back? Spoiler: It’s not the technology. To understand where we’re lacking, it’s worth clarifying what we mean by “data literacy”. There are a few different definitions, but here’s a simple one from Margaret Rouse of whatis.com: “Data literacy is the ability to derive meaningful information from data, just as literacy in general is the ability to derive information from the written word.” She goes on to describe the skills defining data literate people: Knowing what data is appropriate to use for a particular purpose. Interpreting data visualizations, such as graphs and charts. Thinking critically about information yielded by data analysis. Understanding data analytics tools and methods and when and where to use them. Recognizing when data is being misrepresented or used misleadingly. Communicating information about data to people lacking data literacy, an ability sometimes referred to as data storytelling. Every one of the above skills is used in businesses many times per day. We communicate in data, make decisions based on data, market ourselves with data. To lack these skills is to present a fundamental risk to information-driven businesses. The gap is growing There’s another problem. The rate at which the size and complexity of data sets used in business is growing far outpaces our rate of improvement at understanding such data. Big data moves us into the realm of numbers with more zeros than we’ve ever considered, let alone interpreted or analyzed. In other words, humans are becoming increasingly alienated from the technology they’ve helped to create, as our brains struggle to comprehend the latest concepts. That leaves just the PhD-level graduates who can truly work with such scale and complexity — individuals who are highly valuable, but rare and out of reach of many young businesses and startups. What can businesses do to address this? Firstly, as with so many company-wide initiatives, change is incredibly difficult without buy-in from the management level. Just as with efforts related to culture in the workplace, ethics or company vision, the management team needs to be fully onboard. Drive awareness of core skills Businesses can start with educating on the simple, practical skills required to use data in the workplace, including: What’s the best way to visualize this raw data? What story is this data visualization telling me? What’s the source of the data in this chart I’m looking at? Is this data biased in some way? Am I biased in some social or cognitive way, when I’m looking at this? Empower employees with the right tools Fortunately for us, there are a number of entrepreneurs out there who’ve made it their mission to tackle the issue of data literacy in business. The resulting products leverage data in such a way that it’s accessible to the entire company — rather than just the technical, data science or BI teams. Here are a few: Infogram makes it easy for anyone to make infographics and charts to tell stories about data: (source: http://infogr.am) Infogram Founder Uldis Leiterts has even given a TEDx talk on “The age of data literacy”. You can watch it here. ChartMogul (that’s us!) is used by people in almost every role across subscription businesses, to understand customers and make informed decisions. (source: http://chartmogul.com) Optimizely does a great job of educating its users on understanding the statistical data behind running experiments. Concepts like Statistical Significance are complex, but clearly explained in Optimizely’s product and documentation: (source: https://help.optimizely.com/Analyze_Results/Stats_Engine:_How_Optimizely_calculates_results_to_enable_business_decisions) Google does a lot of work to foster data literacy. Obviously tools like Google Analytics come to mind right away, but the company recently launched a micro tool to help storytellers show the relationship between two entities in a visual way, called Data Gif Maker. Anyone can quickly use Data Gif Maker to input data and receive a simple animated GIF to use in their content: (source: https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/make-your-own-data-gifs-our-new-too/) Towards a data literate future “Data literacy is built upon data democratization and the user experience. If a platform is difficult, it won’t be used. If a platform doesn’t serve all teams equally well, it will not be adopted across the organization. If a platform isn’t architected to bridge the gap between regular people and the data scientists creating the algorithms, then the era of data-driven anything will fail to materialize.” ~ H.O. Maycotte, Forbes Today, we live in a sort of “Wild West”, where the quality and validity of data storytelling online varies massively. Some outlets and news publications put a lot of effort into accessible data visualization that connects with people and conveys the facts in a compelling way: (source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/21/climate/how-americans-think-about-climate-change-in-six-maps.html) Unfortunately, in other cases publications seem to be out to use data to manipulate the population, through poorly-visualized data and clear bias: (source: mediamatters.org) As Infogram founder Uldis Leiterts highlighted in his TEDx talk, the world has an 85% literacy rate (that’s literacy, as in, people who can read). Given the rise of data as the lifeblood of our communication in business, journalism and everyday life, it’s probably time for us to reach towards an 85% data literacy rate too.

<sys> [INST] The data literacy shortfall: Are we data-driven, or data-duped? [/INST] At ChartMogul, we believe in data literacy as a core component of any healthy business. We’ll be covering the topic in a number of ways over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for resources and guidance, including data vis input from industry experts! Don’t forget to sign up to our SaaS Roundup newsletter to make sure you get the latest articles from us. I remember being taught some form of data literacy at primary school (around age nine). We started to learn about how you could represent numbers with things like charts to show the relationship between different groups of data. Drawing a bar chart to compare the number of kids in class who like bananas to the number of kids who like apples — you get the idea. For the record, I was fully in the banana camp. 🍌 For years, modern businesses have used data and metrics in almost every decision they make. If you want to argue for more budget for your particular project, you’d better have some data to back up your reasoning. But more recently, the use of data shifted. Technology companies started to implement Machine Learning and AI algorithms in tech products, to find highly optimized solutions to big problems humans weren’t so good at. Machine Learning methods are by nature incredibly hungry for data — they require training on huge datasets to be effective, and there’s really no limit to what they can consume. The more data, the better. At this limitless scale, and with this technology, you can see why people are hailing data as the “new currency”. (XKCD: Machine Learning) Why not just measure everything? Fuelling this change even more, our ability to generate and gather data has increased greatly with the advent of the “Internet of Things”, always-on mobile broadband, and smartphones carrying more sensors than we’d ever dreamed of 20 years ago. Data storage is also ridiculously cheap, so why not gather all the data we can — even if there’s no immediate use for it? For professionals, there’s no escaping the numbers and statistics present in our working day, regardless of your role — Marketers, Salespeople, Engineers, etc. — these people all use data to make decisions and do their everyday work. So we are all surrounded by data. But are we equipped with the skills and knowledge required to make sense of it? Secondly, do the people using such data for storytelling have adequate skills for effectively communicating and visualizing data for their audience? Read more on data-driven culture in our article The Quantified SaaS: The dream of democratized data A recent article in Forbes stated the following: “Data in the hands of a few data experts can be powerful but data at the fingertips of many is truly transformational.” Which hints at the true potential of democratized data in business. If we really can empower everyone to gather, interpret and use data to their advantage, the benefits promise to be huge. In the Enterprise sector, the dream is just as compelling (perhaps unless you’re a data scientist): Kissing goodbye to the standalone BI team, and democratizing access to data that was at one point locked away behind layers of complex queries or software that required months of training. The death of the data warehouse is a welcome change in many agile fast-growing businesses. However, in the same Forbes article is the following statement: “The data literacy divide will impede organizations from reaping higher rewards from their data investments.” And here we reach the crux of the problem: Unlocking the power of data requires not only advanced technology but well-informed, data-literate people. And that’s where the gap is growing. What’s holding us back? Spoiler: It’s not the technology. To understand where we’re lacking, it’s worth clarifying what we mean by “data literacy”. There are a few different definitions, but here’s a simple one from Margaret Rouse of whatis.com: “Data literacy is the ability to derive meaningful information from data, just as literacy in general is the ability to derive information from the written word.” She goes on to describe the skills defining data literate people: Knowing what data is appropriate to use for a particular purpose. Interpreting data visualizations, such as graphs and charts. Thinking critically about information yielded by data analysis. Understanding data analytics tools and methods and when and where to use them. Recognizing when data is being misrepresented or used misleadingly. Communicating information about data to people lacking data literacy, an ability sometimes referred to as data storytelling. Every one of the above skills is used in businesses many times per day. We communicate in data, make decisions based on data, market ourselves with data. To lack these skills is to present a fundamental risk to information-driven businesses. The gap is growing There’s another problem. The rate at which the size and complexity of data sets used in business is growing far outpaces our rate of improvement at understanding such data. Big data moves us into the realm of numbers with more zeros than we’ve ever considered, let alone interpreted or analyzed. In other words, humans are becoming increasingly alienated from the technology they’ve helped to create, as our brains struggle to comprehend the latest concepts. That leaves just the PhD-level graduates who can truly work with such scale and complexity — individuals who are highly valuable, but rare and out of reach of many young businesses and startups. What can businesses do to address this? Firstly, as with so many company-wide initiatives, change is incredibly difficult without buy-in from the management level. Just as with efforts related to culture in the workplace, ethics or company vision, the management team needs to be fully onboard. Drive awareness of core skills Businesses can start with educating on the simple, practical skills required to use data in the workplace, including: What’s the best way to visualize this raw data? What story is this data visualization telling me? What’s the source of the data in this chart I’m looking at? Is this data biased in some way? Am I biased in some social or cognitive way, when I’m looking at this? Empower employees with the right tools Fortunately for us, there are a number of entrepreneurs out there who’ve made it their mission to tackle the issue of data literacy in business. The resulting products leverage data in such a way that it’s accessible to the entire company — rather than just the technical, data science or BI teams. Here are a few: Infogram makes it easy for anyone to make infographics and charts to tell stories about data: (source: http://infogr.am) Infogram Founder Uldis Leiterts has even given a TEDx talk on “The age of data literacy”. You can watch it here. ChartMogul (that’s us!) is used by people in almost every role across subscription businesses, to understand customers and make informed decisions. (source: http://chartmogul.com) Optimizely does a great job of educating its users on understanding the statistical data behind running experiments. Concepts like Statistical Significance are complex, but clearly explained in Optimizely’s product and documentation: (source: https://help.optimizely.com/Analyze_Results/Stats_Engine:_How_Optimizely_calculates_results_to_enable_business_decisions) Google does a lot of work to foster data literacy. Obviously tools like Google Analytics come to mind right away, but the company recently launched a micro tool to help storytellers show the relationship between two entities in a visual way, called Data Gif Maker. Anyone can quickly use Data Gif Maker to input data and receive a simple animated GIF to use in their content: (source: https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/make-your-own-data-gifs-our-new-too/) Towards a data literate future “Data literacy is built upon data democratization and the user experience. If a platform is difficult, it won’t be used. If a platform doesn’t serve all teams equally well, it will not be adopted across the organization. If a platform isn’t architected to bridge the gap between regular people and the data scientists creating the algorithms, then the era of data-driven anything will fail to materialize.” ~ H.O. Maycotte, Forbes Today, we live in a sort of “Wild West”, where the quality and validity of data storytelling online varies massively. Some outlets and news publications put a lot of effort into accessible data visualization that connects with people and conveys the facts in a compelling way: (source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/21/climate/how-americans-think-about-climate-change-in-six-maps.html) Unfortunately, in other cases publications seem to be out to use data to manipulate the population, through poorly-visualized data and clear bias: (source: mediamatters.org) As Infogram founder Uldis Leiterts highlighted in his TEDx talk, the world has an 85% literacy rate (that’s literacy, as in, people who can read). Given the rise of data as the lifeblood of our communication in business, journalism and everyday life, it’s probably time for us to reach towards an 85% data literacy rate too. </sys

The Monthly Recurring Revenue Guide for 2021. Monthly recurring revenue is one of the least exciting topics to take on in 2020. It is simple (to calculate). Everyone knows what it is about. It is hard to act on it (especially if you’re gunning for immediate results). So why deal with it in the first place? Well, the reality is people aren’t that familiar with MRR. While I was researching this topic, I reached out to our Customer Success and Sales teams to see if many customers were coming to them with questions about MRR. I didn’t expect to get many. But in fact, they bubble up all the time. And they range from the simple (What’s a good MRR?) to the really complex “down-the-rabbit-hole” type (What specific experiments can I run that would affect MRR?) In addition, some of the most popular searches on Google suggest that people still struggle with the basics: We wanted to produce a holistic guide that covers everything people want to know about MRR in 2020 and beyond (it’s never too early to start planning for next year!), so we reached out to our customers, partners, and readers to learn what gaps still exist in their knowledge of the subject. Twitter hive, at @ChartMogul we’ve set out to write the MRR guide for 2020 — something that goes beyond the “How to calculate MRR” that you’re so tired of. So that’s why I want to ask you what questions *YOU* have about MRR — share them here and we’ll answer them in the article. — Ilia Markov (@nochainmarkov) August 27, 2020 This is our attempt to answer all the questions people ask about MRR daily. We start with answers to the basic questions (no guide on MRR would be complete without getting the fundamentals right) and gradually explore some of the more advanced topics. Feel free to jump forward to the topics that feel most relevant and interesting to you. And if you still feel some questions remain unanswered, you can always reach us at marketing@chartmogul.com or on our Twitter account to ask your burning question about MRR or anything SaaS metrics-related. What is MRR? MRR stands for Monthly recurring revenue. It measures the total repeatable revenue your company generates each month. Because MRR is based on subscriptions, it has a strong forward-looking element. For example, if a customer pays for a whole year in advance, you should spread their payment over the 12 months it covers and count each share towards your MRR for the year ahead. Example: A customer pays $60 for an annual subscription. Their MRR is $5 for the next 12 months, not $60 in Month 1 followed by $0 in Months 2-12. You should exclude any type of non-recurring payment from your MRR calculation. Any setup or consulting fees that are not recurring naturally shouldn’t be included in the calculation. How do you calculate MRR? Add up all the revenue that customers pay on a monthly/subscription basis. If customers pay for an extended period — for example, a full year — you should split the payment by the number of periods (12 in this example) and add that to your MRR. Let’s look at another example: You have 5 customers: Customer A is paying you $10/month Customer B is paying $10/month as well but also paid a one-time $100 setup fee Customer C paid $60 in January for the whole year Customer D was at risk of churning, so you offered them a 20% discount and they’re now paying $8/month Finally, Customer E recently converted to your Premium plan and are now paying $15/month In this example your MRR is (10 + 10 + (60/12) + 8 + 15) = $48 MRR should only include the recurring portion of the revenue — any type of one-time charge or fee should be excluded from your calculation. Thus, the setup fee has no effect — the MRR includes only subscription charges. What is the difference between MRR and ARR? The abbreviations are misleading! MRR stands for Monthly recurring revenue. ARR is short for the Annual run rate. This is not just a detail of vocabulary. ARR is a forward-looking metric that projects your revenue over the next 12 months based on the MRR you have today. In terms of a formula, it is as simple as ARR = 12 x MRR. Do discounts affect MRR? There seems to be a bit of confusion and discussion around whether discounting should influence the MRR calculation. Some argue that a one-time discount or such that applies only to a specific period (for example 3 months or 1 year) should not affect MRR (because they’re not recurring). However, lifetime discounts are treated differently — because they affect MRR for the whole lifetime of a customer. If someone signs up on a $500/mo plan, but only pays $100/mo for the duration of their engagement, counting their MRR as $500 would be misleading. But the same logic can be extended to cases where you apply a time-limited discount (say 3 months) and a customer churns after 2 months. They never paid the full price, so why would you apply it to your full MRR calculation? We are big proponents of consistency. We believe the MRR calculation should include the true recurring revenue that your business is generating. If a customer is going to be paying $100/mo for the first 3 months and then switch to paying $500/mo after that, then those are the numbers that should go in your MRR. (Committed MRR or CMRR is an especially useful metric that can help you navigate all these forthcoming corrections to MRR.) Do custom enterprise deals count towards MRR? Should enterprise deals with signed custom agreement, be included? — Peter Ocasek (@PeterOcasek) August 28, 2020 The same rules apply as with your other customers — the subscription payment is divided over the period it covers (typically 12 months) and gets added to your MRR. Consulting and setup fees (which occur much more frequently in custom deals) are excluded from the MRR calculation. You should include custom deals in your MRR — without it, you won’t have a full view of how your company is doing. What are the types of MRR? I thought MRR was just a single number? Sure, it is. But your MRR changes based on decisions your customers make about their subscription — they can buy new, upgrade to a more expensive plan, downgrade to a cheaper plan, reactivate an expired subscription, or cancel altogether. We call these the 5 MRR movements. The better you understand these 5 elements, the sooner you can start influencing them — and thus growing your total MRR. Understanding the MRR movements allows you to implement initiatives to influence them. These 5 elements include: New Business MRR: This is the new (recurring) revenue you added during a given period. A typical example is a new client who signed up during a given month. Expansion MRR: Includes the revenue added during a specific month from existing customers. This typically covers two common cases: Customers paying more as a result of upgrading to a higher pricing tier (like the customer who went from the Standard plan to the Premium plan in the example above) or due to expanding their usage of the product (something like adding more seats/users to the plan). Customers who buy add-ons (these should also be recurring). Reactivation MRR: Sometimes customers who have churned come back and start paying again. Their revenue is counted towards Reactivation MRR during the period in which they reactivate their accounts. Contraction MRR: This is the opposite of Expansion MRR — customers do not always switch to paying you more, sometimes they will switch to a lower-priced plan, lower their usage of your product, or stop using an add-on they were paying for. Churned MRR: This section covers the people who cancel their plans during a given period. Each of these elements has either a positive or a negative effect on your total MRR. Keeping track of these 5 categories is useful because it allows you (and different teams within your company — such as success, product, marketing, etc.) to focus on different segments and customers and understand what is driving their behavior. Why is MRR important? Subscription revenue is powerful. It accumulates and compounds over time. Subscriptions (and SaaS in particular) are great for buyers as well. They’re low-commitment, low-cost, and you can upgrade/downgrade or even cancel at any time. There’s no lock-in and you typically get additional features and functionality for no additional cost. As a seller, once you’ve won a customer, you don’t need to sell to them every month. Some churn is natural and customers will leave over time, but with subscriptions, you can focus on acquiring new customers and retaining those who are most likely to leave you. This is where the compounding effect kicks in. (Also remember that happy customers not only tend to stick longer but also advocate your product in front of friends, peers, etc.) MRR is one of the most important metrics for subscription companies of any kind. It shows how far along the road you are in a way that is easy to communicate to internal and external stakeholders alike. It makes it easy to communicate goals and progress towards attaining them to your team and to report on your progress when you’re talking to investors. Many founders we talk to say that MRR is their “North Star” metric. I’m always looking at MRR. At the end of the day, that’s our revenue and drives a lot of other strategic decisions such as hiring and other spend. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer However, it is important to remember that MRR is a trailing metric. You can act on it and the efforts you put into it will be reflected in your MRR, but sometimes it can take weeks or even months to see that effect. MRR vs. Cashflow: How are they different? It seems that quite a few SaaS operatives struggle with the difference between MRR and cashflow reporting and the usefulness of each. For people who pay their 12 month subscription upfront, what are the pros and cons between mainly looking at 'monthly income' (full 12 months attributed to 1 month) or monthly MRR (spreading the yearly subscription over 12 months)? — Niels Zee (@NielsZee) August 31, 2020 What are healthy MRR vs cash flow ratios? Go! — Josh Ho (@jlogic) August 28, 2020 What happens when someone pays you a full year in advance? Let’s use an example again: Customer A signs an annual contract at $60,000 + a one-time implementation charge of $10,000 with a full upfront payment. You invoice them and they wire the money to your bank account. In terms of MRR, you should split the charge over 12 months and add the monthly charge to your MRR. In this case, your MRR grows by $5,000 for the next 12 months (the MRR calculation excludes one-time charges as we discussed above). But in terms of cash flow, the money is already in your bank account (including the one-time fee) and you have taken on a promise to provide a service (implementation + the use of your product) for the next 12 months. Cashflow reporting allows you to look at the actual cash you have in the bank and compare it against the expenditures you have and the services you have to provide before it becomes earned revenue. Both MRR and cashflow reporting are useful for different things. We already spoke about MRR at length above. Looking at cash flow allows you to do things like: Planning your runway: making sure you have enough money to make payroll 3-6-12 months down the road. Understand your expenditure: since cashflow planning also requires that you look at the money you spend, it is very helpful to understand where all your money goes and whether it’s spent wisely. Play out and plan for different scenarios: As discussed above, MRR is a great metric, but it only looks at the current state of your business. Cashflow planning allows you to play out different scenarios and see what would happen with your company if they materialize. For example, you can see what your vital stats would look like with a 2% vs. 3% churn. How do you grow your MRR? That’s a very common question that comes up very often. The challenge here is that a lot of the initiatives you can implement are reflected in MRR at a much later stage. Nevertheless, MRR can be influenced (obviously) and it is important to understand how that works. There are only 5 ways you can grow your MRR — it’s by changing one of the 5 movements we covered above (New Business, Expansion, Reactivation, Contraction, and Churn). New Business and Churn usually get the most coverage, but all 5 elements can be influenced and they all change the outlook on your MRR. And there are many different ways in which these elements can be influenced. For example, devising a monetization strategy that uses scalable pricing is one way to optimize the Expansion element of your MRR. A consistent feature in some of the most successful subscription companies is a strong Net Dollar Retention number — they grow very fast not just because they add new customers, but also because the revenue they generate from their existing customer base expands faster than it churns. In essence, that means companies like Slack continue to grow even if they don’t add any new customers. Segmentation and MRR I do not want to imply that MRR is a static metric. Using segmentation along with your monthly revenue can help you make better decisions. Segmenting customers allows you to understand what initiatives drive (long-term) customer loyalty. We often hear people ask about segmenting MRR per sales rep/account executive — this is something we use for our team at ChartMogul as well. But there are many additional ways in which you can use this — segmenting MRR (especially when looking at New Business MRR) per marketing channel is used by many teams for attribution and to figure out how to optimize marketing budgets. Success teams would often compare NPS scores vs. MRR to make sure the best customers are getting value out of the product and so on. MRR segmentation allows you to gain insight and generate new ideas to optimize your product, monetization, and go-to-market strategies. What’s a good MRR? The only good answer to this question is the Winnie the Pooh-esque The higher, the better. There’s no straight answer to this question and a lot depends on your circumstances — what your goals are for the business, how big your team is, and so on. We often see this question attached to the topic of selling your business. Jason Lemkin gives a good answer to this: But if you’re not looking to sell or to hire more people on your team, a good MRR is one that allows you to continue operating the business. What effect does reducing churn have on MRR? Churn is one of the 5 MRR movements we reviewed above. Reducing churn also generates a compounding effect — customers who do not churn, continue to generate revenue in every month after that. Managing churn is one of the most commonly discussed ways of growing your MRR. But there are other ways in which reducing churn has a (positive) effect on your MRR. A churned customer cannot upgrade their account or buy an add-on (thus limiting the potential of Expansion MRR). They also can’t (or most likely won’t) refer your product to a friend/peer, which is a lost opportunity in terms of word-of-mouth New Business MRR for you. MRR is the mother of all metrics MRR is a reflection of everything about your company — your decisions as a founder, your hiring, even your culture. Make good decisions, hire good people, and create a nurturing environment and your MRR will grow. Of course, this is an oversimplification — you can write a book on each of these — but it’s how companies grow in reality. However, it might take a while before you start to see it moving. Learning how to segment and analyze MRR in a way that allows you to extract actionable insight is what you can do with your MRR number today. We hope you found this useful, but if any questions remain get in touch with us @ChartMogul!

[INST] The Monthly Recurring Revenue Guide for 2021 [/INST]

Monthly recurring revenue is one of the least exciting topics to take on in 2020. It is simple (to calculate). Everyone knows what it is about. It is hard to act on it (especially if you’re gunning for immediate results). So why deal with it in the first place? Well, the reality is people aren’t that familiar with MRR. While I was researching this topic, I reached out to our Customer Success and Sales teams to see if many customers were coming to them with questions about MRR. I didn’t expect to get many. But in fact, they bubble up all the time. And they range from the simple (What’s a good MRR?) to the really complex “down-the-rabbit-hole” type (What specific experiments can I run that would affect MRR?) In addition, some of the most popular searches on Google suggest that people still struggle with the basics: We wanted to produce a holistic guide that covers everything people want to know about MRR in 2020 and beyond (it’s never too early to start planning for next year!), so we reached out to our customers, partners, and readers to learn what gaps still exist in their knowledge of the subject. Twitter hive, at @ChartMogul we’ve set out to write the MRR guide for 2020 — something that goes beyond the “How to calculate MRR” that you’re so tired of. So that’s why I want to ask you what questions *YOU* have about MRR — share them here and we’ll answer them in the article. — Ilia Markov (@nochainmarkov) August 27, 2020 This is our attempt to answer all the questions people ask about MRR daily. We start with answers to the basic questions (no guide on MRR would be complete without getting the fundamentals right) and gradually explore some of the more advanced topics. Feel free to jump forward to the topics that feel most relevant and interesting to you. And if you still feel some questions remain unanswered, you can always reach us at marketing@chartmogul.com or on our Twitter account to ask your burning question about MRR or anything SaaS metrics-related. What is MRR? MRR stands for Monthly recurring revenue. It measures the total repeatable revenue your company generates each month. Because MRR is based on subscriptions, it has a strong forward-looking element. For example, if a customer pays for a whole year in advance, you should spread their payment over the 12 months it covers and count each share towards your MRR for the year ahead. Example: A customer pays $60 for an annual subscription. Their MRR is $5 for the next 12 months, not $60 in Month 1 followed by $0 in Months 2-12. You should exclude any type of non-recurring payment from your MRR calculation. Any setup or consulting fees that are not recurring naturally shouldn’t be included in the calculation. How do you calculate MRR? Add up all the revenue that customers pay on a monthly/subscription basis. If customers pay for an extended period — for example, a full year — you should split the payment by the number of periods (12 in this example) and add that to your MRR. Let’s look at another example: You have 5 customers: Customer A is paying you $10/month Customer B is paying $10/month as well but also paid a one-time $100 setup fee Customer C paid $60 in January for the whole year Customer D was at risk of churning, so you offered them a 20% discount and they’re now paying $8/month Finally, Customer E recently converted to your Premium plan and are now paying $15/month In this example your MRR is (10 + 10 + (60/12) + 8 + 15) = $48 MRR should only include the recurring portion of the revenue — any type of one-time charge or fee should be excluded from your calculation. Thus, the setup fee has no effect — the MRR includes only subscription charges. What is the difference between MRR and ARR? The abbreviations are misleading! MRR stands for Monthly recurring revenue. ARR is short for the Annual run rate. This is not just a detail of vocabulary. ARR is a forward-looking metric that projects your revenue over the next 12 months based on the MRR you have today. In terms of a formula, it is as simple as ARR = 12 x MRR. Do discounts affect MRR? There seems to be a bit of confusion and discussion around whether discounting should influence the MRR calculation. Some argue that a one-time discount or such that applies only to a specific period (for example 3 months or 1 year) should not affect MRR (because they’re not recurring). However, lifetime discounts are treated differently — because they affect MRR for the whole lifetime of a customer. If someone signs up on a $500/mo plan, but only pays $100/mo for the duration of their engagement, counting their MRR as $500 would be misleading. But the same logic can be extended to cases where you apply a time-limited discount (say 3 months) and a customer churns after 2 months. They never paid the full price, so why would you apply it to your full MRR calculation? We are big proponents of consistency. We believe the MRR calculation should include the true recurring revenue that your business is generating. If a customer is going to be paying $100/mo for the first 3 months and then switch to paying $500/mo after that, then those are the numbers that should go in your MRR. (Committed MRR or CMRR is an especially useful metric that can help you navigate all these forthcoming corrections to MRR.) Do custom enterprise deals count towards MRR? Should enterprise deals with signed custom agreement, be included? — Peter Ocasek (@PeterOcasek) August 28, 2020 The same rules apply as with your other customers — the subscription payment is divided over the period it covers (typically 12 months) and gets added to your MRR. Consulting and setup fees (which occur much more frequently in custom deals) are excluded from the MRR calculation. You should include custom deals in your MRR — without it, you won’t have a full view of how your company is doing. What are the types of MRR? I thought MRR was just a single number? Sure, it is. But your MRR changes based on decisions your customers make about their subscription — they can buy new, upgrade to a more expensive plan, downgrade to a cheaper plan, reactivate an expired subscription, or cancel altogether. We call these the 5 MRR movements. The better you understand these 5 elements, the sooner you can start influencing them — and thus growing your total MRR. Understanding the MRR movements allows you to implement initiatives to influence them. These 5 elements include: New Business MRR: This is the new (recurring) revenue you added during a given period. A typical example is a new client who signed up during a given month. Expansion MRR: Includes the revenue added during a specific month from existing customers. This typically covers two common cases: Customers paying more as a result of upgrading to a higher pricing tier (like the customer who went from the Standard plan to the Premium plan in the example above) or due to expanding their usage of the product (something like adding more seats/users to the plan). Customers who buy add-ons (these should also be recurring). Reactivation MRR: Sometimes customers who have churned come back and start paying again. Their revenue is counted towards Reactivation MRR during the period in which they reactivate their accounts. Contraction MRR: This is the opposite of Expansion MRR — customers do not always switch to paying you more, sometimes they will switch to a lower-priced plan, lower their usage of your product, or stop using an add-on they were paying for. Churned MRR: This section covers the people who cancel their plans during a given period. Each of these elements has either a positive or a negative effect on your total MRR. Keeping track of these 5 categories is useful because it allows you (and different teams within your company — such as success, product, marketing, etc.) to focus on different segments and customers and understand what is driving their behavior. Why is MRR important? Subscription revenue is powerful. It accumulates and compounds over time. Subscriptions (and SaaS in particular) are great for buyers as well. They’re low-commitment, low-cost, and you can upgrade/downgrade or even cancel at any time. There’s no lock-in and you typically get additional features and functionality for no additional cost. As a seller, once you’ve won a customer, you don’t need to sell to them every month. Some churn is natural and customers will leave over time, but with subscriptions, you can focus on acquiring new customers and retaining those who are most likely to leave you. This is where the compounding effect kicks in. (Also remember that happy customers not only tend to stick longer but also advocate your product in front of friends, peers, etc.) MRR is one of the most important metrics for subscription companies of any kind. It shows how far along the road you are in a way that is easy to communicate to internal and external stakeholders alike. It makes it easy to communicate goals and progress towards attaining them to your team and to report on your progress when you’re talking to investors. Many founders we talk to say that MRR is their “North Star” metric. I’m always looking at MRR. At the end of the day, that’s our revenue and drives a lot of other strategic decisions such as hiring and other spend. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer However, it is important to remember that MRR is a trailing metric. You can act on it and the efforts you put into it will be reflected in your MRR, but sometimes it can take weeks or even months to see that effect. MRR vs. Cashflow: How are they different? It seems that quite a few SaaS operatives struggle with the difference between MRR and cashflow reporting and the usefulness of each. For people who pay their 12 month subscription upfront, what are the pros and cons between mainly looking at 'monthly income' (full 12 months attributed to 1 month) or monthly MRR (spreading the yearly subscription over 12 months)? — Niels Zee (@NielsZee) August 31, 2020 What are healthy MRR vs cash flow ratios? Go! — Josh Ho (@jlogic) August 28, 2020 What happens when someone pays you a full year in advance? Let’s use an example again: Customer A signs an annual contract at $60,000 + a one-time implementation charge of $10,000 with a full upfront payment. You invoice them and they wire the money to your bank account. In terms of MRR, you should split the charge over 12 months and add the monthly charge to your MRR. In this case, your MRR grows by $5,000 for the next 12 months (the MRR calculation excludes one-time charges as we discussed above). But in terms of cash flow, the money is already in your bank account (including the one-time fee) and you have taken on a promise to provide a service (implementation + the use of your product) for the next 12 months. Cashflow reporting allows you to look at the actual cash you have in the bank and compare it against the expenditures you have and the services you have to provide before it becomes earned revenue. Both MRR and cashflow reporting are useful for different things. We already spoke about MRR at length above. Looking at cash flow allows you to do things like: Planning your runway: making sure you have enough money to make payroll 3-6-12 months down the road. Understand your expenditure: since cashflow planning also requires that you look at the money you spend, it is very helpful to understand where all your money goes and whether it’s spent wisely. Play out and plan for different scenarios: As discussed above, MRR is a great metric, but it only looks at the current state of your business. Cashflow planning allows you to play out different scenarios and see what would happen with your company if they materialize. For example, you can see what your vital stats would look like with a 2% vs. 3% churn. How do you grow your MRR? That’s a very common question that comes up very often. The challenge here is that a lot of the initiatives you can implement are reflected in MRR at a much later stage. Nevertheless, MRR can be influenced (obviously) and it is important to understand how that works. There are only 5 ways you can grow your MRR — it’s by changing one of the 5 movements we covered above (New Business, Expansion, Reactivation, Contraction, and Churn). New Business and Churn usually get the most coverage, but all 5 elements can be influenced and they all change the outlook on your MRR. And there are many different ways in which these elements can be influenced. For example, devising a monetization strategy that uses scalable pricing is one way to optimize the Expansion element of your MRR. A consistent feature in some of the most successful subscription companies is a strong Net Dollar Retention number — they grow very fast not just because they add new customers, but also because the revenue they generate from their existing customer base expands faster than it churns. In essence, that means companies like Slack continue to grow even if they don’t add any new customers. Segmentation and MRR I do not want to imply that MRR is a static metric. Using segmentation along with your monthly revenue can help you make better decisions. Segmenting customers allows you to understand what initiatives drive (long-term) customer loyalty. We often hear people ask about segmenting MRR per sales rep/account executive — this is something we use for our team at ChartMogul as well. But there are many additional ways in which you can use this — segmenting MRR (especially when looking at New Business MRR) per marketing channel is used by many teams for attribution and to figure out how to optimize marketing budgets. Success teams would often compare NPS scores vs. MRR to make sure the best customers are getting value out of the product and so on. MRR segmentation allows you to gain insight and generate new ideas to optimize your product, monetization, and go-to-market strategies. What’s a good MRR? The only good answer to this question is the Winnie the Pooh-esque The higher, the better. There’s no straight answer to this question and a lot depends on your circumstances — what your goals are for the business, how big your team is, and so on. We often see this question attached to the topic of selling your business. Jason Lemkin gives a good answer to this: But if you’re not looking to sell or to hire more people on your team, a good MRR is one that allows you to continue operating the business. What effect does reducing churn have on MRR? Churn is one of the 5 MRR movements we reviewed above. Reducing churn also generates a compounding effect — customers who do not churn, continue to generate revenue in every month after that. Managing churn is one of the most commonly discussed ways of growing your MRR. But there are other ways in which reducing churn has a (positive) effect on your MRR. A churned customer cannot upgrade their account or buy an add-on (thus limiting the potential of Expansion MRR). They also can’t (or most likely won’t) refer your product to a friend/peer, which is a lost opportunity in terms of word-of-mouth New Business MRR for you. MRR is the mother of all metrics MRR is a reflection of everything about your company — your decisions as a founder, your hiring, even your culture. Make good decisions, hire good people, and create a nurturing environment and your MRR will grow. Of course, this is an oversimplification — you can write a book on each of these — but it’s how companies grow in reality. However, it might take a while before you start to see it moving. Learning how to segment and analyze MRR in a way that allows you to extract actionable insight is what you can do with your MRR number today. We hope you found this useful, but if any questions remain get in touch with us @ChartMogul!

<sys> [INST] The Monthly Recurring Revenue Guide for 2021 [/INST] Monthly recurring revenue is one of the least exciting topics to take on in 2020. It is simple (to calculate). Everyone knows what it is about. It is hard to act on it (especially if you’re gunning for immediate results). So why deal with it in the first place? Well, the reality is people aren’t that familiar with MRR. While I was researching this topic, I reached out to our Customer Success and Sales teams to see if many customers were coming to them with questions about MRR. I didn’t expect to get many. But in fact, they bubble up all the time. And they range from the simple (What’s a good MRR?) to the really complex “down-the-rabbit-hole” type (What specific experiments can I run that would affect MRR?) In addition, some of the most popular searches on Google suggest that people still struggle with the basics: We wanted to produce a holistic guide that covers everything people want to know about MRR in 2020 and beyond (it’s never too early to start planning for next year!), so we reached out to our customers, partners, and readers to learn what gaps still exist in their knowledge of the subject. Twitter hive, at @ChartMogul we’ve set out to write the MRR guide for 2020 — something that goes beyond the “How to calculate MRR” that you’re so tired of. So that’s why I want to ask you what questions *YOU* have about MRR — share them here and we’ll answer them in the article. — Ilia Markov (@nochainmarkov) August 27, 2020 This is our attempt to answer all the questions people ask about MRR daily. We start with answers to the basic questions (no guide on MRR would be complete without getting the fundamentals right) and gradually explore some of the more advanced topics. Feel free to jump forward to the topics that feel most relevant and interesting to you. And if you still feel some questions remain unanswered, you can always reach us at marketing@chartmogul.com or on our Twitter account to ask your burning question about MRR or anything SaaS metrics-related. What is MRR? MRR stands for Monthly recurring revenue. It measures the total repeatable revenue your company generates each month. Because MRR is based on subscriptions, it has a strong forward-looking element. For example, if a customer pays for a whole year in advance, you should spread their payment over the 12 months it covers and count each share towards your MRR for the year ahead. Example: A customer pays $60 for an annual subscription. Their MRR is $5 for the next 12 months, not $60 in Month 1 followed by $0 in Months 2-12. You should exclude any type of non-recurring payment from your MRR calculation. Any setup or consulting fees that are not recurring naturally shouldn’t be included in the calculation. How do you calculate MRR? Add up all the revenue that customers pay on a monthly/subscription basis. If customers pay for an extended period — for example, a full year — you should split the payment by the number of periods (12 in this example) and add that to your MRR. Let’s look at another example: You have 5 customers: Customer A is paying you $10/month Customer B is paying $10/month as well but also paid a one-time $100 setup fee Customer C paid $60 in January for the whole year Customer D was at risk of churning, so you offered them a 20% discount and they’re now paying $8/month Finally, Customer E recently converted to your Premium plan and are now paying $15/month In this example your MRR is (10 + 10 + (60/12) + 8 + 15) = $48 MRR should only include the recurring portion of the revenue — any type of one-time charge or fee should be excluded from your calculation. Thus, the setup fee has no effect — the MRR includes only subscription charges. What is the difference between MRR and ARR? The abbreviations are misleading! MRR stands for Monthly recurring revenue. ARR is short for the Annual run rate. This is not just a detail of vocabulary. ARR is a forward-looking metric that projects your revenue over the next 12 months based on the MRR you have today. In terms of a formula, it is as simple as ARR = 12 x MRR. Do discounts affect MRR? There seems to be a bit of confusion and discussion around whether discounting should influence the MRR calculation. Some argue that a one-time discount or such that applies only to a specific period (for example 3 months or 1 year) should not affect MRR (because they’re not recurring). However, lifetime discounts are treated differently — because they affect MRR for the whole lifetime of a customer. If someone signs up on a $500/mo plan, but only pays $100/mo for the duration of their engagement, counting their MRR as $500 would be misleading. But the same logic can be extended to cases where you apply a time-limited discount (say 3 months) and a customer churns after 2 months. They never paid the full price, so why would you apply it to your full MRR calculation? We are big proponents of consistency. We believe the MRR calculation should include the true recurring revenue that your business is generating. If a customer is going to be paying $100/mo for the first 3 months and then switch to paying $500/mo after that, then those are the numbers that should go in your MRR. (Committed MRR or CMRR is an especially useful metric that can help you navigate all these forthcoming corrections to MRR.) Do custom enterprise deals count towards MRR? Should enterprise deals with signed custom agreement, be included? — Peter Ocasek (@PeterOcasek) August 28, 2020 The same rules apply as with your other customers — the subscription payment is divided over the period it covers (typically 12 months) and gets added to your MRR. Consulting and setup fees (which occur much more frequently in custom deals) are excluded from the MRR calculation. You should include custom deals in your MRR — without it, you won’t have a full view of how your company is doing. What are the types of MRR? I thought MRR was just a single number? Sure, it is. But your MRR changes based on decisions your customers make about their subscription — they can buy new, upgrade to a more expensive plan, downgrade to a cheaper plan, reactivate an expired subscription, or cancel altogether. We call these the 5 MRR movements. The better you understand these 5 elements, the sooner you can start influencing them — and thus growing your total MRR. Understanding the MRR movements allows you to implement initiatives to influence them. These 5 elements include: New Business MRR: This is the new (recurring) revenue you added during a given period. A typical example is a new client who signed up during a given month. Expansion MRR: Includes the revenue added during a specific month from existing customers. This typically covers two common cases: Customers paying more as a result of upgrading to a higher pricing tier (like the customer who went from the Standard plan to the Premium plan in the example above) or due to expanding their usage of the product (something like adding more seats/users to the plan). Customers who buy add-ons (these should also be recurring). Reactivation MRR: Sometimes customers who have churned come back and start paying again. Their revenue is counted towards Reactivation MRR during the period in which they reactivate their accounts. Contraction MRR: This is the opposite of Expansion MRR — customers do not always switch to paying you more, sometimes they will switch to a lower-priced plan, lower their usage of your product, or stop using an add-on they were paying for. Churned MRR: This section covers the people who cancel their plans during a given period. Each of these elements has either a positive or a negative effect on your total MRR. Keeping track of these 5 categories is useful because it allows you (and different teams within your company — such as success, product, marketing, etc.) to focus on different segments and customers and understand what is driving their behavior. Why is MRR important? Subscription revenue is powerful. It accumulates and compounds over time. Subscriptions (and SaaS in particular) are great for buyers as well. They’re low-commitment, low-cost, and you can upgrade/downgrade or even cancel at any time. There’s no lock-in and you typically get additional features and functionality for no additional cost. As a seller, once you’ve won a customer, you don’t need to sell to them every month. Some churn is natural and customers will leave over time, but with subscriptions, you can focus on acquiring new customers and retaining those who are most likely to leave you. This is where the compounding effect kicks in. (Also remember that happy customers not only tend to stick longer but also advocate your product in front of friends, peers, etc.) MRR is one of the most important metrics for subscription companies of any kind. It shows how far along the road you are in a way that is easy to communicate to internal and external stakeholders alike. It makes it easy to communicate goals and progress towards attaining them to your team and to report on your progress when you’re talking to investors. Many founders we talk to say that MRR is their “North Star” metric. I’m always looking at MRR. At the end of the day, that’s our revenue and drives a lot of other strategic decisions such as hiring and other spend. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer However, it is important to remember that MRR is a trailing metric. You can act on it and the efforts you put into it will be reflected in your MRR, but sometimes it can take weeks or even months to see that effect. MRR vs. Cashflow: How are they different? It seems that quite a few SaaS operatives struggle with the difference between MRR and cashflow reporting and the usefulness of each. For people who pay their 12 month subscription upfront, what are the pros and cons between mainly looking at 'monthly income' (full 12 months attributed to 1 month) or monthly MRR (spreading the yearly subscription over 12 months)? — Niels Zee (@NielsZee) August 31, 2020 What are healthy MRR vs cash flow ratios? Go! — Josh Ho (@jlogic) August 28, 2020 What happens when someone pays you a full year in advance? Let’s use an example again: Customer A signs an annual contract at $60,000 + a one-time implementation charge of $10,000 with a full upfront payment. You invoice them and they wire the money to your bank account. In terms of MRR, you should split the charge over 12 months and add the monthly charge to your MRR. In this case, your MRR grows by $5,000 for the next 12 months (the MRR calculation excludes one-time charges as we discussed above). But in terms of cash flow, the money is already in your bank account (including the one-time fee) and you have taken on a promise to provide a service (implementation + the use of your product) for the next 12 months. Cashflow reporting allows you to look at the actual cash you have in the bank and compare it against the expenditures you have and the services you have to provide before it becomes earned revenue. Both MRR and cashflow reporting are useful for different things. We already spoke about MRR at length above. Looking at cash flow allows you to do things like: Planning your runway: making sure you have enough money to make payroll 3-6-12 months down the road. Understand your expenditure: since cashflow planning also requires that you look at the money you spend, it is very helpful to understand where all your money goes and whether it’s spent wisely. Play out and plan for different scenarios: As discussed above, MRR is a great metric, but it only looks at the current state of your business. Cashflow planning allows you to play out different scenarios and see what would happen with your company if they materialize. For example, you can see what your vital stats would look like with a 2% vs. 3% churn. How do you grow your MRR? That’s a very common question that comes up very often. The challenge here is that a lot of the initiatives you can implement are reflected in MRR at a much later stage. Nevertheless, MRR can be influenced (obviously) and it is important to understand how that works. There are only 5 ways you can grow your MRR — it’s by changing one of the 5 movements we covered above (New Business, Expansion, Reactivation, Contraction, and Churn). New Business and Churn usually get the most coverage, but all 5 elements can be influenced and they all change the outlook on your MRR. And there are many different ways in which these elements can be influenced. For example, devising a monetization strategy that uses scalable pricing is one way to optimize the Expansion element of your MRR. A consistent feature in some of the most successful subscription companies is a strong Net Dollar Retention number — they grow very fast not just because they add new customers, but also because the revenue they generate from their existing customer base expands faster than it churns. In essence, that means companies like Slack continue to grow even if they don’t add any new customers. Segmentation and MRR I do not want to imply that MRR is a static metric. Using segmentation along with your monthly revenue can help you make better decisions. Segmenting customers allows you to understand what initiatives drive (long-term) customer loyalty. We often hear people ask about segmenting MRR per sales rep/account executive — this is something we use for our team at ChartMogul as well. But there are many additional ways in which you can use this — segmenting MRR (especially when looking at New Business MRR) per marketing channel is used by many teams for attribution and to figure out how to optimize marketing budgets. Success teams would often compare NPS scores vs. MRR to make sure the best customers are getting value out of the product and so on. MRR segmentation allows you to gain insight and generate new ideas to optimize your product, monetization, and go-to-market strategies. What’s a good MRR? The only good answer to this question is the Winnie the Pooh-esque The higher, the better. There’s no straight answer to this question and a lot depends on your circumstances — what your goals are for the business, how big your team is, and so on. We often see this question attached to the topic of selling your business. Jason Lemkin gives a good answer to this: But if you’re not looking to sell or to hire more people on your team, a good MRR is one that allows you to continue operating the business. What effect does reducing churn have on MRR? Churn is one of the 5 MRR movements we reviewed above. Reducing churn also generates a compounding effect — customers who do not churn, continue to generate revenue in every month after that. Managing churn is one of the most commonly discussed ways of growing your MRR. But there are other ways in which reducing churn has a (positive) effect on your MRR. A churned customer cannot upgrade their account or buy an add-on (thus limiting the potential of Expansion MRR). They also can’t (or most likely won’t) refer your product to a friend/peer, which is a lost opportunity in terms of word-of-mouth New Business MRR for you. MRR is the mother of all metrics MRR is a reflection of everything about your company — your decisions as a founder, your hiring, even your culture. Make good decisions, hire good people, and create a nurturing environment and your MRR will grow. Of course, this is an oversimplification — you can write a book on each of these — but it’s how companies grow in reality. However, it might take a while before you start to see it moving. Learning how to segment and analyze MRR in a way that allows you to extract actionable insight is what you can do with your MRR number today. We hope you found this useful, but if any questions remain get in touch with us @ChartMogul! </sys

Enrich Intercom Customer Profiles With Metrics, Analytics, and Data From ChartMogul. Customer data is spread across multiple platforms: CRM, communication, billing, and subscription analytics. Now you can send revenue and subscription data associated with your customer in ChartMogul directly to Intercom. Avoid data silos by consolidating your data into one place and elevate your campaigns in Intercom. To connect ChartMogul to Intercom go to Data Platform > Destinations. No development required. Use ChartMogul customer data to segment your contacts in Intercom As you grow your business, your customer count increases significantly and it becomes impossible to know all your customers. That’s why, when reaching out to your customer base, you need to tailor your messaging to each customer segment. If you’re using a tool like Intercom as your communication platform, your marketing team filters and segments users to build campaigns on a regular basis. Once you connect ChartMogul and Intercom, you will be able to build segments in Intercom based on customer data exported from ChartMogul. Customer profiles in Intercom will be populated with data like MRR, ARR, Net payments, subscriber since, subscription status, plan, email, currency, and company. Using those data points as filters in Intercom will enable your marketing team to provide personalized messaging via Intercom. Looking for inspiration? Below are examples of how you can use ChartMogul data to build segments in Intercom. Send MRR-based marketing campaigns and more Run personalized lead nurture campaigns to improve conversions All your lead generation efforts are fruitless if leads don’t convert. That’s why marketers build lead nurture campaigns to help leads along their journey from lead to advocate. But, the most successful nurture campaigns are highly personalized. Enriching your Intercom customer profiles with ChartMogul data allows your team to send targeted messages to your leads easily. Improve retention with MRR-based onboarding If you segment your customers by MRR or ARR, you can build a specific group that you can target during onboarding. This way, new low-tier customers can get a “self-serve” onboarding flow, while new high-tier customers are offered different messaging and an introduction to your sales team. Educating new customers on your product is important either way, but how you guide them needs to be personalized. Build a segment of long-standing customers with `subscriber since` filter To identify the most loyal, long-standing customers in Intercom, create a segment based on how long a customer has been a subscriber. Build a segment with the `subscribers since` filter and send them a message to get their feedback on how to serve them better, invite them to an advocacy program, or share a link to a gift box. Reactivation campaigns to bring back past customers Create a segment of customers that canceled or became inactive in the past in Intercom and build a reactivation campaign. You can use the `subscription status` from ChartMogul to build a segment in Intercom. Later, email them to share all the updates to your product since they canceled their subscription. They might not know what they are missing out on. Build a segment with currency to target a region Do you have customers in different countries making payments in different currencies? Customize your messaging based on the currency your customers use with the `currency` filter from ChartMogul. Customers paying in US dollars might have different concerns and needs that the ones paying in euros. Connect ChartMogul and Intercom quickly and securely To send customer data and events into Intercom directly, you’ll need admin access and follow a few easy steps. Go to Data Platform > Destinations and choose Intercom. Next, authenticate the destination and select fields you’d like to map between ChartMogul and Intercom. Pick all fields that you’d like to export to Intercom: MRR ARR Net payments Subscriber since Subscription status Plan name Plan external id External id Email Currency Currency symbol Company Timestamp Customer URL When mapping your data, things can get tricky e.g. email is often not enough to map your customers between two platforms. That’s why we use a fallback logic that will allow you two different mapping options. You can have confidence that your customer data got mapped correctly. Learn more about setting up Intercom as a data destination in our Help Center. Destinations allow you to quickly export data out of ChartMogul In ChartMogul, customer profiles feature core billing and contact details, MRR, ARR, subscriptions, transactions, MRR movements, and other data points. This information about your customers can be used beyond making analyses in the ChartMogul UI. Now, you can use that information to build marketing campaigns and send targeted messages to your user base within Intercom. Supercharge your marketing messaging with your subscription data. Destinations help you to export your subscription and revenue data out of ChartMogul with only a few clicks. For more on Destinations, check out our latest release, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination. You can configure your Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination in ChartMogul and export your MRR movements, customers, custom attributes, and tags for further analysis.

[INST] Enrich Intercom Customer Profiles With Metrics, Analytics, and Data From ChartMogul [/INST]

Customer data is spread across multiple platforms: CRM, communication, billing, and subscription analytics. Now you can send revenue and subscription data associated with your customer in ChartMogul directly to Intercom. Avoid data silos by consolidating your data into one place and elevate your campaigns in Intercom. To connect ChartMogul to Intercom go to Data Platform > Destinations. No development required. Use ChartMogul customer data to segment your contacts in Intercom As you grow your business, your customer count increases significantly and it becomes impossible to know all your customers. That’s why, when reaching out to your customer base, you need to tailor your messaging to each customer segment. If you’re using a tool like Intercom as your communication platform, your marketing team filters and segments users to build campaigns on a regular basis. Once you connect ChartMogul and Intercom, you will be able to build segments in Intercom based on customer data exported from ChartMogul. Customer profiles in Intercom will be populated with data like MRR, ARR, Net payments, subscriber since, subscription status, plan, email, currency, and company. Using those data points as filters in Intercom will enable your marketing team to provide personalized messaging via Intercom. Looking for inspiration? Below are examples of how you can use ChartMogul data to build segments in Intercom. Send MRR-based marketing campaigns and more Run personalized lead nurture campaigns to improve conversions All your lead generation efforts are fruitless if leads don’t convert. That’s why marketers build lead nurture campaigns to help leads along their journey from lead to advocate. But, the most successful nurture campaigns are highly personalized. Enriching your Intercom customer profiles with ChartMogul data allows your team to send targeted messages to your leads easily. Improve retention with MRR-based onboarding If you segment your customers by MRR or ARR, you can build a specific group that you can target during onboarding. This way, new low-tier customers can get a “self-serve” onboarding flow, while new high-tier customers are offered different messaging and an introduction to your sales team. Educating new customers on your product is important either way, but how you guide them needs to be personalized. Build a segment of long-standing customers with `subscriber since` filter To identify the most loyal, long-standing customers in Intercom, create a segment based on how long a customer has been a subscriber. Build a segment with the `subscribers since` filter and send them a message to get their feedback on how to serve them better, invite them to an advocacy program, or share a link to a gift box. Reactivation campaigns to bring back past customers Create a segment of customers that canceled or became inactive in the past in Intercom and build a reactivation campaign. You can use the `subscription status` from ChartMogul to build a segment in Intercom. Later, email them to share all the updates to your product since they canceled their subscription. They might not know what they are missing out on. Build a segment with currency to target a region Do you have customers in different countries making payments in different currencies? Customize your messaging based on the currency your customers use with the `currency` filter from ChartMogul. Customers paying in US dollars might have different concerns and needs that the ones paying in euros. Connect ChartMogul and Intercom quickly and securely To send customer data and events into Intercom directly, you’ll need admin access and follow a few easy steps. Go to Data Platform > Destinations and choose Intercom. Next, authenticate the destination and select fields you’d like to map between ChartMogul and Intercom. Pick all fields that you’d like to export to Intercom: MRR ARR Net payments Subscriber since Subscription status Plan name Plan external id External id Email Currency Currency symbol Company Timestamp Customer URL When mapping your data, things can get tricky e.g. email is often not enough to map your customers between two platforms. That’s why we use a fallback logic that will allow you two different mapping options. You can have confidence that your customer data got mapped correctly. Learn more about setting up Intercom as a data destination in our Help Center. Destinations allow you to quickly export data out of ChartMogul In ChartMogul, customer profiles feature core billing and contact details, MRR, ARR, subscriptions, transactions, MRR movements, and other data points. This information about your customers can be used beyond making analyses in the ChartMogul UI. Now, you can use that information to build marketing campaigns and send targeted messages to your user base within Intercom. Supercharge your marketing messaging with your subscription data. Destinations help you to export your subscription and revenue data out of ChartMogul with only a few clicks. For more on Destinations, check out our latest release, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination. You can configure your Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination in ChartMogul and export your MRR movements, customers, custom attributes, and tags for further analysis.

<sys> [INST] Enrich Intercom Customer Profiles With Metrics, Analytics, and Data From ChartMogul [/INST] Customer data is spread across multiple platforms: CRM, communication, billing, and subscription analytics. Now you can send revenue and subscription data associated with your customer in ChartMogul directly to Intercom. Avoid data silos by consolidating your data into one place and elevate your campaigns in Intercom. To connect ChartMogul to Intercom go to Data Platform > Destinations. No development required. Use ChartMogul customer data to segment your contacts in Intercom As you grow your business, your customer count increases significantly and it becomes impossible to know all your customers. That’s why, when reaching out to your customer base, you need to tailor your messaging to each customer segment. If you’re using a tool like Intercom as your communication platform, your marketing team filters and segments users to build campaigns on a regular basis. Once you connect ChartMogul and Intercom, you will be able to build segments in Intercom based on customer data exported from ChartMogul. Customer profiles in Intercom will be populated with data like MRR, ARR, Net payments, subscriber since, subscription status, plan, email, currency, and company. Using those data points as filters in Intercom will enable your marketing team to provide personalized messaging via Intercom. Looking for inspiration? Below are examples of how you can use ChartMogul data to build segments in Intercom. Send MRR-based marketing campaigns and more Run personalized lead nurture campaigns to improve conversions All your lead generation efforts are fruitless if leads don’t convert. That’s why marketers build lead nurture campaigns to help leads along their journey from lead to advocate. But, the most successful nurture campaigns are highly personalized. Enriching your Intercom customer profiles with ChartMogul data allows your team to send targeted messages to your leads easily. Improve retention with MRR-based onboarding If you segment your customers by MRR or ARR, you can build a specific group that you can target during onboarding. This way, new low-tier customers can get a “self-serve” onboarding flow, while new high-tier customers are offered different messaging and an introduction to your sales team. Educating new customers on your product is important either way, but how you guide them needs to be personalized. Build a segment of long-standing customers with `subscriber since` filter To identify the most loyal, long-standing customers in Intercom, create a segment based on how long a customer has been a subscriber. Build a segment with the `subscribers since` filter and send them a message to get their feedback on how to serve them better, invite them to an advocacy program, or share a link to a gift box. Reactivation campaigns to bring back past customers Create a segment of customers that canceled or became inactive in the past in Intercom and build a reactivation campaign. You can use the `subscription status` from ChartMogul to build a segment in Intercom. Later, email them to share all the updates to your product since they canceled their subscription. They might not know what they are missing out on. Build a segment with currency to target a region Do you have customers in different countries making payments in different currencies? Customize your messaging based on the currency your customers use with the `currency` filter from ChartMogul. Customers paying in US dollars might have different concerns and needs that the ones paying in euros. Connect ChartMogul and Intercom quickly and securely To send customer data and events into Intercom directly, you’ll need admin access and follow a few easy steps. Go to Data Platform > Destinations and choose Intercom. Next, authenticate the destination and select fields you’d like to map between ChartMogul and Intercom. Pick all fields that you’d like to export to Intercom: MRR ARR Net payments Subscriber since Subscription status Plan name Plan external id External id Email Currency Currency symbol Company Timestamp Customer URL When mapping your data, things can get tricky e.g. email is often not enough to map your customers between two platforms. That’s why we use a fallback logic that will allow you two different mapping options. You can have confidence that your customer data got mapped correctly. Learn more about setting up Intercom as a data destination in our Help Center. Destinations allow you to quickly export data out of ChartMogul In ChartMogul, customer profiles feature core billing and contact details, MRR, ARR, subscriptions, transactions, MRR movements, and other data points. This information about your customers can be used beyond making analyses in the ChartMogul UI. Now, you can use that information to build marketing campaigns and send targeted messages to your user base within Intercom. Supercharge your marketing messaging with your subscription data. Destinations help you to export your subscription and revenue data out of ChartMogul with only a few clicks. For more on Destinations, check out our latest release, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination. You can configure your Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage as a destination in ChartMogul and export your MRR movements, customers, custom attributes, and tags for further analysis. </sys

Announcing the Vindi <> ChartMogul integration!. A few months ago Rodrigo Dantas, the founder of Vindi, emailed to let us know his team is working on an integration with ChartMogul. We were really excited to be partnering with the South American leader in subscription billing. From my time at Zendesk I’d learned that Brazil was a great market for SaaS and well worth investing time into. Rodrigo also invited me to Brazil to meet their team and give a talk at Assinaturas Day (“Subscription Day” in English) in Sao Paulo, a really awesome one-day event organized by Vindi that brings together founders and executives from SaaS, media and e-commerce, all with the intention of celebrating the subscription economy and learning from each other. I was also really happy to have a great reason to visit Brazil for the first time :) Vindi founder Rodrigo Dantas, demonstrating the ChartMogul integration ChartMogul founder Nick Franklin presenting at Assinaturas Day 2017 in Sao Paulo. This new integration imports your data into ChartMogul, and keeps it in sync. It gives Vindi customers access to all of ChartMogul’s advanced reporting and analytics, including: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Segmentation Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more In addition to Vindi, you can also connect many other tools to your ChartMogul account, such as Zapier. These enrich your data with countless other attributes, so you can perform advanced segmentation on your Vindi subscription data. For example, using ChartMogul you could filter your MRR by sales rep, LTV by marketing channel, and churn rate by NPS score. Learn more about segmentation. Get started with integration If you already have a ChartMogul account, here’s how to connect your Vindi account to ChartMogul. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account, you can sign up for a free trial first before connecting your Vindi account. If you have any feedback when using this new integration, please let us know! Vindi and ChartMogul team members at Assinaturas Day in Sao Paulo.

[INST] Announcing the Vindi <> ChartMogul integration! [/INST]

A few months ago Rodrigo Dantas, the founder of Vindi, emailed to let us know his team is working on an integration with ChartMogul. We were really excited to be partnering with the South American leader in subscription billing. From my time at Zendesk I’d learned that Brazil was a great market for SaaS and well worth investing time into. Rodrigo also invited me to Brazil to meet their team and give a talk at Assinaturas Day (“Subscription Day” in English) in Sao Paulo, a really awesome one-day event organized by Vindi that brings together founders and executives from SaaS, media and e-commerce, all with the intention of celebrating the subscription economy and learning from each other. I was also really happy to have a great reason to visit Brazil for the first time :) Vindi founder Rodrigo Dantas, demonstrating the ChartMogul integration ChartMogul founder Nick Franklin presenting at Assinaturas Day 2017 in Sao Paulo. This new integration imports your data into ChartMogul, and keeps it in sync. It gives Vindi customers access to all of ChartMogul’s advanced reporting and analytics, including: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Segmentation Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more In addition to Vindi, you can also connect many other tools to your ChartMogul account, such as Zapier. These enrich your data with countless other attributes, so you can perform advanced segmentation on your Vindi subscription data. For example, using ChartMogul you could filter your MRR by sales rep, LTV by marketing channel, and churn rate by NPS score. Learn more about segmentation. Get started with integration If you already have a ChartMogul account, here’s how to connect your Vindi account to ChartMogul. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account, you can sign up for a free trial first before connecting your Vindi account. If you have any feedback when using this new integration, please let us know! Vindi and ChartMogul team members at Assinaturas Day in Sao Paulo.

<sys> [INST] Announcing the Vindi <> ChartMogul integration! [/INST] A few months ago Rodrigo Dantas, the founder of Vindi, emailed to let us know his team is working on an integration with ChartMogul. We were really excited to be partnering with the South American leader in subscription billing. From my time at Zendesk I’d learned that Brazil was a great market for SaaS and well worth investing time into. Rodrigo also invited me to Brazil to meet their team and give a talk at Assinaturas Day (“Subscription Day” in English) in Sao Paulo, a really awesome one-day event organized by Vindi that brings together founders and executives from SaaS, media and e-commerce, all with the intention of celebrating the subscription economy and learning from each other. I was also really happy to have a great reason to visit Brazil for the first time :) Vindi founder Rodrigo Dantas, demonstrating the ChartMogul integration ChartMogul founder Nick Franklin presenting at Assinaturas Day 2017 in Sao Paulo. This new integration imports your data into ChartMogul, and keeps it in sync. It gives Vindi customers access to all of ChartMogul’s advanced reporting and analytics, including: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Segmentation Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more In addition to Vindi, you can also connect many other tools to your ChartMogul account, such as Zapier. These enrich your data with countless other attributes, so you can perform advanced segmentation on your Vindi subscription data. For example, using ChartMogul you could filter your MRR by sales rep, LTV by marketing channel, and churn rate by NPS score. Learn more about segmentation. Get started with integration If you already have a ChartMogul account, here’s how to connect your Vindi account to ChartMogul. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account, you can sign up for a free trial first before connecting your Vindi account. If you have any feedback when using this new integration, please let us know! Vindi and ChartMogul team members at Assinaturas Day in Sao Paulo. </sys

How to Achieve Positive Growth with Negative Churn. Is negative churn a myth? You decide. Lincoln Murphy defines negative churn as: “When, for a given time period, expansion revenue more than offsets any revenue you lost from customer churn, downgrades, lower usage, etc.” This happens when existing customers expand their use of your product by purchasing add-ons, paying more over time and increasing their Lifetime Value to such an extent that it makes up for any revenue lost to churn. Here’s what that might look like: Say you have a company that loses 5% to churn each month, but the 95% of remaining customers are so successful with the product that they purchase additional services, increasing spend by 10%. That makes the total revenue of one month equal 105% of the previous month’s revenue. Essentially, you have the same number of customers, but revenue continues to grow. One article compares these ultra-valuable customer accounts to high-yield savings accounts where money keeps pouring in with minimal effort, but I don’t think that gives quite enough credit to how much achieving negative churn can transform businesses. Expansion Served 3 Ways Negative churn expansion typically comes in three flavors: Cross-Sell: Customers purchase add-ons that increase the abilities of the central product or service. Resource Expansion: Customers use more of the product, like upgrading a DropBox account to add more storage space. Seat Expansion: More customers within a company buy the product, and revenue increases by the number of people using it. None of these three expansion methods happen by accident – usually, they are the results of efforts made by your customer success team. Rather than sales people focusing on bringing in new clients, the customer success team is able to focus solely on helping current clients achieve their goals, keeping them happy, satisfied, and eager for even greater successes. It’s a well-established marketing fact that it’s easier to get more money from existing happy customers than it is to pry open the wallets of first-time customers. So why aren’t more companies focusing on continuing to win the hearts and dollars of their existing base? It’s a classic case of a bird in the hand being far better than two in the bush – yet we keep rustling those bushes! Slow, Stop, Reverse: The Roadmap to Negative Churn If negative churn were a place, like El Dorado – the City of Gold, its map would look like this: One road labeled “Customer Success” leading straight to it. No scenic route. No getting lost in the Amazon rainforest. Not even a dangerous river crossing with flesh-eating fish. Just a straightforward trip to the Promised Land that you could make in your mini-van. Seriously, it’s that simple. However, “easy” is another matter. Achieving negative churn takes time, perseverance, conviction, and commitment. Do you have what it takes to… Ensure your customers achieve their desired outcome (hint: it’s a moving target!)? Be proactive in driving expansion revenue? Deliver value faster? Ask for the sale – and get the sale? The definition of Customer Success is, literally, “ensuring your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.” Customers who don’t find success at first are not likely to expand their use of your product or service – but they’ll be more than happy to look for other solutions that aren’t yours. This is why you have to be proactive with customer success. Have your customer success team track the lifespans of your customers and identify hints that all is not well – then make it well. Make it spectacularly well. Impress and delight those customers who are on the edge of leaving, and use lessons learned to help satisfied customers become even more successful. “Delivering value faster not only makes for a very happy customer, but also speeds them on their way to taking advantage of your upsell opportunities.” You’ll also use metrics to know when and how to drive expansion revenue. There will be a point in the lifecycle of your customers where upgrading, adding more seats, or purchasing add-ons is the next logical step. Identify that point for each customer segment, and when customers reach that point, deliver your upsell on a silver platter. Some customers don’t stick around long enough for you to learn exactly why they’re unhappy – at least, that’s what you think. What often happens is that they’ve had a poor onboarding experience and it took too long for them to see value from your product or service. When onboarding is done right, it accelerates the time between when the client makes the purchase to when he or she sees the real value of what your company has to offer. Delivering value faster not only makes for a very happy customer, but also speeds them on their way to taking advantage of your upsell opportunities. If that accelerated expansion revenue is tied to their success, then everybody wins. Of course, the oldest adage in sales still applies: If you don’t ask for the sale, you won’t make the sale. It doesn’t matter if you’re working with brand new prospects or loyal customers. But, the trick to achieving negative churn is not only asking for the sale, but setting the stage to make that sale the next inevitable step. Maybe even as inevitable as the ebb and flow of the Atlantic – except for your business, it’s all flow. Want to read more about SaaS Churn? Download The Ultimate Churn Rate Cheat Sheet PDF from ChartMogul.

[INST] How to Achieve Positive Growth with Negative Churn [/INST]

Is negative churn a myth? You decide. Lincoln Murphy defines negative churn as: “When, for a given time period, expansion revenue more than offsets any revenue you lost from customer churn, downgrades, lower usage, etc.” This happens when existing customers expand their use of your product by purchasing add-ons, paying more over time and increasing their Lifetime Value to such an extent that it makes up for any revenue lost to churn. Here’s what that might look like: Say you have a company that loses 5% to churn each month, but the 95% of remaining customers are so successful with the product that they purchase additional services, increasing spend by 10%. That makes the total revenue of one month equal 105% of the previous month’s revenue. Essentially, you have the same number of customers, but revenue continues to grow. One article compares these ultra-valuable customer accounts to high-yield savings accounts where money keeps pouring in with minimal effort, but I don’t think that gives quite enough credit to how much achieving negative churn can transform businesses. Expansion Served 3 Ways Negative churn expansion typically comes in three flavors: Cross-Sell: Customers purchase add-ons that increase the abilities of the central product or service. Resource Expansion: Customers use more of the product, like upgrading a DropBox account to add more storage space. Seat Expansion: More customers within a company buy the product, and revenue increases by the number of people using it. None of these three expansion methods happen by accident – usually, they are the results of efforts made by your customer success team. Rather than sales people focusing on bringing in new clients, the customer success team is able to focus solely on helping current clients achieve their goals, keeping them happy, satisfied, and eager for even greater successes. It’s a well-established marketing fact that it’s easier to get more money from existing happy customers than it is to pry open the wallets of first-time customers. So why aren’t more companies focusing on continuing to win the hearts and dollars of their existing base? It’s a classic case of a bird in the hand being far better than two in the bush – yet we keep rustling those bushes! Slow, Stop, Reverse: The Roadmap to Negative Churn If negative churn were a place, like El Dorado – the City of Gold, its map would look like this: One road labeled “Customer Success” leading straight to it. No scenic route. No getting lost in the Amazon rainforest. Not even a dangerous river crossing with flesh-eating fish. Just a straightforward trip to the Promised Land that you could make in your mini-van. Seriously, it’s that simple. However, “easy” is another matter. Achieving negative churn takes time, perseverance, conviction, and commitment. Do you have what it takes to… Ensure your customers achieve their desired outcome (hint: it’s a moving target!)? Be proactive in driving expansion revenue? Deliver value faster? Ask for the sale – and get the sale? The definition of Customer Success is, literally, “ensuring your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.” Customers who don’t find success at first are not likely to expand their use of your product or service – but they’ll be more than happy to look for other solutions that aren’t yours. This is why you have to be proactive with customer success. Have your customer success team track the lifespans of your customers and identify hints that all is not well – then make it well. Make it spectacularly well. Impress and delight those customers who are on the edge of leaving, and use lessons learned to help satisfied customers become even more successful. “Delivering value faster not only makes for a very happy customer, but also speeds them on their way to taking advantage of your upsell opportunities.” You’ll also use metrics to know when and how to drive expansion revenue. There will be a point in the lifecycle of your customers where upgrading, adding more seats, or purchasing add-ons is the next logical step. Identify that point for each customer segment, and when customers reach that point, deliver your upsell on a silver platter. Some customers don’t stick around long enough for you to learn exactly why they’re unhappy – at least, that’s what you think. What often happens is that they’ve had a poor onboarding experience and it took too long for them to see value from your product or service. When onboarding is done right, it accelerates the time between when the client makes the purchase to when he or she sees the real value of what your company has to offer. Delivering value faster not only makes for a very happy customer, but also speeds them on their way to taking advantage of your upsell opportunities. If that accelerated expansion revenue is tied to their success, then everybody wins. Of course, the oldest adage in sales still applies: If you don’t ask for the sale, you won’t make the sale. It doesn’t matter if you’re working with brand new prospects or loyal customers. But, the trick to achieving negative churn is not only asking for the sale, but setting the stage to make that sale the next inevitable step. Maybe even as inevitable as the ebb and flow of the Atlantic – except for your business, it’s all flow. Want to read more about SaaS Churn? Download The Ultimate Churn Rate Cheat Sheet PDF from ChartMogul.

<sys> [INST] How to Achieve Positive Growth with Negative Churn [/INST] Is negative churn a myth? You decide. Lincoln Murphy defines negative churn as: “When, for a given time period, expansion revenue more than offsets any revenue you lost from customer churn, downgrades, lower usage, etc.” This happens when existing customers expand their use of your product by purchasing add-ons, paying more over time and increasing their Lifetime Value to such an extent that it makes up for any revenue lost to churn. Here’s what that might look like: Say you have a company that loses 5% to churn each month, but the 95% of remaining customers are so successful with the product that they purchase additional services, increasing spend by 10%. That makes the total revenue of one month equal 105% of the previous month’s revenue. Essentially, you have the same number of customers, but revenue continues to grow. One article compares these ultra-valuable customer accounts to high-yield savings accounts where money keeps pouring in with minimal effort, but I don’t think that gives quite enough credit to how much achieving negative churn can transform businesses. Expansion Served 3 Ways Negative churn expansion typically comes in three flavors: Cross-Sell: Customers purchase add-ons that increase the abilities of the central product or service. Resource Expansion: Customers use more of the product, like upgrading a DropBox account to add more storage space. Seat Expansion: More customers within a company buy the product, and revenue increases by the number of people using it. None of these three expansion methods happen by accident – usually, they are the results of efforts made by your customer success team. Rather than sales people focusing on bringing in new clients, the customer success team is able to focus solely on helping current clients achieve their goals, keeping them happy, satisfied, and eager for even greater successes. It’s a well-established marketing fact that it’s easier to get more money from existing happy customers than it is to pry open the wallets of first-time customers. So why aren’t more companies focusing on continuing to win the hearts and dollars of their existing base? It’s a classic case of a bird in the hand being far better than two in the bush – yet we keep rustling those bushes! Slow, Stop, Reverse: The Roadmap to Negative Churn If negative churn were a place, like El Dorado – the City of Gold, its map would look like this: One road labeled “Customer Success” leading straight to it. No scenic route. No getting lost in the Amazon rainforest. Not even a dangerous river crossing with flesh-eating fish. Just a straightforward trip to the Promised Land that you could make in your mini-van. Seriously, it’s that simple. However, “easy” is another matter. Achieving negative churn takes time, perseverance, conviction, and commitment. Do you have what it takes to… Ensure your customers achieve their desired outcome (hint: it’s a moving target!)? Be proactive in driving expansion revenue? Deliver value faster? Ask for the sale – and get the sale? The definition of Customer Success is, literally, “ensuring your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.” Customers who don’t find success at first are not likely to expand their use of your product or service – but they’ll be more than happy to look for other solutions that aren’t yours. This is why you have to be proactive with customer success. Have your customer success team track the lifespans of your customers and identify hints that all is not well – then make it well. Make it spectacularly well. Impress and delight those customers who are on the edge of leaving, and use lessons learned to help satisfied customers become even more successful. “Delivering value faster not only makes for a very happy customer, but also speeds them on their way to taking advantage of your upsell opportunities.” You’ll also use metrics to know when and how to drive expansion revenue. There will be a point in the lifecycle of your customers where upgrading, adding more seats, or purchasing add-ons is the next logical step. Identify that point for each customer segment, and when customers reach that point, deliver your upsell on a silver platter. Some customers don’t stick around long enough for you to learn exactly why they’re unhappy – at least, that’s what you think. What often happens is that they’ve had a poor onboarding experience and it took too long for them to see value from your product or service. When onboarding is done right, it accelerates the time between when the client makes the purchase to when he or she sees the real value of what your company has to offer. Delivering value faster not only makes for a very happy customer, but also speeds them on their way to taking advantage of your upsell opportunities. If that accelerated expansion revenue is tied to their success, then everybody wins. Of course, the oldest adage in sales still applies: If you don’t ask for the sale, you won’t make the sale. It doesn’t matter if you’re working with brand new prospects or loyal customers. But, the trick to achieving negative churn is not only asking for the sale, but setting the stage to make that sale the next inevitable step. Maybe even as inevitable as the ebb and flow of the Atlantic – except for your business, it’s all flow. Want to read more about SaaS Churn? Download The Ultimate Churn Rate Cheat Sheet PDF from ChartMogul. </sys

How Do You Know You Can Trust Your Subscription Metrics?. Why is my MRR different from what I see in our billing system? This is a common question we hear from customers. Perhaps, the most common one. It is true that often your key subscription metrics can be different from what you see in your billing system. But that’s not a bug or a random event. There’s a reason why we calculate your metrics the way we do — it is to give you an up to date and completely accurate view of what’s happening in your business. In this article, I want to explain why you could and should trust the numbers you see in ChartMogul. But before we get there, let’s start with a story. The single source of truth Every day, I log into ChartMogul and open the same report: ARR against target. ChartMogul allows you to track your progress towards a goal. This chart shows me how I’m tracking against my goal for the year. For the time used so far, am I on track? If not, what decisions or actions am I making today to fix it? Then I click into the MRR movements chart. Here I can see the dynamics of the day, of the month, of the overall business. I can answer questions like: Are my current sales and marketing efforts paying off? Are my best customers expanding and renewing? Am I retaining key accounts? Which pricing plan performs best? As I drill down even further — to an individual customer — I can see each and every transaction, line, item, and discount. To me, this granularity, this detail, is the magic of the subscription data platform. It takes into account every single transaction and customer decision happening within your subscription business. You can quickly get a sense of overall business health on your dashboard. You can even segment based on custom fields and dig in to diagnose things like: What is my churn rate by customer success manager? We don’t generate metrics from the maybe, almost and practically paid customers. Nor do we generate metrics from the deal that your sales team marked as closed-won in Salesforce. Rather, at ChartMogul we’ve chosen to generate subscription metrics primarily from each and every customer invoice. By doing this, we give our users a picture of the money that the business is actually making. That’s why, when you open your ChartMogul dashboard, you don’t see a mirror image of the numbers in your billing system, but rather a true picture of your business updated to the second and based on the actual invoices sent to and paid by your customers. The difference between MRR and CMRR We only report the actual payments that have occurred because we believe it provides the most accurate measure of the current state of your business. For a more forward-looking metric, you should keep an eye on your Committed MRR (or CMRR). While this is not supported yet, we plan to bring it to ChartMogul in the not-so-distant future. When small discrepancies turn into big mistakes To understand why that’s so important, let’s look at a few examples when data inconsistency can have a serious impact on your business. Not accounting for unpaid invoices In some billing systems, MRR is calculated in a way that includes unpaid invoices. If you’re using a billing system as your source of truth for MRR, you could be counting hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid invoices as “MRR”. Imagine you’re the CMO of a $10 million ARR business allocating the annual marketing budget. You log in to your billing system, chat with the CFO, and decide on what you can spend in the next 12-months or so. But in this scenario, neither of you know that your current rate of unpaid invoices sits at about 4%. That would be an awkward boardroom discovery… The money you’ve committed to your marketing budget that you don’t really have is just one part of the picture. It is also $400k-worth of customers who had the motivation to learn about, sign up for, and maybe even adopt your product, but for some reason never got around to paying their invoice. Customers that you could be working with to turn into engaged users of your product. So, the way that your billing system measures MRR should not be a “Just trust what it’s showing us” conclusion. You need to make and maintain consistent decisions about how to measure the health of your subscription business. Recognizing churn at the most appropriate moment Another example is when to recognize churn. You can recognize cancellations as churn at the end of the paid-up billing period. Or, you can recognize churn events at the time of cancellation. There are 2 schools of thought when it comes to recognizing churn. If you choose to recognize churn at the end of the service period (often considered a best practice for MRR reporting), one potential side effect is that your MRR will usually appear higher. Learn more about churn: Check out The Ultimate (SaaS) Churn Rate Cheat Sheet Now imagine you’re the head of sales at a high-growth SaaS company. You’re inches away from the EOY ARR target, and all of the sudden, on December 31, a bunch of churn gets dialed in and now, your target is out of reach. Gutting, right? If you’re a head of sales or revenue ops, this kind of invoice and service-level detail is essential. You have to account for it or you run the risk of over-reporting and under-planning. Subscription businesses at scale need help with this. If you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, that means you have a compounding data set of really meaningful revenue data. Every month, more and more information about successful and failed transactions grows and grows. For a lot of teams that data lives in multiple systems: Stripe, Braintree, Xero, offline invoices, a database, etc. To avoid a scenario where you’re trying to track/figure out your true MRR and other key subscription metrics after the fact, you need to harness your invoice-level subscription data — it will save you time and stress down the road. Getting trustworthy subscription metrics is hard. But you can manage If you’re grappling with any of these challenges, first let me say — you’re not alone. A remarkable number of subscription businesses are piecing together Excel spreadsheets and SQL queries to calculate their subscription metrics. Building and maintaining an inhouse subscription data solution, though, and I know I’m biased, isn’t the solution. At the same time, many new and nimble companies are starting with the full setup that gives them an advantage from Day 1. Don’t trust our word for it — we’ve heard it from the people in the trenches: […W]e saw that while our peer companies were using a mix of homegrown and specialized tools, many new startups were adopting the likes of Segment, Mixpanel, and ChartMogul from the get-go. I wanted to be using the tools of the future and always ready to upgrade and switch things out, rather than getting behind and building up debt. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer I hope I have successfully convinced you that you need a true invoice-level picture of what’s happening in your subscription business. Sign up for a trial today and see just what I mean.

[INST] How Do You Know You Can Trust Your Subscription Metrics? [/INST]

Why is my MRR different from what I see in our billing system? This is a common question we hear from customers. Perhaps, the most common one. It is true that often your key subscription metrics can be different from what you see in your billing system. But that’s not a bug or a random event. There’s a reason why we calculate your metrics the way we do — it is to give you an up to date and completely accurate view of what’s happening in your business. In this article, I want to explain why you could and should trust the numbers you see in ChartMogul. But before we get there, let’s start with a story. The single source of truth Every day, I log into ChartMogul and open the same report: ARR against target. ChartMogul allows you to track your progress towards a goal. This chart shows me how I’m tracking against my goal for the year. For the time used so far, am I on track? If not, what decisions or actions am I making today to fix it? Then I click into the MRR movements chart. Here I can see the dynamics of the day, of the month, of the overall business. I can answer questions like: Are my current sales and marketing efforts paying off? Are my best customers expanding and renewing? Am I retaining key accounts? Which pricing plan performs best? As I drill down even further — to an individual customer — I can see each and every transaction, line, item, and discount. To me, this granularity, this detail, is the magic of the subscription data platform. It takes into account every single transaction and customer decision happening within your subscription business. You can quickly get a sense of overall business health on your dashboard. You can even segment based on custom fields and dig in to diagnose things like: What is my churn rate by customer success manager? We don’t generate metrics from the maybe, almost and practically paid customers. Nor do we generate metrics from the deal that your sales team marked as closed-won in Salesforce. Rather, at ChartMogul we’ve chosen to generate subscription metrics primarily from each and every customer invoice. By doing this, we give our users a picture of the money that the business is actually making. That’s why, when you open your ChartMogul dashboard, you don’t see a mirror image of the numbers in your billing system, but rather a true picture of your business updated to the second and based on the actual invoices sent to and paid by your customers. The difference between MRR and CMRR We only report the actual payments that have occurred because we believe it provides the most accurate measure of the current state of your business. For a more forward-looking metric, you should keep an eye on your Committed MRR (or CMRR). While this is not supported yet, we plan to bring it to ChartMogul in the not-so-distant future. When small discrepancies turn into big mistakes To understand why that’s so important, let’s look at a few examples when data inconsistency can have a serious impact on your business. Not accounting for unpaid invoices In some billing systems, MRR is calculated in a way that includes unpaid invoices. If you’re using a billing system as your source of truth for MRR, you could be counting hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid invoices as “MRR”. Imagine you’re the CMO of a $10 million ARR business allocating the annual marketing budget. You log in to your billing system, chat with the CFO, and decide on what you can spend in the next 12-months or so. But in this scenario, neither of you know that your current rate of unpaid invoices sits at about 4%. That would be an awkward boardroom discovery… The money you’ve committed to your marketing budget that you don’t really have is just one part of the picture. It is also $400k-worth of customers who had the motivation to learn about, sign up for, and maybe even adopt your product, but for some reason never got around to paying their invoice. Customers that you could be working with to turn into engaged users of your product. So, the way that your billing system measures MRR should not be a “Just trust what it’s showing us” conclusion. You need to make and maintain consistent decisions about how to measure the health of your subscription business. Recognizing churn at the most appropriate moment Another example is when to recognize churn. You can recognize cancellations as churn at the end of the paid-up billing period. Or, you can recognize churn events at the time of cancellation. There are 2 schools of thought when it comes to recognizing churn. If you choose to recognize churn at the end of the service period (often considered a best practice for MRR reporting), one potential side effect is that your MRR will usually appear higher. Learn more about churn: Check out The Ultimate (SaaS) Churn Rate Cheat Sheet Now imagine you’re the head of sales at a high-growth SaaS company. You’re inches away from the EOY ARR target, and all of the sudden, on December 31, a bunch of churn gets dialed in and now, your target is out of reach. Gutting, right? If you’re a head of sales or revenue ops, this kind of invoice and service-level detail is essential. You have to account for it or you run the risk of over-reporting and under-planning. Subscription businesses at scale need help with this. If you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, that means you have a compounding data set of really meaningful revenue data. Every month, more and more information about successful and failed transactions grows and grows. For a lot of teams that data lives in multiple systems: Stripe, Braintree, Xero, offline invoices, a database, etc. To avoid a scenario where you’re trying to track/figure out your true MRR and other key subscription metrics after the fact, you need to harness your invoice-level subscription data — it will save you time and stress down the road. Getting trustworthy subscription metrics is hard. But you can manage If you’re grappling with any of these challenges, first let me say — you’re not alone. A remarkable number of subscription businesses are piecing together Excel spreadsheets and SQL queries to calculate their subscription metrics. Building and maintaining an inhouse subscription data solution, though, and I know I’m biased, isn’t the solution. At the same time, many new and nimble companies are starting with the full setup that gives them an advantage from Day 1. Don’t trust our word for it — we’ve heard it from the people in the trenches: […W]e saw that while our peer companies were using a mix of homegrown and specialized tools, many new startups were adopting the likes of Segment, Mixpanel, and ChartMogul from the get-go. I wanted to be using the tools of the future and always ready to upgrade and switch things out, rather than getting behind and building up debt. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer I hope I have successfully convinced you that you need a true invoice-level picture of what’s happening in your subscription business. Sign up for a trial today and see just what I mean.

<sys> [INST] How Do You Know You Can Trust Your Subscription Metrics? [/INST] Why is my MRR different from what I see in our billing system? This is a common question we hear from customers. Perhaps, the most common one. It is true that often your key subscription metrics can be different from what you see in your billing system. But that’s not a bug or a random event. There’s a reason why we calculate your metrics the way we do — it is to give you an up to date and completely accurate view of what’s happening in your business. In this article, I want to explain why you could and should trust the numbers you see in ChartMogul. But before we get there, let’s start with a story. The single source of truth Every day, I log into ChartMogul and open the same report: ARR against target. ChartMogul allows you to track your progress towards a goal. This chart shows me how I’m tracking against my goal for the year. For the time used so far, am I on track? If not, what decisions or actions am I making today to fix it? Then I click into the MRR movements chart. Here I can see the dynamics of the day, of the month, of the overall business. I can answer questions like: Are my current sales and marketing efforts paying off? Are my best customers expanding and renewing? Am I retaining key accounts? Which pricing plan performs best? As I drill down even further — to an individual customer — I can see each and every transaction, line, item, and discount. To me, this granularity, this detail, is the magic of the subscription data platform. It takes into account every single transaction and customer decision happening within your subscription business. You can quickly get a sense of overall business health on your dashboard. You can even segment based on custom fields and dig in to diagnose things like: What is my churn rate by customer success manager? We don’t generate metrics from the maybe, almost and practically paid customers. Nor do we generate metrics from the deal that your sales team marked as closed-won in Salesforce. Rather, at ChartMogul we’ve chosen to generate subscription metrics primarily from each and every customer invoice. By doing this, we give our users a picture of the money that the business is actually making. That’s why, when you open your ChartMogul dashboard, you don’t see a mirror image of the numbers in your billing system, but rather a true picture of your business updated to the second and based on the actual invoices sent to and paid by your customers. The difference between MRR and CMRR We only report the actual payments that have occurred because we believe it provides the most accurate measure of the current state of your business. For a more forward-looking metric, you should keep an eye on your Committed MRR (or CMRR). While this is not supported yet, we plan to bring it to ChartMogul in the not-so-distant future. When small discrepancies turn into big mistakes To understand why that’s so important, let’s look at a few examples when data inconsistency can have a serious impact on your business. Not accounting for unpaid invoices In some billing systems, MRR is calculated in a way that includes unpaid invoices. If you’re using a billing system as your source of truth for MRR, you could be counting hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid invoices as “MRR”. Imagine you’re the CMO of a $10 million ARR business allocating the annual marketing budget. You log in to your billing system, chat with the CFO, and decide on what you can spend in the next 12-months or so. But in this scenario, neither of you know that your current rate of unpaid invoices sits at about 4%. That would be an awkward boardroom discovery… The money you’ve committed to your marketing budget that you don’t really have is just one part of the picture. It is also $400k-worth of customers who had the motivation to learn about, sign up for, and maybe even adopt your product, but for some reason never got around to paying their invoice. Customers that you could be working with to turn into engaged users of your product. So, the way that your billing system measures MRR should not be a “Just trust what it’s showing us” conclusion. You need to make and maintain consistent decisions about how to measure the health of your subscription business. Recognizing churn at the most appropriate moment Another example is when to recognize churn. You can recognize cancellations as churn at the end of the paid-up billing period. Or, you can recognize churn events at the time of cancellation. There are 2 schools of thought when it comes to recognizing churn. If you choose to recognize churn at the end of the service period (often considered a best practice for MRR reporting), one potential side effect is that your MRR will usually appear higher. Learn more about churn: Check out The Ultimate (SaaS) Churn Rate Cheat Sheet Now imagine you’re the head of sales at a high-growth SaaS company. You’re inches away from the EOY ARR target, and all of the sudden, on December 31, a bunch of churn gets dialed in and now, your target is out of reach. Gutting, right? If you’re a head of sales or revenue ops, this kind of invoice and service-level detail is essential. You have to account for it or you run the risk of over-reporting and under-planning. Subscription businesses at scale need help with this. If you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, that means you have a compounding data set of really meaningful revenue data. Every month, more and more information about successful and failed transactions grows and grows. For a lot of teams that data lives in multiple systems: Stripe, Braintree, Xero, offline invoices, a database, etc. To avoid a scenario where you’re trying to track/figure out your true MRR and other key subscription metrics after the fact, you need to harness your invoice-level subscription data — it will save you time and stress down the road. Getting trustworthy subscription metrics is hard. But you can manage If you’re grappling with any of these challenges, first let me say — you’re not alone. A remarkable number of subscription businesses are piecing together Excel spreadsheets and SQL queries to calculate their subscription metrics. Building and maintaining an inhouse subscription data solution, though, and I know I’m biased, isn’t the solution. At the same time, many new and nimble companies are starting with the full setup that gives them an advantage from Day 1. Don’t trust our word for it — we’ve heard it from the people in the trenches: […W]e saw that while our peer companies were using a mix of homegrown and specialized tools, many new startups were adopting the likes of Segment, Mixpanel, and ChartMogul from the get-go. I wanted to be using the tools of the future and always ready to upgrade and switch things out, rather than getting behind and building up debt. Joel Gascoigne, Buffer I hope I have successfully convinced you that you need a true invoice-level picture of what’s happening in your subscription business. Sign up for a trial today and see just what I mean. </sys

Everything You Need to Know About Retention (Rates). Every time I think about how SaaS companies grow, I come back to the idea that: Growth is the result of engagement, retention, and monetization. Tweet this quote But at the same time, retention is also the most crucial factor that drives acquisition and monetization. What that means is that retention plays a role in all three elements of a successful growth engine. None of this is new to people in SaaS, so why write another article on the topic? For one thing, there isn’t a single useful resource that collects everything you need to know about it. Besides, as the industry evolves, so does our thinking about some of its central topics. We’ll get into some of the current trends about retention further down in this guide, but let’s revisit some of the core questions first. What is retention? At its core, retention measures the ability of your business to keep paying customers over time. If you have poor retention, nothing else matters. Brian Balfour It is a question of strategic importance for SaaS companies because of how the subscription model works. Retention is critical for getting high enough LTV, so you can recoup your cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) You can have the best acquisition engine in the world, but it can’t save you if your retention is not up to par. That is why it is vital to understand not just what retention is but how to measure it and how to turn the numbers into insight on how to improve your product. How do you measure retention? Similar to churn, we also need to discern between MRR retention and customer retention. Customer retention rate formula To find your Customer retention rate you need two numbers — how many customers you had on the first day of a given month and how many of those were still subscribers at the end of the month: Customers retained during the period (month) / Customers at the beginning of the period Let’s look at an example to make it easier to comprehend: The Donald Duck Co. starts the month of March with 20 paying customers. During the month, one customer cancels their plan. This means their Customer Retention Rate for March is (20-1)/20 = 95%. This is the simplest way to analyze your retention. While it is a quick and straightforward way to calculate a rate, you should be careful about using the core number of customers to measure retention. Measuring retention by revenue yields more meaningful results. MRR retention rate formula There’s a simple formula to measure your MRR retention rate, and it is very similar to the one we use to measure churn: (Gross) MRR Retention = Revenue retained during the current period (month) / Revenue at the beginning of the period We’re using the same example from above, and it should help you understand how MRR retention is different from looking at customers: The Donald Duck Co. starts the month of March with $100 in MRR. During the month, one customer cancels their $10/mo premium plan. This means their Gross MRR retention for March is (100-10)/100 = 90%. In our example, we’re assuming a small number of customers who are mostly paying the same monthly subscription. But in reality, companies tend to face much more variability. Losing one customer might not seem like a big deal — unless that customer accounts for a significant proportion of your revenue. That’s why we advocate for looking at MRR retention rates. On a separate note, keep in mind that our calculation does not include any new customers gained during the month. Hopefully, it should be obvious why — we’re interested in retention, not all revenue/business. More importantly, it doesn’t include any expansion revenue from those who became customers before the beginning of March and upgraded or bought an add-on during the month. That is because we’re looking at Gross MRR Retention. Another way to look at this is to measure Net MRR Retention, which includes expansion from your existing customer base: In addition to the customer who canceled, in March Donald Duck also had 3 customers switch from the $5/mo plan to the more expensive $10/mo plan. That means their Net MRR retention rate for March is [100-10+(3×5)]/100 = $105/$100 = 105% One question you can often see around the discussion of retention and churn is whether you should be looking at the gross or net numbers. Our answer is that you should be looking at both. They tell you different things. Think about it this way — the gross retention number tells you how well you’re solving the problem customers came with to you in the first place. Your net retention, on the other hand, indicates whether the value of your product and your pricing are aligned with the success of your customers. Cohort analysis for deep understanding of retention Looking at one simple retention rate number does not tell you much about the performance of your company. Cohort analysis provides a much more detailed view and allows you to gain insight that you can turn into concrete actions aimed at improving your retention rates. Net MRR retention cohorts in ChartMogul When we talk about cohorts, we simply mean a group of people who share a specific trait. Thus, we can define a cohort as Customers who subscribed in March 2021, or Customers who were closed by (sales rep) Mary, or even Customers who were closed by Mary in March 2021. A cohort is simply a fancy name for a group. David Skok Cohorts based on time periods have become a standard for analyzing retention: https://twitter.com/JeffChang30/status/1326961038315593728 However, they reveal their real power when you combine time cohorts with segmentation. This allows you to understand who are your best customers and what makes them stick. For a more detailed view on analyzing retention using cohort analysis, check out our resources. Deep dives: Cohort Analysis in the SaaS Metrics Refresher email course The Ultimate Cohort Analysis Cheat Sheet What is a good retention rate? Benchmarking provides the best answer to this question. Naturally, retention varies across niches (consumer vs. B2B software) and segments (SMB vs. enterprise). We have collected several benchmarking studies, which should help guide your understanding: What is a good retention (Lenny Rachitsky and Casey Winters) What’s a Good Net Retention Rate in SaaS? (Jason Lemkin, SaaStr) On the (rising) importance of net retention Over the last few years, we’ve seen SaaS become even more competitive. The emergence of trends such as product-led growth demonstrates how professionals in the industry are trying to find new ways to achieve sustainable success. All that means that it is even more critical than ever to find ways to align your product with the value you generate for your customers and find the right monetization structure that allows you to grow along with them. We often see this reflected in the discussion about value metrics and the fixation on (achieving) positive net MRR retention (i.e., growing even without adding new customers). How can you improve your retention rate? While retention is notoriously hard to budge, it doesn’t mean there aren’t ways in which you can act on it. There are multiple ways you can increase the retention rate of your product: Source (Also, check out Lenny’s excellent Twitter thread that goes into more detail on each of these.) We can probably identify even more ways to improve retention, but the truth is that the first two items on this list have the highest potential — improving your product and your onboarding. Between them, working on your product naturally has a higher chance to deliver more value and improve retention. However, it’s not only costlier and more time-consuming but also challenging to keep delivering more value consistently. That’s why many startup teams go after their customer onboarding as the lowest hanging fruit that presents the most significant opportunity to improve retention rates. Deep dive: A Guide to SaaS Customer Onboarding Retention lies at the core of every successful subscription business The SaaS model is simple when stripped of all layers of complexity added by technology, measurement, etc. At its essence, it is about a promise that your solution will solve a pain that the customer is experiencing. Your retention rate measures how well you are delivering on that promise. You can apply multiple marketing and business tactics to acquire a customer — on a free trial or a freemium plan — but retention is the definitive proof that you are delivering on the promise you attracted them with.

[INST] Everything You Need to Know About Retention (Rates) [/INST]

Every time I think about how SaaS companies grow, I come back to the idea that: Growth is the result of engagement, retention, and monetization. Tweet this quote But at the same time, retention is also the most crucial factor that drives acquisition and monetization. What that means is that retention plays a role in all three elements of a successful growth engine. None of this is new to people in SaaS, so why write another article on the topic? For one thing, there isn’t a single useful resource that collects everything you need to know about it. Besides, as the industry evolves, so does our thinking about some of its central topics. We’ll get into some of the current trends about retention further down in this guide, but let’s revisit some of the core questions first. What is retention? At its core, retention measures the ability of your business to keep paying customers over time. If you have poor retention, nothing else matters. Brian Balfour It is a question of strategic importance for SaaS companies because of how the subscription model works. Retention is critical for getting high enough LTV, so you can recoup your cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) You can have the best acquisition engine in the world, but it can’t save you if your retention is not up to par. That is why it is vital to understand not just what retention is but how to measure it and how to turn the numbers into insight on how to improve your product. How do you measure retention? Similar to churn, we also need to discern between MRR retention and customer retention. Customer retention rate formula To find your Customer retention rate you need two numbers — how many customers you had on the first day of a given month and how many of those were still subscribers at the end of the month: Customers retained during the period (month) / Customers at the beginning of the period Let’s look at an example to make it easier to comprehend: The Donald Duck Co. starts the month of March with 20 paying customers. During the month, one customer cancels their plan. This means their Customer Retention Rate for March is (20-1)/20 = 95%. This is the simplest way to analyze your retention. While it is a quick and straightforward way to calculate a rate, you should be careful about using the core number of customers to measure retention. Measuring retention by revenue yields more meaningful results. MRR retention rate formula There’s a simple formula to measure your MRR retention rate, and it is very similar to the one we use to measure churn: (Gross) MRR Retention = Revenue retained during the current period (month) / Revenue at the beginning of the period We’re using the same example from above, and it should help you understand how MRR retention is different from looking at customers: The Donald Duck Co. starts the month of March with $100 in MRR. During the month, one customer cancels their $10/mo premium plan. This means their Gross MRR retention for March is (100-10)/100 = 90%. In our example, we’re assuming a small number of customers who are mostly paying the same monthly subscription. But in reality, companies tend to face much more variability. Losing one customer might not seem like a big deal — unless that customer accounts for a significant proportion of your revenue. That’s why we advocate for looking at MRR retention rates. On a separate note, keep in mind that our calculation does not include any new customers gained during the month. Hopefully, it should be obvious why — we’re interested in retention, not all revenue/business. More importantly, it doesn’t include any expansion revenue from those who became customers before the beginning of March and upgraded or bought an add-on during the month. That is because we’re looking at Gross MRR Retention. Another way to look at this is to measure Net MRR Retention, which includes expansion from your existing customer base: In addition to the customer who canceled, in March Donald Duck also had 3 customers switch from the $5/mo plan to the more expensive $10/mo plan. That means their Net MRR retention rate for March is [100-10+(3×5)]/100 = $105/$100 = 105% One question you can often see around the discussion of retention and churn is whether you should be looking at the gross or net numbers. Our answer is that you should be looking at both. They tell you different things. Think about it this way — the gross retention number tells you how well you’re solving the problem customers came with to you in the first place. Your net retention, on the other hand, indicates whether the value of your product and your pricing are aligned with the success of your customers. Cohort analysis for deep understanding of retention Looking at one simple retention rate number does not tell you much about the performance of your company. Cohort analysis provides a much more detailed view and allows you to gain insight that you can turn into concrete actions aimed at improving your retention rates. Net MRR retention cohorts in ChartMogul When we talk about cohorts, we simply mean a group of people who share a specific trait. Thus, we can define a cohort as Customers who subscribed in March 2021, or Customers who were closed by (sales rep) Mary, or even Customers who were closed by Mary in March 2021. A cohort is simply a fancy name for a group. David Skok Cohorts based on time periods have become a standard for analyzing retention: https://twitter.com/JeffChang30/status/1326961038315593728 However, they reveal their real power when you combine time cohorts with segmentation. This allows you to understand who are your best customers and what makes them stick. For a more detailed view on analyzing retention using cohort analysis, check out our resources. Deep dives: Cohort Analysis in the SaaS Metrics Refresher email course The Ultimate Cohort Analysis Cheat Sheet What is a good retention rate? Benchmarking provides the best answer to this question. Naturally, retention varies across niches (consumer vs. B2B software) and segments (SMB vs. enterprise). We have collected several benchmarking studies, which should help guide your understanding: What is a good retention (Lenny Rachitsky and Casey Winters) What’s a Good Net Retention Rate in SaaS? (Jason Lemkin, SaaStr) On the (rising) importance of net retention Over the last few years, we’ve seen SaaS become even more competitive. The emergence of trends such as product-led growth demonstrates how professionals in the industry are trying to find new ways to achieve sustainable success. All that means that it is even more critical than ever to find ways to align your product with the value you generate for your customers and find the right monetization structure that allows you to grow along with them. We often see this reflected in the discussion about value metrics and the fixation on (achieving) positive net MRR retention (i.e., growing even without adding new customers). How can you improve your retention rate? While retention is notoriously hard to budge, it doesn’t mean there aren’t ways in which you can act on it. There are multiple ways you can increase the retention rate of your product: Source (Also, check out Lenny’s excellent Twitter thread that goes into more detail on each of these.) We can probably identify even more ways to improve retention, but the truth is that the first two items on this list have the highest potential — improving your product and your onboarding. Between them, working on your product naturally has a higher chance to deliver more value and improve retention. However, it’s not only costlier and more time-consuming but also challenging to keep delivering more value consistently. That’s why many startup teams go after their customer onboarding as the lowest hanging fruit that presents the most significant opportunity to improve retention rates. Deep dive: A Guide to SaaS Customer Onboarding Retention lies at the core of every successful subscription business The SaaS model is simple when stripped of all layers of complexity added by technology, measurement, etc. At its essence, it is about a promise that your solution will solve a pain that the customer is experiencing. Your retention rate measures how well you are delivering on that promise. You can apply multiple marketing and business tactics to acquire a customer — on a free trial or a freemium plan — but retention is the definitive proof that you are delivering on the promise you attracted them with.

<sys> [INST] Everything You Need to Know About Retention (Rates) [/INST] Every time I think about how SaaS companies grow, I come back to the idea that: Growth is the result of engagement, retention, and monetization. Tweet this quote But at the same time, retention is also the most crucial factor that drives acquisition and monetization. What that means is that retention plays a role in all three elements of a successful growth engine. None of this is new to people in SaaS, so why write another article on the topic? For one thing, there isn’t a single useful resource that collects everything you need to know about it. Besides, as the industry evolves, so does our thinking about some of its central topics. We’ll get into some of the current trends about retention further down in this guide, but let’s revisit some of the core questions first. What is retention? At its core, retention measures the ability of your business to keep paying customers over time. If you have poor retention, nothing else matters. Brian Balfour It is a question of strategic importance for SaaS companies because of how the subscription model works. Retention is critical for getting high enough LTV, so you can recoup your cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) You can have the best acquisition engine in the world, but it can’t save you if your retention is not up to par. That is why it is vital to understand not just what retention is but how to measure it and how to turn the numbers into insight on how to improve your product. How do you measure retention? Similar to churn, we also need to discern between MRR retention and customer retention. Customer retention rate formula To find your Customer retention rate you need two numbers — how many customers you had on the first day of a given month and how many of those were still subscribers at the end of the month: Customers retained during the period (month) / Customers at the beginning of the period Let’s look at an example to make it easier to comprehend: The Donald Duck Co. starts the month of March with 20 paying customers. During the month, one customer cancels their plan. This means their Customer Retention Rate for March is (20-1)/20 = 95%. This is the simplest way to analyze your retention. While it is a quick and straightforward way to calculate a rate, you should be careful about using the core number of customers to measure retention. Measuring retention by revenue yields more meaningful results. MRR retention rate formula There’s a simple formula to measure your MRR retention rate, and it is very similar to the one we use to measure churn: (Gross) MRR Retention = Revenue retained during the current period (month) / Revenue at the beginning of the period We’re using the same example from above, and it should help you understand how MRR retention is different from looking at customers: The Donald Duck Co. starts the month of March with $100 in MRR. During the month, one customer cancels their $10/mo premium plan. This means their Gross MRR retention for March is (100-10)/100 = 90%. In our example, we’re assuming a small number of customers who are mostly paying the same monthly subscription. But in reality, companies tend to face much more variability. Losing one customer might not seem like a big deal — unless that customer accounts for a significant proportion of your revenue. That’s why we advocate for looking at MRR retention rates. On a separate note, keep in mind that our calculation does not include any new customers gained during the month. Hopefully, it should be obvious why — we’re interested in retention, not all revenue/business. More importantly, it doesn’t include any expansion revenue from those who became customers before the beginning of March and upgraded or bought an add-on during the month. That is because we’re looking at Gross MRR Retention. Another way to look at this is to measure Net MRR Retention, which includes expansion from your existing customer base: In addition to the customer who canceled, in March Donald Duck also had 3 customers switch from the $5/mo plan to the more expensive $10/mo plan. That means their Net MRR retention rate for March is [100-10+(3×5)]/100 = $105/$100 = 105% One question you can often see around the discussion of retention and churn is whether you should be looking at the gross or net numbers. Our answer is that you should be looking at both. They tell you different things. Think about it this way — the gross retention number tells you how well you’re solving the problem customers came with to you in the first place. Your net retention, on the other hand, indicates whether the value of your product and your pricing are aligned with the success of your customers. Cohort analysis for deep understanding of retention Looking at one simple retention rate number does not tell you much about the performance of your company. Cohort analysis provides a much more detailed view and allows you to gain insight that you can turn into concrete actions aimed at improving your retention rates. Net MRR retention cohorts in ChartMogul When we talk about cohorts, we simply mean a group of people who share a specific trait. Thus, we can define a cohort as Customers who subscribed in March 2021, or Customers who were closed by (sales rep) Mary, or even Customers who were closed by Mary in March 2021. A cohort is simply a fancy name for a group. David Skok Cohorts based on time periods have become a standard for analyzing retention: https://twitter.com/JeffChang30/status/1326961038315593728 However, they reveal their real power when you combine time cohorts with segmentation. This allows you to understand who are your best customers and what makes them stick. For a more detailed view on analyzing retention using cohort analysis, check out our resources. Deep dives: Cohort Analysis in the SaaS Metrics Refresher email course The Ultimate Cohort Analysis Cheat Sheet What is a good retention rate? Benchmarking provides the best answer to this question. Naturally, retention varies across niches (consumer vs. B2B software) and segments (SMB vs. enterprise). We have collected several benchmarking studies, which should help guide your understanding: What is a good retention (Lenny Rachitsky and Casey Winters) What’s a Good Net Retention Rate in SaaS? (Jason Lemkin, SaaStr) On the (rising) importance of net retention Over the last few years, we’ve seen SaaS become even more competitive. The emergence of trends such as product-led growth demonstrates how professionals in the industry are trying to find new ways to achieve sustainable success. All that means that it is even more critical than ever to find ways to align your product with the value you generate for your customers and find the right monetization structure that allows you to grow along with them. We often see this reflected in the discussion about value metrics and the fixation on (achieving) positive net MRR retention (i.e., growing even without adding new customers). How can you improve your retention rate? While retention is notoriously hard to budge, it doesn’t mean there aren’t ways in which you can act on it. There are multiple ways you can increase the retention rate of your product: Source (Also, check out Lenny’s excellent Twitter thread that goes into more detail on each of these.) We can probably identify even more ways to improve retention, but the truth is that the first two items on this list have the highest potential — improving your product and your onboarding. Between them, working on your product naturally has a higher chance to deliver more value and improve retention. However, it’s not only costlier and more time-consuming but also challenging to keep delivering more value consistently. That’s why many startup teams go after their customer onboarding as the lowest hanging fruit that presents the most significant opportunity to improve retention rates. Deep dive: A Guide to SaaS Customer Onboarding Retention lies at the core of every successful subscription business The SaaS model is simple when stripped of all layers of complexity added by technology, measurement, etc. At its essence, it is about a promise that your solution will solve a pain that the customer is experiencing. Your retention rate measures how well you are delivering on that promise. You can apply multiple marketing and business tactics to acquire a customer — on a free trial or a freemium plan — but retention is the definitive proof that you are delivering on the promise you attracted them with. </sys

How Migrating Our Database Eliminated Data Processing Incidents. TL;DR We sharded one of the core ChartMogul databases and changed its tables’ partitioning scheme from LIST to HASH. This way we managed to: Remove a single point of failure (SPOF) from our architecture At least triple query performance Reduce AWS RDS costs by 10%, and Eliminate all incidents deriving from that part of the system Context ChartMogul receives millions of webhooks from various billing systems daily, normalizes and stores them in aggregated tables, and then presents subscription analytics as metrics and charts. This is a full scale extract-transform-load (ETL) process, with various modules performing different data transformations and storing data into their corresponding databases, as presented in the figure below: We migrated to AWS over a year ago, and most modules of ChartMogul’s application are part of a Ruby on Rails monolith using Sidekiq for background job processing and AWS RDS (Postgres) for the aforementioned databases. A few years ago, ChartMogul was in hyper growth, which increased the volume of processed and stored data. To handle the increasing load, ChartMogul engineers decided to horizontally scale the platform database by adding more shards. However, the ingestion database continued to operate under a single Postgres instance (and a read replica) as it was already partitioned using Postgres’ LIST partitioning scheme. Ingestion database tables were partitioned based on the account_id column (a unique internal identifier of each ChartMogul account) and each account received a partition per table in that database. As ChartMogul continued to grow with an increasing number of accounts and more complex integrations and features, LIST partitioning became unsustainable. Despite temporary mitigations to group most accounts under default partitions or scale up the instance (and increase the associated costs), we encountered incidents caused by: Extreme read IOPS due to heavy queries processing hundreds of thousands or millions of records, Out of memory issues due to large and inefficient indexes Stale Postgres statistics requiring regular vacuum operations Administrative tasks related to partitions: attaching or detaching some partitions caused ACCESS EXCLUSIVE locks on the parent table Despite continued efforts to optimize these queries and tasks, fine-tune the AWS RDS parameters, and optimize the normalization processing code, that specific instance was still a SPOF for our application and the most expensive AWS RDS instance. So in late 2022, we decided to migrate its tables under the sharded platform database and leverage from that scaled architecture to: Remove the SPOF and reduce costs Have smaller tables and indexes Optimize performance, and Reduce incidents Decisions The first decision we made was easy: replace LIST with HASH partitioning [4] for the migrated tables. The main advantage is we mix big and small accounts randomly and we don’t have to do manual interventions. The only point of debate was the number of partitions, taking into account our current distribution, future load, and the need to change their number again (which we wanted to avoid). After some thorough simulation we opted for 30 partitions for our largest table, which would result in tables of ~2.5GB (95% percentile). As for the migration tool, a few options were on the table. Internal tools had been developed to migrate tables and data between databases but these were operated on account level and were only used for offline migrations. However, our goal was to migrate the whole database with zero downtime, so we quickly discarded this option. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) was the next option; it’s the standard tool for live database migrations in AWS as it supports batch and incremental loading. We expected it would be very efficient for a Postgres to Postgres migration on identical tables, and we wouldn’t have to deal with inconsistent data types or other usual conflicts that come up in a cross-database migration. Our only additional requirement would be migrating from a single database into five different ones, hence the need to apply relevant rules to filter data either based on the partitioned table list or the account_id column. After verifying that AWS DMS supports both types of rules, we did some quick experimentation in our beta environment and with production clones before agreeing to move forward with this approach. We have five platform shards, so we decided to migrate accounts to their corresponding shard, ideally one shard per day. This method would allow us to thoroughly check for issues on the first migrated shard, and fine-tune DMS settings before migrating the remaining shards. This way, we could avoid the overhead and potential performance issues from starting five replication slots in a running database to support five concurrent migration tasks. Migration We planned for the migration to take a week. The first task was to migrate the ingestion-related code to work in a sharded-database context under a feature flag. This would ensure that the batch of migrated accounts only utilized the platform database when they had their feature flag set. We created the new tables and partitions for each platform shard excluding the indexes, as these would slow down batch loading according to AWS DMS recommendations. Code was also updated to redirect new accounts’ ingestion data directly into the platform database, which meant we would only have to migrate data for existing accounts. Next, we prepared a script which would generate the AWS DMS rules for all accounts to be migrated in one shard. The script would prepare table rules based on table partition (if the account had a separate one) or column rules on the default partition. The initial run for a single shard produced a JSON file with size >2MB, which would reach AWS API limits and was not recommended by AWS DMS documentation. We had to fine-tune it to only consider accounts with data in any of the tables being migrated. Each shard followed this checklist: Generate and apply the AWS DMS rules for all accounts to be migrated. Start the batch loading task and wait for it to be completed. Create indexes and statistics. Resume the AWS DMS replication task and wait for replication lag to catch up. Audit the tables by checking counts, samples and do performance checks on the fly. This was a blocking point: if something was consistently wrong even after retries we aborted the migration for that shard. Stop Sidekiq for the migrated shard, switch feature flags, and resume Sidekiq. This ensured no new data was processed while switching flags, the delay on data processing was only a few minutes, and migrated accounts had no downtime. Wait a couple minutes and then stop the DMS task. We timed the migration on a production clone and the end-to-end flow would require two hours with pessimistic batch load task settings (4 tables in parallel, 50k rows batch size) not to overload the live platform database shard. We ran the first migration on the shard where the ChartMogul account is persisted. Batch loading completed successfully within two hours, except for one small table which failed with no meaningful error logs. Luckily, the table was easy to migrate by exporting and importing with pg_dump while Sidekiq was down. We later found out that some code was updating both the shard and the original database, which led to failed synchronization. Fortunately, this was just a timestamp and had no impact on data. Another issue was our chosen AWS DMS settings for batch loading caused high CPU usage on the platform shard, impacting front-end response time. We lowered them even further to 3 tables and 30k rows batch size and increased the batch loading time to 3–4 hours to ensure the front end would not be impacted. Despite these hiccups, audits were green, query performance was great, and our checks to selected test accounts passed, so we were 100% confident this would work smoothly in all shards. As planned, we successfully migrated all five shards within a week. Afterwards, the team removed all references of the ingestion database from the codebase, and removed the unnecessary feature flag. 5,000 lines of code (LOC) were deleted. Results Our updated architecture is presented in the following figure: After the successful migration we measured 5× improvement in simple select queries and 3× improvement in select queries with joins, while most of the table partitions were below 3GB each. Before, ingestion-related queries were among the top five heavy queries in our AWS RDS Performance Insights, now, they don’t even appear on the list. The ingestion and its replica instances were made obsolete, resulting in reduced AWS RDS costs by 10% by removing the most expensive instance (and its replica) from our system. Most importantly, incidents related to data normalization have been eliminated since April 2023. Over the years, our team has transitioned from committing to solutions with a ‘quick fix’ to taking a more deliberate approach by engaging in RFC discussions, and performing PoCs. Our recent migration was a testament to this transformation, demonstrating the success of the ChartMogul engineering team. In upcoming posts, we’ll explore various engineering and data architecture topics: ongoing migrations, and our strategic approach to scaling our crucial database, the analytics DB (which currently serves as our last SPOF). Other links ChartMogul Import API: https://dev.chartmogul.com/reference/introduction-import-api ChartMogul data model: https://dev.chartmogul.com/docs/system-overview

[INST] How Migrating Our Database Eliminated Data Processing Incidents [/INST]

TL;DR We sharded one of the core ChartMogul databases and changed its tables’ partitioning scheme from LIST to HASH. This way we managed to: Remove a single point of failure (SPOF) from our architecture At least triple query performance Reduce AWS RDS costs by 10%, and Eliminate all incidents deriving from that part of the system Context ChartMogul receives millions of webhooks from various billing systems daily, normalizes and stores them in aggregated tables, and then presents subscription analytics as metrics and charts. This is a full scale extract-transform-load (ETL) process, with various modules performing different data transformations and storing data into their corresponding databases, as presented in the figure below: We migrated to AWS over a year ago, and most modules of ChartMogul’s application are part of a Ruby on Rails monolith using Sidekiq for background job processing and AWS RDS (Postgres) for the aforementioned databases. A few years ago, ChartMogul was in hyper growth, which increased the volume of processed and stored data. To handle the increasing load, ChartMogul engineers decided to horizontally scale the platform database by adding more shards. However, the ingestion database continued to operate under a single Postgres instance (and a read replica) as it was already partitioned using Postgres’ LIST partitioning scheme. Ingestion database tables were partitioned based on the account_id column (a unique internal identifier of each ChartMogul account) and each account received a partition per table in that database. As ChartMogul continued to grow with an increasing number of accounts and more complex integrations and features, LIST partitioning became unsustainable. Despite temporary mitigations to group most accounts under default partitions or scale up the instance (and increase the associated costs), we encountered incidents caused by: Extreme read IOPS due to heavy queries processing hundreds of thousands or millions of records, Out of memory issues due to large and inefficient indexes Stale Postgres statistics requiring regular vacuum operations Administrative tasks related to partitions: attaching or detaching some partitions caused ACCESS EXCLUSIVE locks on the parent table Despite continued efforts to optimize these queries and tasks, fine-tune the AWS RDS parameters, and optimize the normalization processing code, that specific instance was still a SPOF for our application and the most expensive AWS RDS instance. So in late 2022, we decided to migrate its tables under the sharded platform database and leverage from that scaled architecture to: Remove the SPOF and reduce costs Have smaller tables and indexes Optimize performance, and Reduce incidents Decisions The first decision we made was easy: replace LIST with HASH partitioning [4] for the migrated tables. The main advantage is we mix big and small accounts randomly and we don’t have to do manual interventions. The only point of debate was the number of partitions, taking into account our current distribution, future load, and the need to change their number again (which we wanted to avoid). After some thorough simulation we opted for 30 partitions for our largest table, which would result in tables of ~2.5GB (95% percentile). As for the migration tool, a few options were on the table. Internal tools had been developed to migrate tables and data between databases but these were operated on account level and were only used for offline migrations. However, our goal was to migrate the whole database with zero downtime, so we quickly discarded this option. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) was the next option; it’s the standard tool for live database migrations in AWS as it supports batch and incremental loading. We expected it would be very efficient for a Postgres to Postgres migration on identical tables, and we wouldn’t have to deal with inconsistent data types or other usual conflicts that come up in a cross-database migration. Our only additional requirement would be migrating from a single database into five different ones, hence the need to apply relevant rules to filter data either based on the partitioned table list or the account_id column. After verifying that AWS DMS supports both types of rules, we did some quick experimentation in our beta environment and with production clones before agreeing to move forward with this approach. We have five platform shards, so we decided to migrate accounts to their corresponding shard, ideally one shard per day. This method would allow us to thoroughly check for issues on the first migrated shard, and fine-tune DMS settings before migrating the remaining shards. This way, we could avoid the overhead and potential performance issues from starting five replication slots in a running database to support five concurrent migration tasks. Migration We planned for the migration to take a week. The first task was to migrate the ingestion-related code to work in a sharded-database context under a feature flag. This would ensure that the batch of migrated accounts only utilized the platform database when they had their feature flag set. We created the new tables and partitions for each platform shard excluding the indexes, as these would slow down batch loading according to AWS DMS recommendations. Code was also updated to redirect new accounts’ ingestion data directly into the platform database, which meant we would only have to migrate data for existing accounts. Next, we prepared a script which would generate the AWS DMS rules for all accounts to be migrated in one shard. The script would prepare table rules based on table partition (if the account had a separate one) or column rules on the default partition. The initial run for a single shard produced a JSON file with size >2MB, which would reach AWS API limits and was not recommended by AWS DMS documentation. We had to fine-tune it to only consider accounts with data in any of the tables being migrated. Each shard followed this checklist: Generate and apply the AWS DMS rules for all accounts to be migrated. Start the batch loading task and wait for it to be completed. Create indexes and statistics. Resume the AWS DMS replication task and wait for replication lag to catch up. Audit the tables by checking counts, samples and do performance checks on the fly. This was a blocking point: if something was consistently wrong even after retries we aborted the migration for that shard. Stop Sidekiq for the migrated shard, switch feature flags, and resume Sidekiq. This ensured no new data was processed while switching flags, the delay on data processing was only a few minutes, and migrated accounts had no downtime. Wait a couple minutes and then stop the DMS task. We timed the migration on a production clone and the end-to-end flow would require two hours with pessimistic batch load task settings (4 tables in parallel, 50k rows batch size) not to overload the live platform database shard. We ran the first migration on the shard where the ChartMogul account is persisted. Batch loading completed successfully within two hours, except for one small table which failed with no meaningful error logs. Luckily, the table was easy to migrate by exporting and importing with pg_dump while Sidekiq was down. We later found out that some code was updating both the shard and the original database, which led to failed synchronization. Fortunately, this was just a timestamp and had no impact on data. Another issue was our chosen AWS DMS settings for batch loading caused high CPU usage on the platform shard, impacting front-end response time. We lowered them even further to 3 tables and 30k rows batch size and increased the batch loading time to 3–4 hours to ensure the front end would not be impacted. Despite these hiccups, audits were green, query performance was great, and our checks to selected test accounts passed, so we were 100% confident this would work smoothly in all shards. As planned, we successfully migrated all five shards within a week. Afterwards, the team removed all references of the ingestion database from the codebase, and removed the unnecessary feature flag. 5,000 lines of code (LOC) were deleted. Results Our updated architecture is presented in the following figure: After the successful migration we measured 5× improvement in simple select queries and 3× improvement in select queries with joins, while most of the table partitions were below 3GB each. Before, ingestion-related queries were among the top five heavy queries in our AWS RDS Performance Insights, now, they don’t even appear on the list. The ingestion and its replica instances were made obsolete, resulting in reduced AWS RDS costs by 10% by removing the most expensive instance (and its replica) from our system. Most importantly, incidents related to data normalization have been eliminated since April 2023. Over the years, our team has transitioned from committing to solutions with a ‘quick fix’ to taking a more deliberate approach by engaging in RFC discussions, and performing PoCs. Our recent migration was a testament to this transformation, demonstrating the success of the ChartMogul engineering team. In upcoming posts, we’ll explore various engineering and data architecture topics: ongoing migrations, and our strategic approach to scaling our crucial database, the analytics DB (which currently serves as our last SPOF). Other links ChartMogul Import API: https://dev.chartmogul.com/reference/introduction-import-api ChartMogul data model: https://dev.chartmogul.com/docs/system-overview

<sys> [INST] How Migrating Our Database Eliminated Data Processing Incidents [/INST] TL;DR We sharded one of the core ChartMogul databases and changed its tables’ partitioning scheme from LIST to HASH. This way we managed to: Remove a single point of failure (SPOF) from our architecture At least triple query performance Reduce AWS RDS costs by 10%, and Eliminate all incidents deriving from that part of the system Context ChartMogul receives millions of webhooks from various billing systems daily, normalizes and stores them in aggregated tables, and then presents subscription analytics as metrics and charts. This is a full scale extract-transform-load (ETL) process, with various modules performing different data transformations and storing data into their corresponding databases, as presented in the figure below: We migrated to AWS over a year ago, and most modules of ChartMogul’s application are part of a Ruby on Rails monolith using Sidekiq for background job processing and AWS RDS (Postgres) for the aforementioned databases. A few years ago, ChartMogul was in hyper growth, which increased the volume of processed and stored data. To handle the increasing load, ChartMogul engineers decided to horizontally scale the platform database by adding more shards. However, the ingestion database continued to operate under a single Postgres instance (and a read replica) as it was already partitioned using Postgres’ LIST partitioning scheme. Ingestion database tables were partitioned based on the account_id column (a unique internal identifier of each ChartMogul account) and each account received a partition per table in that database. As ChartMogul continued to grow with an increasing number of accounts and more complex integrations and features, LIST partitioning became unsustainable. Despite temporary mitigations to group most accounts under default partitions or scale up the instance (and increase the associated costs), we encountered incidents caused by: Extreme read IOPS due to heavy queries processing hundreds of thousands or millions of records, Out of memory issues due to large and inefficient indexes Stale Postgres statistics requiring regular vacuum operations Administrative tasks related to partitions: attaching or detaching some partitions caused ACCESS EXCLUSIVE locks on the parent table Despite continued efforts to optimize these queries and tasks, fine-tune the AWS RDS parameters, and optimize the normalization processing code, that specific instance was still a SPOF for our application and the most expensive AWS RDS instance. So in late 2022, we decided to migrate its tables under the sharded platform database and leverage from that scaled architecture to: Remove the SPOF and reduce costs Have smaller tables and indexes Optimize performance, and Reduce incidents Decisions The first decision we made was easy: replace LIST with HASH partitioning [4] for the migrated tables. The main advantage is we mix big and small accounts randomly and we don’t have to do manual interventions. The only point of debate was the number of partitions, taking into account our current distribution, future load, and the need to change their number again (which we wanted to avoid). After some thorough simulation we opted for 30 partitions for our largest table, which would result in tables of ~2.5GB (95% percentile). As for the migration tool, a few options were on the table. Internal tools had been developed to migrate tables and data between databases but these were operated on account level and were only used for offline migrations. However, our goal was to migrate the whole database with zero downtime, so we quickly discarded this option. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) was the next option; it’s the standard tool for live database migrations in AWS as it supports batch and incremental loading. We expected it would be very efficient for a Postgres to Postgres migration on identical tables, and we wouldn’t have to deal with inconsistent data types or other usual conflicts that come up in a cross-database migration. Our only additional requirement would be migrating from a single database into five different ones, hence the need to apply relevant rules to filter data either based on the partitioned table list or the account_id column. After verifying that AWS DMS supports both types of rules, we did some quick experimentation in our beta environment and with production clones before agreeing to move forward with this approach. We have five platform shards, so we decided to migrate accounts to their corresponding shard, ideally one shard per day. This method would allow us to thoroughly check for issues on the first migrated shard, and fine-tune DMS settings before migrating the remaining shards. This way, we could avoid the overhead and potential performance issues from starting five replication slots in a running database to support five concurrent migration tasks. Migration We planned for the migration to take a week. The first task was to migrate the ingestion-related code to work in a sharded-database context under a feature flag. This would ensure that the batch of migrated accounts only utilized the platform database when they had their feature flag set. We created the new tables and partitions for each platform shard excluding the indexes, as these would slow down batch loading according to AWS DMS recommendations. Code was also updated to redirect new accounts’ ingestion data directly into the platform database, which meant we would only have to migrate data for existing accounts. Next, we prepared a script which would generate the AWS DMS rules for all accounts to be migrated in one shard. The script would prepare table rules based on table partition (if the account had a separate one) or column rules on the default partition. The initial run for a single shard produced a JSON file with size >2MB, which would reach AWS API limits and was not recommended by AWS DMS documentation. We had to fine-tune it to only consider accounts with data in any of the tables being migrated. Each shard followed this checklist: Generate and apply the AWS DMS rules for all accounts to be migrated. Start the batch loading task and wait for it to be completed. Create indexes and statistics. Resume the AWS DMS replication task and wait for replication lag to catch up. Audit the tables by checking counts, samples and do performance checks on the fly. This was a blocking point: if something was consistently wrong even after retries we aborted the migration for that shard. Stop Sidekiq for the migrated shard, switch feature flags, and resume Sidekiq. This ensured no new data was processed while switching flags, the delay on data processing was only a few minutes, and migrated accounts had no downtime. Wait a couple minutes and then stop the DMS task. We timed the migration on a production clone and the end-to-end flow would require two hours with pessimistic batch load task settings (4 tables in parallel, 50k rows batch size) not to overload the live platform database shard. We ran the first migration on the shard where the ChartMogul account is persisted. Batch loading completed successfully within two hours, except for one small table which failed with no meaningful error logs. Luckily, the table was easy to migrate by exporting and importing with pg_dump while Sidekiq was down. We later found out that some code was updating both the shard and the original database, which led to failed synchronization. Fortunately, this was just a timestamp and had no impact on data. Another issue was our chosen AWS DMS settings for batch loading caused high CPU usage on the platform shard, impacting front-end response time. We lowered them even further to 3 tables and 30k rows batch size and increased the batch loading time to 3–4 hours to ensure the front end would not be impacted. Despite these hiccups, audits were green, query performance was great, and our checks to selected test accounts passed, so we were 100% confident this would work smoothly in all shards. As planned, we successfully migrated all five shards within a week. Afterwards, the team removed all references of the ingestion database from the codebase, and removed the unnecessary feature flag. 5,000 lines of code (LOC) were deleted. Results Our updated architecture is presented in the following figure: After the successful migration we measured 5× improvement in simple select queries and 3× improvement in select queries with joins, while most of the table partitions were below 3GB each. Before, ingestion-related queries were among the top five heavy queries in our AWS RDS Performance Insights, now, they don’t even appear on the list. The ingestion and its replica instances were made obsolete, resulting in reduced AWS RDS costs by 10% by removing the most expensive instance (and its replica) from our system. Most importantly, incidents related to data normalization have been eliminated since April 2023. Over the years, our team has transitioned from committing to solutions with a ‘quick fix’ to taking a more deliberate approach by engaging in RFC discussions, and performing PoCs. Our recent migration was a testament to this transformation, demonstrating the success of the ChartMogul engineering team. In upcoming posts, we’ll explore various engineering and data architecture topics: ongoing migrations, and our strategic approach to scaling our crucial database, the analytics DB (which currently serves as our last SPOF). Other links ChartMogul Import API: https://dev.chartmogul.com/reference/introduction-import-api ChartMogul data model: https://dev.chartmogul.com/docs/system-overview </sys

Announcing the ChartMogul Zapier integration. At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. A big part of that mission means building ChartMogul as a central hub, providing a complete and accurate picture of your SaaS revenue, churn and other critical metrics. Data silos limit the effectiveness of your data The majority of SaaS businesses today use a variety of different services and products to manage different aspects of daily operations – Sales, CRM, Marketing and many more business areas contain solutions that can save you time and increase effectiveness. What we need then, is a way to connect all of these different silos of data and valuable insight together – the value of this combined data being far more than the sum of its parts. Today we’re announcing the beginning of a partnership that will allow you to do this with minimal effort, and leverage these external data sources in ChartMogul. Zapier is driving a connected SaaS ecosystem Zapier is a platform which enables you to connect the services you use together, save time, and get more value from your data. These connections are called Zaps. With hundreds of supported apps on the platform, Zapier allows you to make Zaps in a way that requires zero coding, or even technical expertise. With Zapier you can use a combination of Triggers and Actions to chain together events from the 500+ available apps – including, for the first time, ChartMogul. Examples: What you can do We’ve put together a small set of shared Zaps which demonstrate some key use cases for the integration: “When a lead is won in Hubspot CRM, add the lead source to ChartMogul.” Answer these questions about your business: “Which lead source brings in the most MRR?” “What is my churn segmented by lead source?” With this Zap connecting ChartMogul with Hubspot CRM, you’ll be able to push lead sources into ChartMogul as customer attributes, for use with segmentation. This in turn allows you to break down your SaaS metrics by lead source, and track the success of different lead sources throughout the lifetime of your subscription customers. “When an NPS score is added in Wootric, add the score to the corresponding ChartMogul customer.” Answer these questions about your business: “How much MRR is tied up amongst my detractors?” “What kind of customers are promoters?” Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the definitive measurement of customer satisfaction in the software business. Tools like Wootric allow you to easily send out NPS surveys to your entire customer base, and collect results efficiently. But what if you could see NPS results from customers alongside your SaaS revenue metrics? This Zap enables exactly this functionality, letting you analyze things like ‘Customer Churn Rate split by NPS score’, and more! “When a lead is won in Close.io, add the information to ChartMogul.” Answer these questions about your business: “Which sales rep brought in the most revenue last month?” “Customers of which sales rep had highest churn last month?” “Which sales rep gave out the most discounts?” We’re big fans of Close.io at ChartMogul, and we are using this Zap to push sales rep information into ChartMogul. This zap means that each of your subscription customers will include their corresponding sales rep, which you can use to segment any of your SaaS metrics. Create your own Zaps If there’s a specific service you want to plug in to ChartMogul and automate, you can achieve this by writing your own Zaps. These can then be shared with the community, for use by other ChartMogul customers. How do I get started? If you have a ChartMogul account, you can start using one of our shared zaps from the Admin > Data enrichment section straight away to connect to other services. For more detailed walkthroughs and support, check out our Support Center article. You can also start using any of the shared Zaps above by clicking “Use this Zap” and following the instructions. We’re very excited to see what kind of zaps our customers build! If you’ve got a zap that you’d like to share or request, we’d love to see it! Write to us at platform@chartmogul.com. There’s more to come… Today’s release adds Zapier Actions for ChartMogul, which can be used to build Zaps that push data into ChartMogul from other apps. We’re currently working on the next phase of functionality which will add Zapier Triggers. Once released you’ll be able to build Zaps that automate functionality in other apps based on an event happening in ChartMogul, e.g. a customer upgrading, churning, etc. Stay tuned for this additional functionality in the near future, as well as even more things to put the power in your hands when it comes to growing your subscription business. Share and follow NEW: Announcing the @ChartMogul + Zapier integration https://t.co/zGbpC7rjuz @zapier #SaaS #data pic.twitter.com/6bNf2WYMir — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) March 21, 2016

[INST] Announcing the ChartMogul Zapier integration [/INST]

At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. A big part of that mission means building ChartMogul as a central hub, providing a complete and accurate picture of your SaaS revenue, churn and other critical metrics. Data silos limit the effectiveness of your data The majority of SaaS businesses today use a variety of different services and products to manage different aspects of daily operations – Sales, CRM, Marketing and many more business areas contain solutions that can save you time and increase effectiveness. What we need then, is a way to connect all of these different silos of data and valuable insight together – the value of this combined data being far more than the sum of its parts. Today we’re announcing the beginning of a partnership that will allow you to do this with minimal effort, and leverage these external data sources in ChartMogul. Zapier is driving a connected SaaS ecosystem Zapier is a platform which enables you to connect the services you use together, save time, and get more value from your data. These connections are called Zaps. With hundreds of supported apps on the platform, Zapier allows you to make Zaps in a way that requires zero coding, or even technical expertise. With Zapier you can use a combination of Triggers and Actions to chain together events from the 500+ available apps – including, for the first time, ChartMogul. Examples: What you can do We’ve put together a small set of shared Zaps which demonstrate some key use cases for the integration: “When a lead is won in Hubspot CRM, add the lead source to ChartMogul.” Answer these questions about your business: “Which lead source brings in the most MRR?” “What is my churn segmented by lead source?” With this Zap connecting ChartMogul with Hubspot CRM, you’ll be able to push lead sources into ChartMogul as customer attributes, for use with segmentation. This in turn allows you to break down your SaaS metrics by lead source, and track the success of different lead sources throughout the lifetime of your subscription customers. “When an NPS score is added in Wootric, add the score to the corresponding ChartMogul customer.” Answer these questions about your business: “How much MRR is tied up amongst my detractors?” “What kind of customers are promoters?” Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the definitive measurement of customer satisfaction in the software business. Tools like Wootric allow you to easily send out NPS surveys to your entire customer base, and collect results efficiently. But what if you could see NPS results from customers alongside your SaaS revenue metrics? This Zap enables exactly this functionality, letting you analyze things like ‘Customer Churn Rate split by NPS score’, and more! “When a lead is won in Close.io, add the information to ChartMogul.” Answer these questions about your business: “Which sales rep brought in the most revenue last month?” “Customers of which sales rep had highest churn last month?” “Which sales rep gave out the most discounts?” We’re big fans of Close.io at ChartMogul, and we are using this Zap to push sales rep information into ChartMogul. This zap means that each of your subscription customers will include their corresponding sales rep, which you can use to segment any of your SaaS metrics. Create your own Zaps If there’s a specific service you want to plug in to ChartMogul and automate, you can achieve this by writing your own Zaps. These can then be shared with the community, for use by other ChartMogul customers. How do I get started? If you have a ChartMogul account, you can start using one of our shared zaps from the Admin > Data enrichment section straight away to connect to other services. For more detailed walkthroughs and support, check out our Support Center article. You can also start using any of the shared Zaps above by clicking “Use this Zap” and following the instructions. We’re very excited to see what kind of zaps our customers build! If you’ve got a zap that you’d like to share or request, we’d love to see it! Write to us at platform@chartmogul.com. There’s more to come… Today’s release adds Zapier Actions for ChartMogul, which can be used to build Zaps that push data into ChartMogul from other apps. We’re currently working on the next phase of functionality which will add Zapier Triggers. Once released you’ll be able to build Zaps that automate functionality in other apps based on an event happening in ChartMogul, e.g. a customer upgrading, churning, etc. Stay tuned for this additional functionality in the near future, as well as even more things to put the power in your hands when it comes to growing your subscription business. Share and follow NEW: Announcing the @ChartMogul + Zapier integration https://t.co/zGbpC7rjuz @zapier #SaaS #data pic.twitter.com/6bNf2WYMir — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) March 21, 2016

<sys> [INST] Announcing the ChartMogul Zapier integration [/INST] At ChartMogul, our mission is to help you measure, understand and grow your subscription business. A big part of that mission means building ChartMogul as a central hub, providing a complete and accurate picture of your SaaS revenue, churn and other critical metrics. Data silos limit the effectiveness of your data The majority of SaaS businesses today use a variety of different services and products to manage different aspects of daily operations – Sales, CRM, Marketing and many more business areas contain solutions that can save you time and increase effectiveness. What we need then, is a way to connect all of these different silos of data and valuable insight together – the value of this combined data being far more than the sum of its parts. Today we’re announcing the beginning of a partnership that will allow you to do this with minimal effort, and leverage these external data sources in ChartMogul. Zapier is driving a connected SaaS ecosystem Zapier is a platform which enables you to connect the services you use together, save time, and get more value from your data. These connections are called Zaps. With hundreds of supported apps on the platform, Zapier allows you to make Zaps in a way that requires zero coding, or even technical expertise. With Zapier you can use a combination of Triggers and Actions to chain together events from the 500+ available apps – including, for the first time, ChartMogul. Examples: What you can do We’ve put together a small set of shared Zaps which demonstrate some key use cases for the integration: “When a lead is won in Hubspot CRM, add the lead source to ChartMogul.” Answer these questions about your business: “Which lead source brings in the most MRR?” “What is my churn segmented by lead source?” With this Zap connecting ChartMogul with Hubspot CRM, you’ll be able to push lead sources into ChartMogul as customer attributes, for use with segmentation. This in turn allows you to break down your SaaS metrics by lead source, and track the success of different lead sources throughout the lifetime of your subscription customers. “When an NPS score is added in Wootric, add the score to the corresponding ChartMogul customer.” Answer these questions about your business: “How much MRR is tied up amongst my detractors?” “What kind of customers are promoters?” Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the definitive measurement of customer satisfaction in the software business. Tools like Wootric allow you to easily send out NPS surveys to your entire customer base, and collect results efficiently. But what if you could see NPS results from customers alongside your SaaS revenue metrics? This Zap enables exactly this functionality, letting you analyze things like ‘Customer Churn Rate split by NPS score’, and more! “When a lead is won in Close.io, add the information to ChartMogul.” Answer these questions about your business: “Which sales rep brought in the most revenue last month?” “Customers of which sales rep had highest churn last month?” “Which sales rep gave out the most discounts?” We’re big fans of Close.io at ChartMogul, and we are using this Zap to push sales rep information into ChartMogul. This zap means that each of your subscription customers will include their corresponding sales rep, which you can use to segment any of your SaaS metrics. Create your own Zaps If there’s a specific service you want to plug in to ChartMogul and automate, you can achieve this by writing your own Zaps. These can then be shared with the community, for use by other ChartMogul customers. How do I get started? If you have a ChartMogul account, you can start using one of our shared zaps from the Admin > Data enrichment section straight away to connect to other services. For more detailed walkthroughs and support, check out our Support Center article. You can also start using any of the shared Zaps above by clicking “Use this Zap” and following the instructions. We’re very excited to see what kind of zaps our customers build! If you’ve got a zap that you’d like to share or request, we’d love to see it! Write to us at platform@chartmogul.com. There’s more to come… Today’s release adds Zapier Actions for ChartMogul, which can be used to build Zaps that push data into ChartMogul from other apps. We’re currently working on the next phase of functionality which will add Zapier Triggers. Once released you’ll be able to build Zaps that automate functionality in other apps based on an event happening in ChartMogul, e.g. a customer upgrading, churning, etc. Stay tuned for this additional functionality in the near future, as well as even more things to put the power in your hands when it comes to growing your subscription business. Share and follow NEW: Announcing the @ChartMogul + Zapier integration https://t.co/zGbpC7rjuz @zapier #SaaS #data pic.twitter.com/6bNf2WYMir — ChartMogul (@ChartMogul) March 21, 2016 </sys

5 of TechCrunch Disrupt’s most exciting startups. Mapwize – Bringing mapping indoors http://mapwize.io Source: mapwize.io Mapwize has built a smart layer on top of the OpenStreetMap and Mapbox platforms, which allows businesses to add indoor mapping to their business. For commercial businesses, this can be used to greatly improve the customer experience (i.e. providing directions through the premises) as well as engaging with customers, or providing them additional information based on their specific indoor location. The company utilizes most of the common indoor mapping technologies, such as iBeacons, NFC, Li-Fi, Ultrasound and more. Here’s their #10SecondPitch: Upright – A wearable to fix your posture http://www.uprightpose.com source: uprightpose.com Bad posture is a worldwide epidemic! With more and more of us spending the majority of our days slumped in front of a desk, it has become increasingly harder to maintain a good posture. As founder and CEO Oded Cohen explained to me, the main difficulty with maintaining good posture is remembering to have good posture. To address this, Upright is a wearable that sticks to your back with a couple of sticky pads. It’s then able to detect when the user is in a slouched position, and provide feedback through vibration – a much needed reminder to straighten up. Oded recommends that the device is used for “training”, throughout several short periods in a day. The brain very quickly learns from such training, and after as little as a few weeks can lead to greatly improved posture. Check out Oded’s #10SecondPitch below: CloudImage.io – Saving the world from un-optimized images https://cloudimage.io The folks at CloudImage.io are taking all of the effort out of serving images across the web, in an efficient, performant way. This is a no-brainer for businesses with a large amount of image-based content and without a high level of technical expertise to deliver them to different device types across the world. The CloudImage product provides a simple javascript snippet which handles all of the responsive scaling, cropping, thumbnails and caching part of serving images. The end result is better performance for users and lower bandwidth requirements for the business. Source: cloudimage.io You can watch their #10SecondPitch here: Airstoc – Making drone footage accessible to everyone https://www.airstoc.com Source: airstoc.com In many ways, 2015 was the year of drones. These unmanned flying robots have a seemingly limitless set of possibilities for changing many industries, and one area they’re currently revolutionising is the video industry. Video footage from drones is being increasingly used in film and television – the cost savings vs. chartering a light aircraft are huge, and the quality of such smooth, sweeping landscape shots are changing the way we shoot video. Drones are also much more flexible – you can fly them up close to old buildings, winding through trees, skimming across water – you name it. The problem that the airstoc team are solving is two-sided: Allowing easier access for video producers to obtain quality drone footage (either stock footage, or through hiring a drone operator). Allowing drone operators to easily monetize their high-quality footage. Here’s the team’s #10SecondPitch: Incisively – Optimization as a service http://www.incisive.ly Source: incisive.ly A lot of large companies are employing machine learning techniques to optimize many aspects of their business – pricing, promotions, merchandising strategies etc. Incisively makes that same technology available to a much wider audience, with their SaaS optimization product. As a SaaS business, this means you can optimize for any measurable metric, such as Customer Lifetime Value, Average Sale Price – anything you use as a focus for increased value. Here’s Kashif, Founder and CEO giving his #10SecondPitch: BONUS: NEO POP http://neopop.tradekorea.com Source: neopop.kr/ This one was so fun that I couldn’t help but include it. NEO POP is bringing high-tech customizable dog accessories all the way from Korea to the European market. Their dog collar connects to your smartphone and allows you to program a custom scrolling message, as well as colors and other aspects. If I had a dog, this would be on my Christmas list for sure! Also, the dog hat means that Hong wins the award for the most fun #10SecondPitch: See all the pitches If you want to see more startups from the conference pitching their business in just 10 seconds, head on over to our Tumblr site: #10SecondPitch:

[INST] 5 of TechCrunch Disrupt’s most exciting startups [/INST]

Mapwize – Bringing mapping indoors http://mapwize.io Source: mapwize.io Mapwize has built a smart layer on top of the OpenStreetMap and Mapbox platforms, which allows businesses to add indoor mapping to their business. For commercial businesses, this can be used to greatly improve the customer experience (i.e. providing directions through the premises) as well as engaging with customers, or providing them additional information based on their specific indoor location. The company utilizes most of the common indoor mapping technologies, such as iBeacons, NFC, Li-Fi, Ultrasound and more. Here’s their #10SecondPitch: Upright – A wearable to fix your posture http://www.uprightpose.com source: uprightpose.com Bad posture is a worldwide epidemic! With more and more of us spending the majority of our days slumped in front of a desk, it has become increasingly harder to maintain a good posture. As founder and CEO Oded Cohen explained to me, the main difficulty with maintaining good posture is remembering to have good posture. To address this, Upright is a wearable that sticks to your back with a couple of sticky pads. It’s then able to detect when the user is in a slouched position, and provide feedback through vibration – a much needed reminder to straighten up. Oded recommends that the device is used for “training”, throughout several short periods in a day. The brain very quickly learns from such training, and after as little as a few weeks can lead to greatly improved posture. Check out Oded’s #10SecondPitch below: CloudImage.io – Saving the world from un-optimized images https://cloudimage.io The folks at CloudImage.io are taking all of the effort out of serving images across the web, in an efficient, performant way. This is a no-brainer for businesses with a large amount of image-based content and without a high level of technical expertise to deliver them to different device types across the world. The CloudImage product provides a simple javascript snippet which handles all of the responsive scaling, cropping, thumbnails and caching part of serving images. The end result is better performance for users and lower bandwidth requirements for the business. Source: cloudimage.io You can watch their #10SecondPitch here: Airstoc – Making drone footage accessible to everyone https://www.airstoc.com Source: airstoc.com In many ways, 2015 was the year of drones. These unmanned flying robots have a seemingly limitless set of possibilities for changing many industries, and one area they’re currently revolutionising is the video industry. Video footage from drones is being increasingly used in film and television – the cost savings vs. chartering a light aircraft are huge, and the quality of such smooth, sweeping landscape shots are changing the way we shoot video. Drones are also much more flexible – you can fly them up close to old buildings, winding through trees, skimming across water – you name it. The problem that the airstoc team are solving is two-sided: Allowing easier access for video producers to obtain quality drone footage (either stock footage, or through hiring a drone operator). Allowing drone operators to easily monetize their high-quality footage. Here’s the team’s #10SecondPitch: Incisively – Optimization as a service http://www.incisive.ly Source: incisive.ly A lot of large companies are employing machine learning techniques to optimize many aspects of their business – pricing, promotions, merchandising strategies etc. Incisively makes that same technology available to a much wider audience, with their SaaS optimization product. As a SaaS business, this means you can optimize for any measurable metric, such as Customer Lifetime Value, Average Sale Price – anything you use as a focus for increased value. Here’s Kashif, Founder and CEO giving his #10SecondPitch: BONUS: NEO POP http://neopop.tradekorea.com Source: neopop.kr/ This one was so fun that I couldn’t help but include it. NEO POP is bringing high-tech customizable dog accessories all the way from Korea to the European market. Their dog collar connects to your smartphone and allows you to program a custom scrolling message, as well as colors and other aspects. If I had a dog, this would be on my Christmas list for sure! Also, the dog hat means that Hong wins the award for the most fun #10SecondPitch: See all the pitches If you want to see more startups from the conference pitching their business in just 10 seconds, head on over to our Tumblr site: #10SecondPitch:

<sys> [INST] 5 of TechCrunch Disrupt’s most exciting startups [/INST] Mapwize – Bringing mapping indoors http://mapwize.io Source: mapwize.io Mapwize has built a smart layer on top of the OpenStreetMap and Mapbox platforms, which allows businesses to add indoor mapping to their business. For commercial businesses, this can be used to greatly improve the customer experience (i.e. providing directions through the premises) as well as engaging with customers, or providing them additional information based on their specific indoor location. The company utilizes most of the common indoor mapping technologies, such as iBeacons, NFC, Li-Fi, Ultrasound and more. Here’s their #10SecondPitch: Upright – A wearable to fix your posture http://www.uprightpose.com source: uprightpose.com Bad posture is a worldwide epidemic! With more and more of us spending the majority of our days slumped in front of a desk, it has become increasingly harder to maintain a good posture. As founder and CEO Oded Cohen explained to me, the main difficulty with maintaining good posture is remembering to have good posture. To address this, Upright is a wearable that sticks to your back with a couple of sticky pads. It’s then able to detect when the user is in a slouched position, and provide feedback through vibration – a much needed reminder to straighten up. Oded recommends that the device is used for “training”, throughout several short periods in a day. The brain very quickly learns from such training, and after as little as a few weeks can lead to greatly improved posture. Check out Oded’s #10SecondPitch below: CloudImage.io – Saving the world from un-optimized images https://cloudimage.io The folks at CloudImage.io are taking all of the effort out of serving images across the web, in an efficient, performant way. This is a no-brainer for businesses with a large amount of image-based content and without a high level of technical expertise to deliver them to different device types across the world. The CloudImage product provides a simple javascript snippet which handles all of the responsive scaling, cropping, thumbnails and caching part of serving images. The end result is better performance for users and lower bandwidth requirements for the business. Source: cloudimage.io You can watch their #10SecondPitch here: Airstoc – Making drone footage accessible to everyone https://www.airstoc.com Source: airstoc.com In many ways, 2015 was the year of drones. These unmanned flying robots have a seemingly limitless set of possibilities for changing many industries, and one area they’re currently revolutionising is the video industry. Video footage from drones is being increasingly used in film and television – the cost savings vs. chartering a light aircraft are huge, and the quality of such smooth, sweeping landscape shots are changing the way we shoot video. Drones are also much more flexible – you can fly them up close to old buildings, winding through trees, skimming across water – you name it. The problem that the airstoc team are solving is two-sided: Allowing easier access for video producers to obtain quality drone footage (either stock footage, or through hiring a drone operator). Allowing drone operators to easily monetize their high-quality footage. Here’s the team’s #10SecondPitch: Incisively – Optimization as a service http://www.incisive.ly Source: incisive.ly A lot of large companies are employing machine learning techniques to optimize many aspects of their business – pricing, promotions, merchandising strategies etc. Incisively makes that same technology available to a much wider audience, with their SaaS optimization product. As a SaaS business, this means you can optimize for any measurable metric, such as Customer Lifetime Value, Average Sale Price – anything you use as a focus for increased value. Here’s Kashif, Founder and CEO giving his #10SecondPitch: BONUS: NEO POP http://neopop.tradekorea.com Source: neopop.kr/ This one was so fun that I couldn’t help but include it. NEO POP is bringing high-tech customizable dog accessories all the way from Korea to the European market. Their dog collar connects to your smartphone and allows you to program a custom scrolling message, as well as colors and other aspects. If I had a dog, this would be on my Christmas list for sure! Also, the dog hat means that Hong wins the award for the most fun #10SecondPitch: See all the pitches If you want to see more startups from the conference pitching their business in just 10 seconds, head on over to our Tumblr site: #10SecondPitch: </sys

A photo journal of SaaStock 2017. We sneaked into the venue rather late on the night before the conference fully began to do some prep. This meant we could arrive on the morning of the first full day with a pristine-looking booth, with folded t-shirts and shiny SaaS cheat sheets ready to go! 👕👕👕 It’s always great to see familiar brands (and ChartMogul customers) like Pipedrive powering the coffee (for us mere mortals, as well as sales teams) ☕️🙌 Our favorite hashtag: (Yes, it actually reads #SaaStock in its full form. Rumor has it that founder Alex Theuma keeps these on his bedroom room wall throughout the year…) “I really enjoyed the insights Ryan gave on building Qualtrics. As a family business (he started it with his brother) he bootstrapped it for 10 years, and only afterwards started to take outside money. Overall it was a really refreshing session on growing a SaaS business with or without outside funding.” Thomas Peham Close.io Founder Steli Efti woke us all up in the morning with more energy than I thought was humanly possible! So much great Sales strategy 💥 “A common theme we came across at SaaStock, sitting in David [Apple]’s session as well as other discussions with speakers and investors, was to focus more on your product marketing and finding your ICP. You’re going to churn customers early, but as long as you are getting closer to learning your ICP, you’re getting closer to owning a specific niche within a market.” (read more) Amaan Nathoo, Bonjoro The Investor Zone featured prominently this year, with some very familiar names and faces from the SaaS venture capital universe… “I felt quite humble about my knowledge level of modern SaaS sales when listening to the experts of different fields of SaaS specialization such as marketing, inside sales and client success management. The rules of buying have really changed a lot when clients today have the option of finding lots of alternatives to their needs and trial them with a reasonable effort.” (read more) Markko Vaarnas “Personalisation was a big theme this year using different hacks and tools to ensure that sales reps were focusing on those with high purchase intent from the right companies.” (read more) Alan Gleeson “Building a presence in the US” was an insightful panel for European Founders looking to scale up internationally. It’s always rewarding to see the ChartMogul product on a huge screen — it also makes demos fun! “Be customer centric. Forget the old, boring B2B jargon. Understand your NPS scores and act accordingly. What are the reasons your customers recommend you? Why they don’t?” (read more) Diego Gomes Thanks to the SaaStock team for putting together such a great event, and thanks to everyone who dropped by for a chat! We hope to see you all next year 👋

[INST] A photo journal of SaaStock 2017 [/INST]

We sneaked into the venue rather late on the night before the conference fully began to do some prep. This meant we could arrive on the morning of the first full day with a pristine-looking booth, with folded t-shirts and shiny SaaS cheat sheets ready to go! 👕👕👕 It’s always great to see familiar brands (and ChartMogul customers) like Pipedrive powering the coffee (for us mere mortals, as well as sales teams) ☕️🙌 Our favorite hashtag: (Yes, it actually reads #SaaStock in its full form. Rumor has it that founder Alex Theuma keeps these on his bedroom room wall throughout the year…) “I really enjoyed the insights Ryan gave on building Qualtrics. As a family business (he started it with his brother) he bootstrapped it for 10 years, and only afterwards started to take outside money. Overall it was a really refreshing session on growing a SaaS business with or without outside funding.” Thomas Peham Close.io Founder Steli Efti woke us all up in the morning with more energy than I thought was humanly possible! So much great Sales strategy 💥 “A common theme we came across at SaaStock, sitting in David [Apple]’s session as well as other discussions with speakers and investors, was to focus more on your product marketing and finding your ICP. You’re going to churn customers early, but as long as you are getting closer to learning your ICP, you’re getting closer to owning a specific niche within a market.” (read more) Amaan Nathoo, Bonjoro The Investor Zone featured prominently this year, with some very familiar names and faces from the SaaS venture capital universe… “I felt quite humble about my knowledge level of modern SaaS sales when listening to the experts of different fields of SaaS specialization such as marketing, inside sales and client success management. The rules of buying have really changed a lot when clients today have the option of finding lots of alternatives to their needs and trial them with a reasonable effort.” (read more) Markko Vaarnas “Personalisation was a big theme this year using different hacks and tools to ensure that sales reps were focusing on those with high purchase intent from the right companies.” (read more) Alan Gleeson “Building a presence in the US” was an insightful panel for European Founders looking to scale up internationally. It’s always rewarding to see the ChartMogul product on a huge screen — it also makes demos fun! “Be customer centric. Forget the old, boring B2B jargon. Understand your NPS scores and act accordingly. What are the reasons your customers recommend you? Why they don’t?” (read more) Diego Gomes Thanks to the SaaStock team for putting together such a great event, and thanks to everyone who dropped by for a chat! We hope to see you all next year 👋

<sys> [INST] A photo journal of SaaStock 2017 [/INST] We sneaked into the venue rather late on the night before the conference fully began to do some prep. This meant we could arrive on the morning of the first full day with a pristine-looking booth, with folded t-shirts and shiny SaaS cheat sheets ready to go! 👕👕👕 It’s always great to see familiar brands (and ChartMogul customers) like Pipedrive powering the coffee (for us mere mortals, as well as sales teams) ☕️🙌 Our favorite hashtag: (Yes, it actually reads #SaaStock in its full form. Rumor has it that founder Alex Theuma keeps these on his bedroom room wall throughout the year…) “I really enjoyed the insights Ryan gave on building Qualtrics. As a family business (he started it with his brother) he bootstrapped it for 10 years, and only afterwards started to take outside money. Overall it was a really refreshing session on growing a SaaS business with or without outside funding.” Thomas Peham Close.io Founder Steli Efti woke us all up in the morning with more energy than I thought was humanly possible! So much great Sales strategy 💥 “A common theme we came across at SaaStock, sitting in David [Apple]’s session as well as other discussions with speakers and investors, was to focus more on your product marketing and finding your ICP. You’re going to churn customers early, but as long as you are getting closer to learning your ICP, you’re getting closer to owning a specific niche within a market.” (read more) Amaan Nathoo, Bonjoro The Investor Zone featured prominently this year, with some very familiar names and faces from the SaaS venture capital universe… “I felt quite humble about my knowledge level of modern SaaS sales when listening to the experts of different fields of SaaS specialization such as marketing, inside sales and client success management. The rules of buying have really changed a lot when clients today have the option of finding lots of alternatives to their needs and trial them with a reasonable effort.” (read more) Markko Vaarnas “Personalisation was a big theme this year using different hacks and tools to ensure that sales reps were focusing on those with high purchase intent from the right companies.” (read more) Alan Gleeson “Building a presence in the US” was an insightful panel for European Founders looking to scale up internationally. It’s always rewarding to see the ChartMogul product on a huge screen — it also makes demos fun! “Be customer centric. Forget the old, boring B2B jargon. Understand your NPS scores and act accordingly. What are the reasons your customers recommend you? Why they don’t?” (read more) Diego Gomes Thanks to the SaaStock team for putting together such a great event, and thanks to everyone who dropped by for a chat! We hope to see you all next year 👋 </sys

How Revenue-Based Financing Works and What RBF Providers Care About. This is a guest post by Brian Parks, Managing Partner at Bigfoot Capital. New investment structures are gaining traction in the early-stage SaaS financing market. You may have heard of Revenue-based financing (RBF), venture debt or hybrid structures blending a revenue or profit share concept with an equity ownership stake. Or, maybe you haven’t and are still thinking your only options are to bootstrap or pursue angel and/or venture capital. Bigfoot Capital invests in initial-scale SaaS companies using both RBF and venture debt investment structures. We do not pursue hybrid structures with a significant equity component attached. In this post, you will learn: What revenue-based financing (“RBF”) is 2 Primary RBF structures What RBF investors care about How Bigfoot evaluates initial-scale SaaS companies How the RBF structure functions, what it costs and the value it can generate for your company. We’ve provided our RBF structuring model that we use internally when structuring investments, so you can dive in and understand all of the underlying details (link at the bottom of this post). A high-level look at Revenue-based financing (RBF) What is RBF? Revenue-based financing is an alternative growth investment structure with different mechanics, provisions, and return profiles than either equity capital or traditional lending products. It is first and foremost a debt instrument, that is paid back by sharing in a company’s revenue. Who is it for? RBF is for growing companies that either do not have the current revenue growth rates or scale or Founder desire to attract venture capital and/or lack the assets and meaningful profitability/cash flow to procure traditional debt products (bank financing) at the time of investment. Simplified RBF Here’s an example of how an RBF loan facility can work: We invest $300k with a 36-month payback term. We require $450k (1.5x of investment) to be paid back over that term. You pay us back based on a % of your monthly cash receipts. Our return is IRR-driven (Internal rate of return) based on the timing and volume of the cash receipts we share in over the term of the investment. (Note that the IRR ≠ interest rate. Here’s a primer on IRR. And here’s one on the time value of money.) Higher revenue growth = Higher IRR for us. We’re capturing cash and recouping our investment more rapidly. Lower revenue growth = Lower IRR for us. We’re waiting longer for our cash share which defers our recoup. Once the 1.5x return on investment is returned, you have no further payment obligation and you have retained your equity ownership while growing. 2 Main approaches to RBF Pure debt instrument This is what Bigfoot provides. The expectation is that the RBF facility (i.e. the loan) will be paid back and a return cap will be achieved over time (24-36 months) based on monthly payments delivered as a % of your cash revenue. This is a simple structure that doesn’t impact your cap table, i.e. you keep full ownership of your business. This is generally senior capital, meaning it has first priority of payment in a capital stack that may include equity. Hybrid debt/equity investment There are some groups employing this model, which functions somewhat similarly to a traditional convertible note. The key and important difference between this structure and a traditional convertible note or SAFE is that if you do not raise a subsequent “qualified financing” of, say, at least $1M in equity within a certain timeframe, this investment will not convert to equity and will need to be repaid at a significant multiple of the investment back to the investor. You can think of this structure as redeemable equity whereby you’ve sold equity and you can redeem by purchasing it back at a premium. The time frame is generally longer than that of a pure RBF. Say, 5-7 years vs. 2-5 years. Accordingly, the return cap requirement will be higher 3-4x. I understand this can be a bit hard to follow as there’s more complexity to understand and model here. Matt Wensing of SimSaaS has done a wonderful job of comparing these types of structures in deep detail. What RBF Investors Care About If you’re interested in raising capital through an RBF facility, it is important to understand what investors who offer this kind of financing are looking for when they evaluate potential deals: Existing revenue traction: as RBF investors are getting their return based on receiving a % of your revenue, it’s paramount that you have substantial revenue to share. Revenue growth: In order for an RBF to perform well, revenue needs to be growing at a rate of at least 20% YoY, a far cry from the TTDDD growth rates VCs are looking to capture. Revenue quality: At least for us, this is very important and where we dig hard. Not all revenue is created equal, so we’re evaluating its quality primarily by applying standard SaaS revenue metrics to your revenue and cohort metrics to the underlying customers delivering it. Here’s a post we’ve written on Determining the Quality of SaaS Revenue (comes with a cohort analysis tool). Fundamental quality of operations: Of course, beyond revenue, RBF investors need to believe in the viability of the company and its ability to share revenue without compromising the business. This comes down to how you actually operate and grow the business. How Bigfoot Evaluates Initial-Scale SaaS Bigfoot focuses on initial-scale SaaS. By that we mean: SaaS businesses with $1M-$10M ARR that have raised <$5M in equity capital. We’re very metrics focused as you’ll see below. Additionally, we have our own views on products and markets that may differ from those of VCs. If you’re considering exploring the RBF route, it is useful to know how investors think and evaluate opportunities. How we think about metrics as a SaaS RBF investor (3 buckets) We do our best to utilize data to capture the metrics we care about most across three broad buckets and use these metrics to evaluate opportunities, structure our investments, and monitor our portfolio on an ongoing basis. SaaS Metrics Customer / revenue metrics MRR (scale and growth rates) Revenue quality: ARPU, LTV, Quick Ratio Cohort metrics: cohort sizes, cohort multiple — an indicator of growth Retention / churn metrics Below, you can see some of the customer/revenue metrics we capture. If you connect with our app, we can produce this and our cohort report for you and short-circuit our RBF fit evaluation process (note: this is alpha software, so please forgive our unoptimized load times). Of course, if you have a ChartMogul account tracking your metrics and cohorts, that will help accelerate our decisioning as well. Sales & Marketing Metrics CAC recovery period LTV/CAC Funnel/pipeline metrics (conversions and sales cycles) ACVs/ARPU Financial Metrics We primarily focus on revenue through the SaaS customer and revenue metrics outlined above. For financial metrics, we’re really digging into your OPEX and how it’s serving the company and looking for answers to a multitude of questions (see below). Labor spend: how are you managing your labor and how efficient is it? Are you scalable? Sales & Marketing spend: headcount and discretionary. How effective are you at deploying S&M spend. Can we see that a dollar spent generates 2+ dollars? Can you turn off discretionary spend and still maintain (and even grow) the business. How is your sales cycle? Research & Development spend: how is your engineering organization structured? How much do you need to invest in it to get where you want to be? How much can be cut without compromising the product’s ability to deliver revenue? What level of investment do you anticipate to grow/evolve the product in order to maintain your competitive lead? General & Admin spend: How lean are you running this non-revenue-generating portion of the P&L. Are you spending fast and loose, or do you run a tight ship? Cash Metrics (all about cash) Cash balance before and after investment Net cash burn: historical and projected and the path to profitability Runway: cash low points Cash receipts / management: payment processes and cash capture How we think about markets We don’t need to see multi-billion TAMs to be excited about an investment opportunity. We believe great businesses can thrive in “small”, “boring” markets. We like niches and verticalized software which lend themselves to capital-efficient growth. This post outlines our thinking about markets. How we think about products We’re B2B focused and bucket products into functional categories of marketing, sales, and operations. For the enterprise, we like mission-critical applications that are painful to cut once implemented and justify their existence in a corporate budget. For SMB SaaS apps, we look for ease of use and delightful user experience with consistent engagement and value delivery. These types of apps are inherently going to stay on the credit card. We are not frontier tech investors and are primarily focused on the business problem being solved that we can understand and hear from customers why your solution solves it. Here are a couple of posts we’ve written on proving value with your product and how to position your product. How we think about teams We like Founders and executive teams that have been working on the business for a decent period of time, say 3+ years. Given that we’re investing in lightly capitalized companies that have achieved meaningful revenue traction, the reality is that these companies have been around for a bit. So, we get a lot of comfort that the team that’s gotten the company to that level has been in place and working together for a while. Of course, the team is ever-evolving but the foundational leadership and knowledge remain in place to support new hires. How we think about SaaS financing We started Bigfoot with the belief that there are many, many, many SaaS companies in existence that we can support with a different form of capital than has traditionally been available. These companies may have been passed on or overlooked by traditional early-stage capital providers (angel/VC) and maybe for a good reason if they don’t fit that investment profile. We believe that by focusing on these companies and building our company, products, and service model around them, we can mutually succeed and achieve meaningful outcomes that don’t require billion-dollar exits. Maybe we help you get to a venture round. Maybe we help you get to an exit while retaining your ownership. Maybe you have a great company that cash flows. Any of those is a success we’re interested in playing a role in. Bigfoot’s RBF Structuring Model We’ve provided our model to educate Founders and drive transparency and alignment in this emerging capital market. We believe in helping Founders make their capital decisions with the appropriate data in hand. We do this by providing them with all of the details and tooling that go into how we make our investment decisions and by taking the time to build relationships that help us both get where we’re aiming to go. You grow. We grow. All good. Check it out and create your own model here: RBF Model_Bigfoot Capital_Open-Source (note that the model is view only, so File → Make a copy, no email required). Make sure to spend some time on the ‘Model Overview’ worksheet and reference it as you play with the model. If you have any questions, email Brian at bparks@bigfootcap.com or schedule a call with him. Supporting Links Bigfoot Capital RBF Model Bigfoot Capital Cohort Analysis Model Bigfoot Capital Stripe Application IRR and Time Value of Money Explanations Hybrid Structures Analysis How We Think About SaaS Revenue Quality How We Think About Markets How We Think About Proving Product Value and Product Positioning

[INST] How Revenue-Based Financing Works and What RBF Providers Care About [/INST]

This is a guest post by Brian Parks, Managing Partner at Bigfoot Capital. New investment structures are gaining traction in the early-stage SaaS financing market. You may have heard of Revenue-based financing (RBF), venture debt or hybrid structures blending a revenue or profit share concept with an equity ownership stake. Or, maybe you haven’t and are still thinking your only options are to bootstrap or pursue angel and/or venture capital. Bigfoot Capital invests in initial-scale SaaS companies using both RBF and venture debt investment structures. We do not pursue hybrid structures with a significant equity component attached. In this post, you will learn: What revenue-based financing (“RBF”) is 2 Primary RBF structures What RBF investors care about How Bigfoot evaluates initial-scale SaaS companies How the RBF structure functions, what it costs and the value it can generate for your company. We’ve provided our RBF structuring model that we use internally when structuring investments, so you can dive in and understand all of the underlying details (link at the bottom of this post). A high-level look at Revenue-based financing (RBF) What is RBF? Revenue-based financing is an alternative growth investment structure with different mechanics, provisions, and return profiles than either equity capital or traditional lending products. It is first and foremost a debt instrument, that is paid back by sharing in a company’s revenue. Who is it for? RBF is for growing companies that either do not have the current revenue growth rates or scale or Founder desire to attract venture capital and/or lack the assets and meaningful profitability/cash flow to procure traditional debt products (bank financing) at the time of investment. Simplified RBF Here’s an example of how an RBF loan facility can work: We invest $300k with a 36-month payback term. We require $450k (1.5x of investment) to be paid back over that term. You pay us back based on a % of your monthly cash receipts. Our return is IRR-driven (Internal rate of return) based on the timing and volume of the cash receipts we share in over the term of the investment. (Note that the IRR ≠ interest rate. Here’s a primer on IRR. And here’s one on the time value of money.) Higher revenue growth = Higher IRR for us. We’re capturing cash and recouping our investment more rapidly. Lower revenue growth = Lower IRR for us. We’re waiting longer for our cash share which defers our recoup. Once the 1.5x return on investment is returned, you have no further payment obligation and you have retained your equity ownership while growing. 2 Main approaches to RBF Pure debt instrument This is what Bigfoot provides. The expectation is that the RBF facility (i.e. the loan) will be paid back and a return cap will be achieved over time (24-36 months) based on monthly payments delivered as a % of your cash revenue. This is a simple structure that doesn’t impact your cap table, i.e. you keep full ownership of your business. This is generally senior capital, meaning it has first priority of payment in a capital stack that may include equity. Hybrid debt/equity investment There are some groups employing this model, which functions somewhat similarly to a traditional convertible note. The key and important difference between this structure and a traditional convertible note or SAFE is that if you do not raise a subsequent “qualified financing” of, say, at least $1M in equity within a certain timeframe, this investment will not convert to equity and will need to be repaid at a significant multiple of the investment back to the investor. You can think of this structure as redeemable equity whereby you’ve sold equity and you can redeem by purchasing it back at a premium. The time frame is generally longer than that of a pure RBF. Say, 5-7 years vs. 2-5 years. Accordingly, the return cap requirement will be higher 3-4x. I understand this can be a bit hard to follow as there’s more complexity to understand and model here. Matt Wensing of SimSaaS has done a wonderful job of comparing these types of structures in deep detail. What RBF Investors Care About If you’re interested in raising capital through an RBF facility, it is important to understand what investors who offer this kind of financing are looking for when they evaluate potential deals: Existing revenue traction: as RBF investors are getting their return based on receiving a % of your revenue, it’s paramount that you have substantial revenue to share. Revenue growth: In order for an RBF to perform well, revenue needs to be growing at a rate of at least 20% YoY, a far cry from the TTDDD growth rates VCs are looking to capture. Revenue quality: At least for us, this is very important and where we dig hard. Not all revenue is created equal, so we’re evaluating its quality primarily by applying standard SaaS revenue metrics to your revenue and cohort metrics to the underlying customers delivering it. Here’s a post we’ve written on Determining the Quality of SaaS Revenue (comes with a cohort analysis tool). Fundamental quality of operations: Of course, beyond revenue, RBF investors need to believe in the viability of the company and its ability to share revenue without compromising the business. This comes down to how you actually operate and grow the business. How Bigfoot Evaluates Initial-Scale SaaS Bigfoot focuses on initial-scale SaaS. By that we mean: SaaS businesses with $1M-$10M ARR that have raised <$5M in equity capital. We’re very metrics focused as you’ll see below. Additionally, we have our own views on products and markets that may differ from those of VCs. If you’re considering exploring the RBF route, it is useful to know how investors think and evaluate opportunities. How we think about metrics as a SaaS RBF investor (3 buckets) We do our best to utilize data to capture the metrics we care about most across three broad buckets and use these metrics to evaluate opportunities, structure our investments, and monitor our portfolio on an ongoing basis. SaaS Metrics Customer / revenue metrics MRR (scale and growth rates) Revenue quality: ARPU, LTV, Quick Ratio Cohort metrics: cohort sizes, cohort multiple — an indicator of growth Retention / churn metrics Below, you can see some of the customer/revenue metrics we capture. If you connect with our app, we can produce this and our cohort report for you and short-circuit our RBF fit evaluation process (note: this is alpha software, so please forgive our unoptimized load times). Of course, if you have a ChartMogul account tracking your metrics and cohorts, that will help accelerate our decisioning as well. Sales & Marketing Metrics CAC recovery period LTV/CAC Funnel/pipeline metrics (conversions and sales cycles) ACVs/ARPU Financial Metrics We primarily focus on revenue through the SaaS customer and revenue metrics outlined above. For financial metrics, we’re really digging into your OPEX and how it’s serving the company and looking for answers to a multitude of questions (see below). Labor spend: how are you managing your labor and how efficient is it? Are you scalable? Sales & Marketing spend: headcount and discretionary. How effective are you at deploying S&M spend. Can we see that a dollar spent generates 2+ dollars? Can you turn off discretionary spend and still maintain (and even grow) the business. How is your sales cycle? Research & Development spend: how is your engineering organization structured? How much do you need to invest in it to get where you want to be? How much can be cut without compromising the product’s ability to deliver revenue? What level of investment do you anticipate to grow/evolve the product in order to maintain your competitive lead? General & Admin spend: How lean are you running this non-revenue-generating portion of the P&L. Are you spending fast and loose, or do you run a tight ship? Cash Metrics (all about cash) Cash balance before and after investment Net cash burn: historical and projected and the path to profitability Runway: cash low points Cash receipts / management: payment processes and cash capture How we think about markets We don’t need to see multi-billion TAMs to be excited about an investment opportunity. We believe great businesses can thrive in “small”, “boring” markets. We like niches and verticalized software which lend themselves to capital-efficient growth. This post outlines our thinking about markets. How we think about products We’re B2B focused and bucket products into functional categories of marketing, sales, and operations. For the enterprise, we like mission-critical applications that are painful to cut once implemented and justify their existence in a corporate budget. For SMB SaaS apps, we look for ease of use and delightful user experience with consistent engagement and value delivery. These types of apps are inherently going to stay on the credit card. We are not frontier tech investors and are primarily focused on the business problem being solved that we can understand and hear from customers why your solution solves it. Here are a couple of posts we’ve written on proving value with your product and how to position your product. How we think about teams We like Founders and executive teams that have been working on the business for a decent period of time, say 3+ years. Given that we’re investing in lightly capitalized companies that have achieved meaningful revenue traction, the reality is that these companies have been around for a bit. So, we get a lot of comfort that the team that’s gotten the company to that level has been in place and working together for a while. Of course, the team is ever-evolving but the foundational leadership and knowledge remain in place to support new hires. How we think about SaaS financing We started Bigfoot with the belief that there are many, many, many SaaS companies in existence that we can support with a different form of capital than has traditionally been available. These companies may have been passed on or overlooked by traditional early-stage capital providers (angel/VC) and maybe for a good reason if they don’t fit that investment profile. We believe that by focusing on these companies and building our company, products, and service model around them, we can mutually succeed and achieve meaningful outcomes that don’t require billion-dollar exits. Maybe we help you get to a venture round. Maybe we help you get to an exit while retaining your ownership. Maybe you have a great company that cash flows. Any of those is a success we’re interested in playing a role in. Bigfoot’s RBF Structuring Model We’ve provided our model to educate Founders and drive transparency and alignment in this emerging capital market. We believe in helping Founders make their capital decisions with the appropriate data in hand. We do this by providing them with all of the details and tooling that go into how we make our investment decisions and by taking the time to build relationships that help us both get where we’re aiming to go. You grow. We grow. All good. Check it out and create your own model here: RBF Model_Bigfoot Capital_Open-Source (note that the model is view only, so File → Make a copy, no email required). Make sure to spend some time on the ‘Model Overview’ worksheet and reference it as you play with the model. If you have any questions, email Brian at bparks@bigfootcap.com or schedule a call with him. Supporting Links Bigfoot Capital RBF Model Bigfoot Capital Cohort Analysis Model Bigfoot Capital Stripe Application IRR and Time Value of Money Explanations Hybrid Structures Analysis How We Think About SaaS Revenue Quality How We Think About Markets How We Think About Proving Product Value and Product Positioning

<sys> [INST] How Revenue-Based Financing Works and What RBF Providers Care About [/INST] This is a guest post by Brian Parks, Managing Partner at Bigfoot Capital. New investment structures are gaining traction in the early-stage SaaS financing market. You may have heard of Revenue-based financing (RBF), venture debt or hybrid structures blending a revenue or profit share concept with an equity ownership stake. Or, maybe you haven’t and are still thinking your only options are to bootstrap or pursue angel and/or venture capital. Bigfoot Capital invests in initial-scale SaaS companies using both RBF and venture debt investment structures. We do not pursue hybrid structures with a significant equity component attached. In this post, you will learn: What revenue-based financing (“RBF”) is 2 Primary RBF structures What RBF investors care about How Bigfoot evaluates initial-scale SaaS companies How the RBF structure functions, what it costs and the value it can generate for your company. We’ve provided our RBF structuring model that we use internally when structuring investments, so you can dive in and understand all of the underlying details (link at the bottom of this post). A high-level look at Revenue-based financing (RBF) What is RBF? Revenue-based financing is an alternative growth investment structure with different mechanics, provisions, and return profiles than either equity capital or traditional lending products. It is first and foremost a debt instrument, that is paid back by sharing in a company’s revenue. Who is it for? RBF is for growing companies that either do not have the current revenue growth rates or scale or Founder desire to attract venture capital and/or lack the assets and meaningful profitability/cash flow to procure traditional debt products (bank financing) at the time of investment. Simplified RBF Here’s an example of how an RBF loan facility can work: We invest $300k with a 36-month payback term. We require $450k (1.5x of investment) to be paid back over that term. You pay us back based on a % of your monthly cash receipts. Our return is IRR-driven (Internal rate of return) based on the timing and volume of the cash receipts we share in over the term of the investment. (Note that the IRR ≠ interest rate. Here’s a primer on IRR. And here’s one on the time value of money.) Higher revenue growth = Higher IRR for us. We’re capturing cash and recouping our investment more rapidly. Lower revenue growth = Lower IRR for us. We’re waiting longer for our cash share which defers our recoup. Once the 1.5x return on investment is returned, you have no further payment obligation and you have retained your equity ownership while growing. 2 Main approaches to RBF Pure debt instrument This is what Bigfoot provides. The expectation is that the RBF facility (i.e. the loan) will be paid back and a return cap will be achieved over time (24-36 months) based on monthly payments delivered as a % of your cash revenue. This is a simple structure that doesn’t impact your cap table, i.e. you keep full ownership of your business. This is generally senior capital, meaning it has first priority of payment in a capital stack that may include equity. Hybrid debt/equity investment There are some groups employing this model, which functions somewhat similarly to a traditional convertible note. The key and important difference between this structure and a traditional convertible note or SAFE is that if you do not raise a subsequent “qualified financing” of, say, at least $1M in equity within a certain timeframe, this investment will not convert to equity and will need to be repaid at a significant multiple of the investment back to the investor. You can think of this structure as redeemable equity whereby you’ve sold equity and you can redeem by purchasing it back at a premium. The time frame is generally longer than that of a pure RBF. Say, 5-7 years vs. 2-5 years. Accordingly, the return cap requirement will be higher 3-4x. I understand this can be a bit hard to follow as there’s more complexity to understand and model here. Matt Wensing of SimSaaS has done a wonderful job of comparing these types of structures in deep detail. What RBF Investors Care About If you’re interested in raising capital through an RBF facility, it is important to understand what investors who offer this kind of financing are looking for when they evaluate potential deals: Existing revenue traction: as RBF investors are getting their return based on receiving a % of your revenue, it’s paramount that you have substantial revenue to share. Revenue growth: In order for an RBF to perform well, revenue needs to be growing at a rate of at least 20% YoY, a far cry from the TTDDD growth rates VCs are looking to capture. Revenue quality: At least for us, this is very important and where we dig hard. Not all revenue is created equal, so we’re evaluating its quality primarily by applying standard SaaS revenue metrics to your revenue and cohort metrics to the underlying customers delivering it. Here’s a post we’ve written on Determining the Quality of SaaS Revenue (comes with a cohort analysis tool). Fundamental quality of operations: Of course, beyond revenue, RBF investors need to believe in the viability of the company and its ability to share revenue without compromising the business. This comes down to how you actually operate and grow the business. How Bigfoot Evaluates Initial-Scale SaaS Bigfoot focuses on initial-scale SaaS. By that we mean: SaaS businesses with $1M-$10M ARR that have raised <$5M in equity capital. We’re very metrics focused as you’ll see below. Additionally, we have our own views on products and markets that may differ from those of VCs. If you’re considering exploring the RBF route, it is useful to know how investors think and evaluate opportunities. How we think about metrics as a SaaS RBF investor (3 buckets) We do our best to utilize data to capture the metrics we care about most across three broad buckets and use these metrics to evaluate opportunities, structure our investments, and monitor our portfolio on an ongoing basis. SaaS Metrics Customer / revenue metrics MRR (scale and growth rates) Revenue quality: ARPU, LTV, Quick Ratio Cohort metrics: cohort sizes, cohort multiple — an indicator of growth Retention / churn metrics Below, you can see some of the customer/revenue metrics we capture. If you connect with our app, we can produce this and our cohort report for you and short-circuit our RBF fit evaluation process (note: this is alpha software, so please forgive our unoptimized load times). Of course, if you have a ChartMogul account tracking your metrics and cohorts, that will help accelerate our decisioning as well. Sales & Marketing Metrics CAC recovery period LTV/CAC Funnel/pipeline metrics (conversions and sales cycles) ACVs/ARPU Financial Metrics We primarily focus on revenue through the SaaS customer and revenue metrics outlined above. For financial metrics, we’re really digging into your OPEX and how it’s serving the company and looking for answers to a multitude of questions (see below). Labor spend: how are you managing your labor and how efficient is it? Are you scalable? Sales & Marketing spend: headcount and discretionary. How effective are you at deploying S&M spend. Can we see that a dollar spent generates 2+ dollars? Can you turn off discretionary spend and still maintain (and even grow) the business. How is your sales cycle? Research & Development spend: how is your engineering organization structured? How much do you need to invest in it to get where you want to be? How much can be cut without compromising the product’s ability to deliver revenue? What level of investment do you anticipate to grow/evolve the product in order to maintain your competitive lead? General & Admin spend: How lean are you running this non-revenue-generating portion of the P&L. Are you spending fast and loose, or do you run a tight ship? Cash Metrics (all about cash) Cash balance before and after investment Net cash burn: historical and projected and the path to profitability Runway: cash low points Cash receipts / management: payment processes and cash capture How we think about markets We don’t need to see multi-billion TAMs to be excited about an investment opportunity. We believe great businesses can thrive in “small”, “boring” markets. We like niches and verticalized software which lend themselves to capital-efficient growth. This post outlines our thinking about markets. How we think about products We’re B2B focused and bucket products into functional categories of marketing, sales, and operations. For the enterprise, we like mission-critical applications that are painful to cut once implemented and justify their existence in a corporate budget. For SMB SaaS apps, we look for ease of use and delightful user experience with consistent engagement and value delivery. These types of apps are inherently going to stay on the credit card. We are not frontier tech investors and are primarily focused on the business problem being solved that we can understand and hear from customers why your solution solves it. Here are a couple of posts we’ve written on proving value with your product and how to position your product. How we think about teams We like Founders and executive teams that have been working on the business for a decent period of time, say 3+ years. Given that we’re investing in lightly capitalized companies that have achieved meaningful revenue traction, the reality is that these companies have been around for a bit. So, we get a lot of comfort that the team that’s gotten the company to that level has been in place and working together for a while. Of course, the team is ever-evolving but the foundational leadership and knowledge remain in place to support new hires. How we think about SaaS financing We started Bigfoot with the belief that there are many, many, many SaaS companies in existence that we can support with a different form of capital than has traditionally been available. These companies may have been passed on or overlooked by traditional early-stage capital providers (angel/VC) and maybe for a good reason if they don’t fit that investment profile. We believe that by focusing on these companies and building our company, products, and service model around them, we can mutually succeed and achieve meaningful outcomes that don’t require billion-dollar exits. Maybe we help you get to a venture round. Maybe we help you get to an exit while retaining your ownership. Maybe you have a great company that cash flows. Any of those is a success we’re interested in playing a role in. Bigfoot’s RBF Structuring Model We’ve provided our model to educate Founders and drive transparency and alignment in this emerging capital market. We believe in helping Founders make their capital decisions with the appropriate data in hand. We do this by providing them with all of the details and tooling that go into how we make our investment decisions and by taking the time to build relationships that help us both get where we’re aiming to go. You grow. We grow. All good. Check it out and create your own model here: RBF Model_Bigfoot Capital_Open-Source (note that the model is view only, so File → Make a copy, no email required). Make sure to spend some time on the ‘Model Overview’ worksheet and reference it as you play with the model. If you have any questions, email Brian at bparks@bigfootcap.com or schedule a call with him. Supporting Links Bigfoot Capital RBF Model Bigfoot Capital Cohort Analysis Model Bigfoot Capital Stripe Application IRR and Time Value of Money Explanations Hybrid Structures Analysis How We Think About SaaS Revenue Quality How We Think About Markets How We Think About Proving Product Value and Product Positioning </sys

Alex Delivet on single-handedly founding the B2B Rocks conference. The reason why B2B Rocks Alex Delivet (@alexd) is truly flying the flag for the Paris tech startup scene. Having launched his own business with friends some years ago (TripXP), he was thrown into the deep end of building and growing a tech company out of the French capital. In our chat, we discussed some of the learnings he took away from the failed business, particularly around the experience of founding a company with friends. Nowadays, Alex is almost single-handedly organising the final stages of this years B2B Rocks conference, which is back after a 1-year hiatus, promising a stronger vision and more wholesome experience than ever. It soon became very clear to me that the conference really is made up of 100% his own vision — probably single biggest cause of its great success. Listen to this episode if you want to understand: The things Alex would have done differently at his first company What Alex learned during his time at the startup builder eFounders The problems that exist in the French startup scene today, and how things are changing The difference between a good conference, and a great conference Common mistakes that conference founders make when designing events The reason for restricting the event to founders and investors only An exclusive reveal with regards to its future! Listen to the full episode below. If a podcast person, you can find us on the usual channels: iTunes and Soundcloud.

[INST] Alex Delivet on single-handedly founding the B2B Rocks conference [/INST]

The reason why B2B Rocks Alex Delivet (@alexd) is truly flying the flag for the Paris tech startup scene. Having launched his own business with friends some years ago (TripXP), he was thrown into the deep end of building and growing a tech company out of the French capital. In our chat, we discussed some of the learnings he took away from the failed business, particularly around the experience of founding a company with friends. Nowadays, Alex is almost single-handedly organising the final stages of this years B2B Rocks conference, which is back after a 1-year hiatus, promising a stronger vision and more wholesome experience than ever. It soon became very clear to me that the conference really is made up of 100% his own vision — probably single biggest cause of its great success. Listen to this episode if you want to understand: The things Alex would have done differently at his first company What Alex learned during his time at the startup builder eFounders The problems that exist in the French startup scene today, and how things are changing The difference between a good conference, and a great conference Common mistakes that conference founders make when designing events The reason for restricting the event to founders and investors only An exclusive reveal with regards to its future! Listen to the full episode below. If a podcast person, you can find us on the usual channels: iTunes and Soundcloud.

<sys> [INST] Alex Delivet on single-handedly founding the B2B Rocks conference [/INST] The reason why B2B Rocks Alex Delivet (@alexd) is truly flying the flag for the Paris tech startup scene. Having launched his own business with friends some years ago (TripXP), he was thrown into the deep end of building and growing a tech company out of the French capital. In our chat, we discussed some of the learnings he took away from the failed business, particularly around the experience of founding a company with friends. Nowadays, Alex is almost single-handedly organising the final stages of this years B2B Rocks conference, which is back after a 1-year hiatus, promising a stronger vision and more wholesome experience than ever. It soon became very clear to me that the conference really is made up of 100% his own vision — probably single biggest cause of its great success. Listen to this episode if you want to understand: The things Alex would have done differently at his first company What Alex learned during his time at the startup builder eFounders The problems that exist in the French startup scene today, and how things are changing The difference between a good conference, and a great conference Common mistakes that conference founders make when designing events The reason for restricting the event to founders and investors only An exclusive reveal with regards to its future! Listen to the full episode below. If a podcast person, you can find us on the usual channels: iTunes and Soundcloud. </sys

How to decide what to focus on when you’re building a brand new startup. Late last year, I started building reCharged, a daily briefing and community designed as the antithesis of traditional news. The briefing is delivered each morning on weekdays, doesn’t worry about breaking news, and has no advertising. I coded the software that wires it up, sends the newsletter and gives users access to the community — as well as being the solo-writer behind the content each day. I started the project with the goal of making a little bit of money, but not intending for it to be a full-time focus for at least a few months — basically my side project for experimenting with generating revenue for the first time. I wouldn’t be spending any money on it, just my time, to see if it was worth pursuing. “…every day is an adventure, but a nightmare too: what should I focus on to be effective?” When I launched into beta, on what I’d say was just enough of a working product to scrape by, I found myself surprised: 20 people showed up and started paying for it, even though it was unstable. Fast-forward five months to today, and I’m sending those briefings four days a week to about 300 paying subscribers and $1,800 MRR — utterly terrifying, thrilling, and not what I expected at all. The rollercoaster of building your own product can’t be easily described: emotions in every direction, confusion over why people are churning, a signup here or there to lift your mood — every day is an adventure, but a nightmare too: what should I focus on to be effective? I’m still in the early stages of building the product but plan to share thoughts about key focus areas, and the numbers you should ignore or use, when you’re building your own online business. Get your numbers straight! I launched reCharged, opened signups, invited a few friends and wired up Stripe without ever actually figuring out a reliable way to see how many people were actually using it or what money was coming in. For months, I was literally flying blind. The backend I built for the product gave me a vague figure if I counted each user by hand, but it didn’t paint a picture of my business’ health at all. While Stripe gives you a bunch of basic information it’s not really meant for use as an assessment of your product’s health, and just leaves you confused. As a result of this inability to project the future, or even understand the present properly, I underestimated the impact of each new user on my monthly revenue and how it added up over time to create real, meaningful annual revenue. In the first few weeks I became worried about how few users I had, and that it wasn’t growing fast enough — but in reality I didn’t have a picture of what was actually happening. “…each reader was worth more than I’d realized. I knew that subscription services were compelling because the revenue grows exponentially over time, but I wasn’t really aware of how much that was when it’s calculated as annual revenue, and the impact of each new signup over time.” When I launched reCharged I wasn’t really focused on money so much as finding a middle-ground that meant the product would be self-sustaining, and would fund continued development — ramen money. One key reason for charging upfront and not offering a trial subscription was to build a product that wasn’t predicated on ads, or me continually bank rolling it, but I’d not considered the impact of not having the numbers available. When I wired up ChartMogul to Stripe for the first time I was surprised by the insight you get into the pulse of your product: each reader was worth more than I’d realized. I knew that subscription services were compelling because the revenue grows exponentially over time, but I wasn’t really aware of how much that was when it’s calculated as annual revenue, and the impact of each new signup over time. “Oh my goodness, these people are paying, I better ship stuff.” Getting these numbers right in front of me, and easily digestible, gave peace of mind that I was on the right track, and an ability to understand how changes attracted new users (or drove them away). It also created a much better sense of urgency than I expected: oh my goodness, these people are paying, I better ship stuff. I start and end each day by checking my dashboard, which helps me figure out what’s going on, or if I need to reach out to people to understand why they decided to cancel. It’s also incredibly motivational: if I’m tired, or don’t want to write, I log in and see that 300 people are counting on me to deliver something awesome. Having these metrics at a basic level is a great way to get inspired (and humbled) by the people giving you a vote of confidence, as well as something of a reality check: you aren’t done yet. Ignore your churn (for now) “Churn is a part of daily life for all startups, but in the first few months it’s such a random data point that you can’t really give too much weight to because you don’t have enough information yet.” Now that we’ve talked about the feel-good part, let’s talk about what I believe to be one of the worst parts of building something for yourself: people canceling their subscription. People cancel things all the time. It might have been an expensive month, maybe my product just didn’t seem worth it, or perhaps they expected something else — all of these reasons are totally valid. Even though I can rationalize this, whenever someone cancels it feels super personal, because I obsess over whether or not I’ve disappointed them in some way, even though the reality is people just cancel stuff. If I’m honest, I’ve canceled Netflix five times already for no real reason. Logically, I know there are lots of reasons to cancel but everything is so personal when you’re the person behind the screen making something from scratch. I always want to reach out and ask them why someone has left and if I can win them back somehow, but I know that there’s plenty of totally valid reasons to move on — including that it might not be a great fit! Churn is a part of daily life for all startups, but in the first few months it’s such a random data point that you can’t really give too much weight to because you don’t have enough information yet. If all of your users are cancelling after a month, yes, you’ve got a problem, but if you’re getting more new users than you’re losing, things are probably fine. It’s important to keep an eye on it, and chat to people using a tool like Intercom to see if there’s something you can improve in the future, but it’s important not to let it get you down: people will cancel, particularly when you’re just starting out. Foster meaningful feedback “By engaging with people and ensuring they’re aware that there’s a direct line of communication to you that isn’t just a bot, people become more willing to provide honest feedback that might unlock new growth, or uncover a blind spot.” Feedback is the lifeblood of every early stage company: does this work the way I expect it to? Can I make something easier to understand? Do I provide enough value, or should I adjust my pricing? There’s so many things your customers know to be true that you just can’t see as a maker. Perhaps your signup form is confusing, your resubscribe button is broken, or the benefits your subscribers are paying for don’t seem worth it: without asking, you’ll never know. Many of these issues happened to me, and until someone told me, I had no idea. A core part of building a product or service that lasts is investing heavily in your first users, and doing everything you can to keep them. Those first 1,000 users will make or break your idea, so without their fanatic buy-in you’ll never reach your goals. Treat these early users like they’re investors, because they’re the ones that’ll back you up even if you mess up, break something or worse, get everything wrong — they’re also the ones that are most likely to tell you. I suggest two very direct, deliberate approaches: Track people’s happiness, and their engagement with your product actively Make yourself available directly, via email or chat, at all times Neither of these things are rocket science, but will absolutely change the way you shape your company in the first few months. By tracking if people are opening your emails, logging in to the tool, or engaging with your features, you’re able to understand if it’s meaningfully impacting their day and gauge if they’ll stick around for the long haul. By engaging with people and ensuring they’re aware that there’s a direct line of communication to you that isn’t just a bot, people become more willing to provide honest feedback that might unlock new growth, or uncover a blind spot. This is not easy to do. It’s one thing to say you’re around, but it’s another to get people to actually reach out. One method I’m trying is dropping people an email after they’ve been onboard for three weeks. I generate a list of new users, and flick them a message with a short note to say thank you and ask them if they’ve liked the product so far. Sure, I could automate the process, but people can smell automation a million miles away, By doing this manually I’m able to build a meaningful relationship with my subscribers and delight them with something a little different: someone who isn’t actually a bot. This process has revealed more than I expected: some folks loved the product, others told me they would come back again if I add more to the benefit list. One person told me their entire billing page was broken! If you’re not talking to your users, nothing else matters: you’re flying blind. Obsess over only three metrics! “If you try to look at every number out there in your first few weeks, or even months, you’ll get depressed. There just isn’t enough data to provide value in basic churn rates, failed transactions or even lifetime value yet, and you’ll just get sad.” While you’re figuring the product out and it’s still heavily in flux, I recommend choosing a handful of core metrics and focus on growing those while ignoring the rest. I spent months trying to figure out what mattered, and worrying about that raw churn rate, but realized the metrics that mattered for me are: 1. New users vs. lost users 2. Churn over time 3. Annual Run Rate I use new users vs. lost users to keep my finger on the pulse: do I need to market this more, and how much should I push on that front? The answer is always yes, but as long as this number is growing and the product is still in the growing pain phase, I’m happy to try and keep marketing on the backburner while it improves. Customer churn rate over time is useful, and much more nuanced, as well; a good chunk of people cancel after one month for various reasons, but am I able to retain them for longer than that? Do people cancel after three months, or five? This number is key to understanding if a change I’m making is rippling down and causing problems later — or if I’m unable to create enough value to retain them. Last but not least, Annual Run Rate (ARR) is a great way to humble yourself. If you can retain the people you’ve got backing you, your annual revenue number says a lot about where you (and the product) will be in a year. 300 customers doesn’t sound like that many, but if your pricing is right, it could be enough of a salary to make the jump to full-time on the product. If you try to look at every number out there in your first few weeks, or even months, you’ll get depressed. There just isn’t enough data to provide value in basic churn rates, failed transactions or even lifetime value yet, and you’ll just get sad. Pick the numbers that matter, and run with them. This is just the beginning I’ve been building reCharged for five months now, and I still feel like I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. I’m constantly adapting my strategy, and advice on these things, but so far I’ve found honing in on the metrics that matter really valuable. The team at ChartMogul have been kind enough to offer me space on their blog to share the story of building a one-person online business, so I’ll be posting regularly about these types of problems, what I’m learning and my mistakes in the hope it helps you to build your solo business. I’d love to hear if I’m doing it wrong, right, or whether there’s something you’d like to hear more about in this process. Fire me an email directly, or say hi on my website!

[INST] How to decide what to focus on when you’re building a brand new startup [/INST]

Late last year, I started building reCharged, a daily briefing and community designed as the antithesis of traditional news. The briefing is delivered each morning on weekdays, doesn’t worry about breaking news, and has no advertising. I coded the software that wires it up, sends the newsletter and gives users access to the community — as well as being the solo-writer behind the content each day. I started the project with the goal of making a little bit of money, but not intending for it to be a full-time focus for at least a few months — basically my side project for experimenting with generating revenue for the first time. I wouldn’t be spending any money on it, just my time, to see if it was worth pursuing. “…every day is an adventure, but a nightmare too: what should I focus on to be effective?” When I launched into beta, on what I’d say was just enough of a working product to scrape by, I found myself surprised: 20 people showed up and started paying for it, even though it was unstable. Fast-forward five months to today, and I’m sending those briefings four days a week to about 300 paying subscribers and $1,800 MRR — utterly terrifying, thrilling, and not what I expected at all. The rollercoaster of building your own product can’t be easily described: emotions in every direction, confusion over why people are churning, a signup here or there to lift your mood — every day is an adventure, but a nightmare too: what should I focus on to be effective? I’m still in the early stages of building the product but plan to share thoughts about key focus areas, and the numbers you should ignore or use, when you’re building your own online business. Get your numbers straight! I launched reCharged, opened signups, invited a few friends and wired up Stripe without ever actually figuring out a reliable way to see how many people were actually using it or what money was coming in. For months, I was literally flying blind. The backend I built for the product gave me a vague figure if I counted each user by hand, but it didn’t paint a picture of my business’ health at all. While Stripe gives you a bunch of basic information it’s not really meant for use as an assessment of your product’s health, and just leaves you confused. As a result of this inability to project the future, or even understand the present properly, I underestimated the impact of each new user on my monthly revenue and how it added up over time to create real, meaningful annual revenue. In the first few weeks I became worried about how few users I had, and that it wasn’t growing fast enough — but in reality I didn’t have a picture of what was actually happening. “…each reader was worth more than I’d realized. I knew that subscription services were compelling because the revenue grows exponentially over time, but I wasn’t really aware of how much that was when it’s calculated as annual revenue, and the impact of each new signup over time.” When I launched reCharged I wasn’t really focused on money so much as finding a middle-ground that meant the product would be self-sustaining, and would fund continued development — ramen money. One key reason for charging upfront and not offering a trial subscription was to build a product that wasn’t predicated on ads, or me continually bank rolling it, but I’d not considered the impact of not having the numbers available. When I wired up ChartMogul to Stripe for the first time I was surprised by the insight you get into the pulse of your product: each reader was worth more than I’d realized. I knew that subscription services were compelling because the revenue grows exponentially over time, but I wasn’t really aware of how much that was when it’s calculated as annual revenue, and the impact of each new signup over time. “Oh my goodness, these people are paying, I better ship stuff.” Getting these numbers right in front of me, and easily digestible, gave peace of mind that I was on the right track, and an ability to understand how changes attracted new users (or drove them away). It also created a much better sense of urgency than I expected: oh my goodness, these people are paying, I better ship stuff. I start and end each day by checking my dashboard, which helps me figure out what’s going on, or if I need to reach out to people to understand why they decided to cancel. It’s also incredibly motivational: if I’m tired, or don’t want to write, I log in and see that 300 people are counting on me to deliver something awesome. Having these metrics at a basic level is a great way to get inspired (and humbled) by the people giving you a vote of confidence, as well as something of a reality check: you aren’t done yet. Ignore your churn (for now) “Churn is a part of daily life for all startups, but in the first few months it’s such a random data point that you can’t really give too much weight to because you don’t have enough information yet.” Now that we’ve talked about the feel-good part, let’s talk about what I believe to be one of the worst parts of building something for yourself: people canceling their subscription. People cancel things all the time. It might have been an expensive month, maybe my product just didn’t seem worth it, or perhaps they expected something else — all of these reasons are totally valid. Even though I can rationalize this, whenever someone cancels it feels super personal, because I obsess over whether or not I’ve disappointed them in some way, even though the reality is people just cancel stuff. If I’m honest, I’ve canceled Netflix five times already for no real reason. Logically, I know there are lots of reasons to cancel but everything is so personal when you’re the person behind the screen making something from scratch. I always want to reach out and ask them why someone has left and if I can win them back somehow, but I know that there’s plenty of totally valid reasons to move on — including that it might not be a great fit! Churn is a part of daily life for all startups, but in the first few months it’s such a random data point that you can’t really give too much weight to because you don’t have enough information yet. If all of your users are cancelling after a month, yes, you’ve got a problem, but if you’re getting more new users than you’re losing, things are probably fine. It’s important to keep an eye on it, and chat to people using a tool like Intercom to see if there’s something you can improve in the future, but it’s important not to let it get you down: people will cancel, particularly when you’re just starting out. Foster meaningful feedback “By engaging with people and ensuring they’re aware that there’s a direct line of communication to you that isn’t just a bot, people become more willing to provide honest feedback that might unlock new growth, or uncover a blind spot.” Feedback is the lifeblood of every early stage company: does this work the way I expect it to? Can I make something easier to understand? Do I provide enough value, or should I adjust my pricing? There’s so many things your customers know to be true that you just can’t see as a maker. Perhaps your signup form is confusing, your resubscribe button is broken, or the benefits your subscribers are paying for don’t seem worth it: without asking, you’ll never know. Many of these issues happened to me, and until someone told me, I had no idea. A core part of building a product or service that lasts is investing heavily in your first users, and doing everything you can to keep them. Those first 1,000 users will make or break your idea, so without their fanatic buy-in you’ll never reach your goals. Treat these early users like they’re investors, because they’re the ones that’ll back you up even if you mess up, break something or worse, get everything wrong — they’re also the ones that are most likely to tell you. I suggest two very direct, deliberate approaches: Track people’s happiness, and their engagement with your product actively Make yourself available directly, via email or chat, at all times Neither of these things are rocket science, but will absolutely change the way you shape your company in the first few months. By tracking if people are opening your emails, logging in to the tool, or engaging with your features, you’re able to understand if it’s meaningfully impacting their day and gauge if they’ll stick around for the long haul. By engaging with people and ensuring they’re aware that there’s a direct line of communication to you that isn’t just a bot, people become more willing to provide honest feedback that might unlock new growth, or uncover a blind spot. This is not easy to do. It’s one thing to say you’re around, but it’s another to get people to actually reach out. One method I’m trying is dropping people an email after they’ve been onboard for three weeks. I generate a list of new users, and flick them a message with a short note to say thank you and ask them if they’ve liked the product so far. Sure, I could automate the process, but people can smell automation a million miles away, By doing this manually I’m able to build a meaningful relationship with my subscribers and delight them with something a little different: someone who isn’t actually a bot. This process has revealed more than I expected: some folks loved the product, others told me they would come back again if I add more to the benefit list. One person told me their entire billing page was broken! If you’re not talking to your users, nothing else matters: you’re flying blind. Obsess over only three metrics! “If you try to look at every number out there in your first few weeks, or even months, you’ll get depressed. There just isn’t enough data to provide value in basic churn rates, failed transactions or even lifetime value yet, and you’ll just get sad.” While you’re figuring the product out and it’s still heavily in flux, I recommend choosing a handful of core metrics and focus on growing those while ignoring the rest. I spent months trying to figure out what mattered, and worrying about that raw churn rate, but realized the metrics that mattered for me are: 1. New users vs. lost users 2. Churn over time 3. Annual Run Rate I use new users vs. lost users to keep my finger on the pulse: do I need to market this more, and how much should I push on that front? The answer is always yes, but as long as this number is growing and the product is still in the growing pain phase, I’m happy to try and keep marketing on the backburner while it improves. Customer churn rate over time is useful, and much more nuanced, as well; a good chunk of people cancel after one month for various reasons, but am I able to retain them for longer than that? Do people cancel after three months, or five? This number is key to understanding if a change I’m making is rippling down and causing problems later — or if I’m unable to create enough value to retain them. Last but not least, Annual Run Rate (ARR) is a great way to humble yourself. If you can retain the people you’ve got backing you, your annual revenue number says a lot about where you (and the product) will be in a year. 300 customers doesn’t sound like that many, but if your pricing is right, it could be enough of a salary to make the jump to full-time on the product. If you try to look at every number out there in your first few weeks, or even months, you’ll get depressed. There just isn’t enough data to provide value in basic churn rates, failed transactions or even lifetime value yet, and you’ll just get sad. Pick the numbers that matter, and run with them. This is just the beginning I’ve been building reCharged for five months now, and I still feel like I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. I’m constantly adapting my strategy, and advice on these things, but so far I’ve found honing in on the metrics that matter really valuable. The team at ChartMogul have been kind enough to offer me space on their blog to share the story of building a one-person online business, so I’ll be posting regularly about these types of problems, what I’m learning and my mistakes in the hope it helps you to build your solo business. I’d love to hear if I’m doing it wrong, right, or whether there’s something you’d like to hear more about in this process. Fire me an email directly, or say hi on my website!

<sys> [INST] How to decide what to focus on when you’re building a brand new startup [/INST] Late last year, I started building reCharged, a daily briefing and community designed as the antithesis of traditional news. The briefing is delivered each morning on weekdays, doesn’t worry about breaking news, and has no advertising. I coded the software that wires it up, sends the newsletter and gives users access to the community — as well as being the solo-writer behind the content each day. I started the project with the goal of making a little bit of money, but not intending for it to be a full-time focus for at least a few months — basically my side project for experimenting with generating revenue for the first time. I wouldn’t be spending any money on it, just my time, to see if it was worth pursuing. “…every day is an adventure, but a nightmare too: what should I focus on to be effective?” When I launched into beta, on what I’d say was just enough of a working product to scrape by, I found myself surprised: 20 people showed up and started paying for it, even though it was unstable. Fast-forward five months to today, and I’m sending those briefings four days a week to about 300 paying subscribers and $1,800 MRR — utterly terrifying, thrilling, and not what I expected at all. The rollercoaster of building your own product can’t be easily described: emotions in every direction, confusion over why people are churning, a signup here or there to lift your mood — every day is an adventure, but a nightmare too: what should I focus on to be effective? I’m still in the early stages of building the product but plan to share thoughts about key focus areas, and the numbers you should ignore or use, when you’re building your own online business. Get your numbers straight! I launched reCharged, opened signups, invited a few friends and wired up Stripe without ever actually figuring out a reliable way to see how many people were actually using it or what money was coming in. For months, I was literally flying blind. The backend I built for the product gave me a vague figure if I counted each user by hand, but it didn’t paint a picture of my business’ health at all. While Stripe gives you a bunch of basic information it’s not really meant for use as an assessment of your product’s health, and just leaves you confused. As a result of this inability to project the future, or even understand the present properly, I underestimated the impact of each new user on my monthly revenue and how it added up over time to create real, meaningful annual revenue. In the first few weeks I became worried about how few users I had, and that it wasn’t growing fast enough — but in reality I didn’t have a picture of what was actually happening. “…each reader was worth more than I’d realized. I knew that subscription services were compelling because the revenue grows exponentially over time, but I wasn’t really aware of how much that was when it’s calculated as annual revenue, and the impact of each new signup over time.” When I launched reCharged I wasn’t really focused on money so much as finding a middle-ground that meant the product would be self-sustaining, and would fund continued development — ramen money. One key reason for charging upfront and not offering a trial subscription was to build a product that wasn’t predicated on ads, or me continually bank rolling it, but I’d not considered the impact of not having the numbers available. When I wired up ChartMogul to Stripe for the first time I was surprised by the insight you get into the pulse of your product: each reader was worth more than I’d realized. I knew that subscription services were compelling because the revenue grows exponentially over time, but I wasn’t really aware of how much that was when it’s calculated as annual revenue, and the impact of each new signup over time. “Oh my goodness, these people are paying, I better ship stuff.” Getting these numbers right in front of me, and easily digestible, gave peace of mind that I was on the right track, and an ability to understand how changes attracted new users (or drove them away). It also created a much better sense of urgency than I expected: oh my goodness, these people are paying, I better ship stuff. I start and end each day by checking my dashboard, which helps me figure out what’s going on, or if I need to reach out to people to understand why they decided to cancel. It’s also incredibly motivational: if I’m tired, or don’t want to write, I log in and see that 300 people are counting on me to deliver something awesome. Having these metrics at a basic level is a great way to get inspired (and humbled) by the people giving you a vote of confidence, as well as something of a reality check: you aren’t done yet. Ignore your churn (for now) “Churn is a part of daily life for all startups, but in the first few months it’s such a random data point that you can’t really give too much weight to because you don’t have enough information yet.” Now that we’ve talked about the feel-good part, let’s talk about what I believe to be one of the worst parts of building something for yourself: people canceling their subscription. People cancel things all the time. It might have been an expensive month, maybe my product just didn’t seem worth it, or perhaps they expected something else — all of these reasons are totally valid. Even though I can rationalize this, whenever someone cancels it feels super personal, because I obsess over whether or not I’ve disappointed them in some way, even though the reality is people just cancel stuff. If I’m honest, I’ve canceled Netflix five times already for no real reason. Logically, I know there are lots of reasons to cancel but everything is so personal when you’re the person behind the screen making something from scratch. I always want to reach out and ask them why someone has left and if I can win them back somehow, but I know that there’s plenty of totally valid reasons to move on — including that it might not be a great fit! Churn is a part of daily life for all startups, but in the first few months it’s such a random data point that you can’t really give too much weight to because you don’t have enough information yet. If all of your users are cancelling after a month, yes, you’ve got a problem, but if you’re getting more new users than you’re losing, things are probably fine. It’s important to keep an eye on it, and chat to people using a tool like Intercom to see if there’s something you can improve in the future, but it’s important not to let it get you down: people will cancel, particularly when you’re just starting out. Foster meaningful feedback “By engaging with people and ensuring they’re aware that there’s a direct line of communication to you that isn’t just a bot, people become more willing to provide honest feedback that might unlock new growth, or uncover a blind spot.” Feedback is the lifeblood of every early stage company: does this work the way I expect it to? Can I make something easier to understand? Do I provide enough value, or should I adjust my pricing? There’s so many things your customers know to be true that you just can’t see as a maker. Perhaps your signup form is confusing, your resubscribe button is broken, or the benefits your subscribers are paying for don’t seem worth it: without asking, you’ll never know. Many of these issues happened to me, and until someone told me, I had no idea. A core part of building a product or service that lasts is investing heavily in your first users, and doing everything you can to keep them. Those first 1,000 users will make or break your idea, so without their fanatic buy-in you’ll never reach your goals. Treat these early users like they’re investors, because they’re the ones that’ll back you up even if you mess up, break something or worse, get everything wrong — they’re also the ones that are most likely to tell you. I suggest two very direct, deliberate approaches: Track people’s happiness, and their engagement with your product actively Make yourself available directly, via email or chat, at all times Neither of these things are rocket science, but will absolutely change the way you shape your company in the first few months. By tracking if people are opening your emails, logging in to the tool, or engaging with your features, you’re able to understand if it’s meaningfully impacting their day and gauge if they’ll stick around for the long haul. By engaging with people and ensuring they’re aware that there’s a direct line of communication to you that isn’t just a bot, people become more willing to provide honest feedback that might unlock new growth, or uncover a blind spot. This is not easy to do. It’s one thing to say you’re around, but it’s another to get people to actually reach out. One method I’m trying is dropping people an email after they’ve been onboard for three weeks. I generate a list of new users, and flick them a message with a short note to say thank you and ask them if they’ve liked the product so far. Sure, I could automate the process, but people can smell automation a million miles away, By doing this manually I’m able to build a meaningful relationship with my subscribers and delight them with something a little different: someone who isn’t actually a bot. This process has revealed more than I expected: some folks loved the product, others told me they would come back again if I add more to the benefit list. One person told me their entire billing page was broken! If you’re not talking to your users, nothing else matters: you’re flying blind. Obsess over only three metrics! “If you try to look at every number out there in your first few weeks, or even months, you’ll get depressed. There just isn’t enough data to provide value in basic churn rates, failed transactions or even lifetime value yet, and you’ll just get sad.” While you’re figuring the product out and it’s still heavily in flux, I recommend choosing a handful of core metrics and focus on growing those while ignoring the rest. I spent months trying to figure out what mattered, and worrying about that raw churn rate, but realized the metrics that mattered for me are: 1. New users vs. lost users 2. Churn over time 3. Annual Run Rate I use new users vs. lost users to keep my finger on the pulse: do I need to market this more, and how much should I push on that front? The answer is always yes, but as long as this number is growing and the product is still in the growing pain phase, I’m happy to try and keep marketing on the backburner while it improves. Customer churn rate over time is useful, and much more nuanced, as well; a good chunk of people cancel after one month for various reasons, but am I able to retain them for longer than that? Do people cancel after three months, or five? This number is key to understanding if a change I’m making is rippling down and causing problems later — or if I’m unable to create enough value to retain them. Last but not least, Annual Run Rate (ARR) is a great way to humble yourself. If you can retain the people you’ve got backing you, your annual revenue number says a lot about where you (and the product) will be in a year. 300 customers doesn’t sound like that many, but if your pricing is right, it could be enough of a salary to make the jump to full-time on the product. If you try to look at every number out there in your first few weeks, or even months, you’ll get depressed. There just isn’t enough data to provide value in basic churn rates, failed transactions or even lifetime value yet, and you’ll just get sad. Pick the numbers that matter, and run with them. This is just the beginning I’ve been building reCharged for five months now, and I still feel like I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. I’m constantly adapting my strategy, and advice on these things, but so far I’ve found honing in on the metrics that matter really valuable. The team at ChartMogul have been kind enough to offer me space on their blog to share the story of building a one-person online business, so I’ll be posting regularly about these types of problems, what I’m learning and my mistakes in the hope it helps you to build your solo business. I’d love to hear if I’m doing it wrong, right, or whether there’s something you’d like to hear more about in this process. Fire me an email directly, or say hi on my website! </sys

Gross vs Net Retention Rates in 2023: A Guide To Revenue Retention Metrics. How good is your business at retaining customers? Are you effectively expanding revenue from your existing customer base? And, is your poor retention the reason for your slower growth in 2023? If you’re unsure, check your retention metrics. Gross revenue retention (GRR) and net revenue retention (NRR) are the key metrics to understand how well your SaaS business executes on the promise made to customers. They can help you run your business over the next month, quarter, and year. In this post, we will explain what are GRR and NRR, how to calculate them, why they matter, and what a good retention rate looks like in 2023 based on a study of over 2,100 businesses. What is net revenue retention (NRR)? Net retention benchmarks What is gross revenue retention (GRR)? Gross retention benchmarks Gross Retention vs Net Retention 2 tips for tracking retention rates 3 tactics to improve your retention rate Net Revenue Retention To build a healthy SaaS business, revenue retention should be at the center of your business. Net revenue retention has been in focus, especially with the recent economic downturn. Net Revenue Retention, also known as net dollar retention (NDR), measures the percentage of revenue retained over a period of time. For example, if have a total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $100k on day one, what percentage of that revenue do you still have 12 months later? Retention can be measured over any time period, but it is common to measure it over 12 months. Analyzing retention over 12 months works well for both annual and monthly subscriptions. It allows for the full customer lifecycle, including adoption and expansion. And it also nullifies any impact from seasonality, which can cause short-term fluctuations. If you’d like to track shorter intervals, make sure to look at the same intervals consistently. How to calculate the Net Revenue Retention rate? To calculate net revenue retention, divide your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) today from customers one year ago by MRR from the same group of customers one year ago. This is the net revenue retention formula. For example, one year ago, you had 4 paying customers with a total MRR of 770. Fast forward one year, some of those customers churned, some contracted, and some expanded, and the total MRR today from the same group of customers who existed a year ago is 800. So to calculate net revenue retention, you divide 800 by 770. Your NRR is 103.9%. What is a good net revenue retention rate? Well, it differs by the stage of business you are in. In the pre-product market fit stage of the business, net retention is usually poor. The best early-stage companies have net revenue retention of 79%. At this stage, you can use segments to analyze which customers are the best fit for your product. If your retention is higher for certain customers, you’re getting closer to product market fit. In contrast, as companies reach scale, net revenue retention goes over 100%. Our research found that the most successful companies in the $3-15m ARR range have a net retention rate of 99%. And businesses at scale with ARR in the range of $15-30m have a net retention rate of over 105%. See the chart below for a more detailed look into net retention by ARR range. In addition to ARR, when benchmarking, keep ARPA (average revenue per account) in mind. SaaS companies at a particular ARPA band are often quite similar in terms of the length of the sales cycle, the tenure of contracts, discounting, onboarding, the type of customer support, and even retention strategies. In short, the higher the ARPA, the higher the net revenue retention rate. Learn more about how retention and ARPA are correlated in the SaaS Retention Report. Gross Revenue Retention Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), also known as gross dollar retention (GDR), measures the percentage of revenue retained, excluding expansions, over a period of time. For example, if you have a total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $100k on day one, excluding any contribution from expansions, what percentage of that revenue do you still have 12 months later? In SaaS, people tend to focus overly on NRR as the key revenue retention metric, and GRR is often overlooked. However, in many cases, gross retention can help provide a more complete picture of retention. Gross revenue retention tells you how much revenue you maintain when activities like upsells, cross-sells that increase your average customer value aren’t factored in. Gross revenue retention answers the question of how well you retain your customers, while net revenue retention digs deeper into your ability to expand revenue from those customers. How to calculate the Gross Revenue Retention rate? To calculate gross revenue retention, divide MRR today from customers one year ago (excluding any expansion) by MRR from the same group of customers one year ago. This is the gross revenue retention formula. Going back to our former example, one year ago, you had 4 paying customers with a total MRR of 770. This time, we’re excluding any expansion, and the MRR today from the same group of customers who existed one year ago is 630. So the gross revenue retention rate is 630 divided by 770. GRR is 81.8%. What is a good gross retention rate? Best-in-class gross retention at any stage of the business is over 86%. That means that successful SaaS businesses can only afford to lose 14% of gross revenue in a year. Take a look at the chart below. The top quartile of companies with an ARPA over $500/month hit 90%+ gross retention, while the top quartile of companies with an ARPA less than $50/month only hit 60 to 70%. When judging whether a SaaS company has good gross revenue retention, keep ARPA in mind. Net vs Gross Retention Both GRR and NRR are important metrics to measure customer retention, but they are used in different contexts. In short, GRR is useful when a company wants to measure its core customer base’s retention without factoring in any expansion revenue, while NRR is useful when a company wants to measure the overall revenue growth from its existing customer base, including expansion revenue. You may choose to measure GRR when you want to assess your retention strategies and how well you are at keeping existing customers. In contrast, you may choose to measure NRR when they want to assess how effectively you are growing revenue from the existing customer base through expansion efforts. GDR and NDR are both important metrics to measure customer retention and revenue growth, and the choice of which metric to use depends on the specific context and goals of the analysis. 2 tips for tracking revenue retention rates Run cohort analysis In SaaS, a cohort is a group of customers that start their first subscription in the same month and year. Using cohort analysis helps you identify trends in a particular group of customers. A cohort analysis is commonly used to uncover trends in your customer churn, revenue churn, as well as the inverse, your customer retention and revenue retention. Carry out segmentation For example, you can determine the health of your customers in their first few months of paying for a subscription and identify when customers are dropping off. Or, your customer success team might segment your data to determine if customers with discounted plans are more prone to churn. A marketing executive, on the other hand, might look into how retention data compare against different acquisition channels – which channels are bringing in customers that stick around? 3 tips to improve your revenue retention Target the right customers A few years ago, we learned how important it is to retain the right type of customers. During a pricing migration, we discovered that some customers were simply not the right fit; we found that we had been trying to keep some customers happy for years at great expense to our business. Losing customers when migrating to the new pricing model or implementing price increases is inevitable. However, keeping existing customers that are highly engaged can enable continued growth. Targeting the right customers is essential for improving revenue retention. After all, not all existing customers are equally valuable to a business. Drive expansion Driving expansion through cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers can increase revenue and prevent churn Keep your customers engaged by offering them upsells and upgrades to your product. This can include new features, additional services, or higher-level plans. Make it easy for customers to see the benefits of these options and how they can help them achieve their goals. In many cases, you’ll need to depend on your customer success team. Your customers are the lifeblood of your SaaS business, and keeping them happy and successful is crucial to driving expansion and growing revenue. Proactively identify churn Proactively identifying revenue churn is key to retaining customers. By monitoring usage patterns, engagement metrics, NPS, and customer feedback, businesses can identify potential revenue churn risks and take action to address them before it’s too late. Offering targeted promotions, improving product functionality, or providing exceptional customer support can help retain customers and drive revenue growth. You can use self-service support to assist users faster and boost customer satisfaction or rely on customer success teams.

[INST] Gross vs Net Retention Rates in 2023: A Guide To Revenue Retention Metrics [/INST]

How good is your business at retaining customers? Are you effectively expanding revenue from your existing customer base? And, is your poor retention the reason for your slower growth in 2023? If you’re unsure, check your retention metrics. Gross revenue retention (GRR) and net revenue retention (NRR) are the key metrics to understand how well your SaaS business executes on the promise made to customers. They can help you run your business over the next month, quarter, and year. In this post, we will explain what are GRR and NRR, how to calculate them, why they matter, and what a good retention rate looks like in 2023 based on a study of over 2,100 businesses. What is net revenue retention (NRR)? Net retention benchmarks What is gross revenue retention (GRR)? Gross retention benchmarks Gross Retention vs Net Retention 2 tips for tracking retention rates 3 tactics to improve your retention rate Net Revenue Retention To build a healthy SaaS business, revenue retention should be at the center of your business. Net revenue retention has been in focus, especially with the recent economic downturn. Net Revenue Retention, also known as net dollar retention (NDR), measures the percentage of revenue retained over a period of time. For example, if have a total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $100k on day one, what percentage of that revenue do you still have 12 months later? Retention can be measured over any time period, but it is common to measure it over 12 months. Analyzing retention over 12 months works well for both annual and monthly subscriptions. It allows for the full customer lifecycle, including adoption and expansion. And it also nullifies any impact from seasonality, which can cause short-term fluctuations. If you’d like to track shorter intervals, make sure to look at the same intervals consistently. How to calculate the Net Revenue Retention rate? To calculate net revenue retention, divide your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) today from customers one year ago by MRR from the same group of customers one year ago. This is the net revenue retention formula. For example, one year ago, you had 4 paying customers with a total MRR of 770. Fast forward one year, some of those customers churned, some contracted, and some expanded, and the total MRR today from the same group of customers who existed a year ago is 800. So to calculate net revenue retention, you divide 800 by 770. Your NRR is 103.9%. What is a good net revenue retention rate? Well, it differs by the stage of business you are in. In the pre-product market fit stage of the business, net retention is usually poor. The best early-stage companies have net revenue retention of 79%. At this stage, you can use segments to analyze which customers are the best fit for your product. If your retention is higher for certain customers, you’re getting closer to product market fit. In contrast, as companies reach scale, net revenue retention goes over 100%. Our research found that the most successful companies in the $3-15m ARR range have a net retention rate of 99%. And businesses at scale with ARR in the range of $15-30m have a net retention rate of over 105%. See the chart below for a more detailed look into net retention by ARR range. In addition to ARR, when benchmarking, keep ARPA (average revenue per account) in mind. SaaS companies at a particular ARPA band are often quite similar in terms of the length of the sales cycle, the tenure of contracts, discounting, onboarding, the type of customer support, and even retention strategies. In short, the higher the ARPA, the higher the net revenue retention rate. Learn more about how retention and ARPA are correlated in the SaaS Retention Report. Gross Revenue Retention Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), also known as gross dollar retention (GDR), measures the percentage of revenue retained, excluding expansions, over a period of time. For example, if you have a total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $100k on day one, excluding any contribution from expansions, what percentage of that revenue do you still have 12 months later? In SaaS, people tend to focus overly on NRR as the key revenue retention metric, and GRR is often overlooked. However, in many cases, gross retention can help provide a more complete picture of retention. Gross revenue retention tells you how much revenue you maintain when activities like upsells, cross-sells that increase your average customer value aren’t factored in. Gross revenue retention answers the question of how well you retain your customers, while net revenue retention digs deeper into your ability to expand revenue from those customers. How to calculate the Gross Revenue Retention rate? To calculate gross revenue retention, divide MRR today from customers one year ago (excluding any expansion) by MRR from the same group of customers one year ago. This is the gross revenue retention formula. Going back to our former example, one year ago, you had 4 paying customers with a total MRR of 770. This time, we’re excluding any expansion, and the MRR today from the same group of customers who existed one year ago is 630. So the gross revenue retention rate is 630 divided by 770. GRR is 81.8%. What is a good gross retention rate? Best-in-class gross retention at any stage of the business is over 86%. That means that successful SaaS businesses can only afford to lose 14% of gross revenue in a year. Take a look at the chart below. The top quartile of companies with an ARPA over $500/month hit 90%+ gross retention, while the top quartile of companies with an ARPA less than $50/month only hit 60 to 70%. When judging whether a SaaS company has good gross revenue retention, keep ARPA in mind. Net vs Gross Retention Both GRR and NRR are important metrics to measure customer retention, but they are used in different contexts. In short, GRR is useful when a company wants to measure its core customer base’s retention without factoring in any expansion revenue, while NRR is useful when a company wants to measure the overall revenue growth from its existing customer base, including expansion revenue. You may choose to measure GRR when you want to assess your retention strategies and how well you are at keeping existing customers. In contrast, you may choose to measure NRR when they want to assess how effectively you are growing revenue from the existing customer base through expansion efforts. GDR and NDR are both important metrics to measure customer retention and revenue growth, and the choice of which metric to use depends on the specific context and goals of the analysis. 2 tips for tracking revenue retention rates Run cohort analysis In SaaS, a cohort is a group of customers that start their first subscription in the same month and year. Using cohort analysis helps you identify trends in a particular group of customers. A cohort analysis is commonly used to uncover trends in your customer churn, revenue churn, as well as the inverse, your customer retention and revenue retention. Carry out segmentation For example, you can determine the health of your customers in their first few months of paying for a subscription and identify when customers are dropping off. Or, your customer success team might segment your data to determine if customers with discounted plans are more prone to churn. A marketing executive, on the other hand, might look into how retention data compare against different acquisition channels – which channels are bringing in customers that stick around? 3 tips to improve your revenue retention Target the right customers A few years ago, we learned how important it is to retain the right type of customers. During a pricing migration, we discovered that some customers were simply not the right fit; we found that we had been trying to keep some customers happy for years at great expense to our business. Losing customers when migrating to the new pricing model or implementing price increases is inevitable. However, keeping existing customers that are highly engaged can enable continued growth. Targeting the right customers is essential for improving revenue retention. After all, not all existing customers are equally valuable to a business. Drive expansion Driving expansion through cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers can increase revenue and prevent churn Keep your customers engaged by offering them upsells and upgrades to your product. This can include new features, additional services, or higher-level plans. Make it easy for customers to see the benefits of these options and how they can help them achieve their goals. In many cases, you’ll need to depend on your customer success team. Your customers are the lifeblood of your SaaS business, and keeping them happy and successful is crucial to driving expansion and growing revenue. Proactively identify churn Proactively identifying revenue churn is key to retaining customers. By monitoring usage patterns, engagement metrics, NPS, and customer feedback, businesses can identify potential revenue churn risks and take action to address them before it’s too late. Offering targeted promotions, improving product functionality, or providing exceptional customer support can help retain customers and drive revenue growth. You can use self-service support to assist users faster and boost customer satisfaction or rely on customer success teams.

<sys> [INST] Gross vs Net Retention Rates in 2023: A Guide To Revenue Retention Metrics [/INST] How good is your business at retaining customers? Are you effectively expanding revenue from your existing customer base? And, is your poor retention the reason for your slower growth in 2023? If you’re unsure, check your retention metrics. Gross revenue retention (GRR) and net revenue retention (NRR) are the key metrics to understand how well your SaaS business executes on the promise made to customers. They can help you run your business over the next month, quarter, and year. In this post, we will explain what are GRR and NRR, how to calculate them, why they matter, and what a good retention rate looks like in 2023 based on a study of over 2,100 businesses. What is net revenue retention (NRR)? Net retention benchmarks What is gross revenue retention (GRR)? Gross retention benchmarks Gross Retention vs Net Retention 2 tips for tracking retention rates 3 tactics to improve your retention rate Net Revenue Retention To build a healthy SaaS business, revenue retention should be at the center of your business. Net revenue retention has been in focus, especially with the recent economic downturn. Net Revenue Retention, also known as net dollar retention (NDR), measures the percentage of revenue retained over a period of time. For example, if have a total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $100k on day one, what percentage of that revenue do you still have 12 months later? Retention can be measured over any time period, but it is common to measure it over 12 months. Analyzing retention over 12 months works well for both annual and monthly subscriptions. It allows for the full customer lifecycle, including adoption and expansion. And it also nullifies any impact from seasonality, which can cause short-term fluctuations. If you’d like to track shorter intervals, make sure to look at the same intervals consistently. How to calculate the Net Revenue Retention rate? To calculate net revenue retention, divide your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) today from customers one year ago by MRR from the same group of customers one year ago. This is the net revenue retention formula. For example, one year ago, you had 4 paying customers with a total MRR of 770. Fast forward one year, some of those customers churned, some contracted, and some expanded, and the total MRR today from the same group of customers who existed a year ago is 800. So to calculate net revenue retention, you divide 800 by 770. Your NRR is 103.9%. What is a good net revenue retention rate? Well, it differs by the stage of business you are in. In the pre-product market fit stage of the business, net retention is usually poor. The best early-stage companies have net revenue retention of 79%. At this stage, you can use segments to analyze which customers are the best fit for your product. If your retention is higher for certain customers, you’re getting closer to product market fit. In contrast, as companies reach scale, net revenue retention goes over 100%. Our research found that the most successful companies in the $3-15m ARR range have a net retention rate of 99%. And businesses at scale with ARR in the range of $15-30m have a net retention rate of over 105%. See the chart below for a more detailed look into net retention by ARR range. In addition to ARR, when benchmarking, keep ARPA (average revenue per account) in mind. SaaS companies at a particular ARPA band are often quite similar in terms of the length of the sales cycle, the tenure of contracts, discounting, onboarding, the type of customer support, and even retention strategies. In short, the higher the ARPA, the higher the net revenue retention rate. Learn more about how retention and ARPA are correlated in the SaaS Retention Report. Gross Revenue Retention Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), also known as gross dollar retention (GDR), measures the percentage of revenue retained, excluding expansions, over a period of time. For example, if you have a total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $100k on day one, excluding any contribution from expansions, what percentage of that revenue do you still have 12 months later? In SaaS, people tend to focus overly on NRR as the key revenue retention metric, and GRR is often overlooked. However, in many cases, gross retention can help provide a more complete picture of retention. Gross revenue retention tells you how much revenue you maintain when activities like upsells, cross-sells that increase your average customer value aren’t factored in. Gross revenue retention answers the question of how well you retain your customers, while net revenue retention digs deeper into your ability to expand revenue from those customers. How to calculate the Gross Revenue Retention rate? To calculate gross revenue retention, divide MRR today from customers one year ago (excluding any expansion) by MRR from the same group of customers one year ago. This is the gross revenue retention formula. Going back to our former example, one year ago, you had 4 paying customers with a total MRR of 770. This time, we’re excluding any expansion, and the MRR today from the same group of customers who existed one year ago is 630. So the gross revenue retention rate is 630 divided by 770. GRR is 81.8%. What is a good gross retention rate? Best-in-class gross retention at any stage of the business is over 86%. That means that successful SaaS businesses can only afford to lose 14% of gross revenue in a year. Take a look at the chart below. The top quartile of companies with an ARPA over $500/month hit 90%+ gross retention, while the top quartile of companies with an ARPA less than $50/month only hit 60 to 70%. When judging whether a SaaS company has good gross revenue retention, keep ARPA in mind. Net vs Gross Retention Both GRR and NRR are important metrics to measure customer retention, but they are used in different contexts. In short, GRR is useful when a company wants to measure its core customer base’s retention without factoring in any expansion revenue, while NRR is useful when a company wants to measure the overall revenue growth from its existing customer base, including expansion revenue. You may choose to measure GRR when you want to assess your retention strategies and how well you are at keeping existing customers. In contrast, you may choose to measure NRR when they want to assess how effectively you are growing revenue from the existing customer base through expansion efforts. GDR and NDR are both important metrics to measure customer retention and revenue growth, and the choice of which metric to use depends on the specific context and goals of the analysis. 2 tips for tracking revenue retention rates Run cohort analysis In SaaS, a cohort is a group of customers that start their first subscription in the same month and year. Using cohort analysis helps you identify trends in a particular group of customers. A cohort analysis is commonly used to uncover trends in your customer churn, revenue churn, as well as the inverse, your customer retention and revenue retention. Carry out segmentation For example, you can determine the health of your customers in their first few months of paying for a subscription and identify when customers are dropping off. Or, your customer success team might segment your data to determine if customers with discounted plans are more prone to churn. A marketing executive, on the other hand, might look into how retention data compare against different acquisition channels – which channels are bringing in customers that stick around? 3 tips to improve your revenue retention Target the right customers A few years ago, we learned how important it is to retain the right type of customers. During a pricing migration, we discovered that some customers were simply not the right fit; we found that we had been trying to keep some customers happy for years at great expense to our business. Losing customers when migrating to the new pricing model or implementing price increases is inevitable. However, keeping existing customers that are highly engaged can enable continued growth. Targeting the right customers is essential for improving revenue retention. After all, not all existing customers are equally valuable to a business. Drive expansion Driving expansion through cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers can increase revenue and prevent churn Keep your customers engaged by offering them upsells and upgrades to your product. This can include new features, additional services, or higher-level plans. Make it easy for customers to see the benefits of these options and how they can help them achieve their goals. In many cases, you’ll need to depend on your customer success team. Your customers are the lifeblood of your SaaS business, and keeping them happy and successful is crucial to driving expansion and growing revenue. Proactively identify churn Proactively identifying revenue churn is key to retaining customers. By monitoring usage patterns, engagement metrics, NPS, and customer feedback, businesses can identify potential revenue churn risks and take action to address them before it’s too late. Offering targeted promotions, improving product functionality, or providing exceptional customer support can help retain customers and drive revenue growth. You can use self-service support to assist users faster and boost customer satisfaction or rely on customer success teams. </sys

SaaS pricing mastery with Mobilize CEO Sharon Savariego. This week Ed spoke to Sharon Savariego, Co-founder and CEO of Mobilize. “If you build it right and you have a strong team, then it becomes a collective vision.” ~ Sharon Savariego Looking back at Sharon’s experience, it’s clear that nurturing communication in communities, groups and movements is the underlying theme of her career. So it seems natural that her product, Mobilize, is built to solve problems for these use cases. To her however, this wasn’t a carefully-considered path towards her current position — more just a culmination of work that only seems to fit into place now, looking back over the years. This conversation also goes deep on the pricing strategy for Mobilize. Sharon and her team have a very clear vision for how the subscription pricing should be structured, with each plan targeting a specific company profile, with a very clear understanding of their set of needs. “The same way that journalists are becoming inbound marketers, volunteer managers are becoming community organizers for those top companies — and companies need that more than ever.” ~ Sharon Savariego The Mobilize product (source: moblize.io) So listen to the full interview below for a ton of great advice on pricing, the future of communication in businesses and much more! Finally, if you enjoy the SaaS Open Mic series, let us know by subscribing on Soundcloud or iTunes. It takes just two seconds, and helps us reach more people.

[INST] SaaS pricing mastery with Mobilize CEO Sharon Savariego [/INST]

This week Ed spoke to Sharon Savariego, Co-founder and CEO of Mobilize. “If you build it right and you have a strong team, then it becomes a collective vision.” ~ Sharon Savariego Looking back at Sharon’s experience, it’s clear that nurturing communication in communities, groups and movements is the underlying theme of her career. So it seems natural that her product, Mobilize, is built to solve problems for these use cases. To her however, this wasn’t a carefully-considered path towards her current position — more just a culmination of work that only seems to fit into place now, looking back over the years. This conversation also goes deep on the pricing strategy for Mobilize. Sharon and her team have a very clear vision for how the subscription pricing should be structured, with each plan targeting a specific company profile, with a very clear understanding of their set of needs. “The same way that journalists are becoming inbound marketers, volunteer managers are becoming community organizers for those top companies — and companies need that more than ever.” ~ Sharon Savariego The Mobilize product (source: moblize.io) So listen to the full interview below for a ton of great advice on pricing, the future of communication in businesses and much more! Finally, if you enjoy the SaaS Open Mic series, let us know by subscribing on Soundcloud or iTunes. It takes just two seconds, and helps us reach more people.

<sys> [INST] SaaS pricing mastery with Mobilize CEO Sharon Savariego [/INST] This week Ed spoke to Sharon Savariego, Co-founder and CEO of Mobilize. “If you build it right and you have a strong team, then it becomes a collective vision.” ~ Sharon Savariego Looking back at Sharon’s experience, it’s clear that nurturing communication in communities, groups and movements is the underlying theme of her career. So it seems natural that her product, Mobilize, is built to solve problems for these use cases. To her however, this wasn’t a carefully-considered path towards her current position — more just a culmination of work that only seems to fit into place now, looking back over the years. This conversation also goes deep on the pricing strategy for Mobilize. Sharon and her team have a very clear vision for how the subscription pricing should be structured, with each plan targeting a specific company profile, with a very clear understanding of their set of needs. “The same way that journalists are becoming inbound marketers, volunteer managers are becoming community organizers for those top companies — and companies need that more than ever.” ~ Sharon Savariego The Mobilize product (source: moblize.io) So listen to the full interview below for a ton of great advice on pricing, the future of communication in businesses and much more! Finally, if you enjoy the SaaS Open Mic series, let us know by subscribing on Soundcloud or iTunes. It takes just two seconds, and helps us reach more people. </sys

Building an intentional sales culture. Back to buyer-seller basics In my first sales role, my manager and CEO sent me to a formal training that helped me understand buyers better. I learned early that prospective customers were far more informed and savvy than I initially believed. I studied tons. Role plays, email revisions, and cold calls challenged me to think on my feet. I devoured details of closed lost deals and successful projects. I began to develop an understanding of complex business objectives and technology requirements. The more I learned, the more challenging sales seemed and then, consequently, the more attractive it became to me. I was hooked. I began to develop and shape my own sales philosophy based on my learnings: SaaS buying has been and is changing. Buyers have access to more options, more information, and more power. Customers are often more than 57% of the way through the purchase process when they engage a salesperson. Successful sales teams and salespeople recognize and adjust their approach to this changing power dynamic. Salespeople operate at their best when they become a trusted advisor with a clear and shared vision. A successful sales culture makes it easy for individuals to articulate value at every possible customer touchpoint. I’ll give you a peek into what that looks like here at ChartMogul. Sales culture at ChartMogul Most sales roles — and sales at ChartMogul is no exception — require independent action under pressure. Each person is responsible for their own success and development. Salespeople must go beyond compliance, beyond a sales playbook. Each salesperson’s independent action must be rooted in value. This winter, when prospective AE candidates asked me, “what does it mean to sell at ChartMogul?,” I knew that I needed a concise, shared philosophy that each person could use to evaluate and improve their behavior. Our sales compass is an extension of our company values. At a high level, our sales team knows that we sell with these principles top of mind: Timely — Time is money and time kills deals, right? So we are responsive and thoughtful about how time impacts the customer experience and our ability to meet our sales goals. Credible — We are credible when it comes to relevant industries and technologies. When we don’t know something, we’re not afraid to say so, but we then go and out and learn what’s needed to be the smartest and the crispest of communicators. Invaluable — We strive to create value in every interaction and for a customer’s overall business. Aligned — We are aligned with the customer and aligned with one another. We make people want to do business with us. We can break down a prospecting email or a closed lost deal to see if we’re being true to our sales identity. I can also make changes to processes and structures to make it easier for our team to do the right thing. Articulating value in practice Now that we’ve tackled the high-level bits, let’s get into the detail. Here I’ll explain two examples of how successful salespeople at ChartMogul articulate value. One example will focus on storytelling and one will focus on value creation. Storytelling One easy way to get your team to lead with value is to help them understand what constitutes a true customer success story. You can choose a lighthouse or strategic account that you know intimately or a recently closed won deal that’s fresh in your head. Distill everything you know about the account and opportunity into a story: a before, a turning point (when they opted to do business with you), and a happily-ever-after. Don’t forget the characters — try to position the customer as the protagonist, a champion of software. A simple narrative arc like this can be used to structure customer success stories, proposals, and workshops (source: https://www.donnalichaw.com/) If you are in person, I’d suggest whiteboarding this out, but remote technologies like XMind or LucidChart work well, too. Each person on your team should be able to explain how your product or service can create value for that customer with a simple, engaging plot. Storytelling is an effective way to engage customers, provide social proof, and get customers thinking about the long term. For more ideas on master storytelling, check out these tips from Salesforce. Value creation Help your team understand customer and economic drivers. Give them the tools they need to quantify money saved, money made, or risk mitigated. If you’re intimidated by the idea of quantifying value, you can start with simple behavior change in forecast reviews or sales team meetings. For each one of your active deals, ask your sales team these questions: How does the company make money? (hint: if you don’t know, you don’t have a deal) What business objective or need does your solution help with? How will your solution impact or drive change for the business? If your sales rep is unclear on the customer’s business priorities, he or she will likely be unable move the deal forward with the necessary credibility to create a long-term customer relationship. Some of this can be coached, but in building your team, recruit for business acumen. Sales success is built on the back of consistent, well-executed process month over month. But underneath that execution layer, your team should have a unified understanding of how and why you sell — and that can be a bit different for every organization. My advice: don’t overlook the importance of defining, communicating, and improving your sales culture.

[INST] Building an intentional sales culture [/INST]

Back to buyer-seller basics In my first sales role, my manager and CEO sent me to a formal training that helped me understand buyers better. I learned early that prospective customers were far more informed and savvy than I initially believed. I studied tons. Role plays, email revisions, and cold calls challenged me to think on my feet. I devoured details of closed lost deals and successful projects. I began to develop an understanding of complex business objectives and technology requirements. The more I learned, the more challenging sales seemed and then, consequently, the more attractive it became to me. I was hooked. I began to develop and shape my own sales philosophy based on my learnings: SaaS buying has been and is changing. Buyers have access to more options, more information, and more power. Customers are often more than 57% of the way through the purchase process when they engage a salesperson. Successful sales teams and salespeople recognize and adjust their approach to this changing power dynamic. Salespeople operate at their best when they become a trusted advisor with a clear and shared vision. A successful sales culture makes it easy for individuals to articulate value at every possible customer touchpoint. I’ll give you a peek into what that looks like here at ChartMogul. Sales culture at ChartMogul Most sales roles — and sales at ChartMogul is no exception — require independent action under pressure. Each person is responsible for their own success and development. Salespeople must go beyond compliance, beyond a sales playbook. Each salesperson’s independent action must be rooted in value. This winter, when prospective AE candidates asked me, “what does it mean to sell at ChartMogul?,” I knew that I needed a concise, shared philosophy that each person could use to evaluate and improve their behavior. Our sales compass is an extension of our company values. At a high level, our sales team knows that we sell with these principles top of mind: Timely — Time is money and time kills deals, right? So we are responsive and thoughtful about how time impacts the customer experience and our ability to meet our sales goals. Credible — We are credible when it comes to relevant industries and technologies. When we don’t know something, we’re not afraid to say so, but we then go and out and learn what’s needed to be the smartest and the crispest of communicators. Invaluable — We strive to create value in every interaction and for a customer’s overall business. Aligned — We are aligned with the customer and aligned with one another. We make people want to do business with us. We can break down a prospecting email or a closed lost deal to see if we’re being true to our sales identity. I can also make changes to processes and structures to make it easier for our team to do the right thing. Articulating value in practice Now that we’ve tackled the high-level bits, let’s get into the detail. Here I’ll explain two examples of how successful salespeople at ChartMogul articulate value. One example will focus on storytelling and one will focus on value creation. Storytelling One easy way to get your team to lead with value is to help them understand what constitutes a true customer success story. You can choose a lighthouse or strategic account that you know intimately or a recently closed won deal that’s fresh in your head. Distill everything you know about the account and opportunity into a story: a before, a turning point (when they opted to do business with you), and a happily-ever-after. Don’t forget the characters — try to position the customer as the protagonist, a champion of software. A simple narrative arc like this can be used to structure customer success stories, proposals, and workshops (source: https://www.donnalichaw.com/) If you are in person, I’d suggest whiteboarding this out, but remote technologies like XMind or LucidChart work well, too. Each person on your team should be able to explain how your product or service can create value for that customer with a simple, engaging plot. Storytelling is an effective way to engage customers, provide social proof, and get customers thinking about the long term. For more ideas on master storytelling, check out these tips from Salesforce. Value creation Help your team understand customer and economic drivers. Give them the tools they need to quantify money saved, money made, or risk mitigated. If you’re intimidated by the idea of quantifying value, you can start with simple behavior change in forecast reviews or sales team meetings. For each one of your active deals, ask your sales team these questions: How does the company make money? (hint: if you don’t know, you don’t have a deal) What business objective or need does your solution help with? How will your solution impact or drive change for the business? If your sales rep is unclear on the customer’s business priorities, he or she will likely be unable move the deal forward with the necessary credibility to create a long-term customer relationship. Some of this can be coached, but in building your team, recruit for business acumen. Sales success is built on the back of consistent, well-executed process month over month. But underneath that execution layer, your team should have a unified understanding of how and why you sell — and that can be a bit different for every organization. My advice: don’t overlook the importance of defining, communicating, and improving your sales culture.

<sys> [INST] Building an intentional sales culture [/INST] Back to buyer-seller basics In my first sales role, my manager and CEO sent me to a formal training that helped me understand buyers better. I learned early that prospective customers were far more informed and savvy than I initially believed. I studied tons. Role plays, email revisions, and cold calls challenged me to think on my feet. I devoured details of closed lost deals and successful projects. I began to develop an understanding of complex business objectives and technology requirements. The more I learned, the more challenging sales seemed and then, consequently, the more attractive it became to me. I was hooked. I began to develop and shape my own sales philosophy based on my learnings: SaaS buying has been and is changing. Buyers have access to more options, more information, and more power. Customers are often more than 57% of the way through the purchase process when they engage a salesperson. Successful sales teams and salespeople recognize and adjust their approach to this changing power dynamic. Salespeople operate at their best when they become a trusted advisor with a clear and shared vision. A successful sales culture makes it easy for individuals to articulate value at every possible customer touchpoint. I’ll give you a peek into what that looks like here at ChartMogul. Sales culture at ChartMogul Most sales roles — and sales at ChartMogul is no exception — require independent action under pressure. Each person is responsible for their own success and development. Salespeople must go beyond compliance, beyond a sales playbook. Each salesperson’s independent action must be rooted in value. This winter, when prospective AE candidates asked me, “what does it mean to sell at ChartMogul?,” I knew that I needed a concise, shared philosophy that each person could use to evaluate and improve their behavior. Our sales compass is an extension of our company values. At a high level, our sales team knows that we sell with these principles top of mind: Timely — Time is money and time kills deals, right? So we are responsive and thoughtful about how time impacts the customer experience and our ability to meet our sales goals. Credible — We are credible when it comes to relevant industries and technologies. When we don’t know something, we’re not afraid to say so, but we then go and out and learn what’s needed to be the smartest and the crispest of communicators. Invaluable — We strive to create value in every interaction and for a customer’s overall business. Aligned — We are aligned with the customer and aligned with one another. We make people want to do business with us. We can break down a prospecting email or a closed lost deal to see if we’re being true to our sales identity. I can also make changes to processes and structures to make it easier for our team to do the right thing. Articulating value in practice Now that we’ve tackled the high-level bits, let’s get into the detail. Here I’ll explain two examples of how successful salespeople at ChartMogul articulate value. One example will focus on storytelling and one will focus on value creation. Storytelling One easy way to get your team to lead with value is to help them understand what constitutes a true customer success story. You can choose a lighthouse or strategic account that you know intimately or a recently closed won deal that’s fresh in your head. Distill everything you know about the account and opportunity into a story: a before, a turning point (when they opted to do business with you), and a happily-ever-after. Don’t forget the characters — try to position the customer as the protagonist, a champion of software. A simple narrative arc like this can be used to structure customer success stories, proposals, and workshops (source: https://www.donnalichaw.com/) If you are in person, I’d suggest whiteboarding this out, but remote technologies like XMind or LucidChart work well, too. Each person on your team should be able to explain how your product or service can create value for that customer with a simple, engaging plot. Storytelling is an effective way to engage customers, provide social proof, and get customers thinking about the long term. For more ideas on master storytelling, check out these tips from Salesforce. Value creation Help your team understand customer and economic drivers. Give them the tools they need to quantify money saved, money made, or risk mitigated. If you’re intimidated by the idea of quantifying value, you can start with simple behavior change in forecast reviews or sales team meetings. For each one of your active deals, ask your sales team these questions: How does the company make money? (hint: if you don’t know, you don’t have a deal) What business objective or need does your solution help with? How will your solution impact or drive change for the business? If your sales rep is unclear on the customer’s business priorities, he or she will likely be unable move the deal forward with the necessary credibility to create a long-term customer relationship. Some of this can be coached, but in building your team, recruit for business acumen. Sales success is built on the back of consistent, well-executed process month over month. But underneath that execution layer, your team should have a unified understanding of how and why you sell — and that can be a bit different for every organization. My advice: don’t overlook the importance of defining, communicating, and improving your sales culture. </sys

Finding the Best Sales Commission Structure for your Business in 2020. The compensation given to an employee based on the amount of revenue they generate for your business is known as a commission structure. Commission structures are most often found in industries that are sales heavy or that deal with direct sale services or products but lack a storefront. These industries include real estate, retail, the stock market, and insurance. Which Sales Commission Structure is Best for you? The best sales commission structure for you is dependent upon your business and the goals you have set. You also have to make sure your reps will love your new plan. There is no one size fits all commission structure. To determine which structure will bring you the most desirable results, you must be willing to test the waters. Don’t worry; I won’t let you jump in unassisted. This article will provide you with a life vest of helpful information, so you can better decide what structure is most likely to benefit your business. Let’s dive in! Flat Rate Commissions The simplest of all structures is the flat rate commission structure. It is easy to comprehend, calculate, and utilize. With this structure, when a product is sold, the employee will receive a set percentage commission. This commission percentage is received regardless of what the value of the order is. The amount the employee receives is entirely dependent upon what the flat rate percentage per sale is. For example: Let’s say your flat rate percentage is 10%. If an employee sells a service or product for $1,500, they will receive a commission of $150. If an employee sells a service or product for $3,000, they receive a commission of $300 in their paycheck. The Pros & Cons of a Flat Rate Commission Structure While the flat-rate structure is simple and easy to follow, this can also be its downfall. Because all sales are rewarded with the same commission percentage, there is no push for representatives to sell more, like there is with a tiered structure that will be discussed below. There are two ways you can implement a flat rate commission: Flat rate per order & flat rate per item. Flat Rate Per Order A per-order based commission, where the flat rate percentage is applied to each order received, with a fixed 1 per transaction. For example: A vendor sells item A for $200, and the commission fee is 10% fixed 1 per order. The customer purchases 2 of item A; the vendor will receive $20 in commissions. Flat Rate Per Item A per-item based commission is where the flat rate percentage is applied to every individual item sold (whether or not it is part of a larger order). For example: A vendor sells item A for $200, and the commission fee is 10% fixed per item. The customer purchases 2 of item A; the vendor will receive $40 in commissions. Is a Flat Rate Commission Right for your Business? Flat-rate commissions are commonly found within the insurance, property, and retail industries. If you sell a service or product that is in high demand, has a short sales cycle, and is comprehensible to your targeted market, a flat rate model is a great jumping-off point for you. Tweet this quote Event-Based Commissions A commission awarded to employees for attending training, resolving customer complaints, the timing of deals, and customer outreach, is known as an event-based commission. The impact this structure has on company culture, customers, and brand recognition isn’t immediate, but with time, it can prove to be significant. For example: Your employee attends a training seminar to further their knowledge. The same employee also runs a customer outreach event. Your company pays a 5% commission for training and a 1% commission for customer outreach events. If the employee base yearly pay is $75,000, the employee will earn $3,750 for training, and $750 for the customer outreach event. Is an Event-Based Commission Right for your Business? An event-based commission structure is optimal if your service or product is niche, has a long sales cycle, is high-valued, puts customer experience first, or is dependent on forming long-term relationships. Tiered Commissions A tiered commission structure can be a bit more complicated than a flat-rate commission structure. In this structure, the amount of commission that is paid out progressively increases as the amount the representative sells increases. There are two types of revenue that a tiered commission structure may follow, marginal revenue, and retroactive revenue: Marginal In this structure, the increased commission rates are applied only to the achievement inside of a higher tier. For example: Tier 1 is everything earned up to 15,000, which then begins at tier 2. So, $15,000 receives a 5% commission of $750.00. If the representative sells $15,100, the first 15,000 would still receive the 5% commission, while the $100 would earn a tier 2 commission of 10% garnishing a total of $760. Retroactive In this structure, an increased commission rate is attained by reaching higher tiers and is applied to all revenue. This structure brings about a drastic increase in the amount of commission a representative can achieve. For example: Tier 1, at 5%, pertains to any earnings under $15,000. Therefore, a representative that brings in $14,999 receives a 5% commission of $749.95. However, if a representative earns $15,000, they will then qualify for Tier 2. Let’s say Tier 2 earns the representative a 10% commission. The representative would earn $1,500 in commissions. This number is over twice as much as what they would have received had they brought in a single dollar less in revenue. The Pros and Cons of a Tiered Commission Structure A tiered commission structure can be complicated and confusing for employees to understand. In turn, errors in commission payments can happen if you are not careful. However, this commission structure (when implemented correctly) is a fantastic way to push for higher sales and achieve growth. Is a Tiered Commission Structure Right for your Business? A tiered commission structure may work well if your company has tried a flat rate plan previously, with less than desirable results. If your sales team needs encouragement with exceeding their quota, a tiered commission structure can provide a push in the right direction. Tweet this quote This structure also works well for you if you are an extensive B2B business with a strong sales focus or looking to grow in new areas. Trailer Commissions A trailer commission is a percentage usually between 0.25% to 1% of a mutual fund’s annual unit worth. It is awarded to a salesperson or representative when they can extend services to the buyer past the first-term contract. Representatives are often relied upon for advice, consulting, or support, therefore incentivizing the representative to establish and maintain an enduring relationship with the customer. This commission is paid annually as long as the relationship continues. For example: A client’s annual unit fund is worth $3,000. The Trailer commission is set to 1%; your representative will earn a $30 commission for said client. The Pros and Cons of Trailer Commissions Trailer commissions motivate representatives to build relationships with clients that are beneficial to your long-term business goals. On the other hand, because these fees are ‘hidden,’ they are a heated topic in the investment world. Is a Trailer Commission Structure Right for your Business? If you are part of the investment industry, then a trailer commission structure is probably right for your business. A trailer commission structure can also be excellent for a SaaS business because it relies upon an ongoing service that requires a yearly fee to maintain. Tweet this quote What is a Good Commission Rate? The commission rater you set for your business should be based around several factors. If your business is looking at the long-term bigger picture, you may want to consider setting a volume-based commission rate. However, if your business prioritizes building client or customer relationships, you will want to utilize a commission rate that accounts for your individual sales numbers. In order to find the perfect solution for your business, you will need to keep a close eye on how your commission rates affect employee performance and your bottom-line. Tweet this quote When you find a number that works for you, expect to see revenue increase, as your employees become more incentivized to work harder for your company. How to Pick the Right Commission for your Business Analyze Data Begin by conducting a thorough analysis of last year’s commission and compensation plans. Pinpoint what worked and what didn’t (bonuses, commission structures, etc.) What parts of your plans motivated your employees and led to deals that increased revenue? Using this data can help you determine what commission plan may work best for your business in the coming years. Be Competitive, and Consider Your Industry To bring top talent into your company, you need to have a competitive commission structure. Observe what commission structures are being implemented by your direct competitors and top-performing competitors within your industry. Individual commission plans can work well within one industry and fail miserably in others. It is important to take your industry into consideration before beginning to implement a sales plan. Here is a general rundown of what commission plans are normally found in what industry. Flat-Rate Commission: Utilized by industries that offer high-demand products or services, with short sales cycles. Namely: retail, property, and insurance industries. Event-Based Commissions: Industries that utilize this commission plan offer niche products or services, and have long sales cycles, with an emphasis on putting the customer first. Namely: corporate event planners, wedding planners, etc. Tiered Commissions: Great for B2B businesses that focus strongly on sales and expanding growth into new areas. Namely: Pharmaceutical sales and retail. Trailer Commissions: Utilized by companies that rely upon customers or clients to invest in ongoing services. Namely: Companies within the investment industry, SaaS businesses. Create a Commission Team Bring together a small group of 5-10 senior representatives from different areas of your business, including human resources, finance, marketing, sales, and legal. This group of experienced professionals can offer you valuable feedback on what commission plans they envision working best from their perspective. Use your commission structure to create sales leaders A commission structure is a great way to encourage the desired behavior from your representatives. While there are a few structures to choose from, you now have the information and tools to apply a suitable structure to your business. About the author: Andrew Gazdecki is the Chief Growth Officer at Spiff – the leading sales commission software. Gazdecki has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine, as well as prominent industry blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch and VentureBeat. At Spiff, he’s on a mission to help companies automate commission calculations and motivate sales teams.

[INST] Finding the Best Sales Commission Structure for your Business in 2020 [/INST]

The compensation given to an employee based on the amount of revenue they generate for your business is known as a commission structure. Commission structures are most often found in industries that are sales heavy or that deal with direct sale services or products but lack a storefront. These industries include real estate, retail, the stock market, and insurance. Which Sales Commission Structure is Best for you? The best sales commission structure for you is dependent upon your business and the goals you have set. You also have to make sure your reps will love your new plan. There is no one size fits all commission structure. To determine which structure will bring you the most desirable results, you must be willing to test the waters. Don’t worry; I won’t let you jump in unassisted. This article will provide you with a life vest of helpful information, so you can better decide what structure is most likely to benefit your business. Let’s dive in! Flat Rate Commissions The simplest of all structures is the flat rate commission structure. It is easy to comprehend, calculate, and utilize. With this structure, when a product is sold, the employee will receive a set percentage commission. This commission percentage is received regardless of what the value of the order is. The amount the employee receives is entirely dependent upon what the flat rate percentage per sale is. For example: Let’s say your flat rate percentage is 10%. If an employee sells a service or product for $1,500, they will receive a commission of $150. If an employee sells a service or product for $3,000, they receive a commission of $300 in their paycheck. The Pros & Cons of a Flat Rate Commission Structure While the flat-rate structure is simple and easy to follow, this can also be its downfall. Because all sales are rewarded with the same commission percentage, there is no push for representatives to sell more, like there is with a tiered structure that will be discussed below. There are two ways you can implement a flat rate commission: Flat rate per order & flat rate per item. Flat Rate Per Order A per-order based commission, where the flat rate percentage is applied to each order received, with a fixed 1 per transaction. For example: A vendor sells item A for $200, and the commission fee is 10% fixed 1 per order. The customer purchases 2 of item A; the vendor will receive $20 in commissions. Flat Rate Per Item A per-item based commission is where the flat rate percentage is applied to every individual item sold (whether or not it is part of a larger order). For example: A vendor sells item A for $200, and the commission fee is 10% fixed per item. The customer purchases 2 of item A; the vendor will receive $40 in commissions. Is a Flat Rate Commission Right for your Business? Flat-rate commissions are commonly found within the insurance, property, and retail industries. If you sell a service or product that is in high demand, has a short sales cycle, and is comprehensible to your targeted market, a flat rate model is a great jumping-off point for you. Tweet this quote Event-Based Commissions A commission awarded to employees for attending training, resolving customer complaints, the timing of deals, and customer outreach, is known as an event-based commission. The impact this structure has on company culture, customers, and brand recognition isn’t immediate, but with time, it can prove to be significant. For example: Your employee attends a training seminar to further their knowledge. The same employee also runs a customer outreach event. Your company pays a 5% commission for training and a 1% commission for customer outreach events. If the employee base yearly pay is $75,000, the employee will earn $3,750 for training, and $750 for the customer outreach event. Is an Event-Based Commission Right for your Business? An event-based commission structure is optimal if your service or product is niche, has a long sales cycle, is high-valued, puts customer experience first, or is dependent on forming long-term relationships. Tiered Commissions A tiered commission structure can be a bit more complicated than a flat-rate commission structure. In this structure, the amount of commission that is paid out progressively increases as the amount the representative sells increases. There are two types of revenue that a tiered commission structure may follow, marginal revenue, and retroactive revenue: Marginal In this structure, the increased commission rates are applied only to the achievement inside of a higher tier. For example: Tier 1 is everything earned up to 15,000, which then begins at tier 2. So, $15,000 receives a 5% commission of $750.00. If the representative sells $15,100, the first 15,000 would still receive the 5% commission, while the $100 would earn a tier 2 commission of 10% garnishing a total of $760. Retroactive In this structure, an increased commission rate is attained by reaching higher tiers and is applied to all revenue. This structure brings about a drastic increase in the amount of commission a representative can achieve. For example: Tier 1, at 5%, pertains to any earnings under $15,000. Therefore, a representative that brings in $14,999 receives a 5% commission of $749.95. However, if a representative earns $15,000, they will then qualify for Tier 2. Let’s say Tier 2 earns the representative a 10% commission. The representative would earn $1,500 in commissions. This number is over twice as much as what they would have received had they brought in a single dollar less in revenue. The Pros and Cons of a Tiered Commission Structure A tiered commission structure can be complicated and confusing for employees to understand. In turn, errors in commission payments can happen if you are not careful. However, this commission structure (when implemented correctly) is a fantastic way to push for higher sales and achieve growth. Is a Tiered Commission Structure Right for your Business? A tiered commission structure may work well if your company has tried a flat rate plan previously, with less than desirable results. If your sales team needs encouragement with exceeding their quota, a tiered commission structure can provide a push in the right direction. Tweet this quote This structure also works well for you if you are an extensive B2B business with a strong sales focus or looking to grow in new areas. Trailer Commissions A trailer commission is a percentage usually between 0.25% to 1% of a mutual fund’s annual unit worth. It is awarded to a salesperson or representative when they can extend services to the buyer past the first-term contract. Representatives are often relied upon for advice, consulting, or support, therefore incentivizing the representative to establish and maintain an enduring relationship with the customer. This commission is paid annually as long as the relationship continues. For example: A client’s annual unit fund is worth $3,000. The Trailer commission is set to 1%; your representative will earn a $30 commission for said client. The Pros and Cons of Trailer Commissions Trailer commissions motivate representatives to build relationships with clients that are beneficial to your long-term business goals. On the other hand, because these fees are ‘hidden,’ they are a heated topic in the investment world. Is a Trailer Commission Structure Right for your Business? If you are part of the investment industry, then a trailer commission structure is probably right for your business. A trailer commission structure can also be excellent for a SaaS business because it relies upon an ongoing service that requires a yearly fee to maintain. Tweet this quote What is a Good Commission Rate? The commission rater you set for your business should be based around several factors. If your business is looking at the long-term bigger picture, you may want to consider setting a volume-based commission rate. However, if your business prioritizes building client or customer relationships, you will want to utilize a commission rate that accounts for your individual sales numbers. In order to find the perfect solution for your business, you will need to keep a close eye on how your commission rates affect employee performance and your bottom-line. Tweet this quote When you find a number that works for you, expect to see revenue increase, as your employees become more incentivized to work harder for your company. How to Pick the Right Commission for your Business Analyze Data Begin by conducting a thorough analysis of last year’s commission and compensation plans. Pinpoint what worked and what didn’t (bonuses, commission structures, etc.) What parts of your plans motivated your employees and led to deals that increased revenue? Using this data can help you determine what commission plan may work best for your business in the coming years. Be Competitive, and Consider Your Industry To bring top talent into your company, you need to have a competitive commission structure. Observe what commission structures are being implemented by your direct competitors and top-performing competitors within your industry. Individual commission plans can work well within one industry and fail miserably in others. It is important to take your industry into consideration before beginning to implement a sales plan. Here is a general rundown of what commission plans are normally found in what industry. Flat-Rate Commission: Utilized by industries that offer high-demand products or services, with short sales cycles. Namely: retail, property, and insurance industries. Event-Based Commissions: Industries that utilize this commission plan offer niche products or services, and have long sales cycles, with an emphasis on putting the customer first. Namely: corporate event planners, wedding planners, etc. Tiered Commissions: Great for B2B businesses that focus strongly on sales and expanding growth into new areas. Namely: Pharmaceutical sales and retail. Trailer Commissions: Utilized by companies that rely upon customers or clients to invest in ongoing services. Namely: Companies within the investment industry, SaaS businesses. Create a Commission Team Bring together a small group of 5-10 senior representatives from different areas of your business, including human resources, finance, marketing, sales, and legal. This group of experienced professionals can offer you valuable feedback on what commission plans they envision working best from their perspective. Use your commission structure to create sales leaders A commission structure is a great way to encourage the desired behavior from your representatives. While there are a few structures to choose from, you now have the information and tools to apply a suitable structure to your business. About the author: Andrew Gazdecki is the Chief Growth Officer at Spiff – the leading sales commission software. Gazdecki has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine, as well as prominent industry blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch and VentureBeat. At Spiff, he’s on a mission to help companies automate commission calculations and motivate sales teams.

<sys> [INST] Finding the Best Sales Commission Structure for your Business in 2020 [/INST] The compensation given to an employee based on the amount of revenue they generate for your business is known as a commission structure. Commission structures are most often found in industries that are sales heavy or that deal with direct sale services or products but lack a storefront. These industries include real estate, retail, the stock market, and insurance. Which Sales Commission Structure is Best for you? The best sales commission structure for you is dependent upon your business and the goals you have set. You also have to make sure your reps will love your new plan. There is no one size fits all commission structure. To determine which structure will bring you the most desirable results, you must be willing to test the waters. Don’t worry; I won’t let you jump in unassisted. This article will provide you with a life vest of helpful information, so you can better decide what structure is most likely to benefit your business. Let’s dive in! Flat Rate Commissions The simplest of all structures is the flat rate commission structure. It is easy to comprehend, calculate, and utilize. With this structure, when a product is sold, the employee will receive a set percentage commission. This commission percentage is received regardless of what the value of the order is. The amount the employee receives is entirely dependent upon what the flat rate percentage per sale is. For example: Let’s say your flat rate percentage is 10%. If an employee sells a service or product for $1,500, they will receive a commission of $150. If an employee sells a service or product for $3,000, they receive a commission of $300 in their paycheck. The Pros & Cons of a Flat Rate Commission Structure While the flat-rate structure is simple and easy to follow, this can also be its downfall. Because all sales are rewarded with the same commission percentage, there is no push for representatives to sell more, like there is with a tiered structure that will be discussed below. There are two ways you can implement a flat rate commission: Flat rate per order & flat rate per item. Flat Rate Per Order A per-order based commission, where the flat rate percentage is applied to each order received, with a fixed 1 per transaction. For example: A vendor sells item A for $200, and the commission fee is 10% fixed 1 per order. The customer purchases 2 of item A; the vendor will receive $20 in commissions. Flat Rate Per Item A per-item based commission is where the flat rate percentage is applied to every individual item sold (whether or not it is part of a larger order). For example: A vendor sells item A for $200, and the commission fee is 10% fixed per item. The customer purchases 2 of item A; the vendor will receive $40 in commissions. Is a Flat Rate Commission Right for your Business? Flat-rate commissions are commonly found within the insurance, property, and retail industries. If you sell a service or product that is in high demand, has a short sales cycle, and is comprehensible to your targeted market, a flat rate model is a great jumping-off point for you. Tweet this quote Event-Based Commissions A commission awarded to employees for attending training, resolving customer complaints, the timing of deals, and customer outreach, is known as an event-based commission. The impact this structure has on company culture, customers, and brand recognition isn’t immediate, but with time, it can prove to be significant. For example: Your employee attends a training seminar to further their knowledge. The same employee also runs a customer outreach event. Your company pays a 5% commission for training and a 1% commission for customer outreach events. If the employee base yearly pay is $75,000, the employee will earn $3,750 for training, and $750 for the customer outreach event. Is an Event-Based Commission Right for your Business? An event-based commission structure is optimal if your service or product is niche, has a long sales cycle, is high-valued, puts customer experience first, or is dependent on forming long-term relationships. Tiered Commissions A tiered commission structure can be a bit more complicated than a flat-rate commission structure. In this structure, the amount of commission that is paid out progressively increases as the amount the representative sells increases. There are two types of revenue that a tiered commission structure may follow, marginal revenue, and retroactive revenue: Marginal In this structure, the increased commission rates are applied only to the achievement inside of a higher tier. For example: Tier 1 is everything earned up to 15,000, which then begins at tier 2. So, $15,000 receives a 5% commission of $750.00. If the representative sells $15,100, the first 15,000 would still receive the 5% commission, while the $100 would earn a tier 2 commission of 10% garnishing a total of $760. Retroactive In this structure, an increased commission rate is attained by reaching higher tiers and is applied to all revenue. This structure brings about a drastic increase in the amount of commission a representative can achieve. For example: Tier 1, at 5%, pertains to any earnings under $15,000. Therefore, a representative that brings in $14,999 receives a 5% commission of $749.95. However, if a representative earns $15,000, they will then qualify for Tier 2. Let’s say Tier 2 earns the representative a 10% commission. The representative would earn $1,500 in commissions. This number is over twice as much as what they would have received had they brought in a single dollar less in revenue. The Pros and Cons of a Tiered Commission Structure A tiered commission structure can be complicated and confusing for employees to understand. In turn, errors in commission payments can happen if you are not careful. However, this commission structure (when implemented correctly) is a fantastic way to push for higher sales and achieve growth. Is a Tiered Commission Structure Right for your Business? A tiered commission structure may work well if your company has tried a flat rate plan previously, with less than desirable results. If your sales team needs encouragement with exceeding their quota, a tiered commission structure can provide a push in the right direction. Tweet this quote This structure also works well for you if you are an extensive B2B business with a strong sales focus or looking to grow in new areas. Trailer Commissions A trailer commission is a percentage usually between 0.25% to 1% of a mutual fund’s annual unit worth. It is awarded to a salesperson or representative when they can extend services to the buyer past the first-term contract. Representatives are often relied upon for advice, consulting, or support, therefore incentivizing the representative to establish and maintain an enduring relationship with the customer. This commission is paid annually as long as the relationship continues. For example: A client’s annual unit fund is worth $3,000. The Trailer commission is set to 1%; your representative will earn a $30 commission for said client. The Pros and Cons of Trailer Commissions Trailer commissions motivate representatives to build relationships with clients that are beneficial to your long-term business goals. On the other hand, because these fees are ‘hidden,’ they are a heated topic in the investment world. Is a Trailer Commission Structure Right for your Business? If you are part of the investment industry, then a trailer commission structure is probably right for your business. A trailer commission structure can also be excellent for a SaaS business because it relies upon an ongoing service that requires a yearly fee to maintain. Tweet this quote What is a Good Commission Rate? The commission rater you set for your business should be based around several factors. If your business is looking at the long-term bigger picture, you may want to consider setting a volume-based commission rate. However, if your business prioritizes building client or customer relationships, you will want to utilize a commission rate that accounts for your individual sales numbers. In order to find the perfect solution for your business, you will need to keep a close eye on how your commission rates affect employee performance and your bottom-line. Tweet this quote When you find a number that works for you, expect to see revenue increase, as your employees become more incentivized to work harder for your company. How to Pick the Right Commission for your Business Analyze Data Begin by conducting a thorough analysis of last year’s commission and compensation plans. Pinpoint what worked and what didn’t (bonuses, commission structures, etc.) What parts of your plans motivated your employees and led to deals that increased revenue? Using this data can help you determine what commission plan may work best for your business in the coming years. Be Competitive, and Consider Your Industry To bring top talent into your company, you need to have a competitive commission structure. Observe what commission structures are being implemented by your direct competitors and top-performing competitors within your industry. Individual commission plans can work well within one industry and fail miserably in others. It is important to take your industry into consideration before beginning to implement a sales plan. Here is a general rundown of what commission plans are normally found in what industry. Flat-Rate Commission: Utilized by industries that offer high-demand products or services, with short sales cycles. Namely: retail, property, and insurance industries. Event-Based Commissions: Industries that utilize this commission plan offer niche products or services, and have long sales cycles, with an emphasis on putting the customer first. Namely: corporate event planners, wedding planners, etc. Tiered Commissions: Great for B2B businesses that focus strongly on sales and expanding growth into new areas. Namely: Pharmaceutical sales and retail. Trailer Commissions: Utilized by companies that rely upon customers or clients to invest in ongoing services. Namely: Companies within the investment industry, SaaS businesses. Create a Commission Team Bring together a small group of 5-10 senior representatives from different areas of your business, including human resources, finance, marketing, sales, and legal. This group of experienced professionals can offer you valuable feedback on what commission plans they envision working best from their perspective. Use your commission structure to create sales leaders A commission structure is a great way to encourage the desired behavior from your representatives. While there are a few structures to choose from, you now have the information and tools to apply a suitable structure to your business. About the author: Andrew Gazdecki is the Chief Growth Officer at Spiff – the leading sales commission software. Gazdecki has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine, as well as prominent industry blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch and VentureBeat. At Spiff, he’s on a mission to help companies automate commission calculations and motivate sales teams. </sys

How Cronofy integrated the ChartMogul Import API. Cronofy: Powerful calendar infrastructure as a service Cronofy is an API-based Calendar service which powers a number of top web-based products like Zendesk, Skyscanner and more. The value in their business is in allowing customers to easily integrate calendar-based features to their platform, with support for all of the top calendar services. Trip-booking scenarios are just one use case for the Cronofy product. Cronofy drives the calendar features of Skyscanner, for exactly this reason. We asked Adam Bird, Cronofy’s CEO to give us a detailed rundown of their experience with the ChartMogul Import API. On building their own billing engine Cronofy has built their own internal billing system, which handles creation of statements, bills and pricing calculations. They then use Xero (via an API integration) to generate invoices and handle the ever-complex tax calculations. Cronofy’s pricing model has a number of intricacies that require some thought when it comes to handling the billing data: Adam: Our standard billing approach is to charge a monthly plan fee for up to a set number of users and then a unit fee per user thereafter. However, we also charge on a pure usage basis for some customers, generally larger accounts, with a threshold-based rate that can result in multiple unit prices as a customer transitions through the usage bands. Getting started with the Import API Being a Ruby-based product, the folks at Cronofy immediately looked for a gem to install which would handle communication and authentication with the API itself. Unfortunately this didn’t exist at the time… so they created one! You can find it here on Github. Adam: ChartMogul’s Import API docs are absolutely the place to start and cover the key concepts you need to understand for a successful integration. We’d definitely echo Adam’s advice here — read the manual! We’ve put a lot of work into making our documentation and Developer Hub easy to consume, and it’ll walk you through the essential parts of the integration. Of course, we’re always here to help if you get stuck… The ChartMogul Developer Hub is always the best place to start, when integrating any of the ChartMogul APIs. The technical details There are three key objects that are important in the ChartMogul platform: Customers, Plans, Invoices. Pushing billing data into ChartMogul involves creating or modifying instances of these objects. Creating Customers Customers are somewhat straightforward. A Customer object represents a “real-life” customer in your subscription product. Adam’s input here: You need customer_uuid for the Invoice creation. Make sure you include the country as that gives you access to the regional segmentation features. You can add an external_id which is enforced unique so will return a 422 Unprocessable Entity if you try and create a duplicate record. I’d love to see the ability to lookup, something like: GET /v1/import/customers?external_id=12345 and get a 404 to indicate that a customer record needs to be added. At the moment, when generating an invoice, we have to retrieve the entire Customer list to discover if that customer has been added or not. Defining Plans Every transaction that happens in ChartMogul (i.e. every invoice) must be related to a plan. Plans represent the subscription plan that the customer is subscribed to, and holds important information like the billing interval. In Adam’s words: Plan definition for us was really just about the name. We only needed a monthly interval for any of our plans. An Invoice comprises a series of line_items, each of which is assigned to a plan. This is used to generate a subscription for that customer, which in turn is rendered in the Chart Mogul UI. Similarly to Customers, you have to ensure a plan has been imported via /v1/import/plans before it can be used in a line_item. In our code we lazy insert plans at the point of importing Invoices, which means we don’t have to worry about coordinating a two-part sync. Our method for this is similar to the following: def get_plan_uuid @plans ||= Hash[chart_mogul .list_plans .map { |p| [p.external_id, p.uuid] }] unless @plans[plan_id] record = { external_id: plan_id, data_source_uuid: chart_mogul_data_source_uuid, name: plan_id, interval_count: 1, interval_unit: :month, } plan = chart_mogul.import_plan(record) @plans[plan_id] = plan.uuid end @plans[plan_id] end Importing invoices The Invoice is the all-important object in ChartMogul which holds information related to the customer’s purchase of your service. Invoices are comprised of: One or more Line Items, which represent the kind of service or product being billed and contain some details about them. One or more Transactions, which represent charge or refund attempts to the customer. From these invoices, ChartMogul automatically creates subscriptions and metrics from invoices, so they’re critical to the system! Adam: In our case I decided to collapse all of our statement lines into one line_item and not worry too much about differentiating between fixed fees and add-ons. This is one of those philosophical points that can be argued either way. The other attribute of line_items to consider is quantity. One little gotcha is if you pass a quantity of zero then this will result in the line_item being ignored by the Subscription, even if the amount_in_cents has a value. A quick word on overages Adam: Given the nature of our service we consider overages not as ad-hoc but as MRR. Each unit represents a user whose calendars have been synchronized with our platform. This is an ongoing relationship which generally grows as our customers grow, ultimately resulting in a transition to a high monthly commitment. We do allow customers to automatically transition between plans as their usage grows or shrinks, which makes plan fee + overage fee just feel like a formula for calculating MRR rather than representing different types of revenue. Final thoughts We’re hugely grateful to Adam and the Cronofy team for working with us throughout the Import API beta, identifying issues and giving us detailed feedback along the way. With their help, we’ve now shipped the first public release of the API, opening the doors for virtually anyone to push custom billing data into their ChartMogul account. I’ll leave the final word to Adam: As we’ve been building out this integration, we’ve wiped away and resynced the data several times to get us to something that we feel represents our business. So we may well restate this in the future — such is the power of being able to visualize your financial data in this way. Fundamentally, Vinay and the team have given a lot of thought to how to make this work with other systems, have obviously spent a lot of time on the docs and tutorials and have been super responsive whenever I was scratching my head. We’re fully committed users now and look forward to seeing how the service and, especially the Import API, evolves. The guys at ChartMogul have a built a fantastic solution for SaaS financial KPI reporting. Being able to take advantage of that with what amounts to a custom billing system is inordinately valuable to anyone with a SaaS business.

[INST] How Cronofy integrated the ChartMogul Import API [/INST]

Cronofy: Powerful calendar infrastructure as a service Cronofy is an API-based Calendar service which powers a number of top web-based products like Zendesk, Skyscanner and more. The value in their business is in allowing customers to easily integrate calendar-based features to their platform, with support for all of the top calendar services. Trip-booking scenarios are just one use case for the Cronofy product. Cronofy drives the calendar features of Skyscanner, for exactly this reason. We asked Adam Bird, Cronofy’s CEO to give us a detailed rundown of their experience with the ChartMogul Import API. On building their own billing engine Cronofy has built their own internal billing system, which handles creation of statements, bills and pricing calculations. They then use Xero (via an API integration) to generate invoices and handle the ever-complex tax calculations. Cronofy’s pricing model has a number of intricacies that require some thought when it comes to handling the billing data: Adam: Our standard billing approach is to charge a monthly plan fee for up to a set number of users and then a unit fee per user thereafter. However, we also charge on a pure usage basis for some customers, generally larger accounts, with a threshold-based rate that can result in multiple unit prices as a customer transitions through the usage bands. Getting started with the Import API Being a Ruby-based product, the folks at Cronofy immediately looked for a gem to install which would handle communication and authentication with the API itself. Unfortunately this didn’t exist at the time… so they created one! You can find it here on Github. Adam: ChartMogul’s Import API docs are absolutely the place to start and cover the key concepts you need to understand for a successful integration. We’d definitely echo Adam’s advice here — read the manual! We’ve put a lot of work into making our documentation and Developer Hub easy to consume, and it’ll walk you through the essential parts of the integration. Of course, we’re always here to help if you get stuck… The ChartMogul Developer Hub is always the best place to start, when integrating any of the ChartMogul APIs. The technical details There are three key objects that are important in the ChartMogul platform: Customers, Plans, Invoices. Pushing billing data into ChartMogul involves creating or modifying instances of these objects. Creating Customers Customers are somewhat straightforward. A Customer object represents a “real-life” customer in your subscription product. Adam’s input here: You need customer_uuid for the Invoice creation. Make sure you include the country as that gives you access to the regional segmentation features. You can add an external_id which is enforced unique so will return a 422 Unprocessable Entity if you try and create a duplicate record. I’d love to see the ability to lookup, something like: GET /v1/import/customers?external_id=12345 and get a 404 to indicate that a customer record needs to be added. At the moment, when generating an invoice, we have to retrieve the entire Customer list to discover if that customer has been added or not. Defining Plans Every transaction that happens in ChartMogul (i.e. every invoice) must be related to a plan. Plans represent the subscription plan that the customer is subscribed to, and holds important information like the billing interval. In Adam’s words: Plan definition for us was really just about the name. We only needed a monthly interval for any of our plans. An Invoice comprises a series of line_items, each of which is assigned to a plan. This is used to generate a subscription for that customer, which in turn is rendered in the Chart Mogul UI. Similarly to Customers, you have to ensure a plan has been imported via /v1/import/plans before it can be used in a line_item. In our code we lazy insert plans at the point of importing Invoices, which means we don’t have to worry about coordinating a two-part sync. Our method for this is similar to the following: def get_plan_uuid @plans ||= Hash[chart_mogul .list_plans .map { |p| [p.external_id, p.uuid] }] unless @plans[plan_id] record = { external_id: plan_id, data_source_uuid: chart_mogul_data_source_uuid, name: plan_id, interval_count: 1, interval_unit: :month, } plan = chart_mogul.import_plan(record) @plans[plan_id] = plan.uuid end @plans[plan_id] end Importing invoices The Invoice is the all-important object in ChartMogul which holds information related to the customer’s purchase of your service. Invoices are comprised of: One or more Line Items, which represent the kind of service or product being billed and contain some details about them. One or more Transactions, which represent charge or refund attempts to the customer. From these invoices, ChartMogul automatically creates subscriptions and metrics from invoices, so they’re critical to the system! Adam: In our case I decided to collapse all of our statement lines into one line_item and not worry too much about differentiating between fixed fees and add-ons. This is one of those philosophical points that can be argued either way. The other attribute of line_items to consider is quantity. One little gotcha is if you pass a quantity of zero then this will result in the line_item being ignored by the Subscription, even if the amount_in_cents has a value. A quick word on overages Adam: Given the nature of our service we consider overages not as ad-hoc but as MRR. Each unit represents a user whose calendars have been synchronized with our platform. This is an ongoing relationship which generally grows as our customers grow, ultimately resulting in a transition to a high monthly commitment. We do allow customers to automatically transition between plans as their usage grows or shrinks, which makes plan fee + overage fee just feel like a formula for calculating MRR rather than representing different types of revenue. Final thoughts We’re hugely grateful to Adam and the Cronofy team for working with us throughout the Import API beta, identifying issues and giving us detailed feedback along the way. With their help, we’ve now shipped the first public release of the API, opening the doors for virtually anyone to push custom billing data into their ChartMogul account. I’ll leave the final word to Adam: As we’ve been building out this integration, we’ve wiped away and resynced the data several times to get us to something that we feel represents our business. So we may well restate this in the future — such is the power of being able to visualize your financial data in this way. Fundamentally, Vinay and the team have given a lot of thought to how to make this work with other systems, have obviously spent a lot of time on the docs and tutorials and have been super responsive whenever I was scratching my head. We’re fully committed users now and look forward to seeing how the service and, especially the Import API, evolves. The guys at ChartMogul have a built a fantastic solution for SaaS financial KPI reporting. Being able to take advantage of that with what amounts to a custom billing system is inordinately valuable to anyone with a SaaS business.

<sys> [INST] How Cronofy integrated the ChartMogul Import API [/INST] Cronofy: Powerful calendar infrastructure as a service Cronofy is an API-based Calendar service which powers a number of top web-based products like Zendesk, Skyscanner and more. The value in their business is in allowing customers to easily integrate calendar-based features to their platform, with support for all of the top calendar services. Trip-booking scenarios are just one use case for the Cronofy product. Cronofy drives the calendar features of Skyscanner, for exactly this reason. We asked Adam Bird, Cronofy’s CEO to give us a detailed rundown of their experience with the ChartMogul Import API. On building their own billing engine Cronofy has built their own internal billing system, which handles creation of statements, bills and pricing calculations. They then use Xero (via an API integration) to generate invoices and handle the ever-complex tax calculations. Cronofy’s pricing model has a number of intricacies that require some thought when it comes to handling the billing data: Adam: Our standard billing approach is to charge a monthly plan fee for up to a set number of users and then a unit fee per user thereafter. However, we also charge on a pure usage basis for some customers, generally larger accounts, with a threshold-based rate that can result in multiple unit prices as a customer transitions through the usage bands. Getting started with the Import API Being a Ruby-based product, the folks at Cronofy immediately looked for a gem to install which would handle communication and authentication with the API itself. Unfortunately this didn’t exist at the time… so they created one! You can find it here on Github. Adam: ChartMogul’s Import API docs are absolutely the place to start and cover the key concepts you need to understand for a successful integration. We’d definitely echo Adam’s advice here — read the manual! We’ve put a lot of work into making our documentation and Developer Hub easy to consume, and it’ll walk you through the essential parts of the integration. Of course, we’re always here to help if you get stuck… The ChartMogul Developer Hub is always the best place to start, when integrating any of the ChartMogul APIs. The technical details There are three key objects that are important in the ChartMogul platform: Customers, Plans, Invoices. Pushing billing data into ChartMogul involves creating or modifying instances of these objects. Creating Customers Customers are somewhat straightforward. A Customer object represents a “real-life” customer in your subscription product. Adam’s input here: You need customer_uuid for the Invoice creation. Make sure you include the country as that gives you access to the regional segmentation features. You can add an external_id which is enforced unique so will return a 422 Unprocessable Entity if you try and create a duplicate record. I’d love to see the ability to lookup, something like: GET /v1/import/customers?external_id=12345 and get a 404 to indicate that a customer record needs to be added. At the moment, when generating an invoice, we have to retrieve the entire Customer list to discover if that customer has been added or not. Defining Plans Every transaction that happens in ChartMogul (i.e. every invoice) must be related to a plan. Plans represent the subscription plan that the customer is subscribed to, and holds important information like the billing interval. In Adam’s words: Plan definition for us was really just about the name. We only needed a monthly interval for any of our plans. An Invoice comprises a series of line_items, each of which is assigned to a plan. This is used to generate a subscription for that customer, which in turn is rendered in the Chart Mogul UI. Similarly to Customers, you have to ensure a plan has been imported via /v1/import/plans before it can be used in a line_item. In our code we lazy insert plans at the point of importing Invoices, which means we don’t have to worry about coordinating a two-part sync. Our method for this is similar to the following: def get_plan_uuid @plans ||= Hash[chart_mogul .list_plans .map { |p| [p.external_id, p.uuid] }] unless @plans[plan_id] record = { external_id: plan_id, data_source_uuid: chart_mogul_data_source_uuid, name: plan_id, interval_count: 1, interval_unit: :month, } plan = chart_mogul.import_plan(record) @plans[plan_id] = plan.uuid end @plans[plan_id] end Importing invoices The Invoice is the all-important object in ChartMogul which holds information related to the customer’s purchase of your service. Invoices are comprised of: One or more Line Items, which represent the kind of service or product being billed and contain some details about them. One or more Transactions, which represent charge or refund attempts to the customer. From these invoices, ChartMogul automatically creates subscriptions and metrics from invoices, so they’re critical to the system! Adam: In our case I decided to collapse all of our statement lines into one line_item and not worry too much about differentiating between fixed fees and add-ons. This is one of those philosophical points that can be argued either way. The other attribute of line_items to consider is quantity. One little gotcha is if you pass a quantity of zero then this will result in the line_item being ignored by the Subscription, even if the amount_in_cents has a value. A quick word on overages Adam: Given the nature of our service we consider overages not as ad-hoc but as MRR. Each unit represents a user whose calendars have been synchronized with our platform. This is an ongoing relationship which generally grows as our customers grow, ultimately resulting in a transition to a high monthly commitment. We do allow customers to automatically transition between plans as their usage grows or shrinks, which makes plan fee + overage fee just feel like a formula for calculating MRR rather than representing different types of revenue. Final thoughts We’re hugely grateful to Adam and the Cronofy team for working with us throughout the Import API beta, identifying issues and giving us detailed feedback along the way. With their help, we’ve now shipped the first public release of the API, opening the doors for virtually anyone to push custom billing data into their ChartMogul account. I’ll leave the final word to Adam: As we’ve been building out this integration, we’ve wiped away and resynced the data several times to get us to something that we feel represents our business. So we may well restate this in the future — such is the power of being able to visualize your financial data in this way. Fundamentally, Vinay and the team have given a lot of thought to how to make this work with other systems, have obviously spent a lot of time on the docs and tutorials and have been super responsive whenever I was scratching my head. We’re fully committed users now and look forward to seeing how the service and, especially the Import API, evolves. The guys at ChartMogul have a built a fantastic solution for SaaS financial KPI reporting. Being able to take advantage of that with what amounts to a custom billing system is inordinately valuable to anyone with a SaaS business. </sys

Grover: Kiss goodbye to buying?. Gadgets as a service There’s a big overlap between financing a big purchase, and renting it. Both help you spread the cost of such a spend. But the team at Grover want us to have a flexible way in which we can rent technology and hardware products for as long as we want, and give them back when we’re done. Thom Cummings (left), CMO. Michael Cassau (right), Founder and CEO. There’s a lot to take away from this conversation! Clearly building and growing a hardware subscription business carries some unique challenges, but there’s also a large overlap between a lot of the aspects of a SaaS business. Some of the questions we dig into include: How do you convert consumers to a subscription-oriented way of thinking? What are some of the differences between SaaS and subscriptions for physical products? Is there a limit to the transition to subscription models for consumers? What kind of metrics are important for optimizing the Grover business? How do you approach pricing such a product? If you want to read more on the experience of using Grover, there’s a great piece in Vice’s Motherboard publication: I Rented All the Expensive Tech I Can’t Afford Get the full interview below, or in your usual podcast app (I use Pocket Casts, it’s awesome): iTunes | SoundCloud

[INST] Grover: Kiss goodbye to buying? [/INST]

Gadgets as a service There’s a big overlap between financing a big purchase, and renting it. Both help you spread the cost of such a spend. But the team at Grover want us to have a flexible way in which we can rent technology and hardware products for as long as we want, and give them back when we’re done. Thom Cummings (left), CMO. Michael Cassau (right), Founder and CEO. There’s a lot to take away from this conversation! Clearly building and growing a hardware subscription business carries some unique challenges, but there’s also a large overlap between a lot of the aspects of a SaaS business. Some of the questions we dig into include: How do you convert consumers to a subscription-oriented way of thinking? What are some of the differences between SaaS and subscriptions for physical products? Is there a limit to the transition to subscription models for consumers? What kind of metrics are important for optimizing the Grover business? How do you approach pricing such a product? If you want to read more on the experience of using Grover, there’s a great piece in Vice’s Motherboard publication: I Rented All the Expensive Tech I Can’t Afford Get the full interview below, or in your usual podcast app (I use Pocket Casts, it’s awesome): iTunes | SoundCloud

<sys> [INST] Grover: Kiss goodbye to buying? [/INST] Gadgets as a service There’s a big overlap between financing a big purchase, and renting it. Both help you spread the cost of such a spend. But the team at Grover want us to have a flexible way in which we can rent technology and hardware products for as long as we want, and give them back when we’re done. Thom Cummings (left), CMO. Michael Cassau (right), Founder and CEO. There’s a lot to take away from this conversation! Clearly building and growing a hardware subscription business carries some unique challenges, but there’s also a large overlap between a lot of the aspects of a SaaS business. Some of the questions we dig into include: How do you convert consumers to a subscription-oriented way of thinking? What are some of the differences between SaaS and subscriptions for physical products? Is there a limit to the transition to subscription models for consumers? What kind of metrics are important for optimizing the Grover business? How do you approach pricing such a product? If you want to read more on the experience of using Grover, there’s a great piece in Vice’s Motherboard publication: I Rented All the Expensive Tech I Can’t Afford Get the full interview below, or in your usual podcast app (I use Pocket Casts, it’s awesome): iTunes | SoundCloud </sys

New: Connect PayPal to ChartMogul. Who’s it for? Any business using PayPal Subscriptions and Recurring Payments feature. What does it do? The new data connection gives PayPal merchants access to all the advanced reporting features of ChartMogul, e.g. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Annual Run Rate (ARR) Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more There are millions of organisations around the world using PayPal to bill their customers, now they can get a better understanding of how their subscription business is really performing using the new PayPal connection for ChartMogul. As far as we know we’re the first to make powerful subscription analytics software available to PayPal merchants. Enough talk, let me try it! If you already have a ChartMogul account you can use these setup instructions to get started. Or if you’d rather skip the docs, just login to your ChartMogul account and head over to Admin > Data load > Add data connection > give it a name (e.g. “PayPal connection”) > select PayPal and follow the instructions. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account you can signup for a free trial here and then follow the setup instructions to connect your PayPal account.

[INST] New: Connect PayPal to ChartMogul [/INST]

Who’s it for? Any business using PayPal Subscriptions and Recurring Payments feature. What does it do? The new data connection gives PayPal merchants access to all the advanced reporting features of ChartMogul, e.g. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Annual Run Rate (ARR) Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more There are millions of organisations around the world using PayPal to bill their customers, now they can get a better understanding of how their subscription business is really performing using the new PayPal connection for ChartMogul. As far as we know we’re the first to make powerful subscription analytics software available to PayPal merchants. Enough talk, let me try it! If you already have a ChartMogul account you can use these setup instructions to get started. Or if you’d rather skip the docs, just login to your ChartMogul account and head over to Admin > Data load > Add data connection > give it a name (e.g. “PayPal connection”) > select PayPal and follow the instructions. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account you can signup for a free trial here and then follow the setup instructions to connect your PayPal account.

<sys> [INST] New: Connect PayPal to ChartMogul [/INST] Who’s it for? Any business using PayPal Subscriptions and Recurring Payments feature. What does it do? The new data connection gives PayPal merchants access to all the advanced reporting features of ChartMogul, e.g. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Churn rates Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Annual Run Rate (ARR) Cohort analysis Geo-mapping And much more There are millions of organisations around the world using PayPal to bill their customers, now they can get a better understanding of how their subscription business is really performing using the new PayPal connection for ChartMogul. As far as we know we’re the first to make powerful subscription analytics software available to PayPal merchants. Enough talk, let me try it! If you already have a ChartMogul account you can use these setup instructions to get started. Or if you’d rather skip the docs, just login to your ChartMogul account and head over to Admin > Data load > Add data connection > give it a name (e.g. “PayPal connection”) > select PayPal and follow the instructions. If you don’t yet have a ChartMogul account you can signup for a free trial here and then follow the setup instructions to connect your PayPal account. </sys

Announcing the ChartMogul Developer Hub. The ChartMogul Developer Hub contains documentation and tutorials for all ChartMogul APIs: Import API – push customer and billing data into ChartMogul Enrichment API – add additional attributes to customers for use with the Segmentation features Metrics API – export metrics, graph and customer data from a ChartMogul account We used Readme.io to power our developer hub and spent some time styling and branding it to fit in with our visual identity, we really hope you like it. What if I need help? Our customer success engineers are ready to help you with any of the APIs or anything else related to ChartMogul, just email support@chartmogul.com

[INST] Announcing the ChartMogul Developer Hub [/INST]

The ChartMogul Developer Hub contains documentation and tutorials for all ChartMogul APIs: Import API – push customer and billing data into ChartMogul Enrichment API – add additional attributes to customers for use with the Segmentation features Metrics API – export metrics, graph and customer data from a ChartMogul account We used Readme.io to power our developer hub and spent some time styling and branding it to fit in with our visual identity, we really hope you like it. What if I need help? Our customer success engineers are ready to help you with any of the APIs or anything else related to ChartMogul, just email support@chartmogul.com

<sys> [INST] Announcing the ChartMogul Developer Hub [/INST] The ChartMogul Developer Hub contains documentation and tutorials for all ChartMogul APIs: Import API – push customer and billing data into ChartMogul Enrichment API – add additional attributes to customers for use with the Segmentation features Metrics API – export metrics, graph and customer data from a ChartMogul account We used Readme.io to power our developer hub and spent some time styling and branding it to fit in with our visual identity, we really hope you like it. What if I need help? Our customer success engineers are ready to help you with any of the APIs or anything else related to ChartMogul, just email support@chartmogul.com </sys