SaaS Founders and the Mental Health Crisis

Hello SaaStronauts!

In this issue:

• SaaS Founders and the Mental Health Crisis
• Exponentially Grow Your SaaS with Sticky Products
• The Magic Word
• How to Find Growth With Your Existing Customers
• When and How to Prioritize SaaS Infrastructure Costs

🚀 Let's blastoff!

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🧠 SaaS Founders and the Mental Health Crisis

• The lightning-fast pace that the SaaS world moves can have destructive effects on founders mental health.
• Despite finding success, many SaaS founders still feel a lot of stress and anxiety about work.
• Warning signs can include prioritizing work over your physical health, or being addicting to your phone when you're not working.
• Therapy is valuable. It can feel like things get worse before they get better, but the end goal is worth it.
• Mental health issues can stem from learned behaviors that were once valuable, but become destructive and dysfunctional as we get older.
• Decouple your self-worth from your work performance.
• Connect with your spouse or a friend over things that aren't work related.
• Turn everything off, and stop to just breathe.

Our takeaways from "I Work, Therefore I Am - Exploring The SaaS Mental Health Crisis". Read this article.

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🧲 Exponentially Grow Your SaaS with Sticky Products

• The T2D3 formula, or “triple triple double double double”, is a common benchmark for measuring the performance of a SaaS startup.
• Triple revenue during the first 2-3 years, then double during the next 3 years.
• Acquire customers using outbound sales activities like cold calls, email campaigns, and advertising.
• Working harder does not unlock exponential growth. It often only provides linear growth.
• Create a "sticky" product that continuously delivers value. The longer customers stick around, the more likely people they know will have contact with your product too.

Our takeaways from "Accelerating SaaS Growth". Read this article.

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🪄 The Magic Word

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🌱 How to Find Growth With Your Existing Customers

• Repeat customers spend an average of 67% more than new customers.
• It costs SaaS companies an average of 6-7x more to convert a new visitor than it does to retain an existing customer.
• Start a loyalty program with either points, or giving your users free stuff when they hit X purchases.
• Collect feedback throughout each step of your sales process.
• Engage with your existing audience through multiple social platforms.
• Make self-support easy through chat and documentation on your website.

Our takeaways from "How to retain your best customers". Read this article.

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💰 When and How to Prioritize SaaS Infrastructure Costs

• Early stage companies should be more concerned with finding product-market fit than their infrastructure. Optimize infrastructure only if it's related to your product's core offering.
• If you're optimizing for growth, plot your revenue and operation costs on a graph to see how the two numbers are related over time.
• Do not slow down growth for infrastructure if you can only have one or the other.
• While growing your company, think of costs as a percentage of total revenue. But when you switch to focus on reducing costs, going by percentage hides important details about infrastructure decisions.

Our takeaways from "Should you prioritize infrastructure costs?". Read this article.

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