Unlocking the secrets of SaaS growth | Corey Haines (SwipeWell, Baremetrics, SavvyCal)

What are the Secrets of SaaS Growth | Corey Haines (SwipeWell, Baremetrics, SavvyCal)

Scott: Hey, this is Subscription Heroes, and I'm Scott Hurff, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Churnkey. I loved the chat I had with Corey Haines in this episode. He's a marketer, entrepreneur, podcaster, and investor who's building Swipe Files and SwipeWell. You might also know him for his time at Baremetrics as head of growth, or his consulting work with companies like Savvy Cal, Riverside.fm, and Timetastic.

In this episode, we cover the metrics he tracks for each of his projects, how he manages time across so many endeavors, how he conducts customer research, and much more.

What It Really Takes to Build a Bootstrapped SaaS

Scott: So I was just in SwipeWell yesterday, collecting some things for a future top-secret project. Felt good.

Corey: I love it, man. What were you doing specifically? Like, what were you searching through? Tell me your process for how you go back and use your swipe file.

Scott: So here's my issue. I have a billion tabs open in Safari, which presents another issue because SwipeWell is only in Chrome. So this is a live feature request: a Safari plugin. But yeah, I just have this really annoying habit of collecting. I don't know, probably 200 tabs across five or six browser windows. And I know it's in there somewhere. If I'm looking for inspiration, or I just see something on Twitter and pop in to look at it, and then move on. What I used to do was take screenshots and keep them in a Dropbox folder. Super annoying. But now, I have SwipeWell, and it's actually kind of changed how I keep track of screenshots and inspiration.

Corey: That's awesome. Yeah, SwipeWell is going well. It's one of those things. You know this journey, even better than I do, but the SaaS bootstrapping journey is a long, winding one sometimes.

I think building any SaaS company is like that. It's just that when you have funding, it might feel a little bit easier, and your learning feels quicker because you have more resources. But for what it is, it's been such an amazing learning journey: actually being in the game and able to implement a lot of the strategies I've been using for other companies in consulting, and re-sharing things I see other companies do, doing teardowns and breakdowns. It's so much fun. Every month, we get new customers, MRR goes up, not as fast as we wanted, of course. Never fast enough. But the big thing we're consistently working on is customer research, getting closer to product-market fit, and really nailing down the jobs to be done. Why do people use a product like this? How do we find more people like that and help them do that job better?

Scott: Yeah, and you can just tell, it's different because it's your thing. You're running the show, doing everything, for better or for worse. You can just feel that excitement. It's pretty cool to see.

Corey: Thanks. I try to exude that. Sometimes I feel like I have to filter myself to get a company's voice down when I'm consulting. But working on SwipeWell, I'm like, that's me. I have to take all the filters off and get back to myself. I'm so used to ghost-writing.

Why Talking to Customers Is the Best Way to Improve Your SaaS Onboarding

Scott: That's a good reminder. It's just funny to see your voice evolve over the years. You really are a ghost-writer chameleon. So it's just really cool to see you out there on your own. It's a long, winding journey. There's no straight way with the bootstrapping path. It's just winding.

Are you still doing those back-to-back customer calls? I remember you wrote that you did like 100 customer interviews over a week or two at one point.

Corey: No, no. That was only for a specific period when we were trying to nail down our onboarding. So the process was: we started working on SwipeWell in February 2022, and by around May, we had an MVP ready for people to start using. A little buggy, but okay, let's start getting people in. We had an alpha invite, worked out some kinks, then a beta invite. And then it felt like, well, things were working pretty well. The tool works the way it should. Now, how do we get people to use the tool the way it should be used?

So we needed to build a formal self-serve onboarding flow, which we had none of at the time. Instead of guessing at what it might look like, I thought: How about I just hop on a bunch of calls? I'll share my screen, I'll be a fly on the wall, and I'll ask them to just go through it and stop whenever they feel stuck, or something doesn't make sense.

Through those calls, I started to piece the puzzle together. I could see the patterns. For these types of use cases, this is what people want to do first, second, and third. And these are the aha moments where it clicks for people.

So it was through those 100 calls over about two months that we designed the first iteration of the onboarding flow. We rolled that out to customers and had them go through it live. Then another 10 to 20 customer calls to work out the kinks. Move step four to actually be step two. Rearrange this thing. By about our fourth iteration, after around 130 calls overall, we felt like, okay, this is good enough for now. Let's move on.

Scott: 130 calls, impressive. What do you do with all that raw feedback? Is it just pattern matching and taking notes?

Corey: Yeah, I didn't have a super formal process. I wasn't formally mapping every single call or even looking at data that much. There was just so much happening on screen. There were too many details to write down and track for every single customer. So I was drawing patterns in my head, but I was marking down all the aha moments, all the questions, all the places people got stuck.

The main thing I was doing was recording the calls on Zoom using a tool called Grain. Grain was the one that allowed you to create an annotated timestamp on the call. Live on the call, I would have this little chat right in front of me. Someone would ask a question and I'd just type something like "question about Chrome extension installation" or "confused about X feature," and that timestamp would link back to that part of the call.

So I could share it with Connor, and as the calls were going on, I was sharing that feedback live with him so he could also see the patterns and draw some of the same conclusions. After collecting all the timestamps, there were a lot of clear patterns. Everyone gets stuck here. Everyone has an aha moment here. Just taking a raw list of all those timestamped annotations allowed us to map what would make sense as a pattern for the onboarding flow.

Scott: That's really cool, especially the sharing part. When I've done this kind of research, it's so hard to communicate the raw experience or the patterns. It ends up just being you in a silo saying, "No, believe me, this button should be over here."

Corey: Definitely one of the huge challenges across every SaaS company. Certain teams know different things about the customer that, if everyone knew them, everyone would be more aligned and it would unlock so much. Engineering is really aware of use cases and usage data. Marketers are very aware of objections and conversion rates. Sales. Customer success. Everyone knows a different angle. It's like the old parable of the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant. One guy says it's a tree, another says it's a bush. In reality, they're all feeling a different part of the same thing. If you could mesh them all together, you'd have the full picture of the customer.

Churnkey Break

Scott: Let's take a little break to tell you about Churnkey, the ones making this podcast happen. You might look at your churn numbers and think there's got to be a way to turn this around. Churnkey is the only platform that fixes every type of churn for you. We handle retention for customer-obsessed teams like Jasper, Fairdrop, AI Dungeon, and Castos. We lower cancellations by up to 42%, recover up to 89% of failed payments, and increase customer LTV by 28%, with user-friendly cancel flows, modern failed payment recovery, and AI-driven feedback analysis. Head to churnkey.co to get started.

How to Find Your SaaS Value Proposition From Customer Feedback

Scott: You said one word back there that popped out to me: inspiration. Whenever we share a customer GIF or screen share, and they're running into a problem, it is really inspiring. You see your product being used in a meaningful way, and they care enough to say, "This isn't working for me. I'm going to tell you about it." That's super inspiring. I have to resist the urge to drop everything and go fix it.

Corey: Absolutely. Having that direct line of communication is like none other. So you're doing marketing, you're doing product. How do you approach this in a structured way? Do you have a framework?

The one I keep falling back on time and again is Jobs to Be Done. I think it could differ for everyone, just choose your flavor, because a framework is really just a different lens for viewing the underlying principles of psychology, motivation, and what makes business happen. For me, Jobs to Be Done has been my go-to because of the four forces: the push away from the current solution, the things that keep you attached to it, the pull toward the new solution, and the anxiety of adopting a new solution. It's a circle-of-life pattern that's broad enough to cover all the bases, but specific enough that it lets you map certain campaigns, features, and decisions within the company to a specific force.

For SwipeWell, for example, a lot of people's current solution is Dropbox, Google Drive, their desktop folder, or a general-purpose tool like Slack, Notion, or Airtable. Maybe even a screenshot tool. What are the things pushing them away from those products? That quite literally becomes the opposite of those forces, which becomes the value proposition for what we should build.

The only reason to build this product in the first place is if we can help people do the opposite of what's frustrating about the current thing they're using. If we can't do that, we shouldn't go build a product. On the flip side, what pulls someone to the new solution, and what are their anxieties about it? That was a really big one for us.

One thing I heard time and again during early customer discovery calls was, "I love the idea of a swipe file. I just never end up using it." That's anxiety. They're thinking: if I adopt yet another tool, am I just going to go back to the same old pattern where I don't actually make use of it? So on our landing page, one of the ways we ease that anxiety is we say, "Build a swipe file that you'll actually use." We're just addressing the elephant in the room. We're saying, we know it's scary, we know you're trying to protect yourself from being let down again, give us a try anyway.

Scott: That's one of my exact anxieties. I become a collector and I'm so focused on the collecting part that I don't categorize, label, or build systems to go back and actually use them.

Corey: Right. And I think with every category of software, there's a major anxiety specific to that category, ubiquitous across every tool in it. I found this with Baremetrics. Every single analytics tool, people always ask: "Well, what do I do with the data?" You'll hear that across the board, whether it's Baremetrics, Amplitude, or Google Analytics.

The anxiety is really a question of the integrity of the value proposition. For analytics tools, it's always, "What do I do with the data?" For curation tools, whether it's SwipeWell, Readwise, or a Notion second-brain setup, the anxiety is always, "Am I actually going to use it?" CRMs have their own anxiety. Dev tools have their own. They all do.

So it's really important to know what that inherent anxiety is about the value proposition, so you can address it up front. And the thing is, it's pretty easy to guess what the anxiety is going to be, even without hearing it directly from a customer. By not addressing it, you're leaving money on the table because everyone's thinking the same question. And chances are your competitors aren't answering it either. If you can ease that anxiety, you're going to have a leg up on them.

Scott: I've felt the pressure to answer that in positioning or sales calls, but I've never heard anyone put it quite like that. That's a really powerful way to look at it.

Corey: Thanks. I'm going to have to get the recording so I can write that down somewhere.

What Writing a SaaS Marketing Book Really Feels Like

Scott: It's going right into the book, right? Founder Marketing. How's that feeling?

Corey: It feels like a bummer, honestly. It's definitely a grind. I'm great at getting words on paper with no pressure. That's how my courses came to be, how my newsletter came to be. But the thing about a book is it's a lot more final than a course or a tweet. You do the initial brain dump, and then you have to clean it up, organize it, fill it out, and expand the pieces that are brief. That's been the hardest part. I have to fight some perfectionism. But I'm about 80% done with the manuscript. I just need to push through to the end so I can get into editing mode. I'm kind of stuck in purgatory right now.

Scott: The biggest challenge I faced was similar. You look back at chapter three while you're at the end, you start editing in real time, and then you realize you just changed something you referenced later. And you get stuck in this tangled web of your own making. Just get it done first.

Corey: I really need to. I started writing it last summer. It's not like I'm writing my magnum opus of sci-fi. This is just practical advice for people working in SaaS who want to grow their company. I've been living and breathing this forever. Just get it out there.

Scott: And the cool thing is, if you're self-publishing, you can just update as you go. Very liberating.

Corey: Exactly. And people who get the first version, if there are some grammar mistakes, that'll just be a collector's edition.

How to Track Success Metrics Across Multiple SaaS Projects

Scott: I want to talk about how you track success across your work and projects. Beyond the obvious ones, like subscriber count or calculating MRR, is there something you find yourself tracking consistently across every effort you're making that feels unique or particularly you?

Corey: I find that having one true North Star is a little aspirational. It's hard to just pick one, and I don't think there's ever just one metric above all else. I think I have different metrics for different seasons of what I'm working on.

For SwipeFiles, the North Star would be total subscribers. But then, if I drill down, I'm thinking about members, course sales, monthly growth rate, new subscribers per month, and revenue per subscriber. You can see how the rabbit hole goes down. At the end of the day, the one I can influence the most is the total number of subscribers, so that's my North Star.

For SwipeWell, a similar approach. Right now, we're not a hyper-growth startup, and we don't have a ton of money to deploy. We're bootstrapped and still finding our way around product-market fit. So we have a North Star of total number of users, then drill down to monthly active users, and then total number of swipes. Those all triangulate the same thing: how much value am I creating for people?

Scott: Is there a way you approach extracting those key metrics? Are you looking at usage patterns in an analytics platform?

Corey: Yeah, going straight to the source. For SwipeWell, we're pulling raw SQL queries from Supabase. For Swipe Files, I just go into ConvertKit, look at total subscribers, open rates, and click-through rates. I'm a big fan of actually getting technical, step by step, and truly understanding things like all the different data layers. Where does this data live? How do we connect it to another system?

Understanding tools like Segment, a data warehouse, or a CDP of your choice. That pipes into every other tool. Now your database is routing to user lists, to Churnkey, fill in the blank. Everyone has the data they need. But the big thing in the beginning is: do you have the infrastructure set up in a way where you can route the data to all the right places and put a visualization layer on top of it?

Scott: The data directness sounds super refreshing. Just two sources and we're good.

Corey: Right. No need to over-complicate it. People go crazy playing founder: "Oh, I want to use this tool and that tool." How about you just focus on getting users and having something that works? Then you can add to the toolset as you need.

How to Manage Your Time and Stay Productive Across Multiple Projects

Scott: I want to switch gears and talk about how you work. I think of you as a kind of Renaissance man. You're doing product, marketing, you've got your newsletter, you're optimizing domain authority on Ahrefs, dropping threads. How do you organize your week around all of these inputs? Do you have like an SEO Thursday or a newsletter day?

Corey: It's probably simpler than you'd think, but that might be some of the magic to it. I don't really claim to be incredibly productive. My thesis on work and productivity is: only work on really high-leverage projects at any time. Cut out pretty much everything else and roll through those high-leverage projects one at a time.

Practically, I try to batch most of my meetings on Wednesdays. That clears my mind for the other four days, knowing there might be one or two meetings at most, but otherwise my entire day is free for deep work.

At the beginning of the week, I have these little analog cards, and I'll write down the high-level projects I'm going to work on for that week. Product A, projects A, B, and C. Product B, projects A, B, and C. That's my list. If I get through it early, I add to the list. If I don't finish, I start at the top of the same list the next week.

Corey: For SwipeWell, Connor and I meet every two weeks on a Wednesday, check in on what's happening, and decide what goes on the paper for me to work on. And then I basically entirely ignore email. Most things just end up unread or archived. My Twitter DMs are my main communication channel, which is funny, but email is just such a dumpster fire. I've tried to clean it a million different ways and eventually realized: why am I doing this?

In a lot of meetings, I just ask people to send me a Loom video. Send me a DM on Twitter. I might not get back to you right away. I'm a horrible communicator. But that allows me to really just focus on getting these high-leverage projects done at my own pace.

Scott: I empathize with the select-all-archive method of inbox management. And honestly, I kind of resent that inbox management is even a thing. It's other people's obligations landing in your space.

Corey: Right. What I do is bookmark the page, so when I open my email, it's already filtered for primary and unread. I'll quickly scan the Updates and Promotions tabs to see if anything should be in the primary inbox, and then my unreads are basically my to-do list. Not interested in that. Interesting. Select, mark as read, archive. If there's something to respond to, I respond quickly, and it's cleared. Ten minutes, I'm out of there. That helps me surface the most important things without anything getting buried on page five from three months ago.

What Corey Haines Is Reading and Why He Recommends Star Wars Books

Scott: Just cut it loose. Free yourself from the obligation. Alright, we're coming up on time. I want to ask you two questions. I ask pretty much anyone. First: is there a book or article you've read recently that's left an impression on you?

Corey: Sure. This one will probably be a little off the beaten path. I haven't been reading a lot of non-fiction or business books lately. I've been reading a lot more sci-fi. The most recent thing I read, well, listened to, because I had PRK surgery recently, where they laser your eyes. I slept for like two days straight, and basically couldn't see for a while. So I was listening to audiobooks all day long.

I listened to Path of Destruction about Darth Bane, which is actually a really underrated book. I'm a huge Star Wars nerd; you can see the Mandalorian helmet behind me. I listened to that one non-stop. It got me through surgery.

Scott: Oh, that trilogy is so good. Bane kind of becomes like a James Bond figure in a way. And Star Wars, when it actually humanizes the bad guys, it gets really good. It's not just a simple allegory of good and evil.

Corey: Exactly. I also read the one about Palpatine, right before that. Also really good. It changed my frame on the traditional story of good guy versus bad guy, and good always wins in the end. I enjoyed the book even though the main character is a very bad guy and there isn't really a happy ending. It's a bit like watching a car crash. You just want to observe and see it unfold. But there's still a lot of character development and strong story arcs.

Top Productivity Tip: Get Outside Early Every Morning

Scott: I could probably talk about this with you all day, so we need to move on. Last question: in life, in business, in working out, whatever it is, do you have one high-octane tip you'd give other listeners?

Corey: Hmm. If it's going to be high-octane, I have to really think about this one.

Honestly, I feel like everyone in tech right now is obsessed with Huberman and the Huberman Lab podcast. Awesome guy. One of the things he always talks about is getting natural sunlight in your eyes 30 minutes to an hour after you wake up. That naturally helps your body wake up, you become more alert, and it creates dopaminergic effects throughout the rest of the day. More energy, motivation, and focus.

Funny enough, I live in an apartment, and I have a pug. If I don't take him out, he'll just blow up like a balloon. So for the last five years, I've taken him out first thing in the morning, every single day. And I think that's actually been one of my keys to success, because now I realize: I get outside, I get sunlight, I get blood flow, and it's almost meditative. So my high-octane tip is just: get outside early. Take a little walk. Take your dog out.

Scott: I could take that advice. I'm dragging myself out of bed with three kids every day.

Corey: Just put them on a leash and see what happens.

Scott: I might get some calls from the police on that one. But thanks, Corey. Appreciate it.

Corey: Thanks for having me, Scott. Take it easy.

Scott: Don't miss out on future episodes. Get alerts for new drops at subscriptionheroes.com or follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Special thanks to Churnkey for sponsoring the show. Learn how to make customers happier while boosting revenue at churnkey.com. I'm Scott Hurff, and this has been Subscription Heroes.