Startups, business & tech
Happy Monday!
As always, we send a list of our new posts at the beginning of the week, and this week we have two posts we want to share:
Have a great week!
Happy Monday everyone!
Today we have two new stories for you:
Have a great week!
Going into its fourth year, one of the things the Quipu team and its CEO Roger Dobaño are proud of is their low churn rate.
Quipu is an online billing software that solves your daily administrative tasks. And as with any SaaS product, churn is a number they keep close track on, says Dobaño:
I’m in touch with the churn numbers daily, but we measure it monthly, like most startups.
A low churn percentage is not only validating that they’ve built a product people like, but keeping the rate down over years has also taught them a lot about how their customers think and act, according to the CEO:
For a B2B SaaS company, it’s often quite expensive to acquire new users, so we’re very proud that we’ve been able to hold churn under one percent from the start.
It’s not rocket science, with more customers come more responsibilities, and that means a higher demand for service.
As you’re scaling your customer base, one of the most important things you need to do is to make sure your customer service team scales together with your customers. The easiest way to keep churn down, is to have someone that really understands the product and cares about the customers.
He continues:
Even though many of your customers never need any help with the product, it’s part of the trust relationship you build, as the customers know that there are humans to talk to at the other end of the software.
The first 12 months Quipu didn’t hire customer care people says the CEO:
For the first year of our business, I did all the customer support myself. Not only because the team was small, but so that I always knew what our customers thought about our product.
He says he’s still in touch with the customer service team, as it’s one of the best ways to know how to develop and improve the product.
He explains that the way customer service agents should attend struggling users could be an article in itself. The baseline is to listen a lot, be understanding, patient and get to the core of what kind of problem the user is facing. There’s usually always a way to fix it.
It’s not about making it hard for customers to unsubscribe, according to Roger, but it’s about understanding why they want to leave.
If you want to unsubscribe, we’ll get notified when you push the button, and we’ll get in touch. Their reason for unsubscribing is often connected to a task we can help them achieve very easily, preventing them from leaving and making them happy again.
And if the customer has decided to leave anyway, you’ll at least have the data on why, if you actually talk to them. It’s also for security reasons, as people’s financial data has to be treated carefully.
When you’ve grown a significant amount of customers or users you should also consider measuring CSAT and NPS metrics.
Apart from great service, upselling is another way to prevent customers from choosing another product. The more ways people use your product, the lesser is the chance of the person leaving you.
With a very low churn rate, you’re actually able to reach negative churn, if you’re able to upsell enough.
When you have a payback period of one year, which is normal in SaaS companies, you need to know that people are happy especially in the beginning to keep the retention rate high.
Apart from speaking with the customers, tracking their movements and tasks inside the product is a very good way of seeing where it goes right and wrong.
For example, in Quipu one of our services is managing invoices. After looking at the user movements, we now know that the retention rate is much higher if the user creates three or more invoices. With this info we’ve been able to retain more customers over the years.
Dobaño adds that it’s also important to use movement trackers to contact users who are struggling, even before they complain or think about leaving.
It’s both upsides and downsides to talking a lot with your customers (obviously more positive sides though). One of the challenges is that people have a lot of thoughts on what kind of features you should develop next.
If you’re working B2B, you’re in touch with professionals, and they’re aware of what type of features would make their day easier.
This results in new features that both keep the retention rate high and make it easier to acquire new users.
But it is easy to take water over your head and create ten good features to please everyone, instead of making 3 perfect features. It’s a difficult balance, according to Roger:
We try to focus 60 percent of our capacity on building our existing product better, and 40 percent of our time making features for acquiring new customers.
When you’re working with high growth products, it’s often essential to be raising funding from investors.
A motivation in keeping your churn low is that most investors will not bet on a SaaS startup if it has a churn rate of 2 percent or more.
So even though you’re acquiring a lot of customers early on, having churn in mind from the first minute, can be more valuable than you think.
Some last tips on the list to prevent churn you should consider is:
Usually we organize our javascript apps either by what they are or by what they do. The first is like rails: separate directories like components, containers, reducers, etc. And the second more or less like feature/DDD: user, cart, and so on. Tho both of these options are very mainstream and solid they contain some constraints.
When you structure the code files tree by what they are you tend to keep every component of the same feature so distant that it’s very difficult to connect the pieces. Therefore you dive into some troubles like the path hell; a lot of require('../../../etc') in your code. And everything is extremely coupled to the directory structure.
In the other hand, when you are driven by what they do everything is more isolated and maintainable. But there’s a lot of duplication. And the communication between the features either is based on a weak contract or depends upon some infrastructure. Both of these options are prone to raise some bugs.
Pods it’s an evolution of the last one. You can think about pods like the microservices of the front applications. A pod is an isolated and completely independent microapp which can communicate 100% with other pods. Therefore, you get code base which is composable, extendable, reusableand extremely easy to test. Tho, the main benefit is that you completely erase the inter components side effects. Once a pod is failing you are totally sure that it’s because itself has something wrong; not an external piece.
A pod is an isolated and completely independent microapp which can communicate 100% with other pods
The unique requirement of the pods is to driven all the pods intercommunication through an event bus. If you’re already using any Flux pattern, lib or framework it’s gonna be very easy to lead this communication to the dispatcher; which is actually a single point for the events.
For a pod is not mandatory to have the logic, presentational and communication layers. Can have all of just one of them. Imagine a router pod. It has the logic and communication layer but doesn’t expose any view. Or the opposite, a form pod which only exposes a presentational layer and depends 100% on the arguments received (see React props).
Because every pod acts like and independent application we place the tests inside them. This means two things: stop duplicating the files tree, and making code coverage meaningful. When you have 100% coverage with a pod you know that it won’t fail. No side effects.
In a nutshell, by working with pods you get a secure and very flexible structure. Very easy to test and without side effects. It scales from 0 to millions without worrying about big refactors due to the fact that every pod is isolated but available to communicate with all the other pods.
In case you want to see some code here’s a Github repository with a simple pod architecture. Give it a look and check the benefits the pods can offer. If you have some doubts or proposals don’t hesitate to open an issue or comment here. This is a living pattern. We’re using the pods at Ulabox and they’re proving to be the solution to a lot of structural codebase problems. Tho, we’re willing to listen about your thoughts and concerns.
The journey is long, take some pods.
Hi! Thanks for agreeing to chat with me now that you’ve had your human body for a couple weeks. I’m excited to hear about how things have been going. Here’s how I’d like to spend our time: we will have an open conversation and explore your experiences. Later on, I have some specific questions that I would like you to answer, to get more specific feedback. At last, I’ll be sure to leave enough time at the end for any questions I might be able to help you with.
Does that sound good?
— Sure, sounds good.
Awesome. So is there anything you’ve noticed that you particularly like about your new body?
— Well, I like these sausagy things, but there’s one that is too short and out of the way, I wish they were all the same length and pointing in the same direction.
I’m going to assume you’re talking about your fingers. The little one is called “thumb”. Has it been useful in any way?
— Not really.
What if you want to grab something?
— I don’t see a problem. I have more sausagy things.
That’s true. Anything else about the fingers that you’d like to share?
— Let me think. Five sounds like too much, no? Maybe two or three would be enough.
Were there any particular situations where those extra couple of fingers were in the way?
— Yeah I was in bed with a friend…
That’s enough. Thank you. Any other aspects of your body you’ve particularly enjoyed or liked over the past couple of weeks?
— As I was saying, I was in bed…
GOT IT. Let’s move on. Have there been any events or situations where you’ve found your new body limiting?
— Yes I tried to fly from a tree branch and realized quickly that I couldn’t fly.
How did you reach that realization?
— I fell. Straight to the ground, landed on my arm. Which also made me realize these arm things aren’t very good at taking impact, the bones are pretty weak. I had to see someone called a “doc” and now I have this cast thing on. Are you going to fix that?
Oh my! I’m sorry to hear that happened. I’ll take a note to make sure we cover that type of bug in the design for later versions. How does the cast change things for you as you evaluate your body?
— I can decorate it with doodles. I really like that. If I do it on the outer layer of the body it wears off. Are you going to make cases for the body? Like with flowers and stuff. I saw some people wearing them.
You mean clothes? Sir, are you walking around naked?
— What are clothes?
Never mind. Let me ask you something. How has the temperature regulation been in the new body?
— Hmmm… what’s that word…? Cold! Yeah, that’s it! This body doesn’t have enough fur. Except in some funny parts, where it shouldn’t. You should definitely review the fur.
Interesting… I’d like to switch gears a little to focus on keeping the body up and running. In your orientation, we went over things like eating and grooming. Is there anything noteworthy you’d like to share about those kinds of processes?
— Eating is good. I like that. But I felt it was a bit random. There were no clear instructions on what I should or shouldn’t eat. I enjoyed the sweet things. I don’t really know why you offer green stuff with no taste.
Vegetables?
— Whatever you call it. The red stuff was good, like tomatoes sometimes, when they came with cheese, in a bun, with bacon, and meat.
Burgers?
— YES! Those were really good. I basically just ate those.
Welcome to America.
— What?
Nothing. Thank you so much! That’s all for regarding that subject. I just have a few more questions. On a scale from 1–5, where 1 is “I wish I had my old self back” and 5 is “I can’t believe I didn’t get this body sooner”:
— Not having a body is very different, you can do a lot of stuff if you have a nice working body I guess. I’ll say 4.
How would you rate your satisfaction level with your new body so far?
— 2. Maybe 3 on a good day.
Is there anything in particular that lead you to answer that way?
— It’s kind of slow and fragile. I wish it was faster. And bigger too.
How likely are you to recommend this experience to a friend?
— 3.
Is there anything in particular that lead you to answer that way?
— It’s fun to use for a while. But I guess you might get tired of it after a while, and would like to change it for a newer, faster, better-looking model.
Right on the spot. And finally, what’s one thing you really hope will be added to your body in the future?
— Wings. Or wheels. Whatever makes it faster. And fur. I said fur before, didn’t I?
You did. What value would that addition provide to you?
— I want to be faster. And warmer.
Thanks again for all your feedback — you’ll receive the gift certificate to the new body maintenance shop shortly. I’ll talk to you again in a few weeks. Take care!