How do you set financial goals without negatively obsessing over them?
I've launched a few small-scale SaaS products this year in pursuit of freeing myself from the shackles 9-to-5 day job. Of those, fitIQ.io - a niche product offering awesome insight for WHOOP wearable users - is emerging as the frontrunner in terms of adoption, and is subsequently where I've been putting most of my "marketing" efforts. Scare quotes around that word because like most builders, when it comes to marketing I Have No Idea What I'm Doing.
Anyway, after very modest but increasing month-on-month growth from May-July, I did something new for August: I set myself some goals. Specifically, I set goals for how many new Pro subscribers I expected (wanted?) to hit for the month. How grown up! I thought. This must be a good thing. It's healthy to set targets and to hold myself to account.
And so, much like when I used to run the occasional race, I set myself A, B and C goals. A would be me on my best day, most likely out of reach but gotta shoot for the moon and all that. B is what I'd expect to hit. C is what I'd settle for. Go me! I've given myself concrete aims and some flex: hopefully I'll cruise to the C goal and feel great about myself when I hit the B or - maybe - even A.
Except, as the month wore on and I slipped further and further behind even the C goal, I started to get increasingly anxious. Falling behind what I had thought was a low target I should breeze by made me feel like total crap. I became more and more fixated on these user numbers, sleeping ever more badly and waking up every day hoping to see that sweet, sweet Stripe email or two. Elation when I did. Despair when I didn't. Failure looming.
In the end, partly due to an 'End of August' 20% off promo I threw together in the last week of the month, I scraped the C goal. But I had my most stressful month so far on this year and it's not one I want to repeat in September.
How do you find the balance here? I want fitIQ (and the others) to become businesses; I can't just cut them a free ride, and so I think setting them / me goals is healthy. I don't think the goals I set were unreasonable as they were based on the few months prior. But I ended up absolutely despising them and feeling like a failure for the last couple of weeks of the month.
I'd love to hear how you all do it.
Nick
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I think I am in a somewhat similar position. I'm also building a SaaS product as a side-hustle and want to turn it into a business. Started in February and gained my first paying customer end of July.
First of all, I was actually overwhelmed by getting my first paying customer. It was amazing to see, that someone I don't know actually wants to pay real money for my service. The next weeks were quite rough, as I was hardly getting 2-3 paying customers per week & my marketing activities didn't seem to work at all...
I then decided to not focus at all on the number of paying customers or revenue I made, but instead I only focused on making the product the best it could be. Spent no more thoughts on marketing or how to attract users, but instead pushed out update after update. Now I'm proud of the product, instead of the number of customers or revenue and it seems to be healthier.
And in consequence I'm now getting more than 10 new paying customers on a good day and hope to grow even more in the future. :)
Hope, this was helpful to you. :)
Are you asking how to set goals and balance them; or how to perform marketing to hit your goal?
To be realistic, since you based your goal off your previous months performance, you have to assess how the previous performance (ie number of signup) is achieved, and see if you can consistently utilise the same method to get the same / more number of signup.
If you actually have no idea about how the previous batch of signup even come from (and no clue how to do marketing), I feel that it is best for you to figure out a marketing channel that works for you first.
Every marketing channel has different cycle and take different length to see if it works. SEO could take months, while doing a 1-1 sales pitch might see more immediate result.
Goals like signups are useless if you have no idea how to achieve them, just my personal opinion. A better way is to build up a system and set that as a goal, and let the process run itself.
What I meant:
That works better in the early days.