Goodbits

Work continues to progress as we shore up key product areas and work on acquisition.

PAID ADS
Of the CAD$500 we've spent on ads so far, we've ended up at a $10 blended signup (paid/organic).
Of the various ad groups running, we have everything from $3/signup to $20/signup.
The best performing ad group was the one paid signup resulted in both the lowest CPA, as well as a conversion to paid
Removing India from the ad groups seemed to decrease non-performing traffic.
Lots of room for improvement still, as ad quality scores are still low (<3)

PRODUCT
We've been under heavy spambot attack, which has had a major effect on signups. We've added a honeypot to trap the bots. Looks like there's one legitimate signup for every 6 - 7 bot signups.
We shipped a major feature refactor in the image previewer element, which had been the culprit to a high number of support requests.

Shorter update this week. The team is heads down working on a large re-write of the image handling component after fielding a series of inter-connected bug reports from customers.

Also underway is tweaking of Google Analytics and conversion rate optimization. We have an eye to test Google and Facebook display ads to coincide with the relaunch planned later this fall.

Last, Mixpanel is now humming along and our customer success rep has been deep-diving into leading indicators of trial>signup success. We've narrowed down, on what we believe to be, THE critical action to ensure customers find value after signup.

Exciting times!

With the major product issues stabilized, the team is steadily shipping user-requested features, squashing bugs, and optimizing our marketing and growth engine.

In particular, it seemed there were considerable experiments underway when we acquired the app. This has been apparent as the marketing site differs from what's in the product, billing plans don't match either product or marketing site, and so on.

Major updates this week:

Product

• Based on a customer call, we added a new content block ("Link Only") which enables users to create a bulleted list of hyperlinks.

Growth

• Pricing work is on the way (Pricing V1.5) – Currently our marketing site and billing page is communicating different things to customers, there are some alignments that is needed to be done. As we complete user interviews, we're close to finalizing the new model moving forward. Most excitingly, we expect to be able to raise prices for new customers (existing customers get grandfathered in on legacy prices), while still undercutting our competitors. Win-win!
• In-app we weren't showing premium upgrades to users on lower tiers. We shipped an update to fix this, which is expected to increase upgrades.
• We have pushed out a new set of site changes on the marketing site. Impact to signups from the changes seems to be in a good direction.
• We're still finding and fixing some broken links on the site, along with general SEM tweaks (such as removing /YYYY/MM/DD/ from URL structure and adding 301s)

We remarked this week that things were pretty quiet at Goodbits. There were a few a handful of support tickets which came in, a few customer interview notes posted, and otherwise, the only "bings" from Slack were the steady drip of subscriptions being charged.

This. Is. Awesome.

There's no crisis, no panic, no outage, nothing that requires a "stop everything and put out this fire" attitude, which is exactly as it should be. The systems and processes are all stabilized, and the team is working towards relaunching in the next 90 days.

That is until the call notes & recording of a customer interview hit the system.

BLAMO! It was a massive jolt of energy to hear and really feel the emotion in the users voice.

As a result of this one customer interview:

• Dev team got fired up and started working on a few "quick win" features that came up
• Success got fired up and started working on a global email to all customers saying "We care"

🚨Biggest pain point?🚨

"The last few months have been very frustrating, and getting anything fixed on this has been very frustrating. Just being able to have people listen to it is hugely appreciated"

It's a great reminder that sometimes, you don't need to ship a feature, give a discount, or squash a bug. Sometimes you just need to make your customers feel heard.

(that's a total non-sequitur, but first thing I came up with when I thought of the word "gelling")

The team is really gelling, with very little "top-down" decision making needed. By that I mean, we set the mission, values and responsibilities early on, hired people who are motivated and independent, and the rest seems to be "falling into place".

Some examples:

• Customer success manager has been responding to support tickets, reproducing and documenting bugs, creating tickets for dev to respond to and ensuring customer happiness... with zero direction.
• Developer has been triaging critical customer bugs, stabilizing the backend and enabling the growth team to have their own dev environment for testing...

Amazing when a plan comes together!

Our Corporate Tech Stack
Adopting a set of new internal tools has been pretty seamless. The two foundational apps are Notion and Slack, with everyone else building on top.

Notion:
"Company-wide" intranet. While each department may have their own system of record (Github for Dev, HelpScout for Support, etc), Notion crosses all departments and houses the corporate-level information.

Slack: Internal communications & notifications "command center". Notifications from all our other applications are funneled into slack, by department, to keep a 'pulse' on the business.

The rest includes:

• G Suite: Email, docs, drive.
• HelpScout: Support queue, knowledge base, and we'll likely add LiveChat functionality down the road
• Github: Code repository and backlog tracking (Github issues)
  Recurly/Stripe. Currently using both Recurly for subscription management + Stripe for billing. Need to consolidate into Stripe to save $200/mo on Recurly.
• Profitwell: Subscription reporting. This is somewhat duplicative of Recurly for now, but better integrates with Databox.
• Databox: Internal dashboarding and metrics tracking. Databox has been a dream to use (and BI has come a long way since the last time I looked at this).
• Zapier: Corporate Duct-tape.

Separate Accounts & Planning For the Exit
We hold regular meetups with other SaaS business buyers (what's been dubbed "micro pe entrepreneurs") and the consensus from the group seemed to be keeping accounts completely separate across apps/web properties.

That means for each business/product/project:

• separate email accounts,
• separate hosting accounts,
• etc.

The reason given is that in the event of a sale down the road, some accounts are hard/impossible to transfer if they are mingled together.

For example, Stripe has a feature of only being able to change ownership once in an accounts life.

One entrepreneur relayed a story of buying a paid newsletter business which lost 75% of their customers when they moved to a new billing provider.

😬

• Refactored our SSL certs, completing all items in our "Stabilize" theme
• Transferred the very last accounts over from seller, completing our "Transition" theme
• Cleared out the support queue - Inbox Zero!
• Completed 2-year audit of customer cancellation reasons ("churn reason analysis.")
• Setup Google Optimizely & have 1st experiment running

We're now 50% complete our integration plan. As a reminder, our 5 themes were:

✓ Transition
✓ Stablize
👉Instrument & Deep Dive
☐ Optimize
☐ Experiment & Steady State

A NOTE ON TRANSITION
Knowledge transfer has been an important element in taking over from the previous owner. This includes the obvious technical aspects

• How to restart services
• Known product issues

Beyond that, it's proven very helpful to focus on the "why" of certain product and marketing decisions:

• why prioritize one feature over another
• why focus on email builder vs email sending as core product * functionality

Some possible reasons "why" a (potentially obvious) could include:

• "Hadn't gotten around to it",
• "Didn't have the right skills/resources to accomplish it",
• "Not enough hours of the day",
• "Look, Game of Thrones was on and it was a cultural touch stone and..."

All good reasons for doing it now.

On the other hand, if the reason a feature hadn't been added was "We tried that, it led to a negative outcome", that's a different story.

It's always easy to plow in to a new situation, assume everyone who came before you was an idiot, and go do the "obvious" thing. It's a lot more nuanced once you get into the weeds...

Adding annual plans had been a major feature we wanted to add going into this acquisition. What we didn't know is that users were asking for it too!

In SaaS, collecting 12 months of revenue upfront is magical for cashflow, and can enable you to grow faster by re-investing into the business at what is effectively 0% interest. It can also reduce churn (assuming a users Lifetime Value (LTV) on a monthly plan is lower than the annual price, and there's an appropriate refund policy in place).

Adding a yearly option alongside your monthly plan will improve your cash flow immediately...

For now we'll be rolling out annual billing for users on an individual basis, and expect to release the capability on our marketing site for self-service signup soon.

As it turns out, transferring Webflow accounts is... non trivial. We had to stand up new accounts, spin down one Webflow account transfer assets, then spin up the instances. It was unclear exactly how much downtime was required, so we blocked off a few hours, had customer notifications in place,

As it turned out, the transfer took effect immediately, and all the prep work seems to have been a bit overkill.

Our process for taking over the product can be broken down into 5 stages, and our goal was to complete them in the first 30 days.
Transition - Take over the product, accounts, responsibilities
Stabilize - Ensure the business is stable, robust and fortified against interruptions and downtime
Deep Dive & Instrument - Research and understand what's happening today
Quick Wins - Act on any low hanging fruit that exists
Steady State & Iterate - Operate on a steady rhythm of profitable growth

We've completed the transition activities, making good progress on the stabilize activities, and nearing completion on deep dive & instrumentation. The team's excited about the low hanging fruit that's been discovered and eager to progress to the "quick wins" phase to start executing on some of them.

In advance of executing on the "quick wins" theme, this week we introduced the key drivers worksheet.

The worksheet is built on a generic model applicable to most SaaS applications, and highlights the major levers which can be applied in order to grow. The major ones are:

Site traffic - How many visitors do we get on a monthly basis?
Site>Trial Conversion - How many of those visitors signup for a free trial
Trial>Paid - How many trials convert into a paid subscription
Churn - Of our paying customers, how many churn out
Price* - What do we charge for our product

• Price is a simplistic measure in this case, as we're ignoring the growth opportunities from both upsells and expansion revenue for the moment.

SINGLE THROAT TO CHOKE
(to borrow an anachronism from a less woke era)

Each metric must have a SINGLE owner associated with it. In the case of metrics with multiple owners that seem to make sense, the metric will be broken down.

For example, our customer success manager will be responsible for reducing inactivity churn (subscribers who aren't using the product and then quit), whereas our full stack developer will be responsible for reducing product churn (subscribers who run into a bug that prevents them from realizing value, and then quit).

SYSTEM VS GOAL THINKING
The conversation that resulted from this sheet turned into a discussion on systems thinking vs goal thinking. Where systems thinking is to track activity, with the confidence that that activity will result in the goal being achieved. Examples of system thinking include:

• It takes 100 phone calls to land a sale.
• If I write 10 blog posts, it'll increase my search ranking
• Etc.

Goal thinking is the opposite. With goal thinking, you start with the goal (reduce churn by 5% per month!) and then work backwards to identify the activities needed to achieve that goal.

For example, to reduce churn by 5%, I might try the following things:

• Order the product backlog to focus on bugs affecting the most users
• Update user onboarding workflows to highlight new features to increase engagement
• Initiate email nurturing campaigns for users on certain product triggers
• Etc.

There's an important benefit to goal thinking as it relates to hierarchies.
Rather than the boss doling out work assignments (Make 100 calls!), the goal is assigned (reduce churn!) and the activities to achieve that goal are left as an exercise to the goal owner.

Crucially, this forces the goal owner (the worker bee, in this context) to come up with the activities themselves, which inherently gets them more engaged, and take more ownership for the ultimate success and outcome of the goal.

The key drivers sheet was well received, and after the meeting, some team members commented on being fired up from seeing "how" we were going to make Goodbits successful. Cool!

Next step, we'll be assigning owners to each metric to each metric, then work with the individual team members to jointly come up with targets to hit.

Onwards!