Finding product-market fit is always a challenge for startups. But it can be especially difficult for horizontal companies who struggle with the idea of serving everyone. To combat that urge, Airtable’s founding team took a slowed-down approach when launching their product.
Instead of following the 'move fast and break things' mantra, the founders ditched the public launch and hosted a private beta where only 100 people could test Airtable. By doing so, it was easier for the founders to siphon out the signal from the noise. They then doubled down on where they saw traction but kept the product vision nimble to quickly pivot along the way.
SaaS companies must take a systematic approach to retaining customers to avoid wasting resources on failing retention strategies. This article explains why you should ditch exit surveys and build a customer churn funnel instead.
Understanding your competitors and their strategies will help to better position your own business. This article walks through a five-step framework for conducting a competitive analysis; the steps are: 1) social analysis, 2) AD analysis, 3) SEO analysis, 4) strategic narrative analysis, and 5) customer (and segment) analysis.
Product-led companies typically spend comparable amounts on sales and marketing to Sales-led businesses, but they spend more on research and development. This article explains why public PLG companies saw a larger decline in profitability since the start of COVID-19 compared to SLG businesses.
Every SaaS company, bootstrapped or not, can pull six key levers to significantly impact their businesses. In this article, Paddle’s Senior Product Manager and Chief Strategy Officer explains what the levers are and how founders can use them to grow their bootstrapped startup.
Supermetrics, a marketing analytics platform, reached €1 million in ARR with no sales team or outside funding within four years of launching. The company leveraged marketplaces to accelerate the organic adoption of its products. Supermetrics started with an add-on for Google Sheets, then expanded into other ecosystems like AWS and HubSpot to tap into their vast user base.
In addition, the company used a 14-day free trial coupled with an accessible price point (to avoid approval roadblocks) to turn users into customers and then into raving fans. As the company scaled in size, Supermetrics transitioned from pure product-led to sales-assisted to acquire larger customers.
SaaS companies can’t survive on new logo growth alone. Acquiring new customers without managing attrition is like filling a leaky bucket. Revenue may be flowing in, but your churn rate is limiting your growth and eating away at your profit.
By aligning your company around a single retention metric, you can make customer success the center of your growth strategy. The goal is to promote cross-functional collaboration within your team to manage churn. One example is to have customer data flow between your sales, marketing, and CS team to personalize the relationship throughout the customer journey.
On Wednesday, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a dialogue-based chatbot capable of understanding and responding to natural language queries. Early users have started experimenting with a variety of use cases like; creating long-form content, writing sections of code, or generating AI art prompts.
OpenAI’s effort to democratize AI for companies will also commoditize it. Competing on AI-led features will not be enough. Instead, companies should leverage AI to streamline their internal workflows or improve the customer experience. For example, SaaS companies struggling to keep up with support tickets could use ChatGPT to have real-time conversations with customers that don't feel so…robotic.
When we think of Content Marketing, we often think of Blogging. But there's more we can do on our site to drive traffic. This article walks through five alternative forms of content to add to your website: 1) Engineering As Marketing, 2) Free Tools, 3) Independent Research, 4) Directories, and 5) Templates.
Longer sales cycles typically have higher CAC levels. As a result, not all customer channels will yield the same return. This article walks through the best channels to drive sales growth for companies with higher CAC levels.
An API-based product can be another growth driver for SaaS companies offering only their core platform. An example of this is Google Maps. It started as a standalone direct-to-consumer product, then offered an API to third-party vendors. This article walks through how SaaS companies can take an API-led approach to achieve new product growth.
It’s common for SaaS companies to use WordPress to build their landing page and manage their content, while delivering their product through a subdomain. This article walks through seven WordPress plugins that can help grow your site's traffic. (SaaS Weekly uses three of these plugins).
An operating plan is a way for the management team to communicate the performance of the business to the board. A proper plan can be presented in just two slides: one slide showing the ARR growth and related metrics (also called a walkforward) and one slide showing the lineitems on the P&L.
When presenting the operating plan to the board, be sure to provide both strategic and financial context. Communicate the thought process behind the numbers, not just the numbers themselves. Instead of simply reading off the metrics, overlay what strategies and considerations drove the company's performance and how you will hit the forecasted numbers.
There are many highly specialized tools in a SaaS company's marketing-tech stack. Understanding the different layers can help ensure the data ties together between each system. The three layers are (1) the data foundation, (2) the segmentation layer, and (3) the activation layer.
The data foundation layer enhances the profile of a prospect by aggregating both first and third-party data. The segmentation layer then provides marketing a way to group the audience into segments for prioritization or tailored messaging. Finally, the activation layer controls all communication touchpoints marketing has with the audience.
Not all intent data is created equal. There are typically three levels, and each subsequent level is less and less informative. To properly funnel prospects, create a matrix that scores the intent level based on the data that is captured.
First-party intent data represents the direct interaction between your audience and your brand, such as a demo request or webinar registration. Second-party intent data is collected and traded between channel partners, such as sharing leads from a comarketing campaign. Lastly, third-party intent data is collected and sold by outside entities that don’t have a direct relationship with your audience.
