What metrics/docs are imperative to have in your business?
Hi all, I am super curious how everyone structures their business and how/what you track and find necessary to have in place.
What metrics do you need to have in place that you deem important to run your business successfully?
What do you track in the early stages? For example, do you track financials, churn, do you develop SOPs or other documents?
Do you have policies in place like onboarding or HR etc.?
For any SaaS business, a profitable customer success strategy starts from choosing the right customer success metrics.
Here, we have composed a list of 16 useful metrics for measuring customer success in SaaS: https://bit.ly/2ZiKTdt
Hope it helps!
Thanks for sharing. I'll give the link a read.
Our main KPIs this last year had been DAU (daily active users) and MRR (monthly recurring revenue), with a goal of reaching 10k mrr by sept 1st (1year in). We did it, but in my case (I have a very large audience of fans on social media) MRR didnt correlate into product market fit, so achieving that goal didnt necessarily progress the larger goal. We're changing our main KPI to be 'paying clients' rather than MRR, because it was easy to get MRR from fans who simply believe in me, but dont necessarily use the software.
For onboarding, for someone to become a formal part of the team, with vesting equity, they need to have gone through interviews, and be approved by, every single member of my current team. Additionally, I always bring in at least one advisor or friend whos a subject matter expert in the new hires area, to properly vet them and give me the go ahead to hire.
Congrats on the success so far. For the KPIs do you track them on excel or other software programs? That Includes the vetting process of new hires. Does this documentation live anywhere? Or does the subject matter expert handle it all?
The admin dashboard inside our software tracks the users. Stripe tracks the customers and MRR.
Got it. Thanks for the input.
For me (still building product/in pre launch/research stage) The metrics I will be tracking once I've launched are:
In terms of operations as its just me, in my business plan I've created an operations plan which includes details such as what to focus on each day (themes) and actions to take every week/month e.g.
ETA: @Paolo just came across an interview by a founder of an SaaS that specialises in documentation, information management etc. You should I understand check it out.
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/generating-25-000-mo-offering-wikis-to-company-slack-teams-f7e811e0c2?utm_source=indie-hackers-emails&utm_campaign=ih-newsletter&utm_medium=email
Hello,
Thanks for sharing.
When you speak of PH, do email and sales represent actions/results from the PH launch itself?
For business ops, what specifically do you track in the verticals mentioned?
For example, accounting is a broad topic, is there anything specific?
Can you provide examples of the 3 bullets in this category?
Out of this list, is what would you say are the top three must-haves?
No probs and yes I meant emails/sales /upvotes will be tracked following the PH Launch. They will be my 3 main metrics/must haves.
As for the business ops bullets.
1 . Accounting will include reviewing income, expenses and weekly/monthly profit.
2 & 3 Will entail sharing all actions taken on the client's project and sharing insights, findings & reviewing where we are in relation to the project plan I created at the beginning of the project.
Awesome. Thanks for the info. I'm in the process of building a startup hub on Notion to alleviate the issue I spoke about in the main post. Do you think that's something you'd be interested to try out?
Maybe you can check this website, maybe it can help. https://saas-journal.webflow.io/posts/spotlight-on-saas-metrics-for-operations
Hey, thanks for posting the article. I don't think it really answers my question, though.
To elaborate, working in a startup that I was not the co-founder or founder of, I found the company was disorganized. They had no policies in place nor any documents to reference. This leads to frustration because there was no direction.
In that, I figured there must be documents in place, or spreadsheets that contain important data like finances, that are important to track, share and understand.
I wondered what this group considers necessary to know and track in their businesses to avoid the issues mentioned above.