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SaaS business

Don’t Be an Alien to Your Users. Learn What Is Customer Development with Eleken

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Imagine that aliens decided to build a product for humans. “A life-changing solution that would make people’s life easier”, think the extraterrestrials. But there’s one problem. Aliens never visited planet Earth and never talked to humans. They only observed our species from a distance and dreamed about how they will change our lives with an amazing product. 

We at Eleken wouldn’t have been surprised if their released solution had been far from what people would even want to use. As a design company for SaaS businesses, we know how important it is to talk to users before building a product.

We would personally recommend aliens start with customer development. In our world, this framework allows startups to talk to customers, ask about their needs, and come up with viable solutions. In this article, we will provide the definition of customer development, share some helpful tips on how to conduct it, and explain the key stages of this process. Ready? Let’s get started!

What is customer development?

Customer development is an integral part of the Lean startup concept that determines if a product or service is relevant to the customers’ needs. This methodology allows companies to identify their target audiences’ requirements, find the right approaches to fulfill them, and test potential solutions for converting and acquiring customers in future. 

four stages of customer development: discovery, validation, creation and building

To better understand the meaning and importance of the customer development framework, let’s take a look at the brief history of this concept.

The origin of customer development

The idea of customer development emerged in the 1990s and was first introduced by an entrepreneur Steve Blank. He believes that a startup should not use the same business development methods as large enterprises. Instead, it has to find its own way to succeed and seek alternative business models to apply. And the customer development process is one of the most effective ways that saves the day for startups. 

According to Blank, customer development is somewhere between Business Model Design and Agile Engineering. This method helps startups evaluate hypotheses, reveal customers’ problems, and, finally, understand how their product can solve them. 

Customer development doesn’t just provide a better idea of who your customers are and what they need. It also reveals the startup idea’s downsides and mismatches that might later get critical for a company. That’s why the customer development process isn’t a cakewalk for product owners and founders. It requires significant effort from the whole team to identify potential mistakes, prove or deny the hypotheses, and pivot if necessary. 

However, these potential challenges are definitely worth it in the long run. Keep reading to discover the most significant benefits of customer development.

Main reasons why customer development is important for startups

Startups often focus on product development, considering customer development a less important, secondary process. However, Steve Blank’s book “The Four Steps to Epiphany” and the later evolution of Lean product management prove such an approach is falsee. Without putting effort into understanding your customers, your product development strategy won’t cover their actual needs. As a result, even a great idea is at risk of failure. 

Customer development model applied before product development or at its earliest stages significantly increases your chances of success. The method helps you achieve the following goals: 

Reduced product-market fit challenge

It’s not a secret that many startups fail, and the most common reason is the lack of product-market fit

piechart common reasons for startup failure

It means that the idea behind a product or service doesn’t match the audience’s needs. That is a typical problem of startups that neglect customer development. 

Saved time and costs

Without your customers’ feedback, you can make wrong decisions leading to an unsuitable investment strategy. Customer development will help you avoid this challenge by testing your audience, learning their expectations, and changing goals before the product development process even starts. As a result, you won’t waste your time and money implementing inappropriate ideas.

Better understanding of target customers

Customer development enables direct interactions with your target audience and helps you realize how to communicate your product’s value. For a new product, it’s crucial to get a better idea of your customers and build a product based on their feedback. An existing product can use this method to improve customer service, take an important step towards a better user experience, and show customers that their opinions matter.   

Data-driven approach

During the customer development process, you can collect various data related to your clients’ needs, market specifics, and potential marketing and sales prospects. All this information forms a basis for your future product development strategy and product roadmap. And most importantly, it relies on the results of research, not on bare assumptions.   

Increased chances to succeed

Taking into account all the advantages we’ve mentioned, let’s describe the most significant one with Steve Blank’s quote from “The Four Steps to Epiphany”: 

“Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.”

In a nutshell, you won’t develop a successful product without establishing direct communication with your users and testing every single solution. And that is where sufficient UX expertise comes to the rescue. 

UX and customer development 

Thorough UX research is an integral part of customer validation. It provides deeper insights into the targeted market segment, audience, and competitors. We at Eleken regularly conduct comprehensive UX research for our partners. This process helps get deeper insights into users’ actual pain points. And together with product teams, we are able to design products that address and solve real problems.

With this in mind, let’s explore customer development and find out how to do it step by step. 

Customer development process: Key steps

Let’s dive deeper into customer development stages and learn some practical tips based on Eleken’s experience.

Step 1. Customer discovery

At this initial stage of the customer development process, the product team defines hypotheses, defines problems, and comes up with possible solutions. The discovery also involves interviews with the target clientele. 

Here are several key steps a product team needs to take throughout this customer development phase. 

  1. Defining hypotheses. First of all, it’s essential to carefully document assumptions regarding all the aspects you might need to change. Brainstorming hypotheses usually refers to your business model, MVP features, and conversion strategy. Also, it’s worth paying attention to every group of people that will interact with your product. To name a few, these are customers, distributors, investors, tech partners, and more.

  2. Conducting interviews. Normally, a product team conducts two initial rounds of interviews. Their primary goal is to define whether your product’s value proposition addresses the problem you’re dealing with. Also, it’s the initial test of your product’s core features. Customer feedback will show how effectively they cover their needs.

  3. Validating product ideas. After defining hypotheses and interviewing target customers, the team can see which assumptions are wrong. At this point, you should already have “early adopters” ready to keep testing your product. With their help, you can shift your ideas or find out how to convey your value proposition more efficiently. 

Step 2. Customer validation

This stage of customer development is all about the readiness to scale up your startup. Now, when a buyer persona is defined, the product team focuses on learning how to grow the business model. They launch an MVP, get it to the market, and test sales with the first real customers. 

Here are the main concepts related to the customer validation stage:

  1. Minimum viable product (MVP) is the earliest version of a new product. It contains only basic functionality and is designed to get the first real feedback from your users. Does the solution based on the discovery phase meet your audience’s needs? Are people ready to pay for the proposed set of features? An MVP will help you find out. Besides, it will allow you to pivot without significant investments if something goes wrong.

  2. Product positioning is the introduction of your product to the market. Your customers, partners, and potential investors learn what your product is and what makes it unique. In particular, product positioning communicates your product’s type and category, its key advantages, and the audience that will benefit from it most. It also states how your product stands out from competitors. 

Step 3. Customer creation

So the product team has discussed hypotheses, interviewed potential clients, validated ideas, tested them… What’s next? They keep testing the MVP. Even if this early version of your product seems to perform well, you should still care about people’s opinions. This is the only way to learn how to acquire and convert new customers, scale your business, and increase revenue. 

At this point, it is obvious why user feedback is important for customer development. 

Here are several methods of getting your customers to share information: 

  1. One-on-one interviews. When talking to your customers, you will find out the main challenges they face when using your product. Prioritizing those early adopters whom you dealt with from the very beginning will help you see how your solutions evolved over time, what has changed, and what else you should fix.

  2. Online surveys. Product teams often conduct online tests and look for people’s feedback on services like Quora and Reddit. This helps better understand your niche and collect some valuable quantitative data. 

  3. Focus groups. When applying this method, researchers organize respondents into small groups (three to five people each) with similar opinions and pain points. It helps understand how different types of buyers perceive your product. 

Step 4. Company building

At this stage, your MVP is about to grow, as well as your business. You may need to hire more professionals, open new departments, and optimize the internal processes. At the same time, you should still keep your audience in mind. Further rounds of customer development interviews will help you come up with features your customers strive to get. You will also be able to improve the overall functionality, polish your customer service, and upgrade your product the right way. 

Now, let’s take a look at a real-life example of a well-established customer development strategy leading the startup to success. 

Dropbox: an example of customer development

Dropbox is a popular cloud hosting service with nearly 700 million registered users. The product experienced almost instant success after its launch in 2007. Although the market was highly competitive at that time, the startup managed to get several million users in just a year and a half. 

image of the graph "Number of paying Dropbox users rom 2015-2021"
Image source: Statista

Sounds like a typical story of a fast-growing tech startup from Silicon Valley, right? Well, what makes it unique is that Dropbox achieved this result without any advertisement at all. Instead, they carefully studied their client base and clearly communicated the product’s value to their audience. 

The problem 

Dropbox founders had no sufficient experience in marketing. So they invested a lot of money in ineffective marketing channels. Eventually, they decided to use the customer development strategy described in the Four Steps to the Epiphany to understand their problem and find a viable solution. 

Customer discovery 

The team working on the product realized they needed to delay the launch and dive deeper into their customers’ feedback. For 18 months, they talked to early adopters, trying to understand their market and discover what kind of product people really needed. 

Customer validation

At this point, Dropbox founders created a snapshot of their future product. It was an early MVP they wanted to test with their early adopters. This method resulted in great success. The team got valuable feedback that validated their assumptions and allowed them to move on. 

Customer creation 

Instead of turning to traditional marketing channels, Dropbox relied on the word-of-mouth approach. While being almost invisible across the web, they kept working with early adopters and getting feedback. They also created a landing page to get people involved before the product’s launch. People who liked their product passed this page to their friends. And unlike traditional marketing strategies they tried, this method actually worked.

Company building 

Dropbox offered extra cloud storage space for free to users who encouraged others to sign up. And this referral program, based on customers’ positive feedback, started to pay off. The outcomes were spectacular. The word of mouth program increased the user base from 100,000 to four million users. 

To sum up

Dropbox, as well as other successful examples of customer development, prove that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for startups. Traditional marketing and product development tactics often fail to deliver the desired outcome. The problem lies in the lack of customer feedback that reveals what people actually need from your product, how they interact with it, and which of your assumptions should be corrected. 

That is exactly where the customer development methodology will get you covered. It allows you to validate your product-market fit and not to be an alien to your customers.

Customer development is closely related to UX research. And we at Eleken regularly help startups discover their end-users’’ needs, conduct user interviews, and do comprehensive research to collect valuable data that helps businesses. Need professional UX/UI design services to complement your customer development? Contact us.

Mariia Kasym

Author

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SaaS business
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0
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UX ROI Case Studies: How Effective Design Can Boost Your Business Performance

Having a robust and efficient solution doesn't always mean customers will choose it over competitors. It is user experience (UX) design that ensures users seamlessly interact with your product, which, in turn, contributes to higher retention and engagement. 

Studies also prove the value of UX design. For example, according to McKinsey, companies prioritizing design have a 32% higher revenue growth and a 56% higher total return to shareholders than their competitors. Another research by Forrester revealed that UX design ROI is $100 for every invested $1. Overall, design unicorns (businesses that invest more in UX) usually see a significant 75% sales increase. In our recent article, you can find more UX statistics that prove the value of great design, from user engagement to conversions.

Being a design agency focused on SaaS products, our clients often ask us about the financial value of UX design. For them, user experience can seem like an elusive thing that is impossible to measure. But it is not so. There are UX metrics to evaluate the success of a design that also allow business owners to see how UX design can impact business results. And in this article, we are going to talk about them while also covering some real-life examples of companies for which investments in UX made a significant difference in their business.

So, let’s start with ways you can evaluate the success of your design.

Key UX metrics to measure the impact of UX design on your business

As UX designers, we are strong supporters of the idea that good design equals good business. And many companies tend to agree with us. Still, more than 50% of them don’t know how to assess the results of their design teams. So talking about a good old ROI would be great for starters.

The traditional ROI index shows the likelihood of a return on investment and is presented as a percentage. The ROI formula looks as follows:

ROI formula

For example, if you invest $300 and your sales go up by $600, your ROI is 100%, according to the formula: 

ROI formula

As for design projects, to assess the impact of UX design, you should focus on usability, satisfaction, and user engagement. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Usability

Most usability metrics are based on the data collected during usability testing. Through this type of testing, researchers observe the user behavior when they complete tasks trying to identify how easy it was to achieve a specific goal. As a rule, about 5 users have to participate in such tests to get clear results. 

Here are metrics to measure usability:

  • Task completion rate, or success score, shows the percentage of users who have successfully completed a specific task like creating an account, finding the right product from the list, or filling in the request form. To get your success score, you should calculate the number of completed tasks and divide it by the number of attempts.
Success score formula
  • Time on task lets you learn how much time (minutes, seconds, hours, days, or else) it takes a user to complete a task. As a rule, the shorter it takes, the better.
Task time forula
  • Error rate measures all wrong actions, such as slips (accidental behavior) and mistakes (incorrect non-accidental intentions) performed while completing a task. You may need to evaluate all of them, so you will need an error rate formula: 
Error rate formula

When focusing on one error, you have to find an error occurrence rate by calculating the total number of errors and dividing it by the number of attempts:

Error occurence rate formula

Engagement

User engagement metrics show how users will interact with a digital product helping to determine areas that need to be improved. Here are the key metrics:

  • Time spent on site measures the average amount of time users spend on specific product pages. To calculate the average time on a page, you should divide the total time users spend on a page by the total number of page views, then subtract the number of page exits. 
Average time on page

There are also a number of analytics tools like Google Analytics that can provide you with valuable numbers.

  • Pageviews show the number of pages the user has viewed over a period so that you can identify pages your users are interested in, and those that cause user friction. 
Pageviews
semrush.com

Satisfaction

User satisfaction is a crucial metric when you want to define the design's success. It shows how well your solution meets or exceeds users’ expectations and goals. This metric evaluates your users’ trust and loyalty. 

User satisfaction can be measured using the following metrics: 

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) represents the percentage of users who would recommend your product. To determine the NPS, consider asking your existing customers how likely they are to recommend the solution to their friends and colleagues. Users should give a score of 1 to 10.  One means “not at all likely”, and ten - “very likely”. Based on the results, users are divided into three categories: 
Net Promoter Score

Now you can calculate the NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters. 

Net Promoter Score

For example, if 70% of customers are promoters and 10% are detractors, then your NPS score is 60.

Net Promoter Score

Generally, the score is considered positive when it is above 0, meaning that you have more promoters than detractors. But leading companies often have an NPS score of 50 and above. For example, Apple has an NPS score of 68, while Amazon’s NPS is 51

  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) lets you understand ​​how users feel about your product or its specific functionality. You need to ask users to rate their satisfaction with your product from 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). 
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

To calculate a CSAT score, you’ll need to know the number of satisfied customers and the total number of received answers. You can use the following formula to identify a percentage score:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • System Usability Scale (SUS). Here, your users will have to answer 10 questions, giving a score from 1, meaning “strongly disagree,” to 5, which stands for “strongly agree”. After gathering feedback, you add each score and multiply it by 2 to get from 0 to 100 points. If the score is 68 and above, for example, then everything is fine with the usability. If the score is lower than 68, then your product requires improvement.
System Usability Scale (SUS)
researchgate.net

So, as you can see, UX design is not just a superficial product or service aspect but an essential business driver. And with the list of UX metrics we shared in this article, you can easily evaluate the success of your design and its overall business value. 

But looking at specific examples where companies already did that and benefited from it is no less interesting, so let’s do it. 

UX ROI case studies that show why investing in design is worth it

Here are some examples to demonstrate how good design decisions can result in a great benefit for both your users and your business.

How changing one button led to a $300 million revenue boost 

For the book “Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks”, Jared M. Spool shares how a small change in a form’s design let an e-commerce website increase its revenue by $300 million. 

The website was losing a significant amount of revenue due to a poorly designed checkout process. But the problem was, nobody on the team knew what the problem was.   

That’s why the company decided to conduct usability testing. After testing the website, the team discovered that customers resisted registering. Users just wanted to make a purchase and leave the website.

Registration redesign
Registration redesign resulted in an extra $300 million

The design team offered to replace the Register button with a Continue button. They also added a message informing users that they don’t have to create an account to make purchases on the website and just click Continue to proceed to checkout. 

The results of this simple change were impressive: the sales grew by 45% to an extra $15 million in the first month, leading to an overall revenue increase of $300 million.

How usability testing allowed HubSpot to improve user retention

When HubSpot was working on the record page redesign, the team discovered that excessive usage patterns were slowing down sales and support workflows. To improve usability, HubSpot decided to start by calculating user satisfaction metrics, such as CSAT and NPS scores, to then continue with usability testing.  

By testing nearly 40 activity types on the record timeline, the team identified significant issues, such as unresponsiveness and limited functionality, leading to an 11% decline in users. The team also measured the time it took to respond to an email after opening a record, which averaged around 8 minutes.

To decrease the time spent on email responding, HubSpot conducted live experiments and iterated based on user feedback, consistently prioritizing users’ needs. They eliminated unnecessary white space, reduced the load time by taking out unnecessary information, and simplified data scanning and actions on the record. 

Hubspot record page before and after redesign

When talking about numbers, the company managed to achieve great results. Their total revenue grew by 33% to $1.731 billion compared to 2021.

How SEOcrawl grew 2X after a complete UX redesign

SEOcrawl was looking to expand their existing platform to cover every aspect of the SEO needs. The company partnered with Eleken to redesign the product and improve its usability.   

We started the redesign with the competitor analysis and reviewed the existing visual design trends. Throughout the whole redesign process, each and every design decision was guided by user feedback. The SEOcrawl team shared new screens with its customers and asked them what improvements could be made. The entire redesign process was completed in under four months and then successfully implemented by developers.

As the redesign progressed, SEOcrawl's team recognized the growing expectations of their customers and decided to extend their product's functionality. To meet users’ needs, our team designed the Crawler tool for detailed SEO analysis of product web pages, and the SEO Monitor tool to detect and point out product problem areas. 

SEOcrawl's SEO Monitor tool
SEO Monitor tool to detect and point out product problem areas

After our fruitful collaboration, SEOcrawl fully revamped its solution and doubled its user base. What’s more, the new functionality allowed them to gain new paid customers, and the platform continues to grow.

Final thoughts

If you're still in doubt about whether to invest in UX, just remember that fixing UX design mistakes during development can cost 10X more, while a post-release fix can cost you up to 100X. And from the examples we covered, it’s easy to see that investing in user experience delivers a strong ROI and is definitely worth your attention.

And if you decide that excellent user experience will be your priority, hire Eleken UI/UX designers.

SaaS business
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0
min read

Best Books on SaaS Metrics Every Startup Owner Should Read

The importance of tracking the right metrics is crucial in the startup industry. If you measure your progress, you know how to improve your product, therefore, your business grows.

Nowadays there are dozens of online resources on how to grow a SaaS startup for beginners. In case you need more in-depth information you shouldn’t neglect the power of a traditional book.

This article reviews the five best books on SaaS metrics that will help you not only find useful and relevant ways of measuring your business, but also give valuable lessons and advice on how to run a successful startup.


Book reviews

Below you will find the list of books for startup business that is definitely worth your attention. Some of them are exclusively about the ways of measuring business progress, and others also contain valuable insights into growing a successful SaaS company. All of them are must-reads for a startup owner.

Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth

by Ash Maurya

best book on saas metrics Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth by Ash Maurya cover

Imagine you have an idea of a perfect SaaS. You study the market, learn customers' pains and needs, and create an MVP. Your next question is how to understand that your business is going to be profitable?

Scaling Lean gives a useful scheme for making a prosperous startup. The book reveals key metrics that allow for measuring the effectiveness of your project and show the product's profitability to investors. Tracking these indicators lets you influence the course of events if something fails in your business process.

Ash Maurya teaches you to:

  • estimate the feasibility of the startup business model in 5 minutes
  • identify the growth factors with a traction metric, instead of constantly monitoring the revenue statistic
  • divide your launch plan into stages and set the right risk priorities at each stage by using the 10X Staged strategy
  • set goals, find strategies to achieve these goals and test the strategies with LEAN sprints

Scaling Lean answers how to use metrics to measure the progress of your startup, helps to find a focus and teaches how to conduct effective experiments to test your business model correctly.

The essential SaaS metrics guide: how to grow your subscription business by measuring it the right way

by Leonardo Faria

best book on saas metrics  The essential SaaS metrics guide: how to grow your subscription business by measuring it the right way by Leonardo Faria cover

It is not a problem for an entrepreneur to make a good product. However, very often they don’t know how to grow their business and lift it to the next level. The Essential SaaS Metrics Guide states that you should be able to collect and analyze the relevant business data to constantly improve the product.

SaaS differs from a traditional business and requires different ways of operating with pricing, order management, metrics, and profits. Monitoring the revenue statistic is not enough to understand in which direction to move your business. Faria provides us with a clear collection of ways to measure the development of your SaaS product.

The book gives:

  • General information about the subscription-based business model. You’ll learn about the SaaS economics, distinctive features of SaaS subscription business, the change in customers’ behavior, the reason many companies shift to SaaS, and so on.
  • Faria states that cloud-based software allows you to better track the customers’ needs to provide customers with valuable updates.
  • The list of core metrics for subscription business. The book gives advice on which metric to use at different stages of your business (super early, early and growth stage). As well, it gives a full description of six key SaaS metrics plus their formulas and characteristics.

One more valuable advice from this essential saas metrics guide is:

“It’s important keep in mind that it’s crucial that you identify your key custom metrics and measure them together with the industry standard metrics.”

To sum up, this book is clear, quick to read, and is good for a basic understanding of business metrics related to SaaS companies.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

by Alistar Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistar Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz cover


Lean Analytics offers useful information on how to check the value of your startup idea, find the correct audience, make your business profitable, and let people know about it.

In their book, the authors divide business models into six categories including SaaS. They give detailed characteristics for each of them and provide the reader with appropriate metrics for each category. Also, the book introduces the lean analytics stage, explains what must be done during this stage and accompanies this information with numerous examples.

This book helps to understand how to track various important indicators. It is a clear guide for entrepreneurs on how to find a focus, set priorities and not try to improve everything at once.

Lost and founder: a painfully honest field guide to the startup world

By Rand Fishkin

Lost and founder: a painfully honest field guide to the startup world By Rand Fishkin cover


Lost and Founder is one of the best books for tech startups that reveal all the truth about launching a new project. It is a combination of a personal story with valuable start-up insights.

The author is a founder and a former CEO of Moz — a SaaS company that offers a variety of tools for running SEO campaigns. Today it is a $60 million revenue business, but it wasn’t an overnight success.

We got used to reading amazing stories about a guy who dropped out of college but had a brilliant idea and after overcoming several struggles he started a million dollar company known all over the world. Rand tells us a different story, honest, painful, but realistic.

Almost at the very beginning, the author states: “The first time you play a new video game, you’ll suck.” This statement shows the style of Fishkin's writing and his vision for launching a tech startup.

Lost and Founder is not only a personal story about the thorny way of Moz, it is a practical guide for start-up entrepreneurs. Here you can find:

  • The truth about being a startup founder (Chapter 3). A CEO’s job is more about enabling other people to complete tasks, rather than doing them yourself. As your project is growing, you will probably hire a well-qualified team (better than you are). Your task will be not to fulfill your brilliant ideas, but to make sure other people do everything correctly. That’s not so romantic and more about troubleshooting.
  • An honest look at pivoting. (Chapter 4) Very often shifting to a new strategy is viewed as a panacea in case of failure in the start-up’s strategy. Fishkin says that if you managed to achieve at least some progress in what you do, it’s better to stick to your plan and not to pivot.
  • Sources of fundings and ways of making money (Chapter 6,7,8). These chapters tell how to search for sources of financing, how to get them, and what to do with the money once it is in your hands. As well, you can find very valuable information about the venture capital business mode in these chapters.
  • Discussion of SaaS metrics (Chapter 9, 17). The book doesn’t give you a list of top ways to measure the progress of your business, but there is plenty of useful advice on how you do it.

Here is an extract from Lost and Founder:

“Pro Tip: If you have any type of subscription or recurring revenue, make sure you measure LTV (Lifetime Value—the total revenue customers spend during their relationship with your firm) by referral source(s) and by the number of visits prior to conversion. If your stats look like Moz’s, you’ll probably want to adopt a similar, slow-burn conversion process.”
  • Advice on when to sell a startup (Chapter 13). There are plenty of stories when popular businesses denied the million-dollars offers, decided to stay independent and eventually built a world-changing corporation. Rand Fishkin gives an honest view of selling a startup.

Lost and founder gives a realistic look at what is actually happening when you start a tech company. There isn’t one separate chapter completely dedicated to metrics, however, you can find them discussed alongside with other valuable lessons.

From impossible to inevitable

By Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin

From impossible to inevitable By Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin book cover
From impossible book on SaaS metrics
Image credit: Amazon

Every entrepreneur dreams of increasing their income fast and efficiently spending minimum time. Is growing twice or even five times larger possible for a startup?

The authors believe that it is not only possible but doesn’t require luck or unbelievable efforts. They say you need to follow the template that was created based on the fastest-growing companies’ experience.

From impossible to inevitable is a guide in marketing and sales that discusses real cases of both the author’s success and growth strategies of well-known organizations (Zenefits, Salesforce, EchoSign).

The book gives you a template of growing your business that can be divided into seven parts:

  • Be the best in your niche. From impossible to inevitable recommend to find a specific issue and become the best in solving it. It’s better to satisfy one type of client rather than try to be good for everyone.
  • Constantly generate leads. The book divides leads into three types and gives advice on how to generate each of them. Create a marketing strategy, use the right metrics, and monitor customer satisfaction rates to attract more customers.
  • Improve your sales system. As the company becomes larger, more problems occur. It is better to make money not from small, but from solid deals. Ross and Lemkin recommend finding a good sales director and expanding your sales team to increase the size of your deals.
  • Make your customer buy more. A good way to increase the profit is to sell each customer more than once.
  • Get ready for trouble. Startups are always about difficulties. From impossible to inevitable states that an entrepreneur should be prepared for troubles and understand that it takes time to become successful.
  • Hire dedicated employees. If you want to grow your business, you should find an initiative team that is passionate about their job.
  • Motivate yourself and do your best at work. Remember that everything is in your hands.

The authors guide you on each of seven steps and tell how to put them in practice. Of course, in this detailed guideline, you will find useful information on SaaS metrics.

To sum up

Monitoring the right metrics helps to examine your financial performance and shows the real overall state of your business. Metrics can explain to your team members what factors are important for the company growth and how to achieve business goals.

We hope the above list will become an effective solution for your business growth strategy.

In case you’ve already read a lot of information on this topic but still struggle to apply the techniques in practice, think about asking a professional for help. Read about the growth product manager.

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