SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How my shift from SaaS to SaaS+ moved retention from 74% to 107%
14 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What is the significance of SaaS Plus in improving retention rates?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Please welcome Erica Olson to the stage. Hi, everybody.
Oh, it's so fun to be here. I have learned so much. So big shout out to the Founder Path team. I know we all feel the same way. Erica Olson from OnStrategy. I am going to share how we started our SaaS journey, blew it up, and started all over again. So I've been at this for a little while. Before I go too far, though, just what we do. My company's name's on strategy. We build strategic plans.
We translate those strat plans into OKRs. And then we manage the quarterly performance cycle against those OKRs. So that's what we do. It's always really interesting to explain that. The world of OKRs has just blown up sky high since we've been a business. So it's nice that there's enough fluency around that now. Our competitive landscape is massive. So we'll talk a little bit about that as well.
Our ICP is fundamentally organizations that have to have a strategic plan, people that have funders, nonprofit boards, or government institutions. So that's what we do. In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk a little bit about how we blew up our model and why we did, what our SaaS Plus game is all about, and how we keep our customers and some warning signs.
As I was thinking about our presentation and kind of restructuring it a little bit as I was listening to all of the good talks earlier today and yesterday, a lot of what I'm going to share is unconventional. It's working for us. I don't know if it'll work for you, but take what you can and leave what doesn't work. So here we go. So here's the magic slide. It looks like that.
All of our slides look like that. What's not on this slide is the bar chart before 2017. So we grew a SAS DIY model up to about 1.2, 1.5 million. And we had churn, or we had a retention of about 70%, pretty high churn. We couldn't change it. We couldn't fix it. We couldn't retain any more customers. We threw everything we knew at it.
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Chapter 2: How does the guest define their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. So how do we sell SaaS Plus?
Chapter 3: How did the guest transition from a DIY model to a SaaS Plus model?
This has been, again, quite a journey for us. Maybe like all of you, I could pepper the walls with all my different pricing pages. We stopped doing that. We do not have a pricing page anymore. So I'll talk about that in just a minute. But here's how we land our ICP. We are vicious with our inbound. We only do inbound. Andre, maybe I'll talk to you about that.
We don't do any outbound because selling strategy in OKRs is like selling a root canal, so we stopped doing that. It doesn't work for us, at least not yet. So we built a really, really robust inbound, predictable inbound engine. So those are monthly numbers for us. That might not look very big, but our Annual contract value is about 30K, so we're pretty happy with that.
Our specific metric that we drive towards is our 20 MQLs. That means a call held, I have to say. Shout out to Chili Piper. We just converted to them and we doubled
last week our number of calls held so we're still working on dialing in the qualification on that but that's okay it's pretty awesome so i'm super excited about that anyways and that's our conversion path there so you can see uh pretty good pretty predictable uh pretty healthy No paid, we don't do any paid.
And I guess maybe the hack and the takeaway for those of you that are driving an inbound content strategy is producing content's easy. We are producing content, all of us, all of the time. Producing low in the funnel content that converts is something that we shifted to and that was a big unlock for us. It might be obvious, it wasn't obvious to us.
So anyhow, and we have brutal qualification because we have one salesperson, so. Yeah, all-in-one pricing. This is also one of the unconventional things that we did. We got rid of the pricing page. We're selling strategy. So selling like $399, $499, $599 was not in alignment with the value of what we're selling.
So we got rid of it and we said, great, if you want to buy from us, you're going to talk to us and we're going to solution sell to you. So that's what we do. That's why we really focused on calls held with our ICP. It's all unlimited users. We don't sell per seat. And the reason that we did that is because when we deploy OKRs, the more people that have OKRs, the better off we are.
Why would we put a pricing barrier up in front of our customers? So unlimited users, yes, we did the analytics on that so that the pricing covers like 80% of what the value price would have been anyways if we were doing per seat selling. And quite frankly, it makes the administrative side a lot easier. And then we embedded the services. There's no question. We don't ask you if you want services.
We don't ask you if you want an add-on. If you want to buy from us, it's software and services. That's how we sell it. So here is our pricing. This is our model. We just landed on this. We just changed to this. We do quarterly automatically renewed offerings.
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