Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] What's up, founders? And welcome to the In Demand podcast, where we talk all about how to troubleshoot growth for your PLG SaaS. I'm your co host, Asia Arangio, the CEO and founder of DemandMaven. And I'm Kim Talarczyk, client services manager at Demand Maven, where we help SaaS companies reach their toughest growth milestones.
[00:00:22] All right, Kim, let's get into it.
[00:00:26] Hey, everybody. I am super pumped to be recording this.
[00:00:31] Okay, so it's just me today.
[00:00:34] Hopefully we can get Kim on at some point to do this as well. But I had this idea. I've been watching a lot of Charlotte Dobry YouTube.
[00:00:43] This is not related to Sass at all, but I really like the style of videos that Charlotte puts out. And something that she does that I just think is really cool is she actually goes to Reddit. She goes to various forums on the Internet, and she reacts to posts that are a little bit more on the spicy side, on the salacious side. And I started thinking founders post all the time on subreddits, like the subreddit community. SaaS, like subreddit r SaaS, I think is what it's called.
[00:01:14] But I don't think I've ever just, like, looked at posts in a forum and decided to react to them or give my thoughts on them. And it's. It's also. It's doubly weird because I have been working with the Tiny Seed community and the microconf community for years. And, you know, I. I've known Rob Walling pretty much since I started Demand Maven. And it's really funny because one of the things that we do that ends up being one of the most popular pieces of content is we'll do like a Robin Asia reacts type video content. And founders will submit questions, and Rob and I, and sometimes Craig Hewlett will join as well. Um, but Rob, Craig, and I will just boom, boom, boom, answer all the questions, and it actually ends up being some of my most favorite content that I produce. And I was kind of thinking, like, I. I could just. I could also just do this. So if you like this style of content, please let me know in the comments whether it's, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn, send an email wherever makes sense for you to leave feedback.
[00:02:22] I don't think Spotify supports Spotify. Spotify might support comments either way. If you like this style of content, please like and subscribe and comment below.
[00:02:34] Okay, I have a few posts pulled up. We are going to dig into a few of them. I have not read all of them. I wanted to make sure I kept all of my feedback, my gut reactions as pure as possible and okay, okay, okay. Good things happened when I decided to stop building and focus on marketing.
[00:03:00] I already have a feeling I know where this is going.
[00:03:02] Okay, good things happened when I decided to stop building and focus on marketing.
[00:03:08] This photo is from my striped dashboard. Here's the story.
[00:03:13] Marketing is something that's always been really hard for me. I think it's because deep down I'm kind of a perfectionist and I want to make sure my product is ready for prime time before putting it out there. But the more you build, the more you realize that it's never really ending. And the goal posts are always moving for one reason or another.
[00:03:29] And so for months I just sat in my room building away something that no one knows about. I'm sure some folks out there reading this can relate, but the longer you go on without real paying customers, the less momentum you have towards your business. More than anything, it really does feel like fuel in the tank.
[00:03:45] Yes, I'm this is actually a shorter post. I'm going to go ahead and read the whole thing, but I do want to re. I want to bookmark that mentally to like react to a few things. So naturally, after months of building, I started feeling like I was losing momentum and suddenly I started feeling tempted to work on other ideas. Crazy to think that I've spent months on one thing, but my natural instinct as a builder was to work on a new project rather than sell the thing that I'd been working on.
[00:04:09] The truth is, I've been victim to that before. And so this time I decided that at the start of the month I was going to dedicate myself to actually selling what I was building. I didn't really know where to begin, so as a first step, I randomly started posting on social media about my product. The first couple of posts resulted in a modest amount of views and some nice comments, but not much else. But I decided to stick with it. Then one day I woke up and overnight I had doubled the amount of user that had signed up for my product. But then I got a paying user and then the next day another one. And then this continued faster than I could have ever imagined. I even received a DM from a VC who was interested in what I was building. We're now at the end of the month and I feel like I'm in a place now with my business that I couldn't have imagined at the start. This feels like just the beginning. And I'm excited to see where this goes. And for those who are curious, this is what I'm building. Daydream video.com TL Dr. Put your thing out there, market consistently and things can change for you really fast. Good luck. You got this. Okay. I love, love, love this post for a number of reasons. The first is because you're exactly right.
[00:05:07] Part of the process of launching and building a SaaS is the customer acquisition side. And particularly, like if you've heard me speak before, if you followed my YouTube channel or followed my podcast or consumed any of the content or anything that I've put out there, you know that I am very much a big proponent of growth beyond just marketing. A lot of founders, a lot of like the market still kind of sees us as a marketing agency, but we're actually not a marketing agency at all. We don't do any marketing execution. We work with agencies and other providers and consultants depending on what needs to happen.
[00:05:42] But what I find is there's an obsession with customer acquisition to a point in the business. And then founders need to build confidence outside of marketing, such as looking at pricing, looking at activation, looking at ux, product strategy, et cetera. There are so many other growth levers to pull and it's really important to learn how to pull them. But in the early days, when you have an mvp, when you have a really solid idea, when you've built something, you do need to pause for a minute and do marketing. Now, do marketing is a very, very, very big phrase. It's a very big phrase. It means a lot of different things, a lot of different people. But what we're truly trying to accomplish at this stage is customer acquisition.
[00:06:24] At the end of the day, you aren't going to know if you have product market fit until you start charging and until you have real paying customers, it's really, really, really hard to know what direction to go in. And in order to get paying customers, even the most minimal amount of marketing can help. Now I think what a lot of people think of whenever they hear do marketing is that you have to build this like super scaled out thing. Like you've gotta, you know, you've gotta go and hire a team, you've gotta go and pay a bunch of money on Google Ads or Reddit ads or whatever.
[00:06:57] But sometimes the best marketing can literally just be you're announcing it to your peers, you're, you're posting it in areas and places that are relevant to your audience and that can sometimes be enough. And what I Find is you can grind on like without hiring a single marketing person or a single agency pretty much until you get to like a million like a millionaire are sometimes, sometimes you do need more support before you get to that moment. But when you get to that milestone sometimes like you don't actually need to invest like a ton in marketing. You can actually go heads down and very quietly build, have marketing sprints which I find is a better.
[00:07:35] I think that's easier for founders to imagine and think of.
[00:07:39] It gets easier to kind of imagine like what a sprint looks like versus like okay, where do I continuously put my effort? I think continuous marketing investment is a little different.
[00:07:48] But marketing sprints I think are easier to, to cut a grock if that or like to, to conceive of. Because if you think about like okay, if I, if I have a sprint, let's call it a six to eight week sprint. Could be a three week sprint. Whatever you want, like whatever length of time you want the sprint to be. You can say okay, I'm going to knock out like these five to 10 or 15 things and you boom, boom, knock them out. And then you go back to building or you go back to doing whatever it was that you were doing before and then you come back and you, you, you kick off your next marketing sprint to kind of get the next batch of users. And you can literally do that until right around the million mark is where it starts to get really hard to consistently do that and to continue to scale and grow. It depends on your business. Your mileage may vary but for most businesses out there, once you get to that like million mark in ARR at least usually that's kind of where like okay, like you got to start delegating things potentially, you know, restructuring the team, et cetera. But in those very early days your first 5 camera are 10 camera 25 KMR.
[00:08:45] All you need really is this. And what I find is I think a lot of founders over complicate it. I think they overthink the marketing process. They think again they gotta do all this big stuff but you actually don't. You can actually do the marketing sprint approach.
[00:09:01] Find like I don't even wanna say a handful. We're talking like one or two channels like this founder literally like all they did was sounds like they, they posted on social media.
[00:09:13] First couple posts, got a few views, some nice comments.
[00:09:16] Obviously your mileage may vary. It really does depend on your customer and your market context.
[00:09:21] Posting on social isn't going to work for everyone. But what's important is that you are very aware and cognizant of where, of who your buyer ideally should be or could be. And you post wherever it is that they're at or you, you. That's all marketing is marketing. The only, like, the only mission and goal of marketing ultimately is to make sure that your product is in front of the right person at the right time through the channels that they actually care about. Which is why one channel does not fit all.
[00:09:52] One marketing strategy isn't going to work for everybody.
[00:09:55] It is really, really, really important that you understand like who your target buyer is. But once you do, or once you have that sense, listen, you don't have to scale something out that's like super welding crazy. So I love this post. I'm glad that this founder Twitter took the time in the space to actually kick off what I'm going to call as a marketing sprint. That's basically what they did. They, they put the product down for a bit and they focused on those things to kind of get the initial traction. This is really common. Again, it's really, really, really common. It's also really common to believe that if you just keep building and tinkering that somehow revenue will happen. You do have to put things down and do a marketing like you just do. But what's cool is it doesn't have to be wild and crazy marketing. It can be very simple actually. And you don't have to overcomplicate this. I think once founders get to like the 25kmhr or even like 60k in MRR, I find they, they tend to overcomplicate the marketing process. They try to add too many channels and it just, it burns them out like way too fast and they feel lost, they feel stuck. They're not really sure where to focus. But really, like I say grind it out until you get to a million. And when I say grind it out, like, yeah, you might do things that aren't super scalable. You might, you might only be doing one thing and that's it. And if it gets to, to a million, I think that's great. By the time, and by the time you get to that size, you'll have more budget to do more things. And not just marketing, but also like, you know, thinking about pricing, thinking about activation, stuff like that. I don't know the exact business model for this founder, but kudos to you.
[00:11:25] This is amazing.
[00:11:27] Chemical deer512i. I'm proud of you. This is great. And you know, you're not sharing any real like any. I don't Want to say like real numbers here. You're not sharing like your actual mrr, but if it continues to look like this and you have great retention long term, you're, you're going to do well. You're going to do so well for yourself. And yeah, I'm, I'm proud of you. Good job. This is a big step. Okay.
[00:11:49] Okay, we got the next one.
[00:11:53] Ooh, this is from Pabodowski.
[00:11:57] I was stuck at 150amonth for two years. One change took me to 8.6 K. MRR. Here's the honest breakdown.
[00:12:06] Ooh. Okay. I think I have a hunch, I think this is going to be about payments, but I, or like pricing. I could be wrong though, but I'm curious. Okay.
[00:12:20] Two years. That's how long I sat at 150amonth with my SaaS before anything clicked. I'm a solo founder with a full time 9 to 5. So I want to share the honest version of what finally worked, including the parts that didn't. Okay, what I'm building an AI rendering tool for architects and interior designers. You describe a space, it generates a realistic render. The space is crowded, so that's not the interesting part.
[00:12:41] An AI rendering tool for architects and okay, I'm familiar with this industry.
[00:12:45] This is an interesting industry. It's one of those industries that's like, you'd think that they would be more primed and ready for tech, but they're just as old school as like the most old school industries the world.
[00:12:58] What I find though is that because they're designers by nature and also like low key engineers by nature, they do tend to highly value super quality product. So I will say if you can make something incredible, they are, they're going to love it. Reaching them is a little tough and a little expensive. If you think about the world that these folks live in, they tend to operate in a more like these folks are targeting and appealing to the like the top 1 to 5% of earners. The world that they're in tends to be more, I don't want to say like pure luxury, but architects and interior designers, like, they tend to be more on that side of the fence. And so the way that you reach them is just going to be different. Okay, but we'll keep reading. We'll keep reading.
[00:13:43] The mistake that cost me two years.
[00:13:46] My original product used a node based system. Oh, this is going to be engineering based, tech based. Interesting. Think comfy ui. It was generally powerful and completely wrong for my audience.
[00:13:58] Architects don't want to Learn a node graph. Ah, this is a UX story. Ah, they told me directly, repeatedly, that the learning curve was too steep. I heard it for a long time before I acted on it. Lesson number one, when users keep saying the same thing, believe them sooner. Yes, yes, believe them.
[00:14:18] Believe them. They will literally tell you when something sucks. And what my thing is too is like, to be fair, customers do want to make you happy as a founder, which is why you won't always hear the most honest version of how they're feeling about something. But if someone is being honest with you and telling you, hey, this is hard to use, or hey, this kind of sucks, or hey, this isn't like what I thought it was, use that, use that like and believe them. Because if one person says it, there are probably a hundred or even a thousand more that are feeling it but would never say it to your face. So the people who would say it to your face, hold them so close. Hold them so close because they are going to, they are going to be ultimately who helps you scale grow, et cetera. Because they're going to be honest with you and you're not going to. That's a blessing. You don't get that from every customer. I've interviewed tens of thousands of people in my career running Demand me event and it's it like when you find truth tellers, you keep them very close.
[00:15:24] Okay, so lesson number one. When users keep saying the same thing, believe them sooner. I was also selling one time payments, so revenue just sat flat at a hundred to $150 per month total.
[00:15:37] The pivot. Oh, that's really interesting. So one time payments.
[00:15:42] I was also selling one. Okay, so this is a price, this is a pricing model story as well. So this is UX and pricing.
[00:15:48] So it kind of sounds like there was a monthly plan, but they also sounds like they had like a one time, like a one time payment plan. And that makes sense based off of usage. If it's too hard to use, people aren't going to use it often enough for that one time payment to be worth it. That makes sense. The pivot.
[00:16:07] Six months ago I ripped out the entire node system and rebuilt the product as a plain chat.
[00:16:12] You describe what you want in normal language, any of 140 plus languages. An assistant asks follow up questions and it builds the optimized prompt behind the scenes. No prompt engineering required. At the same time, I switched to a subscription model that took me from $150 per month to 8.6k in MRR. Yes, the marketing lever that actually mattered SEO as a solo founder with a day job, I can't do unscalable marketing. I need channels that work while I'm asleep before 30 to 50 daily visitors mostly from AI tool directories and chatgpt suggesting my site low intent under 1% conversion after I started a real blog, used ahrefs for keyword research and targeted the exact questions architects Google because my domain already had some age content ranked Fast jumped from 180 to 200 targeted visitors a day.
[00:17:01] From those visitors I now get 40 to 70 free trial signups a day 20 to 35% conversion high intent search traffic plus a product that's finally easy equals the engine behind the mrr.
[00:17:14] I'm a pause here.
[00:17:16] Yes, yes, yes, yes. You. You did exactly what you should have done, especially if you already have a full time job. I'm impressed that you found the time outside of the full time job to execute any of cause this is a lot of work and it's hard and this is the grinding that I'm talking about whenever I talk about like you're in that phase where you kind of, you just need to grind it out like you're not ready to hire anybody, you're not ready to invest or scale marketing or scale anything. You've just really gotta be super dialed into that product experience.
[00:17:47] It sounds like also you didn't have the right pricing model, which is an excellent, excellent discovery. Yes, pricing in and of itself has a huge impact on how fast you're gonna grow and also too if customers think it's valuable enough.
[00:18:02] My next question for this founder would be what's your NRR? So you've got 8.6 KNR. That's great. What does net revenue retention look like, particularly at six and 12 months? Because that will tell you more information about if you're ready to scale what you've got.
[00:18:18] Again, net revenue retention is the number if you're using ProfitWell or Stripe. There's a built in metric here for you.
[00:18:26] Like you already have this metric out of the box. But what net revenue retention tells us is how many, what percentage of revenue are we retaining over the long period of time. Monthly churn is what a lot of founders will start with, but monthly churn doesn't really tell the full story over longer periods of time. That's what net revenue retention does. It tells us what is our long term retention number and that tells us if we can afford to invest more on the customer acquisition side, if we can invest more on activation or wherever. If it's less than 70% at 12 months, you've got a business that isn't at a place where it's going to be able to handle a lot of volume quite yet because it's just going to turn everything out over like the next six months and you're going to have to spend more energy and more money to replace what you've lost because you're, it's a leaky funnel, like you're churning things out over time.
[00:19:15] But if it's more than 70%, and I would say if it's like 80 to 90%, that's a really good sign that you can, you can afford to invest more. Even 80% fee feels better and different than 70% net revenue retention.
[00:19:27] So the ultimate goal really becomes to figuring out what exactly that is. What I love about what this founder did was they focused on a channel. Now here's the thing about marketing channels. I have a podcast episode that's coming out soon, if not later. Like me talking through the top channels and my recommendations, my quick recommendations for each of them.
[00:19:49] The thing about it though is that there are really like, I would say four to five super basic marketing channels that will be largely applicable to most people, depending on give or take your LTV or like your pricing strategy. So some pricing strategies just don't allow for certain channels. If you're only charging 20 bucks a year for your product, for example, you're not gonna be able to afford to invest in conferences until you are very well scaled out and you can afford the super long term CAC basically.
[00:20:17] But when you're just starting out, you need channels that you can afford to invest in that make sense for the ROI that you're hoping to see. And that is largely dependent on your pricing model, your target audience, and the channels that they actually care about. This founder dialed into SEO pretty quickly, it sounds like, which makes sense. Like this audience searches for tools. That's not a most audiences do, except for in scenarios where you are in a software category that is like totally new or I don't want to say totally new because like nothing's actually truly new in the sun, under the sun. But like you're in a category that's adjacent and different enough that people might not think to search for a solution, but they experience the pain and the problem.
[00:20:59] So even then in that scenario you'd still target keywords that are related to the pain and the problem.
[00:21:05] What I love about what this founder did is they, they already know that they can't do unscalable, which hell yeah, that's incredible that you're aware of that. SEO is one of the most scalable channels. If you don't mind it being slow. It's one of the most scalable channels that someone can invest in. And this person literally said, I targeted the exact questions architects Google. That's exactly how you should be thinking about it. Now this is where we get into like top of the funnel versus middle of the funnel versus bottom of the funnel keywords. And what that means is like when you imagine that top of the funnel is like, these are questions that are totally unrelated to the problem that you solve, but it's something that your audience would be searching. So if I'm HubSpot, someone might be searching like how to change the colors of an email or like what's canva? Like marketers are searching that potentially.
[00:21:58] But it's so top of the funnel that anyone who's searching that it would give you a lot of traffic, but it would also give you a lot of noise.
[00:22:05] Bottom of the funnel, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna show you the polar opposite because that's. So that's more important.
[00:22:10] Bottom of the funnel would be like, I'm specifically searching for an email marketing platform that's designed for SaaS companies and can integrate with like sales and customer service or customer success.
[00:22:21] That would be, that's a long tail keyword. It's a pretty long one. But that would be an example of like something that you could target from a keyword perspective, create content around, make sure you're securing the backlinks, blah, blah, blah. All the things now that matter to the SEO search algorithms these days. Eat is another big thing that a lot of SEOs talk about.
[00:22:43] And then, then there's, of course, you know, you can certainly optimize for AI search, but when you think about like the level of keywords this founder very clearly dialed into, what's a very high intent bottom of the funnel keyword set that I can target. And this person is not full time on their product yet. So they can, they can grow and invest in, in this over the long term and see incremental gains and not get too caught up in like trying to invest into too many things at once or feeling overwhelmed. And like, just focus on the SEO piece.
[00:23:19] Now to be fair, even SEO is not something that's going to be as directly applicable to every single industry. There are definitely exceptions to the rule. There are certain industries where they, they, they don't search for tools, they don't even think to search for Tools.
[00:23:35] Maybe they search for solutions like related to the software. So like manufacturing is a really good example. They might not specifically search for like a manufacturing platform or software, depending on the context, but maybe they're searching for like, how do I fix this machine? Or like they're searching for things maybe possibly related to the software, but they might not know to search for software. So all that to say you've really got to do your research and really understand your buyer and understand what is it that they're actually doing online. That or, or even offline, possibly, if you can afford offline channels like events, conferences, things like that.
[00:24:13] But what are they doing specifically? Like, that's the, that's the most critical and important part. Okay, I'm going to get off my high horse. Okay, so what didn't work? I'm excited to talk about this.
[00:24:24] What didn't work? I tried Pinterest, Instagram, visual fields seemed obvious.
[00:24:29] Hit a hundred thousand views on Pinterest, converted into basically nothing. Yes, this is really common for organic social. So common. People saved renders to mood boards. No intent to click through eyeballs does not equal customers. I went back to high intent channels. Yes.
[00:24:45] Good job. You are thinking like a marketer. Good job, good job. The funnel that converts sign up three free renders, no credit card. Hit paywall with three tiers. The trick.
[00:24:57] Oh, interesting. So like you sign up, you get three for runners, no credit card. Okay. You hit the paywall with three tiers. Okay. Yep. Okay, so this is, this is a value metric. So the value metric here is the three free renders. The more renders you need, then you gotta pay.
[00:25:09] The trick. An automated email fires the moment they use their last free credit with a promo code catching people at peak. Demonstrated intent is the biggest conversion driver I have. The experiment I'm running right now, four days in. That no card free trial was amazing at producing signups. But a lot of them were tourists, not serious clients. Yep, and my churn rate showed it. So four days ago I A killed my cheapest plan which attracted low commitment users and B, replaced the three free renders with a seven day pro trial that requires a card upfront. Okay, the bet, fewer signups but far higher quality and lower churn. No verdict yet. I'm watching Churn closely. Sometimes the move that tanks your vanity metric is the one that fixes the real one.
[00:25:47] Honest current state SEO traffic is also dipping slightly. Right now it's a treadmill. I'm back in analytics. Refreshing content, realigning with search intent. Not set. And forget what I do differently subscriptions from day one and skip the complex architecture entirely. But the grind taught me a repeatable playbook and I'm now building a second app for different niche using the same blueprint. Happy to answer anything. Numbers to pivot the SEO side. Ask me anything.
[00:26:09] Okay, so this is kind of where a few things may or may not be true.
[00:26:16] Yes, you certainly want to attract the higher quality signups.
[00:26:22] What I find is a better model for founders at this stage in size is that they actually don't require a credit card up front. They focus instead on qualifying, pre qualifying your product led growth. So self service funnel, that was a lot of words.
[00:26:39] But what this founder is basically doing is this is all product led growth, it's all self service, meaning they don't have to talk to a salesperson to get access to the product. They can sign up for themselves and they can see if they like it or not.
[00:26:52] What would be better would be you don't have the credit card requirement, but what you do is you maybe ask them two to three most fundamental critical questions for you to know if they are qualified. Now, the only way you can know if they're qualified is by running interviews, talking to a handful of paying customers, and getting a feel for who's a serious buyer and what about them makes them serious versus maybe people who aren't as serious and who turn later based off of those insights. You're then going to adjust your product led self serve signup flow to to ask. You're just gonna ask two to three questions and I promise you, it's actually not gonna impact your conversion rate nearly as much as you're afraid it will. Every founder is always terrified of this. It never actually does. It's so common to answer like a couple of questions about yourself. You're going to use those questions to do a couple of things from the data side. You're going to use those questions to isolate your qualified funnel. Oops, sorry, I hit the mic. You're going to use that data to segment out your qualified funnel. And then simultaneously you're also going to look at your unqualified funnel, your qualified funnel on the data side. That's what you pay the most attention to. And you're going to be tracking things like their conversion rate, their churn net revenue attention, all the things that you would typically track. You're also going to track the volume, of course. Are you growing that particular, that particular segment or is it contracting? That's what you're going to stay pretty dialed into. The unqualified side.
[00:28:20] You can spend energy there. But what I find most founders do is they kind of ignore the unqualifieds and they really just stay focused on the qualifieds. The reason why is because your whole pipeline, your industry, the math might never really math. Like you might always have a kind of like a SAD activation or trial conversion rate because you're looking at all the data and not the qualified data. Look at the qualified data because that's actually the thing that's the most important.
[00:28:47] And then you've got to focus on how do you grow the qualified data, how do you, how do you grow the qualifieds? Basically that sign up, there are some metrics that we use for this. So some people call this a pql. A PQL is a good way to think about it. Other some people do consider the trial list to be an mql, but then maybe they don't become a PQL until they fill out some data about themselves and it's clear that they're qualified. Maybe they take some actions in the product. There's a number of ways that you can kind of think about slicing and dicing this, but that's how we think about self service trials and self service funnels. Because if you add the credit card, it will absolutely reduce the amount of signups.
[00:29:19] A lot of people who maybe are actually ready to enter a credit card, it's, it's going to be a smaller amount. This industry may or may not be used to this, but ultimately I would get really critical about if the friction of the credit card is actually worth it, particularly given the fact that you probably can adjust some things on your side to better understand the quality of who's coming up, who's signing up and coming into the product. I hope that makes sense. Okay. But I, I still love everything that's happening here.
[00:29:52] I love that you've listened to customers. I love that you adjusted your pricing strategy. And I love, love, love that you focus on a channel that you can actually like put energy into and that you feel good about. I agree. SEO is a treadmill. I would also be looking at how can you improve your AI. SEO, which it's AI is definitely going to be AI Search, LLM Search. It's going to be like chasing a dragon. I think in these first few years, SEO is what seems to be pretty consistent.
[00:30:20] But that's also changing. And so with, especially with more Google search overviews, like, that's completely gonna, that's totally gonna change how we think about SEO. And the needle is definitely moving for sure on what success looks like. Stay dialed into that though. I would say keep going. You're an 8k MRR now or whatever it is I imagine you're gonna be.
[00:30:40] You're going to be at the 15 and 20k mark, I would say relatively soon. The next big thing now is to be looking at how do you maintain excellent long term retention and then also how do you consistently maintain your ability to grow the customer acquisition side and then also how can you qualify people on that self service trial? Because that's what actually matters.
[00:31:03] Yeah, sure. Like you can add the credit card requirement. All that's going to do is just restrict your flow.
[00:31:08] I would say don't restrict the flow. Just adjust what data you're collecting so you can better measure the flow. And then once you're able to better measure the flow, you can make more informed decisions without cutting off a whole part of the market that just isn't ready to enter credit card. Because like, why should they have to? There are too many SaaS companies out there that don't require it. It's just an extra friction step that I don't think is actually going to make sense for you. Especially if you don't know how they actually buy. Especially if you don't know like who is actually coming in and you haven't done like a deep research dive into understanding their behavior.
[00:31:38] But overall, I like it. Cool. All right. I don't know if this was fun or not, but it was fun for me.
[00:31:46] I had fun. I think I'm gonna do it again. All right. I love both of these stories and I'm excited to cover some, some additional ones. Okay, thanks again, y'. All.
[00:31:55] Bye.
