🏴☠️ ⚡️ Issue #10: Sprint No. 1 Wrap (Day 0 to 30)
Welcome! This newsletter is dedicated to acquiring and operating Micro SaaS firms. Join us every other Saturday morning for deal analysis, operating frameworks / templates, and other musings...
Our 1st month of operating acquisition ☝️ is in the books!
Moving forward, every other issue of this newsletter will provide a performance report for the respective month. Here’s what we’ll cover:
🥅 BY THE NUMBERS — Traction against our weekly scorecard
🤘 EXECUTION & HIGHLIGHTS — Through the lens of our 30 & 60-day OKRs
🚧 LEARNING & CALIBRATIONS — Macro learning lessons and beyond
Are we missing anything?
As always, feedback is welcomed and sincerely appreciated :)
🥅 BY THE NUMBERS
WEEKLY SCORECARD:
In general, we are pretty thrilled with the scorecard results - screenshoted below. This is the last time you will see a manual representation of our scorecard. Systems > data capture > real time analytics and we’ve done all of the foundational work to achieve the appropriate visibility (e.g. the tip of the iceberg).
Churn has maintained steady state; elite retention is our number one priority.
New trail signups (our existing funnel) is performing okay, given it is purely organic today with no investment.
We have big plans to improve the percentage of trail users that achieve ‘onboarded,’ though we are pleased with the existing base rate.
Our trial-to-paid conversions are solid (measured against comparable benchmarks). Though as noted above, we expect this to improve a lot in subsequent weeks as we pour energy into the onboarding mechanics and getting users to the ‘aha moment'. If our work is effective, this conversion rate is a lagging indicator and will soon show results.
There was a steady drip of new paying users, keeping our net customer base very stable. No complaints here
Support tickets were also generally stable, maintaining the responsive, human touch once the seller has fully transitioned is a key risk and mission critical for us.
GROWTH:
MRR: 6.94%
PAID USERS: 7.93%
Disclaimer: The numbers above provide an inflated view of growth. We transitioned our payment platform to Stripe ~60days ago and our downstream analytics (Profitwell) are unable to distinguish a new customer from an existing customer who has made their first transaction on Stripe. Thus, much of the MRR and User growth is a function of existing customers hitting Stripe’s radar. By Weds (4/5), our CRM (Hubspot) will be fully live and established as the core system of record, consolidating firmographic, commercial, behavioral, and product usage data. Expect 100% accuracy here moving forward..
🤘 EXECUTION & HIGHLIGHTS
Please note: you may notice the OKRs below are not totally consistent with those we shared in the initial deal announcement. This is a reflection of how our thinking has evolved since then as a function of more perfect information and time behind the wheel.
— OKRs: FIRST 30 DAYS
Objective: Define / Execute Onboarding Quick Wins
KEY RESULTS & HIGHLIGHTS:
✅ Conduct Primary Research - via survey and live interviews to uncover the answer to our most pressing question ‘when you signed up for PORTFOLIO COMPANY, what was the #1 thing you were trying to accomplish?’ Turns out, we can say with 95% confidence our users sign up to: send an invoice, book clients, and convert leads. Understanding the order of those priorities is a different challenge. Our conclusions will translate directly into how we sequence / guide user onboarding / activation.
✅ Remove friction from account creation: auto select the base pan for new trail users and punt plan selection until after trial; reduce to 14 days; refresh pricing visualization to accelerate comprehension and reduce ‘paradox of choice’.
✅ Demo Environment: Establishing a squeaky clean demo environment is a VERY high leverage activity because it speeds up your ability to communicate the product, create new support content down the road, etc. Highly recommend prioritizing this early so activities like ‘how to X’ user guides don’t hit a brick wall when you need a visual aid.
✅ Definition of ‘onboarded’ and technical steps: this is another VERY high leverage activity that will guide a wide range of activities early on (e.g. in-app guides, email drip campaigns and support article). What is the most important outcome for a trial user and what are the technical steps (aka every click) involved with getting to that outcome?
Objective: Implement Operational Tech Stack
KEY RESULTS & HIGHLIGHTS:
✅ Implement Hubspot CRM: to establish a system of record (SOR), with consolidated and enriched customer profiles to essentially accelerate every aspect of the business (Think: checking Hubspot vs checking: Stripe, Product Control Panel, etc.).
✅ Implement Innertrends: for visibility into product usage, and behavior tracking against our onboarding technical steps and goals / milestones. ‘You can only improve that which you measure.’
✅ Implement Hubspot Marketing: for visibility into buyer journeys (traffic, channels, etc.)
✅ Implement Hubspot Support: to position us for the pending sunset of Zendesk, in the interest of consolidating systems and data integrity
✅ Implement Hubspot Knowledge Base: to host a full re-hual of support content, and again, consolidate tech stack vendors / systems
Objective: Refresh Brand Identity / Style Guide
KEY RESULTS & HIGHLIGHTS:
✅ Launch design contest on 99Designs: as Dalio contends, ‘model nature wherever you can.’ Nothing like a design contest to crowd source creative work, for natural selection to then provide a winner amongst the crowd.
✅ Finalize Brand Style Guide: this is a critical asset, as it basically provides guard rails / communicable direction and standards for all creative work moving forward. This enables you to bring in 3rd parties and outside resources for select activities as needed (e.g. email marketers) without the typical tradeoffs (loss of brand consistency and voice, etc.)
— OKRs: FIRST 60 DAYS
Objective: Refresh User Onboarding
KEY RESULTS & HIGHLIGHTS:
✅ Define 5x onboarding goals and their respective technical steps: upon defining the definition of ‘onboarded’ (aka the time a trial user first senses value or ‘the brand promise’), you can consider how this first steps fits into the context of the broader onboarding journey to then define the technical steps and build resources to guide / support users accordingly across channels.
✅ Create support content to guide a user’s journey toward goals (via Scribehow): we must assume a need to reinforce user direction across channels (e.g. in app cues, email drips) and that many users will get hung up as they go. Instead of chipping away at the same predictable support tickets, let’s invent the wheel once (1x support article) and direct traffic accordingly. This is a very high leverage activity.
Objective: Establish Customer Support Function
KEY RESULTS & HIGHLIGHTS:
✅ Write foundation for Customer Support Manual & SOPs: We started by establishing a consistent vocabulary (a notion table with common terms and definitions) and there was an observable improvement / acceleration in communication . We then established basic SOPs (e.g. how to access a user account, how to upgrade / downgrade an account) to strip the thinking out of these activities. We also established standards for escalating technical tickets and time-to-resolution base rates.
✅ Establish baseline NPS: Again, in the interest of base rates and ‘measuring what you hope to improve,’ we included an NPS as the main CTA in our new owner / CEO announcement. This was without question our most productive primary data harvesting exercise; in addition, it reaffirmed PORTFOLIO COMPANY is held fondly in the hearts of the vast majority of users.
✅ Analyze Zendesk Historical Support Tickets: Our first order of business was to categorize tickets by class (e.g. How To; Technical Issue; Feature Request; Bug; Sales Question) and module (e.g. Contracts & Proposals, Booking & Scheduling) to uncover where the tickets are concentrated. ChatGPT, specifically Promptloop is your best friend here. The screenshots below detail our findings. This provides invaluable direction re where to focus support content (mostly technical issues / how to’s > start with invoicing and payments), while identifying quick wins for product…
✅ Analyze NPS Survey: the efficacy of NPS surveys depends on who you ask but it’s a simple-to-implement and familiar method to establish a base rate. Anything north of 50 is considered very solid (SaaS firms with ~50 NPS scores: HubSpot, Asana, Zoom, Slack) so we’re happy with this as a point of departure. Most importantly, it created a dialog with out most engaged customers and provided critical inputs to our plans for refreshed customer support infrastructure and the product roadmap.
Top 3 Positive Feedback:
PORTFOLIO COMPANY made my life a lot easier running my business! Everything is automated and that frees up a lot of my time, allowing me to focus on my craft (literally our brand promise)
The learning curve can be challenging but the functionality and customization is the best you’ll find.
Customer service is excellent. The SELLER is very responsive and thoughtful.
Top 3 Negative Feedback:
The user interface of PORTFOLIO COMPANY is dated and needs a refresh.
We need better tooling to customize / brand client-facing features (e.g. inquiry forms, proposals)
The reporting and analytics would be more useful with customized reporting and better import / export capabilities, in addition to integrations with accounting tools
🚧 LEARNING & CALIBRATIONS
⬇️ Headcount = ⬆️ Alignment & Communication (aka Speed)
FTEs and headcount literally translates to weight you must pull and lead toward a desired outcome. I’d take 2x digital warlords over 30 associates. Said another way, find 1x person that punches like 15x. These individuals are hard to come by, but Micro SaaS’ very essence is a magnet for this profile. This essentially sets up to be a win win win (less headcount > easier alignment / fewer communication nodes > better performance > operating leverage / business impact). Without question, the prospect of lean operating models with a few, high output performers was one of my greatest draws to this game. After a month in the saddle, I can tell you the alignment and pace of execution is phenomenal. In a more traditional SaaS context, I would have been happy with our 30 day output over the course of an entire quarter. Imagine a world where you could connect every activity with a business objective and provide raw visibility across the business... Micro SaaS baby, lez go.
Fractional Teams = Execution bottleneck
At the risk of contradicting myself, it’s not all roses and fractional teams are a reality of our operating model right now. This is a great solve for the talent predicament typically associated with Micro SaaS (no cash flow to pay top talent!), though it does create throughput friction. In our future state, the hope is to bring the squad on full-time, fractionalized across our small portfolio (vs fractionalized across a wide range of consulting engagements). The pros still far outweigh the cons. I am super clear on how our model evolves to achieve greater performance.
Build from scratch > Repurpose / Make the best of what’s there
Woof, I feel there where areas where I lacked discipline and fell victim to basic rookie mistakes. I asked ‘how do we make the most out of all this legacy support content?’, when the much better question was ‘what content do we need to support our new onboarding sequence?’ I was trying to take advantage of what was there, instead of defining what it is we need to do to get where we want (and happy days if we can draw from something that already exists).
Quick wins > Totally flushed game plans
Execution is 👑. We view activities through the lens of impact and operating leverage. Out of the gate, the hope is to find things that require low effort and have the potential for high impact. For example, instead of a full pricing refresh, let’s simplify / improve how pricing is visualized and communicated today. With that said, we do need a thoughtful view on the milestones associated with refreshing pricing, but only to the level of depth that allows us to uncover quick wins that are generally in service of the big picture. If you spend all day flushing out long-term plans, you miss the boat for quick action that yields solid result now. We must continue to ask ‘what are the quick wins here?’ Is execution of that quick win counter to the general vision for this domain / stage / whatever?