✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your saas

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[bite-sized case studies]

ACTIVATION

1) Give more of your product to get feedback of your best users

Twitter tweet

 Growth tactic by Pierre de Wulf

COMMUNICATION

2) Appeal to emotions

Growth tactic by Andrea Bosoni

ACQUISITION

3) do things that don’t scale

Growth tactic by Eli Rubel

ACQUISITION

4) piece of advice

Enjoyed this conversation on reddit, here is the TL;DR

• distribution is more important than the product

• a good product will most likely fail if no one knows about it.

• start really small, you will think big later.

• solve a goddamn problem and people will come

read the post here.

🛠 TOOL OF THE WEEK

This indiehacker built this cool tool with real time stats (suchs us most users) for subreddits.

If reddit is one of the channels worth give it a look

r/SaaS

✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your saas

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[bite-sized case studies]

PRICING

1) pricing & business models

One of the most interesting growth levers you can experiment with is pricing.
It has an immediate impact on your bottom line and cashflow.

But, you need to make it work with your business model 

This week I talked with a founder who explained he decided to remove monthly plans and have only annual. This is because some users will use their product occasionally and turn on the subscription only when they needed (just one or two times in a year)

He said to me: “I’m not interested in serving this customers, so I switch all my plans to annual”.

Now the focus is on the right place.

You can do this in many ways. See how Jason did it for his hosting company:

Twitter tweet

 Growth tactic by Jason Cohen & Steven Cohn

RETENTION

2) friendly reminder of what monthly churn rates cost you in revenue each year:

Growth tactic by dirk salhmer

BUSINESS MODELS

3) rephonic’s playbook

growth tactic by james potter

ACQUISITION

4) round of experts

seems legit.

I’ve had similar success with this kind of approach.

growth tactic by nxusnetwork

🛠 TOOL OF THE WEEK

I recently started doing some customer interviews and found this awesome tool for recording, taking notes and getting AI summaries.

It also shows the speaking time during the calls, an smart and subtle way to make shut the f*up! 😇

free plan is super generous and more than enough for most cases.

✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your saas

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[bite-sized case studies]

GROWTH

1) growth teams and their focus

The first growth team and scaled teams are not the same.

If growth teams were superheroes, the first team would be Batman, constantly improvising in the heat of battle, while scaled teams are more like Iron Man—still adaptable but with way more tech and resources at their disposal.

The first growth team is purely an experimentation team—nothing more.

- They don't own any surface areas.
- They focus on underperforming areas to drive business performance.
- They can change metrics mid-week.
- Their process is exclusively anchored in experimentation.
- They operate by seeking forgiveness, not permission.

This ‘Growth team as firefighters’ approach often makes them one of the highest-leverage groups in the organization. This team typically includes a PM, one or two engineers, and a data person.

In contrast, a scaled team:

- Has pods centered around growth metrics: acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention.
- Owns specific surfaces.
- Experiments but stays bound to their pod’s metric.
- Succeeds through integration and influence within the organization.
- Owns self-serve experiences and revenue.

These growth pods usually consist of a PM with a 1:7 engineer ratio, along with design and data resources, plus dedicated marketing resources where applicable.

Growth tactic by Elena Verna

GROWTH

2) growth as engineering

hey saas folks! 👋

we're cooking up something new here:

→ we see growth as an engineering problem (because, well, it is)
→ we've got a team of software engineers, data science, and biz savvy people
→ we're hungry (for success, but also literally - we work through lunch)

we're itching to chat with:

1) saas scale-ups with all the fancy analytics, events, and metrics in place, but struggling to turn those numbers into cold, hard cash

2) saas up-and-comers who know they need all that data stuff but haven't quite figured out how to set it up yet

no sales pitch, just pure problem-solving fun.

curious? shoot me a message and let's talk.

reply to this email or connect with me on linkedin

FOUNDERS

3) founder mode

Last week, paul graham released a new piece about founders mode vs managers mode.

worth reading.

worth reflecting on it.

read the full article

ACQUISITION

4) Which bootstrapped SaaS companies are best at SEO?

Tim Soulo and Ryan Law had to trawl through many thousands of SaaS companies and pull data from multiple sources to answer this question.

...which resulted in a pretty interesting chart you can see below.

Why "bootstrapped" though?

Well, because bootstraped companies don't have millions of dollars and hundreds of employees to throw at the problem of growing their search traffic.

So each company on this list is a great target to study and learn from!

Growth tactic by Tim Soulo

79+ SaaS retention techniques

Todays resource is bring to you by Optiblack

📬 SUGGESTION BOX

✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your SaaS

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[Bite-sized case studies]

RETENTION

1) Reducing churn by just 25% can lead to a growth in profit by as much as 85%

Let’s walk through it:

→ Let's assume that your business currently has 1,000 customers and each customer spends $100 per month, resulting in $100,000 MRR.

1,000 X $100 = $100,000 monthly revenue

Reducing churn by 25%, you will retain an additional 250 customers each month.

Assuming each customer has an average lifetime value of $1,200, the total additional revenue you can generate from these retained customers each year would be $3.6M

250 customers/month x 12 months/year x $1,200/customer = $3.6M

RESULT: Reducing churn by 25% has the potential to increase your annual revenue by $3.6 million!

While oversimplified, this example highlights the significance of churn mitigation in today's landscape.

✅ Prioritize customer success by offering personalized support and tailored solutions to build trust and foster a long-lasting relationship.

✅ Monitor customer behavior to identify early signs of dissatisfaction or disengagement and intervene early.

✅ Provide flexible pricing and plans that allow customers to scale up or down as needed.

✅ Offer ongoing training and education to empower customers and strengthen the partnership

✅ Seek and encourage customer feedback. Take action on their input to identify areas for improvement to address immediately.

 Growth tactic by Evan Hughes

ACTIVATION

2) Make onboarding your top priority

• Week 1 retention: Can you get your users to use your product more than once?

• Mid-term retention (weeks 2-4): Can you establish any pattern of usage?

• Long-term retention (weeks 4+): How does your product become an indispensable tool?

Most companies put more effort into improving long-term retention—but it turns out that improving early retention through better onboarding cascades into the rest of your customer life cycle, creating ongoing retention gains.

Dan’s efforts to improve the onboarding experience at HubSpot’s now-defunct Sidekick product drove up first-week retention by nearly 15%. What’s more interesting, though, is that those effects continued indefinitely. At week 12, those initial improvements had boosted retention from roughly 15% to over 25%—an improvement of over 60%.

So how can you improve your onboarding and see similar results in your own SaaS? Margaret Kelsey over at Appcues lists some best practices:

✅ Know your customers. Understand the job customers are “hiring your product” for, and frame your onboarding around achieving that success.

✅ Identify your aha moment, and get users there fast.

✅ Map out and benchmark the user journey. Design a path to guide them through key features that help them achieve their goal.

✅ Continue educating users, even after onboarding. Provide tips, training, and education so customers get the most out of the product.

Growth tactic by Dan Wolchonok & Margaret Kelsey via paddle.

RETENTION & REVENUE

3) Closing the feedback loop

– How should you respond when customers request a feature?

My suggestion is to talk with your customers, and this is a great excuse for doing so. Plus, your customer feels heard, which encourages them to offer more feedback in the future.

But don’t stop there.

Once the feature is developed, reach out to the customer who requested it to tell them about its release.

Now your customers are participating in the roadmap, and most importantly, they are aware of it!

From there, you can grant them beta access to those features and try to get additional feedback from them.

Growth tactic by Mariano Martene

Posthog Handbook

The PostHog Handbook is like an open playbook. It gives you a peek into how they work, make decisions, and grow the team.

Whether you're curious about their culture, product development, or just want to know how they roll day-to-day, this handbook has the inside scoop.

Check growth & marketing sections

🛠 TOOL OF THE WEEK

I just learned that DuckDuckGo has made the most popular LLM models available for free and with privacy. Really useful.

PS: Great comeback, don’t you think? Interesting repositioning idea, at least.

📬 SUGGESTION BOX

✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your SaaS

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[Bite-sized case studies]

PRICING / ACQUISITION

1) Hike pricing strategy while driving urgency

A 'Price Hike' strategy is a simple yet brilliant approach to drive urgency and reward early birds.

Start with a lower price point and increase it incrementally after every few sales.

But the best part is how.

Here's how Steph Smith did this with her Internet Pipes course:

→ Price started at $30,
→ Price hike of $20 for every 20 sales
→ Price currently at $310

For a total of 607 sales! (and climbing fast)

It makes it feel like you need to get it now, or else you'll miss a huge opportunity. It works also for testing your pricing and build some authority on the process. Brilliant 👏
 

Growth tactic by Steph Smith

ACQUISITION

2) Warm users before emailing them -aka Pretargeting

You spent hours building email lists for cold outreach, wouldn't it make sense to make good use of this?

They’re your ICP after all.

The idea is to warm prospects up to your product before sending the cold emails.

You can upload your list of emails and create Custom Audiences for Facebook, X and Linkedin.

Be careful with ad fatigue, What has worked best for me is:

1) Free Lead Magnets (valuable content)
2) Consumable & actionable content (short format / social selling)
3) Memes (no kidding🤷‍♂️)

Bonus: Try experimenting with lookalike audiences from your best email lists.

EXPANSION

3) Proof that you can build a $1M saas in ANY category

Bonus: check the comments (link below) for a list of 50 vertical SaaS

This is not a growth tactic, but it will serve as an introduction to the ‘Resource’ that you will find below in this newsletter.

In this post, you will find a collection of 50 vertical SaaS. They all did the same:

• Identify an underserved market segment.

• Examine where current solutions fall short and develop a product specifically designed for that target audience.

• Avoid wasting resources on recreating standard features (such as billing, subscription management, or CRM)

But most of all, they….

→ went like crazy on addressing unique challenges within their chosen market.

Growth tactic by Pat Walls

The Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project

This is a long read from a VC that focuses exclusively on vertical SaaS.

It’s full of case studies and explains the way they have grown many vertical SaaS by expanding into niche market and through the value chain.

Super interesting reading and might give you new ideas on how to grow your company 🧠.

Learn how to win your category, expand your offerings, and extend through the value chain with strategic insights and practical examples

Vertical and SMB SaaS aren’t just great businesses; they can be incredible platforms that can achieve a high market share percentage, and enjoy network effects.

1) Win the Category:

• Picking Your Market

• Control Points 2.0

• Truths About Vertical SaaS

2) Expand Offerings:

• Multi-Product Opportunity

• Multi-Product Getting Started

• Payments

• Payroll

• Insurance

3) Extend through the value chain:

• Patterns of Extension

• Supplier Extensions

• Employee Extensions

• Consumer Extensions

• Marketplace Take Rates

• Industry Transformation

By David Yuan 

🛠 TOOL OF THE WEEK

If you're a founder or do growth, you likely spend a lot of time working with calculations, forecasts, and models.

These models are essential as they provide a playground to interact with and imagine scenarios.

Typically, this work is done on spreadsheets, but they can be messy, hard to understand, and not everyone can follow them easily. Until now….

Enter Decipad. The tool that will change the way you present numbers. Think of it as a note-taking app, similar to Notion, but with real-time calculations.

It's something I've been craving for a long time, and I just got into my hands to begin playing with it, and it feels quite good! I'm confident you'll love it too.

📬 SUGGESTION BOX

✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your SaaS

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[Bite-sized case studies]

REFERRAL

1) Reduce up to 30% of your churn with a cancellation Flow

Implementing a cancellation flow could be one of your fastest ways to reduce your churn and improve your product.

It’s a combination of retention tactics (many of which I shared in this newsletter) that will allow you:

• Avoid or deflect cancellations → compound effect on $MRR

• Gather valuable feedback → build a better product

Usually triggered by users clicking a “Cancel Subscription” button.

All large tech companies have their own cancellation flows. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Adobe, LinkedIn, Canva, Miro etc.

I’ve included some flows at the end (see Resources section) for you to get inspired in case you want to do it yourself.

Often, engineering teams are better focused on building your product. If that’s your case, I've got good news for your:

I can implement this for your SaaS in exchange for a little feedback. 

Just send me an email at mariano@saas-hq.com with the subject “Cancellation Flow” and I’ll send you more info.

METRICS

2) All your SaaS metrics connected across layers

I often see a lot of visuals about SaaS metrics. But this one nailed. Either you’re the founder or in growth, you need to work and connect all the layers at the same time.

Connect the dots

Growth tactic by Toni Hohlbein 

FEEDBACK

3) Talk to your customers

They tell you to talk to your customers but no one tells you that unfortunately most of your customers are unresponsive.

In my experience I get the best results by keeping it simple like if you’re writing a message to a friend.

One word subject line. A couple of sentences. One ask.

Most people want to be helpful as long as you don’t ask them to read and reply to a wall of text with lots of questions.

Growth tactic by Andrea Bosoni

Top Cancellation Flow Examples

Breakdown of top cancellation flows that B2B and B2C companies are using. Free & ungated.

A great cancelation flow can supercharge your retention.

Resource by Aakash Gupta

📬 SUGGESTION BOX

✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your SaaS

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[Bite-sized case studies]

SEO

1) Find most of the question-based searches done to show your site in the SERPs.

Twitter tweet

Growth tactic by Ross Stevens

SALES

2) Stop losing revenue growth to poor sales incentive plans.

Stop losing revenue growth to poor sales incentive plans.

The best salespeople in the world are motivated by money.

They don't hide from this fact, they embrace it.

They seek to sell valuable solutions to big problems.

They seek high earning potential and recognition.

They seek a brand and product that delivers on its promise.

They seek a team with shared values and culture.

Most importantly, they seek uncapped financial rewards.

A tiered commission structure is the best way to incentivize salespeople.

The concept is simple...

The higher your quota attainment, the higher your payout rate.

This changes the game from hitting or missing quota...

To a game of salespeople working their way up a monthly ladder of money.

This game breaks their achievements down into smaller buckets.

Each bucket unlocks more income, keeping them consistently motivated.

But Collin, how do you prevent reps from sandbagging deals?

(keep reading)

Growth tactic by Collin Cadmus

RETENTION

3) If you’re in PLG, this is the most important survey you can send to your customers.

If you’re in PLG, this is the most important survey you can send to your customers.

At Rows.com, our North Star product metric is Power Workspaces (3DL7): These are the number of workspaces (accounts) that use the product 3 days or more in the previous 7 days.

We pick this metric because:

■ As a productivity product, we expect our customers to use Rows multiple times a week.

■ It provides a more accurate reflection of engagement than Weekly Active Users (WAUs), being less affected by product launches, company news, or re-engagement campaigns.

■ It’s a leading indicator for ARR: more power workspaces means more people are using the product heavily, are likely happy with the product, more likely to hit the limits of the free plan and upgrade.

■ It sets a high standard.

For all these reasons, Power workspaces should always go up. When they don’t, we want to understand why.

That’s why every Monday we send a lost power workspace survey.

An email to people who were power users 2 weeks ago, but lost that ‘status’ last week, narrowed down to (non-repeated) people who went from +2 days active in the previous weeks to 0 or 1 day active in the last week.

After many iterations I find that plain-text, succinct emails works best.

There’s no link to a form, there’s no brand design, just a personal email asking for feedback. All of the responses go to my inbox, and I respond to every one of them.

I get a 3-5% response rate in the emails, and they are all incredible helpful.

Some people report bugs that we were unaware about, others give feedback about specific features we’re missing, and a few tell us that they are using the product happily but had a down week or an infrequent use case.

The best part is that the feedback comes from people who really gave the product a hard try.

They use(d) it for at least 3 days in a specific week, so we’re getting to hear from those who have a problem to solve in Rows, and who are likely to stay or come back if we do a few more things right.

I also find this feedback extremely motivating for our team, allowing us to directly address specific reasons for losing accounts and potentially win them back.

Getting anyone to reply to your surveys and getting quality customer feedback is always frustrating. With the Lost Power Workspace survey we’re finding a consistent, high-quality channel to hear from the dormant users, find commonalities between them, and get better faster.

Growth tactic by Henrique Cruz

REVENUE

4) Value first, then credit card

Something to consider about #1, is that not every product is optimised by taking payment methods before a trial.

To a certain extent, the entire model behind Google Meets is the opposite.

They’ll let you create a meeting with almost no friction, and then when your about to hit your usage cap, you’ll be able to start a trial from within the call.

Growth tactic by UX Bites

🛠 TOOL OF THE WEEK

I recently started doing some customer interviews for a new SaaS and found this awesome tool for recording, taking notes and getting AI summaries.

It also shows the speaking time during the calls, which was really helpful to keep my mouth shut 😇

free plan is super generous and more than enough for most cases.

📬 SUGGESTION BOX

✅ 1 to 3 bite-sized case studies to grow your SaaS

✅ 1 to 3 curated resources from top-notch experts

[Bite-sized case studies]

REVENUE

1) Doing what you did in your early stage phase for too long will kill 💀 your startup.

In the early stage, you fuel hyper through acquisition.
You rock a low CAC Payback and reinvest the $ in more growth.

With scale, your ARR composition changes.Most of the ARR comes from existing customers.

example:

ARR = $100M ($50M New, $50M Existing)

To maintain a 3X growth ($300M) on this composition through acquisition, you need to 5X your New ARR ($250M).

It’s not doable, especially while maintaining a low CAC Payback.

Hence, relying mainly on acquisition is no longer a viable option.

What to do?

The game has changed.

It’s about monetizing and expanding ($) your base (NRR / GRR).
AND maintaining the efficient acquisition engine.
You have to do both.

How do you expand ($) your base? More value!

The second product add-ons, new services, and additional monetization layers.

Value! Value! Value!

It’s a mindset and a strategy shift.
People tend to keep doing what’s working.
But in this case, your startup will stagnate if the switch is made too late.

Growth tactic by Eugene Segal

ACTIVATION

2) Try before buy

Love to see Grammarly implementing “try before buy” for their premium suggestions. It's such a smart move!

1️⃣ It tickles my curiosity, and I really want to tap it to see the correction. Especially the sneak peek at the bottom left corner.

2️⃣ Three free usages every 𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗬 𝗗𝗔𝗬. Not every month, or capped at 10 total. 3 every day. This costs them nothing but quickly builds the habit loop. Ideal Grammarly usage frequence is daily, and they continue pushing for that.

3️⃣ Instant gratification once I click it, I implement their corrections in 99% of the cases.

Growth tactic by Dani Pavlu

ACTIVATION

3) Top 5 activation mistakes you're probably making – and what to do about them.

⏱️ It doesn't happen fast enough.

👉 What to do: time-bound your activation metric.

We care about activation as a leading indicator of future outcomes.

Speed matters: the faster you know whether a user has activated, the faster you can get a readout on growth experiments and marketing channels.

🌈 Your expectations are too high.

👉 What to do: plan for a 20-40% activation rate. Adjust your business case accordingly.

With PLG, you'll pull in lower intent users who are self-educating on your product, but aren't ready to buy. 40-60% of new sign-ups never return to the product on a second day.

Lenny's benchmarks show a 25% median activation for prosumer SaaS and 33% for enterprise SaaS. Plan for it.

📺 You're not connecting activation with marketing.

👉 What to do: segment your activation rates by marketing source, then focus on improving this metric.

The biggest influencer on your activation rate isn't your growth team. It's your marketing team.

You'll want to measure activation by marketing source. Bonus points if activated sign-up volume is the top KPI of the marketing team.

🔮 Activation isn't predictive.

👉 What to do: measure whether improvements in activation flow-through to business outcomes. If they don't, change the metric.

Activation isn't the goal. It's the leading indicator of the goal.

Conversion, $$, retention, PQLs, etc. -- that's what you really care about. Your growth team might be laser-focused on improving activation only to find out that all of their work didn't improve business outcomes.

📏 It's one-size-fits-all.

👉 What to do: as you scale, start to segment users and personalize activation paths to different audiences.

Not all of your users are trying to achieve the same thing. So why do you push them down the same onboarding path?

Folks often focus on simplifying onboarding, reducing friction, etc., but can't crack the code on improving their activation rate. The problem: you shouldn't have only had one definition of activation.

Growth tactic by Kyle Poyar

+25 SaaS Onboarding Flows

The people from Optiblack have reviewed onboarding flows of the top SaaS products.
 
They created this Miro board to help you understand how leading SaaS companies convert faster and to help you match the common patterns in onboarding.

📬 SUGGESTION BOX