Metrics

🚩 Every fund, whether it’s Venture, Private Equity, or somewhere in between, has metric guidelines they look to when assessing an investment opportunity. These are not always hard thresholds, especially on the Venture side, where investors' primary concern is if there is product market fit. AirTree Ventures’ Andrew Yeo shared which specific metrics signal strength or red flags for them, as well the average of each metric across their portfolio. Defining what is “market” net churn is always a fun debate, and Airtree’s view is that anything below -.05% per month is terrific while -0.5% to .05% is good. 1-2% net revenue churn per month is where they start to get spooked.

🍲 We are going to stick with the topic of consumption based pricing (and food emojis) with this piece from our friends at Chargify, which shows how the pricing model isn’t just good for your NDR – it can actually be a driver of product adoption. First, it lets users try out your product with a lower cost upfront, so your conversion rates should go up givven that the pricing model is more customer-friendly than inflexible flat rates. It also should reduce churn because your customers only pay for exactly what they need and seamlessly upgrade as they increase usage, units, or whatever variable you base your pricing on. This is much smoother than forcing customers to increase a maxed out subscription mid month (a useless point of friction).

🥣 At Gainsight’s Pulse 2021 conference, SaaS advisor and consultant Dave Kellog took the stage to share net dollar retention (NDR) benchmarks and evolving trends in software metrics. Median NDR for private companies is up to 104% and the public SaaS median is 111% – both growing numbers due to NDR’s increasing impact on valuation (churn is a dead metric) and more companies adopting usage models which are ideal for growing contract value over time. He is also covers issues with the life time value (LTV) metric stemming from low or negative churn rates – for example, a 3 year old company with very little churn could show a 20 year LTV, when in reality there isn’t enough data to prove that. The full slides are available here.

🚙 You can’t define marketing success without measurement, which is why we all track simple metrics like engagements, clickthroughs, conversion rates, etc. We tend to give those easily trackable metrics a disproportionate amount of attention because simply put, we are too lazy to explore new and more challenging ones. That’s called the measurability bias, and it occurs in a wide range of areas that extend far beyond marketing and SaaS. So what can you do about it? Try to have an open mind towards less familiar metrics. They could end up being key to unlocking a new level of effectiveness in your marketing.