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I was asked by a potential investor for Key Performance Metrics for our company. What do you think the KPIs are for a typical SaaS company? Here are the ones that I think we should give him:

  • CAC - Cost of Customer Acquisition
  • LTV - Lifetime value
  • Churn Rate
  • MMR - Monthly Recurring Revenue
  • MCCS - Monthly Cost of Customer Services

Am I misinterpreting what the investor wants and looking at the wrong metrics? Any guidance is appreciated. Thanks!

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I think this link will help you! http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/

Regards, João Augusto Zaratine

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+1 Good link. Does a good job explaining cohort analysis - something that seems to be missing many times when discussing churn. – jimg Jul 13 '12 at 22:11

The main metrics to look at is:

  • User count and growth: How many users do you have, and how is this growing
  • Retention: How many users come back to your site
  • Activity: This is define by whatever you provide, but basically you want to know if users are actually doing something on your site

Assuming you sell something:

  • Conversion rate (very importante!!): How many users go from free to Paying
  • Incremental Sales: in SaaS you have recurring revenue, so by how much does this revenue grow over a given period.

Customer satisfaction:

  • How many of your customers would recommend you to others?
  • How many of your customers have recommended you?
  • How many of your customers like you?

Competitiveness:

  • How many times do you loose against your competitors in a deal (or do you win?)

Other stuff to have:

  • Customer Acquisition Cost: How much do you have to spend (time + Money + other) to get a customer to sign-up and to convert.
  • Life Time Value (tough to calculate but critical): what's a user worth during its life time with you (expected / average)
  • Incremental Cost per new User (how much does it cost you to add a new user, careful, at the beginning it might be almost 0 but as you scale there are some incremental steps like adding a server, adding an Sys Admin, etc..)

There are others for sure. To answer your question I would say that you could present those numbers based on assumptions if you are in the Business Plan/pitch phase but they will likely to be wrong. Maybe the investor just wants to see if you have a good understanding of your business and what matters..

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While forentrepreneurs.com is very usefull, here http://chaotic-flow.com/ you will find a deep analysis about SaaS metrics, their components, explanations and bechmark.

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