How Zapier used FOMO to hit 50m ARR
Happy Friday folks! We’ve got bigger news than Joe Rogan’s Spotify deal—please welcome the newest member of the SaaS Playbook team, Bern!
She’s a fellow SaaS enthusiast who will be helping curate our playbook content and help push some other initiatives we’re noodling on (more on that in the coming weeks). Excited to have her on board.
📧 When Alex Lieberman started The Morning Brew, he didn’t expect to build a $13m dollar newsletter. He didn’t even intend to start a business; he was just a student looking to keep up with financial news. But he recognized that industry publications were pretty dull and not designed for he and his peers, so he decided to create more relatable content himself. He went with a variety of grassroots tactics to get it off the ground, like asking for sign-ups at lectures he gave to increase word of mouth. Pretty interesting how Lieberman mostly relied on his own curiosity to create the newsletter—he admits he isn’t a writer or skilled content creator. He just identified a problem and was relentless in solving it; it’s that same the same type of ambition he looks for in hires.
🐾 While we’re on email marketing, let’s look at the way Vero broke down the nuances of email KPIs. They point out that just looking at campaign centric data, like open rates, CTRs, and conversions on a campaign by campaign basis is helpful, but limited. To really get the full picture, you’ll want to couple those basic metrics with the context about how your audience interacts with your brand. For example, you shouldn’t assume a fresh email subscriber is new to your brand; they could have been quietly admiring your tweets for a while.
As Vero puts it, “Customers don’t interact with or think about your company as separate marketing channels or individual email campaigns. So why would you track email performance in such silos?”
🤝 By amassing over 2,000 integrations in just nine years, Zapier continues to be a quickly growing player in SaaS, hitting 50m ARR just a couple years back. What was their secret sauce? Zapier started with a handful of key integrations to create an MVP, then they played on a simple but powerful principle: FOMO. As more operators caught wind of Zapier, they wondered why their competitors had integrations, and they were left out. By building out a solid partnership strategy, Zapier was able to get partners to build the connectors and even promote them for them.
💵 The cycling in and out of customers is the bane of most SaaS company’s existence. While new customer acquisition is vital, retention is even more important because what’s a leaky bucket worth? The quick and easy way to measure is the appropriately named Quick Ratio. As Ben Murray (The SaaS CFO) explains, the SaaS Quick Ratio measures your directional growth, or to simplify even further, net gains vs. net losses of bookings or subscribers. It’s one of those metrics that most people know but few actually measure on a consistent basis, so here’s your friendly reminder that there’s no better number to give you the heartbeat of your business.
🦎 We tuned into the SaaS Podcast’s most recent episode which features Paul Joyce, founder and CEO of the dashboard tool Geckoboard. It’s an inspiring story, Paul decided to make the leap from his banking job into entrepreneurship and took 4 years to just decide on what idea he wanted to pursue. That led to a dashboards MVP launched on Hacker News which garnered him a couple hundred signups. It wasn’t a ton of traction, but enough to get the feedback needed to iterate and push forward. He ended up using his life’s savings to give his growing idea 5 months of runway, and it paid off—today they have 5,000 customers and are doing over 5m ARR.