“Busy” does not equal “productive”. You shouldn’t be doing 1,000 different things. Business isn’t that complicated. Very few things are urgent. Very few things actually even need to get done. Figure out what your goals are for the coming 3, 6, 12 months and work your way backwards. Identify exactly what things need to get done to accomplish those goals. Chances are it’s not actually that much. But most people pick 10–20 things and try to do it all. But instead of getting a lot done…then end up getting almost nothing done. Pick just 1 or 2 “must do” things and focus on them. If you get those done, you’ll be ahead of the game.…

Resist the urge to hire. If you’ve raised any amount of money, the very first thing you’ll have a deep burning desire to go do is hire people. But resist it. Growing a business isn’t an overcomplicated task that needs a huge team to do it. Hyper-focus on tasks that actually move the needle. You can do an unbelievable amount with a small team. And then, when there’s a deep need for someone with specialized skill, they’ll have a much bigger impact on growth.…

Dave Ramsey talks about “nerds” and “free spirits” when it comes to finances in marriage. The “nerd” loves to manage the budget while the “free spirit” loves to forget there’s a budget to manage. My wife is the “nerd” and I’m the “free spirit”. She’s managed our finances for the entirety of our nearly 12 years of marriage. It’s not that one is better than the other. Without the nerd, the free spirit would spend recklessly and go broke. Without the free spirit, the nerd would never spend any money at all and would be miserably uptight. They need each other for balance. Your business is the same way. If you, as a founder, aren’t the “nerd” and obsessing over finances and forecasting the future isn’t your bag, don’t force it. Hire a nerd. Today.…

Want to reduce churn? Of course you do! Make your product part of your customers’ daily workflow. Engaged users don’t churn. And really there’s no more sure-fire way to keep a customer engaged than by becoming a part of the workflow of the entire company! The fastest way to do this is by having multi-user support in your product. When multiple people within a company start getting value out your product, it’s much harder for them to churn. You’ve become part of an entire organization’s or department’s toolset And people don’t like changing tools.…

Retargeting is a mystical world of unicorns and fairies...clothed in a shroud of banner ads. If not used properly, you can blow through thousands of dollars in no time and have no new customers to show for it. What is this mystical banner-ad-shrouded retargeted unicorn you speak of? Retargeting is a type of online advertising that resurfaces your brand/product around the web after a user has visited your site. It’s the whole scenario where you go to the Cinnabon site to check out the new Cinnabon Bites and then you go to Facebook 3 days later and there’s a huge picture of cinnamon roll in your news feed. In our example your app is a gooey taste piece of bread slathered in butter, cinnamon and sugar. The concept here is that once you’ve express some level of interest in a product (As indicated by your visit to the site) You’re much more likely to become a paying customer. Retargeting effectively optimizes your banner ads. Retargeting, as with any form of advertising, won’t work for everyone. But you’re potentially leaving a cost-effective acquisition channel on the table. So, give it a try and see how it works for you!…

The first version of Baremetrics was built in 8 days. But that was spread across 30 days of juggling client work, two other SaaS products and 10 days of international travel with no access to really even think about Baremetrics. So, you have no excuse for taking months (or even years) to ship. You're procrastinating. But even after you get your initial product out the door, you keep shipping features fast and frequently. Ship basic, MVP-versions of features to find out how (or even if) users want to use the feature, and then iterate on top of it. And if it’s not working? KILL IT! If it doesn’t have a noticeable effect on revenue, it doesn’t stick around. Prove the idea as best you can, ship it as fast as you can and kill it as intelligently as you can. Rinse. Repeat. Ship fast & frequently.…

Pricing products is hard. I get that. When you’re brand new to pricing, it’s easy to think “If I can 6get anyone to pay me $99 a month, I’ll be set!” You’re itching to make some money, any money, and you’ll give away the farm to try to entice people to fork it over. But stop. Stop giving it away. Chances are you’re already charging far too little. Having an “unlimited” plan just puts the nail in the coffin. Here’s why. You should be pricing based on value. And how you price should scale in parallel to the value your customer is receiving. With that in mind, does “unlimited” makes sense? No! Because they get “unlimited” value while you just capped how much revenue you can make on any given customer. Now would be an appropriate time to facepalm. Do you realize how bad of a move that is? The type of customers who will make use of that “unlimited” plan are the exact customers who will be more than happy to pay you exponentially more than you’re charging! Never offer “unlimited” plans…

How much did you spend on coffee this morning? What did that Chipotle burrito cost you? How much did that season of The Walking Dead set you back? Entrepreneurs spend hundreds of dollars a month on completely inconsequential things yet are afraid to charge even $20 for their product that creates thousands of dollars in value for other businesses. If you’re solving real, actual business problems, there’s no reason you can’t charge hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for it. And what’ll surprise you even more is that those customers who are paying you a lot more are almost universally more pleasant human beings. Some of your worst and most demanding customers will be the ones paying you $5/mo. Instead of dealing with them, just charge more. You’ll almost certainly prefer having 1,000 $100/mo customers than 10,000 $10/mo customers. Charge more!…

Deep in the minds of most founders is the fear of rejection. Heck maybe it’s not even all that deep your mind. Maybe it’s at the forefront and it keeps you up at night. That’s normal. It’s what you do to fix it that matters, though. What happens is we trick ourselves into thinking that random pet project or networking event or conference or Twitter exchange is real, actual, tangible, needle-moving work. It’s not work, it’s procrastination masked as work. Real business progress happens with saying “no” to things, not “yes”. What you choose to reject defines your growth. Stop faking progress with busy work…

Most founders are some form of a jack-of-all-trades. With Baremetrics, for the first six months I did 100% of the work: UI design Marketing design Frontend development Backend development Marketing Sales Support …the whole bag. But that was a mistake. I waited far too long to make my first hire. Hone in on the things you’re really great at and hire out the rest as soon as possible. Don’t wait to delegate…

Seems every week there’s some new tool to “monitor the competition”. But here’s a little secret for you: the competition doesn’t matter. If you’re genuinely building something that is solving a problem for your customers, the only people you should care about are your customers. Give yourself some credit. You’re uniquely equipped to solve the problems your customers have and that’s why they’re paying you. It’s so easy to fall in to the habit of checking up on what your competition is doing. You start checking their blog regularly to see if they’ve released any new features… You add their name in Google Alerts You follow them on Twitter all so you don’t miss out on their next big move. But here’s the problem: doing this puts you perpetually one step behind. It makes you reactive instead of proactive. Focus on solving the problems of the customers you have (or the customers you want to have) What your competition is doing is at the bottom of the list of things you should care about. Stop chasing the competition…

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” That Reid Hoffman quote...money. Literally will print money for you early on if you take it to heart. No one will remember how polished your product was or wasn't when you first launch. Hardly anyone will even know you launched anything. They'll only remember if your product created value for them. By shipping as fast as possible you're able to find out as soon as possible how to best serve your market. Stop trying to attain the perfect product…

You've undoubtably read a slew of articles on how to validate your business or product. Unfortunately…all of those methods are bogus. There is only one type of validation. ONE. When building a sustainable business… Money No money? No validation. 1,000 people on your mailing list is not validation. 1,000 people on your free plan is not validation. 100,000 Twitter followers is not validation. Money is validation. And what you need as a business in its earliest stages is validation. Otherwise you risk wasting colossal amounts of time doing something people potentially have no interest in. Many of us have a psychological barrier to asking people to pay us. We're afraid they'll tell us "no" or that it's not worth what we're wanting to charge. But finding out if they will pay you is absolutely crucial. Charge from day one…

A $9/mo customer is an entirely different customer than a $99/mo customer. They're a different sales process, they'll use your product differently and, more importantly, they'll have drastically different support loads. That $9 customer will likely make up the large majority of your support requests. They'll demand the most. They'll nag you the most. And they're the most likely to jump ship when a competitor comes out with something similar and charges $8 for it. You don't want to build a business on customers who will spend more at McDonald's for lunch than they do on a business product that creates value for them. Go after customers who aren't price conscious. That $99 customer is happy to fork over the cash because they're mature enough to know that anything that saves time/money or creates value is worth paying for. On top of that, they'll also be exponentially more loyal. They won’t waste their time looking for things that are marginally better...they pay for what works the most and then they get back to building their business. And as a general rule, if the businesses you're targeting don't charge much money, don't expect to make much money from them.…

Failed charges are low hanging fruit for most subscription companies. The average early stage subscription startup is losing over $1500 per month to recoverable failing charges. Most of these customers don’t even realize their card is failing. There’s no malicious intent, they’re just oblivious. The easiest way to get customers to update their billing info is by blocking access to your app or content. But it’s also the most heavy handed…especially if the reason the card is failing is due to a stolen credit card and the customer is just waiting on a new number to get issued. Progressively getting pushier tends to work better. Send a series of 2-4 emails for a couple of weeks that let the customer know their card is failing with a link to update it. Then on the last email, mention you’ve had to block access. At which point you should block access to their account with a note and link to update their billing info. If the customer goes more than a month after you’ve blocked access, you should consider them cancelled and move on. Now, it’s a big pain to manually do this (and generally it’s also pretty inefficient). Using a Dunning tool can automate the entire process for you. There are lots of different dunning tools out there, many of which are built right in to your subscription billing software (such as Recurly). If you use Stripe, we at Baremetrics happen to offer a Dunning tool (baremetrics.com/dunning), but the bigger tip here is just to get something in place so you aren’t leaving money on the table!…