How To Design Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, and Drip Email Campaigns – Medium. The only metric that matters. I've been lucky to be part of the early growth of several really interesting and now important networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. One of the things that I felt working on each of these is that we never looked at numbers or metrics in the abstract -- total page views, logged in accounts, etc, but we always talked about users. More specifically, what they were doing and why they were doing it.
At LinkedIn we didn't talk about "total page views", but instead "profile views" - how many people were using LinkedIn to search for and find other people, and how many people were on LinkedIn being viewed. At Twitter while we had (and they still have) crazy page view numbers, we talked instead about how many people were looking at their timeline and reading tweets or tweeting. When I meet new companies today, I often hear things like "We have 10M uniques with 30M page views per month. " How many people are really using your product? You need a metric that specifically answers this. There’s only a few ways to scale user growth, and here’s the list. Scaling growth is hard – there’s only a few ways to do itWhen you study the most successful mobile/web products, you start to see a pattern on how they grow.
Turns out, there’s not too many ways to reach 100s of millions of users or revenue. Instead, products mostly have one or two major growth channels, which they optimize into perfection. These methods are commonplace and predictable. Here are the major channels that successful products use to drive traction – think of them as the moonshots. Paid acquisition. If your users give you money, then you can buy users directly through ads.
Usually companies try to maintain a 3:1 CLV:CAC ratio to keep their margins reasonable after other costs. These channels work and scale, because of two reasons: They’re feedback loops. It might seem like it’s best to crack one of these channels right away, and then ride then into glory. New products often only have months, or a year, to live, so these strategies are often not a real option. Good luck. Understanding SaaS: Why the Pundits Have It Wrong. Tune into any cable network stock market channel and the airwaves resonate with one consistent theme: SaaS companies are simply too expensive. In fact, we might even be in a bubble! The argument goes as follows — high revenue growth coupled with lack of profits means these businesses are fundamentally broken.
Just as we saw in 1999-2000, investors’ willingness to pay for growth at any cost will end and many SaaS companies will be left behind. image: Andreessen Horowitz But that line of reasoning conflates the lessons of the 1999-2000 tech bubble. So why do the pundits have it all wrong? When it comes to SaaS, however, such simplicity can lead to bad investment decisions. The key difference between traditional software and software as a service: Growth hurts (but only at first) In the traditional software world, companies like Oracle and SAP do most of their business by selling a “perpetual” license to their software and then later selling upgrades.
Here’s an example. 7 Tips on How to Build a Successful SaaS Business. With the global Software-as-a-Service revenue projected to hit $16 billion this year, and then $22 billion by 2015, it’s tempting to jump in and develop your own SaaS business. So we’ve collated tips from proven SaaS entrepreneurs to try and provide some basic pointers of how to succeed. Our company Time Doctor is also a SaaS business and we’re fascinated by the industry and by examples of successful SaaS business. Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and co-founder of Marketo says… “Maintain a Healthy Balance” At a startup you must do a lot at once. For example, start off the day listening, reading, and engaging in relevant conversations around the topics that your product or service addresses. And finally, carve out some time to focus on building and improving upon your product. Peter Reinhardt, Co-founder of Segment.io “Customer support is the difference between success and failure in SaaS products” At the very beginning, your SaaS product will necessarily be incomplete, buggy and hard to use.
(72) SaaStr on GrowthEverywhere: "On Building a $10. (43) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): What is a good price strategy for infrequently used SaaS products. Why Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) Is The Most Important Metric in SaaS. One thing that is great in SaaS, from a 20,000 foot perspective at least, is You Can See The Future. It’s the benefit of a recurring revenue stream in a B2B model.
If you did $100k last month, and have grown 6% a month each month for the last 12 mos, I can pretty much say you’ll be a $2m+ ARR business in the next twelve months or so. The thing is, sales is variant, and sales pipelines have big data quality issues — and worse, sales as a metric is a lagging indicator. In fact, your monthly sales tell you about the past.
>> But there’s a better metric, your Key Metric, you should track and score yourself to, and hold your VP Marketing and marketing team to – Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR), your growth in qualified leads, measure month-over-month, every month. As long as you are using Qualified Leads, and you use a consistent formula and process to qualify them, you can then See The Future: If the sales team has changed, your sales team quality may have declined. And you know what? (19) Why Tilting Just a Smidge from Self-Service Can... - SaaStr - Quora. Recently I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with a number of outstanding entrepreneurs building self-service SaaS business at the bottom of the market. A customer base made up of Very Small Businesses and individual business purchasers in slightly larger companies. By all means, if you can build a $100m self-service SaaS business without the need for a sales team, a client success team, webinars, getting on planes, and all that — go for it.
One con is that these businesses often are tougher to gain a longer-term competitive advantage in unless there is a network effect (e.g., DropBox). And competition thus ends up being even fiercer. But from a business model perspective, why invest in sales, demand gen, and all that if you don’t have to? Why not just build a wonderful product and let them all sign up on their own? Let me just share one semi-obvious piece of math and learning. Here’s the thing. Why? And what you’ll find is epic on the churn side. SaaS Metrics 2.0 – A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters. SaaS Metrics 2.0 – A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters. The critical metrics for each stage of your SaaS business (Guest post by Lars Lofgren of KISSmetrics) [My friend Lars is a product marketer at KISSmetrics and loves helping SaaS businesses understand how their business is growing.
He writes regularly for the KISSmetrics blog and his personal marketing blog. He wrote the following post about SaaS products and the metrics you use to evaluate their success level. Lots of great information in there. You can follow Lars at @LarsLofgren -Andrew] How healthy is your SaaS business? We’re bombarded with KPIs and an endless series of metrics to tell us how we’re doing. But instead of using data to measure our progress, it’s much more likely that we get lost and start focusing on metrics that are easy to track but don’t mean anything.
For a SaaS business, there are a few core metrics that need your undivided attention. In this post, I’m going to break down the essential metrics for each stage of a SaaS business. What this framework will give you: Let’s jump in. You’re probably in this stage if: This is the first major hurdle you’ll need to overcome. Find A Profitable App Store Niche--Fast ⚙ Co. Bootstrapped CPC rule of thumb: MRR/25 by. In the first year of business, you have literally no data for making decisions and predictions. Even after the first hundred customers, half of those were serendipitous one-offs, not representative of repeatable, controllable customer acquisition, and the scale of the data isn’t statistically significant. One of the root questions you have at the start, which is supposed to be data-driven (but you don’t have data) is: What’s the maximum I should bid for CPC (cost-per-click) campaigns like Google AdWords? The answer for a funded startup is “Bid as much as possible, to get as many customers — and data!
— as you can, as quickly as you can, then rapidly iterate from there in the presence of that data.” Easy for them to say, but what about a bootstrapped, profit-driven business? Here you don’t have the budget to “spend as much as possible,” and you’re keen on getting a reasonable return on investment reasonably quickly, and you can’t just “spend to acquire the data.” Here’s my way. LTV = MRR x 20.