Why Misunderstanding Startup Metrics Can Cost You Your Business
There has been a lot of public debate over the past several weeks about whether it’s a good thing to be “gross margin positive” or not and commentary always reminds me that some people at startups don’t quite understand financial metrics or even how to think about which ones are healthy. When I publicly Tweeted […]
Want Happy Customers? Implement the 5-Visits-Plus-2-Badges Rule. For Your Customer Success Team — And You.
If you are a SaaStr reader, you’ll know how passionate I am about Customer Success. For one simple reason: Second Order Revenue. Upsells. Renewals. Word-of-Mouth. Champion Change. What it all means is that if you do it right, you’ll make 6x or more the revenue from your customers after the sale itself. The details on […]
Eleven Secrets of SaaS Product Design
SaaS product management professionals should always remember that there are four P’s in marketing, one being product. Unfortunately, software companies have a bad habit of thinking about product in isolation from the rest of the marketing mix. This is a particularly costly mistake in SaaS and is the root cause of many a SaaS Don’t. […]
Breaking Through The SaaS Ceiling
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave […]
Prisoners, And Why It Doesn’t Really Matter Your App Is So Hard to Rip Out
There are two things I see SaaS entrepreneurs who are post-Traction and post-Scale say again and again: We’re So Sticky. Once we’re in, it’s so hard to rip us out. Our Churn is Basically Zero in the Enterprise. We’re doing great because No One Leaves. If you’re coming from a Freemium background, or B2C, that […]
Measure Your Churn. But What’s Even More Important is to Measure Your Almost Churn. 5 Tricks to Help You Here.
Churn is a paramount topic in SaaS, as we all know. If every dollar of ARR is worth $6+ in the long term, including upsells and second order revenue … then of course, by the same token, for every dollar of ARR that churns … you’re losing $6 of notional ARR. Lose a $100k customer? […]
Churn and SaaS
SaaS companies are faced with copious amounts of advice about pricing, monetization, funnel management and all the different things used to describe the processes involved in attracting, gaining and maintaining customers. One of the big areas that companies think about is that of churn – or how many customers “drop off” and stop using the […]
What is MRR Churn? | SaaS Metrics FAQs Part 2
Why measure SaaS MRR churn? Show me the money! SaaS MRR churn is an important SaaS metric that measures the financial impact of churn. While customer churn is an important operational metric, CFOs always prefer MRR churn. In this second SaaS Metrics FAQs article, I explore ways to analyze SaaS MRR churn.
SaaS Metrics FAQs | What is Churn?
A little over two years ago, I published a series of well received articles on SaaS metrics that culminated in the SaaS Metrics Guide to SaaS Financial Performance. Since then, I’ve received numerous inquiries regarding the many practical quirks encountered in day-to-day SaaS metrics implementation. In response, I’ve decided to revisit the SaaS metrics topic […]
SaaS Benchmarks | Acquisition Cost and Churn Challenges
What is a typical churn rate for SaaS? What is a good time frame to recover CAC? As SaaS companies mature, high quality SaaS benchmark studies are appearing.
