Today, I'm sharing three strategies that most learn only with experience. These strategies help improve ROI, save you from making colossal mistakes, and help you deliver a bigger impact with less effort.

First, a community update...

Community Update

I've added four new posts to the Growth Strategies Hub.

#1 Sales deck template

Here's a sales deck template that made one of my clients, based in France, $45K within 30 days. Use the template, season it with smart copywriting, garnish it with clever design, and voila, you have a killer sales deck ready to ace your next demo!

#2 A primer on social media paid ads

Here's everything you need to know about running social media ads for your SaaS. The guide includes the science of social media ads and discusses the strategies for LinkedIn and Facebook. It's to the point and covers a lot of nuances - more value than most paid Udemy courses.

#3 A cold email campaign

This post goes beyond what I've already discussed in the cold email framework for SaaS published last year. This is a very tactical post and goes into the campaign-level details. Essentially, you will learn methods to caliberate the following funnel:

#4 The blueprint of an ace affiliate program

An affiliate program is a proven growth channel and can do wonders in the early stages when you do not have the resources to build other channels. However, most affiliate programs never lived up to their potential. Here’s is a blueprint to design a successful SaaS affiliate program.

With these four strategies, now there are 29 proven and actionable strategies in the hub.

Upgrade to read all

Sometimes, early-stage founders need only a little help in growth and marketing. They have a broad sense of things they should do but lack the actionable skills. They are either not yet there to hire a full-time marketer or want to know enough marketing to have an informed discussion with a full-time hire or independent contractors.

The Growth Strategies Hub is a repository of proven growth strategies, frameworks, templates, and tactical guides. Within minutes, you can learn answers to real growth questions, discuss strategies, ask questions, and suggest improvement ideas. There’s an early offer for you to avail.

I'm adding new posts every month. 🤗

Let’s dive right into today’s post.

You can read this post on the website here.

Strategy #1

Frequency analysis: A short-cut to high product engagement and better gross margins

There is a case for prioritizing gross margins over MRR, especially for self-funded (bootstrapped) businesses. After a certain stage, improving unit economies is easier, and more lucrative than acquisition. It can potentially lead to the discovery of hidden opportunities. It's a transient phase where you strengthen the business fundamentals and set the stage for aggressive acquisition afterward.

A high-ticket B2B company can work on improving unit economies from day one while a self-serve PLG business can focus on it after acquiring a moderate user base.

So, what's the strategy to improve gross margins?

It's called frequency analysis. It's based on the detection and commercialization of features that users frequently use.

Here's how you do it:

1. Pull the customer-wise usage of features from your analytics software to a spreadsheet.

2. Analyze the frequency of feature usage and look for triggers that lead to high product engagement for more users.

3. Study the interconnectedness of feature usage i.e. does a usage of one feature invariable leads to more usage of another feature? Rank all such patterns based on their correlation coefficient.

4. Don't ignore the outliers, examine them separately as outliers sometimes lead to tremendously scalable and profitable opportunities.

5. The question you want to answer is: what features are frequently used and are most valuable to users.

6. Craft pricing plans based on the insights you've collected so far to motivate users to move up the plan: from free to basic, from basic to premium, from premium to enterprise.

You will have to observe the response to these changes for many months and iterate a couple of times. But in the end, you will have an extremely fine-tuned economic machine in a market filled with competitors that leave money on the table every day.

Strategy #2

Safeguard against false analogy in the determination of SaaS PMF

False analogies can misdirect and derail the growth of your business. Social media platforms like Facebook are free for their users because they earn money by selling usage data. Hence, they focus on:

• User growth: More users, more demographic data

• User engagement: More engagement, more usage data

Free tools like temporary emails and PDF-to-word converters earn money using banner ads. Hence, they focus on:

• Web traffic growth: More traffic, higher ad revenue

• User engagement: More engagement, more time to page, high ad revenue

Sometimes, SaaS businesses take a leaf out of these playbooks and focus on user growth & engagement, and to some extent, rightly so. You can't grow a SaaS business without users actively engaging with the product.

However, the problem arises when companies ignore the fundamental SaaS growth equation - SaaS companies earn money from the sale of subscriptions. The holy grail of SaaS growth is consistently increasing subscription revenue. In other words, to grow a SaaS product is to SELL it.

User growth and engagement are essential milestones, but users don't love the product enough unless they pay to use it. Hence, monetization is necessary to achieve product-market fit.

Strategy #3

Necessity and Risks of Repetition in Positioning

Consider this:

A founder launches a new product or feature, writes a blog post about it, and posts about it on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Some people visit the website while many do not. Then the founder wonders if their product is good enough or not.

On the other hand, some of the biggest companies on Earth, figure out a message that resonates with their market (e.g. "Just do it") and repeat it day after day for decades.

As a founder, you have a long-running association with your product before it is launched and even before it is developed. You know its origin story, competitive advantage, and the benefits it can deliver to its users.

But the same is not true for your market. They do not know about your product, They do not know the context of its genesis, They do not know its competitive advantage, They just do not know it at all.

In this context, it is unrealistic to assume that they will understand everything about your product when they land on the homepage or when they read that bottom-of-the-funnel blog post.

Yes, they will gain some insights, nod along with some arguments, and show some interest, but will that be enough for them to sign up for the product? Most likely not.

Therefore you have to continuously repeat the awesomeness of your product for a long time. You have to share its greatness as often as possible so that your market understands it.

But here is a catch:

You have to talk about the same product, but not in the same manner. Because if you repeat yourself verbatim, chances are only a few people will find it interesting, and a larger chunk of your market will not relate to your message.

And then they will stop listening to you.

Instead, think about all possible different angles, use cases, and pain points. String them together as part of your product positioning. Then, depending on the channel you are using and the market niche you are targeting, use one of those angles in your copy.

A fun poll

Google seems to have changed its stance on depreciating third-party cookies as per the updates they shared in a recent blog post. Does it affect your marketing plans in any way?

❤️ Thank you for reading issues #34 of the Organic SaaS Growth newsletter.

Until next time

Ankur Tiwari

Founder, Thoughtlytics

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