Blue Horizon’s reading list is a curated collection of articles for SaaS founders and management teams. We are entrepreneurs and operators who have lived through the process of founding and scaling software companies. Here are the articles and resources we found useful this week.
The Silent, Lurking Churn: Activation Rates Less Than 90%
by Jason Lemkin, saastr.com
The best way to grow your revenue in SaaS is to keep the revenue you do have. That’s the magic of compounding revenue. And the simplest way to make that happen is to make sure all your customers go live as soon as possible…It took me a little while to see activation rates as literally one of the 3-4 most important metrics in SaaS, but it probably is. I started to track activation rates at a lot of start-ups I work with, and I saw numbers that shocked me. I often see 60% or so activation rates 30 days in.
How to Tackle Investment Data Management and Content Automation Initatives in Tandem
by Synthesis Technology
Three steps to tackling the data management problem while keeping content automation goals moving
1 – Start with the biggest thorn
2 – Build a scalable model
3 – Choose smart and adaptable endpoint tools for the data
Firms should be willing to ask themselves – and their vendor partners and peers – what can be skipped or simplified without measurably hindering progress.
Customer Education & Its Best Practices
by ChurnZero
Without customer education, your customers don’t know how your products work, and they don’t know how to use them to best address the problems they need to solve. It’s important that the time between when your customer first encounters or adopts your product and when they experience the value your product can bring is as short as possible.
The Sales/Marketing Expense Ratio
by Dave Kellogg, kellblog.com
In a world where sales has more political power, better negotiating skills, and more negotiating leverage than their marketing colleagues, the somewhat natural state of affairs is for this ratio to slowly increase over time. The question is: should it? Everyone on the e-team needs to take accountability for thinking about that and ensuring the company gets the right, not just the easy, answer. And the CMO has the unique responsibility of ensuring they do.
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