Knowing of which metrics to track, and which to ignore, is an essential part of growing your SaaS business. The ability to filter out good, actionable, data from the ever-present noise that just distracts you is what separates many successful businesses from the ones that never get off the ground. By creating a system of how you can collect, review, and take action on the data in your business you'll be able to take action with confidence that your business is going in the right direction.

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Transcript:

Rob Walling: Thanks for joining me on this week's MicroConf refresh episode of the MicroConf podcast. We are continuing our journey through the building, your first SaaS ultimate crash course, playlist. That playlist has received rave reviews on Twitter and from folks contacting us. So if you haven't watched the talks, you can always head over to youtube.com/MicroConf to see the visuals today's talk is from Craig Hewitt.
It was given in 2019 at MicroConf Europe. It's called "Staying on Top of Your SaaS Metrics". Know what to measure, to maintain sustainable growth. It's an exceptional talk. And here's how Craig describes it, knowing which metrics to track and which to ignore as an essential part of growing your SaaS business, the ability to filter out good, actionable data from the ever-present noise that just distracts you is what separates many successful businesses from the ones that never get off the ground by creating a system of how you can collect review and take action on the data in your business.
You'll be able to take action with confidence that your business is going in the right direction. And this is one of 10 talks in the playlist that covered things ranging from finding an idea to launch and early growth to outbound sales, to customer support, onboarding, and playing the long game, staying sane while you're starting up.
Hope you enjoy it.

Craig Hewitt: Hello everyone. I think I've met many of you, and a lot of familiar faces, so it's good to be here. it's an unenviable position to be right after lunch. On the second day, people are. Tired or hungover. we're gonna have a lot of, interaction here. if you have questions, you can stop me. We don't have to have questions at the end.
but what are we talking about today is SaaS analytics, and SaaS metrics that you need to watch and those that you don't, cause I think running a SaaS business, which I guess show of hands who runs a SaaS or subscription and business. Awesome. Good for you. and who attracts their metrics like every day, every week, every month, Cool.
Okay. We're going to talk about all this. so that's cool. SaaS metrics are fun. there we go. But it's the second day right after lunch. And so what's really cool is how we can grow our companies faster by paying attention to our metrics because metrics by themselves aren't really that important. so who, again, show of hands. Who's happy with their current growth rate, who has a positive growth rate, I guess we'll start with that.
Yep. And who's happy with it. Right on. Cool. That's not unexpected. Okay. after your talk right there. Cool. so I think what we're going to say here is instead of just this nebulous to grow and I want to grow my business, let's put some values around that. So metrics and narrowed down this whole huge field of like marketing and sustainability to something that's a little more, tangible and that we can affect better.
one son just started judo. He's seven and it's not my son, but, I think, this, this Bruce Lee quote is really cool because it dispels like the arrival fallacy, right? The rival fallacy is that when I get to 10 K and I quit my day job that I'm there. Or when I have a team of 10 people and I don't have to be working in the business every day, I can work on the business that everything will be sunshine and rainbows uniforms.
and it's not true, right? Because you're never there. We're all at this conference because we want more out of our businesses and this fulfillment that it gives us personally. and I think talking about metrics, it's the same thing. We are never going to be there. We're never going to be happy.
And so you just have to get cool and comfortable with being unhappy and run your business this way. So who has seen something like this and all the marketing world? Yep. Cool. top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, the idea is just get a bunch of people aware of your brand and your content, and then you work them through this funnel by educating them about the problem that your product solves.
and then hopefully. Oh, is this not working? Okay.
everybody hear me. Okay, cool. I'm like double fist in here. And then convert them at the bottom of the funnel. And so this works really well. This is pretty traditional. I think some people are starting to dispel this a little bit with instead of funnels, they're using loops and cycles.
but the idea is really that you start at the top with something like awareness and then in