How to Create Unstoppable Self-serve SaaS Growth | Samuel Hulick (SelfServeSaas.com)

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Scott: Welcome to Subscription Heroes. I'm your host, Scott Hurff. Today, we get to learn from the legendary Samuel Hulick. Samuel's a customer onboarding and activation expert who loves teaching operators how to turn their SaaS into a retention powerhouse. Samuel created self-serve SaaS.com, a playbook, and a community for optimizing skill-friendly cash flow. Here's what we covered:

What the Holy Grail of onboarding is and how to apply it to your business.
Avoiding the bad habits we've learned from viral social companies.
Why you should be segmenting your customers by intent.

There's so much more, so let's dive in.

I want to start with your latest work. What do you want people to know about Self-Serve SaaS?

What People Should Know About a Self-Serve SaaS Business Model?

Samuel: Well, I think self-serve SaaS is really important. Especially when we're talking about it within a subscription context, there are a lot of digital offerings out there that you could generally call a SaaS company, or a startup, or whatever kind of tech business you want to put in the nomenclature you want to apply. And a lot of those business models are predicated on bringing in healthy subscription-based customers.

And if you are a self-serve SaaS company, you're not only offering a digital product to people on a subscription model, but you're also hoping they'll convert and stay subscribed on their own. So you need to create an automated conversion process for the whole customer lifetime, since you won't have any human-driven sales functions available to help augment that. So that's just a really fascinating area of where design meets business for me. And it's something that I think a lot of companies...

I think there is a lot of information out there on how to scale your company in an enterprise, upmarket, sales-driven kind of way, but not much on how to scale your company based on self-serve. And especially if your market is really self-serve, I think there should be ways for founders to succeed without reinventing the wheel over and over.

Scott: Right. It's like these principles are fairly self-evident: you get lower overhead, faster scaling. I guess Optimizely is one of the earliest examples of this, back in 2014. But now it's everywhere. The problem is, as you said, it's not always clear how to approach it. So just to establish a baseline, what are the core tenants for you of a self-serve SaaS as a business model? Not the proper noun, but the... I guess the generic?

Samuel: I think of it almost like a really sophisticated vending machine. If you're going up to a vending machine in real life to buy a soda or a bag of pretzels or something like that, you are deciding what you want and facilitating the transaction entirely yourself. It's all one coherent entity in a way that is completely driven autonomously by the user of the vending machine, so to speak. And in a similar sense, we're creating really complicated digital vending machines and looking to create digital environments for people to be able to successfully buy their bag of pretzels or their soda. So to me, that's the gist of it. But there's plenty more complexity to dive into. I'm not sure how deep you'd like me to go.

How to Scale a Self-Serve SaaS Model: Turning CAC Into Long-Term LTV

Scott: I guess one of my questions is, if you have an existing self-serve product and you've stumbled your way into it, you've found some success; how could you deliberately apply a self-serve SaaS model with your tenants? You know, you want to create a virtuous cycle of getting your customers more of what they want, helping your team understand your customers better, and then, of course, that has ongoing benefits: improved free-to-pay conversion and retention, etc. Is there a framework you would apply, or some tactics, or anything like that?

Samuel: There are a million different tactics for sure. As far as frameworks that I'm working on, I don't think that there are a lot of really reliable ones out there right now. Some are close, like, there's product-led growth, or jobs-to-be-done, or different conceptual frameworks to help you get into the mindset of serving users in an autonomous kind of fashion. But at the same time, I think really from a business standpoint, what you're ultimately looking to do is to turn your cost of acquiring new subscriptions into long-term, healthy lifetime subscription revenue. And as a business function, the smarter that you can get about taking your cost of acquiring a customer, your CAC, and producing LTV, lifetime value, out of it, to me, that's really the name of the game. We're trying to create processes that are smart ways for us to go out and buy quality lifetime revenue as cheaply as possible. And to me, the biggest force multiplier that you can take to that approach is to create an ecosystem in which people can succeed on their own as users when they're trying to improve their lives with your offering.

That's easier said than done, for sure. But I think if you look at startups, a lot of times it's harder to break into an enterprise sales kind of market because you've got to be SOC 2 compliant. I mean, it's just a whole different ball game. And so it's easier to get started in a self-serve kind of context where maybe you're just creating an app and selling it for twenty dollars a month and kind of seeing what happens. But if that turns into something that has traction, the real question is how do you then scale that out, and how do you double down on what's working, or even identify what's working versus what isn't? And that's something that I see a lot of companies struggle with, and then ultimately outgrow by just doing sales instead, rather than getting really, really sophisticated at the self-serve side of things and learning how to lean into those margins and squeeze as much juice out of it as they can.

How to Reach 100 Million ARR With a Self-Serve SaaS Model

Scott: I saw the stat the other day. I think it was a presentation from Jessica Bardos from Salesforce Ventures. She was saying that only 150 private subscription companies have crossed 100 million dollars. And you know, so I haven't been a part of a lot of startups that have crossed that line. That to me seems pretty big. But I think it's a good number because only a few companies in history have unlocked this. So if you had a SaaS and you wanted to grow to 200 million in revenue starting today, where would you start? How would you unlock that growth?

Samuel: So, when you say 100 million revenue, is that MRR?

Scott: Closer to 10 million a month.

Samuel: If we're talking about that within a self-serve context, we also need to be thinking about just the nature of self-serve as a business model, where the business model dynamic works best in scenarios where people want to make independent decisions for relatively smaller amounts of money than in a sales-driven kind of context. So in industry lingo, it's low ARPA, high volume. Low average revenue per account, but you've got a ton of accounts out there. Instead of trying to sell big contracts to Fortune 500 companies, you've got 20,000 small businesses that could be your target market, for example.

And so when I'm thinking about how to get to 100 million ARR in a self-serve context, one of the very first things that I think of is: what's the amount of volume of customers that's going to make up that amount of money? And how do I find a repeatable process for not only going out and acquiring those customers, but also keeping them around as sticky, good, long-term revenue that I can be building upon month over month over month?

And so from that standpoint, for me, if I'm really trying to think of how I scale out to, I don't know how to do the math in my head off the top, but you know, it'll be thousands and thousands of customers. What I would really be trying to hone in on are: what are the improved life circumstances that somebody is coming to my offering for? And how do I create processes not just around being more effective at charging them, but being more effective at getting them to the outcomes that they're hoping that my app will unlock for them in their life? And the more that we can focus on the right outcomes that are strongly correlated with really healthy long-term lifetime value, and the better that we can get at moving that lever to unlock those outcomes for people, the more likely it is that we would have a repeatable process for turning CAC into LTV at such a rate that we could scale it up to 100 million dollars.

Scott: Outcomes happen outside the product, you like to say, right?

Samuel: That's right. There are in-app outcomes, and there are out-of-app outcomes, and every single in-app outcome is driven by an out-of-app outcome.

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MailChimp as a Self-Serve SaaS Success Story

Scott: Is there someone who comes to mind, a company that you've worked with, or one that's scaling right now? That makes you go: they really have got this right, or they're inspiring to me in some way?

Samuel: I mean, MailChimp is a great example of a relatively bootstrapped self-serve business model. I did have the pleasure of working with them several years ago, and you know, I'm quite a fan of what they accomplished there. I'm not sure what has happened since they sold to Intuit, I think. But that's definitely a path to emulate, although of course it did take quite a long time to get there for them, as it would for any company of that size.

Scott: What was their exit again? Was it 1.5 billion or something?

Samuel: Yeah, they're pretty staggering volumes, just in terms of daily signups and the amount of revenue they're making. It's quite a machine they have running over there.

What are Key Value Metrics in SaaS and How Do You Find Yours?

Scott: So, a while ago, we had a conversation where we were speaking about key value metrics. And just to define them, key value metrics embody the things that people do on your product that they find valuable, or they extract some benefit from those things, and that makes them stay around longer. Correct me if I'm not defining this well. But I was wondering: what do you think about how businesses can do a better job of uncovering, understanding, or collecting their own key value metrics? The one that comes to mind is the urban legend of Facebook in the early days: seven friends in three days?

Samuel: You get that number of friends, you're stuck around for life. So how can businesses do a better job of finding their own key value metrics and constantly rediscovering them as they evolve?

There are a number of different ways we could tackle that. On the one hand, I think that a lot of the key value metric mindset out there has been largely established by go-big-or-go-home viral social companies. So Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. I mean, Twitter had "follow 30 people," Facebook had "seven friends in three days," etc. And in all of those companies, they're not directly making money from their user base; they're making money from ads, partnerships, whatever. And so the growth metrics that they had to work with were, by definition, loosely connected to revenue at best. And therefore, you would need to use something like, well, if people follow 30 people, then there seems to be an inflection point in terms of retention.

But really, those kinds of questions are more about, especially when you start going down the road of "how do we get people to build habits and get addicted to our product". A lot of the viral kind of plays don't necessarily make sense within a subscription business model, where you are saying, hey, we're here to help provide value to you, and we want this to be a good deal for you, where ideally you're happy to pay 20 bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, whatever that is, in exchange for all the benefits that the offering unlocks for you.

And so to me, the question really becomes less focused on key value metrics in terms of engagement and user behavior in the abstract, and more about what are the specific goals that are driving people to find your offering to be relevant to begin with, and how do you speak to those goals as much as possible, and identify which of those goals most closely correlate with revenue, which is something that a Twitter or a LinkedIn wouldn't necessarily be able to do.

Scott: I think it's telling that the most prominent, prevalent examples of mythical key value metrics, and they have the air of urban legend and are all tied to social apps and growth-minded virality. SaaS key value metrics aren't as cinematic or fun to discuss, in certain cases, in pop culture, right?

Samuel: I mean, urban legends are only worth so much. And I think that when companies that do have a closer connection to revenue, who are charging their customer base directly, try to emulate the Twitter and Facebook-type growth approaches. A lot of times, I'll see a data scientist come up with something like: "Oh, there's an inflection point in retention if somebody creates three projects, so let's gear our activation experience around getting people over that three-project threshold." Where you know for a fact that nobody is like, "You know what's great about this thing? I can make three projects with it." Nobody's coming to you for that.

They're coming for a byproduct of trying to do something else that's actually meaningful to them. And the more that you can put your finger on the pulse of what's actually meaningful to people, and again confirm that that is something that correlates strongly with long-term healthy revenue production, then you have the makings of at least a hypothesis that you can be trying to build out a process around optimizing.

Whereas if you're trying to optimize for creating three projects, in theory, you could be gamifying it so that more people go in and create three instances of whatever project is in your app; but that doesn't mean that they're getting value. And it probably doesn't mean that getting more of those extra people to do that arbitrary thing is going to unlock more value in the form of revenue for you either. It's not the thing that's causing people to pay you. To me, that's really the name of the game: identifying what's the driving force that leads people to want to give you money in an ongoing kind of way, and how do you just keep doubling down on that as much as possible instead.

How to Use Intent Segmentation to Identify Key Value Metrics in SaaS

Scott: I've been in conversations in those rooms where I've had similar conversations where it's the three-project fallacy. I guess we'll call it. It just cracks me up because it's just so simplistic. And I guess it's a reflection of that someone doesn't know where to start, or they're just exhausted by all the inputs, and this is the most common or prevalent metric that popped up in all the Mixpanel dashboards or whatnot. Are there any common places to start in uncovering these key value metrics, or just common ones you see across the board in SaaS?

Samuel: One big recommendation that I make is to segment by intent. So if somebody is, for example, creating their account, you can ask them, "What are the benefits that you're here to unlock? How can we be of help to you?", asking them basically, "What are you here for help with?" And when they press a button that answers the survey question that says "this is what I'm here for," then you can flag that particular user for tracking.

You can see how likely it is that people who say they're here for option A actually go on to convert, or are retained in month two or month three, versus people who say they're here for option B, or who say they're not here for any of these options, in which case you have a mismatch between your messaging and your product's value proposition. So one general recommendation that I would make is that there's a lot of opportunity in the chasm between what marketing is focused on, which is usually driving top-of-funnel signups, trial starts, very high-level account creation kind of things, and ultimately what product is focused on, which is delivering capabilities for long-term healthy customers.

How those marketing signups turn into a product's long-term customers is an area that I think a lot of companies have as an oversight, even just organizationally. They've got their marketing department, they've got their product department, maybe they've got customer success, maybe they've got growth. But really, who's watching to see: are these new trials that we're getting high quality? Are they likely to convert? Do we have a general theory in place around what inflection points people need to experience in order for them to convert? I think there's just a lot happening there that is really interesting to explore, but maybe because of the general org chart design, it tends to be overlooked in most companies.

Scott: I've definitely seen that happen before. It's like, marketing goes, "hey, we've got you all the leads you asked for," and product goes, "yeah, but they're all churning". And finance goes, "you've got to do something about this churn problem," and it's just passing the baton around. And who ultimately owns that? Who can cut through and solve the problem of the mismatch?

Samuel: 100 percent. That's another podcast, I'm sure. Or a whole management course.

What Is Context-Aware Onboarding and How Does It Work in SaaS?

Scott: So you mentioned onboarding and segmentation, and you said in the past that the Holy Grail of customer onboarding and ultimately customer success is context-aware, or segmented, onboarding. And I actually saw this the other day in Pseudo. It's an AI-assisted fiction writing app started by my two friends, Ahmed Gupta and James Yu, full disclosure. And it's amazing. You come into the app, and it asks you what type of story you're working on, and you type in free form: "I'm writing a novel about a Space Opera," or "a heist fantasy".

I don't know why those came to mind, but sure, we'll go with it. It literally says, "Hey, in a Space Opera, you need to come up with some characters like Luke in Star Wars," and it makes these crazy references. I just thought it was pretty incredible. So I'll send you some screenshots after. But I guess my question is: where are the key elements of this context-aware onboarding experience? I imagine it starts with someone's role, or a mix of: "What key benefit am I looking to get out of your product?"

Samuel: I think it's really a question of just meeting people where they're currently at. One really simple example that I remember hearing about; there was a company. It was a mobile app that gave guitar lessons, and they tried all kinds of different things to improve their activation and conversion rates, and a lot of them didn't work, as is the case with any kind of growth experiments. But one that they finally landed on that did work was just a simple question when you're going through the onboarding: "What's your current skill level in playing guitar? Are you an absolute beginner? Do you know how to read music?"

And just by getting an understanding of where people were at, they were able to tailor the lessons to somebody who had the level of skill that the person claimed to have. And doing that alone made it a lot easier for the software company to identify what would be relevant and what wouldn't be relevant to any given person, depending on the situation that they had self-reported as being in.

And that is really freeing from a software design perspective, because you don't have to just satisfice and create a one-size-fits-all experience that, in theory, could be useful to anybody, but in practice is not actually made for anybody. You should get some contextual clues about somebody. Ideally, those clues would be not only about their current situation, like "how good are you currently at playing guitar," but also "why do you want to become better at guitar," "what are the things that you want to be able to learn".

If you can get an understanding of where somebody's currently at and where they're trying to get to, especially as it relates to how they're trying to leverage your app to get there, then it's a lot easier. It's almost like painting by numbers: "Okay, well, you need to do this and this and this." You can lay out a whole journey for them. Not as you railroad them through it like a wizard, you still can provide the optionality, but you can choose what to surface as far as what's relevant to them at any given time. And so from that standpoint, I think segmentation is extremely powerful and underleveraged, especially within the realm of product design.

Even something really simple, let's say an invoice-sending app. If you're asking people why they want to send invoices, and one category of people said they wanted to appear bigger so they could land a big new client, and they wanted to step up their invoice game because of that. Then another category of people said that the person who handled their invoices left the company, and they just have a zip drive with Word documents in it, and they don't know what to do.

That's a whole different category of concerns and problems to be solved. And even if you just took that segmentation information and just had a different testimonial on the billing page that spoke specifically to, "man, it was amazing how [product] helped me get all my Word docs imported into a thing, and now I don't have to worry about lapsed payments anymore". If that's the testimonial that they see after they told you that's their problem, it's much more likely that they'll go, "okay." Kind of like, as a kid, did you play "Hotter and Colder?" Where it's like, "getting warmer, getting warmer." You want to let people know that they're getting warmer as much as possible. And that's not, "you're getting closer to seven friends in three days" or "you're getting closer to three projects", it's "you're getting closer to the stuff that you care about."

Scott: I love how you put that, because it creates this insane feedback cycle of: we've successfully identified this type of customer that we can call out, and then we're seeing them progress through. But also, we're getting other product ideas, too, where, if you want to appear bigger to land a client and that segment takes off, then you can do all sorts of product enhancements to satisfy that and increase retention and all that good stuff.

Samuel: It informs marketing, too, to your point. It can inform your acquisition strategy, it can inform what your ad copy is, and who you're running your ads to. That's why I was using the highfalutin term of "ecosystem" earlier. One example that comes to mind; this isn't really segment-specific, but I just recently started getting the activation emails from Buzzsprout, which is a podcast hosting service. One of the first lifecycle emails that they sent was "here's our guide on the best microphones under a hundred dollars." And that's not an email like "you haven't made three projects yet, log in to get three projects started" or anything that's tone-deaf or just speaking only to the practical logistics that need to take place in order for somebody to make the app function.

Instead, they're understanding: if they just come in and say "upload your podcast episode" as the very first step, it assumes that people have a podcast episode, or a podcast at all, or even a microphone, or know where to start, or any of those things; podcast titles and all those kinds of things are hard to figure out. And so if you really want to take on the customer's problems and genuinely help guide them to places that they couldn't get to without you, sometimes it involves helping them understand the best microphones under a hundred dollars. But that has nothing to do with the operation of your interface.

How to Grow Your SaaS User Base by Solving Problems Outside Your Product

Scott: I faced it in a different startup where you had to buy physical hardware keys, a Trezor or Ledger, and you had to wait for that thing to come in, and then you had to go back to the app and set it up. So there was this period where people forgot about you. But if you can identify that segment, knock down the barriers, get them to a solution faster, outcome happening outside the product, you've got your gear, now you're set up. And I'm sure there's another activation lifecycle email where it's like, "how to tune your mic" or "how to connect it with this or whatever," right?

Samuel: It's basically: your problems are my problems, and we're going to try to solve them as comprehensively as possible. Because even if you think about it, in the case of Buzzsprout, their total addressable market changes depending on what their approach is. If they're only going to help people who already have a podcast episode recorded, that's a way smaller market than people who want to start a podcast but don't really know where to begin.

And if you can come in early and be helpful when they're in the figuring-it-out phase, it's going to really build the kind of trust that would lead to a really healthy long-term subscription further down the line. So it's a question also of timing and market specificity, where you could say, "Well, we really want to help people who already have podcast art and have already recorded five episodes, and they're just looking to find a better host for their services." But your market is way smaller as a consequence of that. Your market is basically just your competitors' customers, rather than a very wide pool of people who are somewhere in the journey of trying to start their podcast instead.

Scott: It's especially relevant because I think podcasting as an industry declined something like five percent last year, so continuing to get new blood in is even more important, and more of a challenge.

Samuel: I think that's relevant for any business, especially when we talk self-serve, you really have to be thinking volume, and ideally also expansion, as you would with any kind of SaaS business. But you don't have the giant whales coming in and spending the equivalent of all the rest of your customers just in one account to be able to save you, so to speak. You really have to be, whether you like it or not, in much closer touch with the heartbeat of your growth process.

How Often Should You Revisit Your SaaS Onboarding Segmentation Strategy?

Scott: I want to ask about segmentation. One thing I've seen in companies is that you work really hard on onboarding. It's a huge priority; you nail down the persona, the customer profile, whatever you want to call it, you have the segmentation questions and role questions, and then you kind of move on.

It becomes stale over time. Not because you're neglecting it on purpose, but because you're busy, you're putting out fires everywhere. And then the data you look at just kind of starts to tilt and shift in a way that starts making less sense. How do you make sure this stays current? Do you put a team on this? Do you revisit it every quarter? I'd be remiss if I didn't ask an AI question too: could AI do this, probably? How do you keep these segments fresh and prevent them from going stale?

Samuel: I think that you want to keep your finger on the pulse of how things are trending at any given moment. And this again speaks back to maybe the org chart disconnect that we were talking about before, where marketing's focused on their metrics, product's focused on their metrics, and hopefully all of these things just kind of come together to produce good unit economics. Whereas for me, I like to start by looking at the unit economics and getting an understanding of: what is our CAC to LTV ratio right now? How long does it take to pay off the cost of customer acquisition? Is it 10 months? Is it 14 months? What does that do to our cash flow?

And to me, if you start with revenue and then reverse engineer different points of leverage along the customer journey, that could impact revenue. I think that's more compelling than "well, we sifted through the data and found that you've got to create three projects, and then you're more likely to still be logging in two months later, so let's try to make that happen." I can understand why companies would want to move on from that, or generally speaking, not find a lot of success in doing that repeatedly. But at the same time, I really would advocate for not thinking of your activation process as a feature that you just ship and then revisit every couple of years. To me, it's really the heartbeat of your company.

This is how you're going out and actively investing money to bring in new subscribers. And you continually want to be informed as to whether the new subscribers that you're bringing in are at least on track to be as healthy as your past subscribers, if not more. Ideally, you're acquiring them at a more scale-friendly acquisition cost. And so to me, those are trends that are taking place within your data and within your customer base daily. To just revisit that every couple of years, to me, that's a concerning way of approaching it, in my opinion.

Samuel Hulick's Recommended Reading: Reframing Business by Richard Normann

Scott: Amen to that. It ends up being one of those all-hands-on-deck three-month grind fests, and then you put it on the shelf. And it's like, why did we do this? Just to get a bump in metrics or survey results for a few months, and then... yeah, it's frustrating.

I want to close with two questions. The first is: if you're reading a book or a long-form piece lately, which one has had a particularly strong effect on you?

Samuel: There's a book that I came across that I think is out of print, so it's a little hard to recommend.

Scott: I already love it.

Samuel: It's called "Reframing Business" by Richard Normann. This was a book that I heard recommended in a lecture on an economics theory called service-dominant logic, which is similar to a lot of the concepts that we've been talking about today. They built out this theory, largely inspired by the work of Richard Normann, who wrote the book "Reframing Business." So I was like, all right, I should check this out. The way they're putting this is completely in line with how I see it, too. I found that very, very inspiring. So that's the book that I'm working my way through right now, and I strongly recommend it if you're willing to take the chance on an expensive, obscure, out-of-print book.

How to Build SaaS Systems That Actually Deliver on Your Product's Promise

Scott: So just for our listeners, for one last high-octane tip: what would you leave them with? It could be about design, leadership, or reading is up to you.

Samuel: I think really, for me, one of the keys that I see missing in our industry is a real sense of investment in actually following through on the expectations that you're setting with your customer base. A lot of people will create value propositions that sound good on the surface, but are maybe kind of abstract. Or even like a really well-intentioned company, they go out, and they do switch interviews to identify the different jobs to be done. Thinking about how that could inform their marketing or the way that they position their offering, or things like that. And I think that's great. But I would also recommend that we really think about: how do we create systems that reliably follow through on the promises that we're making?

And if we're identifying jobs to be done, instead of just using those to put a different spin on our marketing and our positioning, how do we create systems that actually get people to the places that they're hoping the jobs will get them to arrive at? And build out the processes that reliably help people make incremental progress toward becoming better at playing guitar, or appearing bigger to potential clients with their invoices, or whatever it is that they're trying to unlock in their life. How do we take on those problems and create systems that genuinely are geared toward increasing the likelihood that people are successful with those out-of-app outcomes, rather than just making sort of hand-wavy promises and giving everybody a one-size-fits-all interface?

Scott: Could not agree more. The promise needs to be not just a guidepost, but actually followed through on and taken as a commitment. I love that you said that. I'm grateful for you coming on. Thank you so much.

Samuel Hulick: A pleasure, of course. Awesome. Thanks.

Scott Hurff: 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. Your support for this show has been incredible so far, and let's keep the momentum going.