SaaS增长天花板：为什么取消率总是赢过营销

We've all heard this phrase, right? If you're not growing, you're dying. But is it true? I don't know. Maybe it kind of sounds right, but it also kind of sounds like the kind of thing a VC says to force you to grow unnaturally. I don't know. But um over the next 40 minutes, I'm going to assume that it is true uh and that you want to grow, and maybe growth is harder now than it was, or maybe it's always been hard. And so it'd be nice to have a couple of ways to grow uh faster.

And growth is mysterious. Like this is a a chart of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter subscribers. And uh he posted this on Twitter and we said, "Whoa, what happened there?" And he goes, "I don't know."

[panting]

Okay. But sometimes it's not so mysterious. The uh the founder of Projection Lab posted this. We said, "What happened there?" And he goes, "Well, I hired John." Who's John? And how can I get one? Well, turns out John's a marketer.

[panting]

Oh, so if you make something and don't tell anyone, sales are bad. And if you make something and tell people, like maybe it's better. What a mystery. Good growth is so hard to figure out. Anyway, even when you have it figured out, growth always slows, which is part of the the reason that we're, you know, talking about this. This is a actual data from a content affiliate campaign at WP Engine 10 years ago. You can see how it's good for a while and then I don't know, it tapers off and shrinks a little.

So I'm going to explain why this always happens with marketing campaigns and other things. Uh for example, it happens at Buffer, or happened at Buffer. Buffer's a company we probably all love, right? They're super transparent. They did a lot of things first. The founders are awesome. Great company. But look, same thing as I just showed you that happened to Buffer. But Buffer also fixed it. Ooh. Don't you want to know how they did that?

So of course we're going to talk about that. But I'm going to start by talking about cancellations because cancellations are financially a problem. I'll get to that, but to me cancellation feels very personal. And the reason is I think about the gauntlet of pain that a person goes through to sign up ever. Like they searched on Google or whatever, they saw an ad, they clicked it. That's already what? 1% at best chance that that happens.

They come to the home page, they didn't bounce, they thought the features were pretty good, they saw the pricing page, that didn't scare them off. They maybe they looked at competition. They said find that price sounds pretty good, so they signed up. And then they onboarded and maybe they talked to support and maybe they had to configure some crap and upload their photo for the 8 millionth time and right? And then after all of that, they they were like, "No."

I mean, they went through a gauntlet of pain. I mean, what is this? 1 in 10,000? Cuz like 1% get through the website, maybe another 1% after that pay. This is a 1 in 10,000 person and they're like, "I still don't want this." And it's like, "Oh my god, why?" Like Like you're the you're I mean, so so to me it's like an emotional personal thing even setting the finances aside. The whole point is that I want whoever that is to be successful.

I failed them. I I really want to know why. But there is a good financial reason, so we should talk about that. Which is that cancellation beats marketing always. So, I want to explain [snorts] that cuz it's also useful to know more about marketing. So, this is a idealized but typical marketing channel. What happens is you figure it out like, "Oh, we figured out how to do the Facebook ads after all." And then very quickly you get to like, "Well, this is how many searches there are."

And maybe you optimize over time so it gets a little bit better, but it kind of looks like that. But then over time it can look like this because you're kind of doing everything that you reasonably could, and then it often gets worse. It often starts sagging for lots of reasons. People have already seen the ad who are going to see the ad. They're not clicking. That's the deal, right? Or competition bids up the ads, so it's just not cost-effective to run the ad anymore.

Or maybe it people just aren't using Facebook as much anymore, the wrong people are. There's lots of reasons, right? But it looks like this. Um for example, here's our content marketing campaign that looks like I mean this is real data that looks as much like the model as as you can imagine. And you can see, okay, it was good and then eh. And this is so common that I gave this the name the elephant curve. And so if you search online for elephant curve, if you're into this stuff, and you're like, I want to I want like 20 real world examples of this and why and a big long analysis, then search for elephant curve.

Um I don't know. It doesn't really look like an elephant. I just I like I thought the elephant was cool. I wanted to give it a name. I could have called it Jason curve. That'd be really bad, right? So at least I called it elephant curve. Anyway, so um it always looks like this. Then you say, yeah, but I'm going to unlock more marketing campaigns. And I'll say, yeah, but uh if you stack multiple marketing campaigns that you unlock over time, it actually still adds up to exactly the same curve, which is part of why it's such a common phenomenon, cuz like all the math sort of like runs in this direction.

Also, not all the marketing channels are very good. Also, you run out of them. There aren't infinite marketing channels. So one way or another, this is going to be it when it comes to like paid marketing, that kind of stuff. And you're going to get this curve. But cancellation does not work at all like this. This is the problem. So imagine a company with a thousand customers. And imagine the marketing is kicking in 100 customers a month.

Who cares how expect how efficient it is? That's what they're doing. And suppose this company has a cancellation rate of 5% per month, which a lot of people in here would say, that's pretty good because you're cancellation is 5%, you think it's good. You're wrong, but okay, I get it. And so um so okay, so 50 so because it's a thousand customers, 5% means 50 leave. Okay, so this company's adding 50 customers a month. That sounds okay.

And if this is something like you, one thought you might have is this is fine. Like if I just stay like this, status quo, I'm adding customers every month, some are leaving. And so I'll just grow 50 customers a month kind of forever. I mean forever, but you know, it'll it'll just go. And the answer is, nope. It absolutely will if you don't change anything, you will stop growing. And the reason is, imagine this company has 3,000 customers instead.

Marketing doesn't care. Like AdWords doesn't care how many customers you have. It still just works the same way. It doesn't scale with you, but cancellation does. That's what 5% means. It means 5% of how big you are. That means it scales with how big you are. So, in this example, now 150 customers are leaving and this company is shrinking even though all we did is add more customers and change and kept everything else the same.

So, as you grow, you go for you actually start growing more slowly and eventually even shrinking or really you just stay still. So, cancellation wins. That's what I mean by cancellation wins. So, here's an interesting thing you can do, should do. This is more real data from ConvertKit, now called Kit, another company that shows their data shares our data their data with us, which is awesome. This is just their new customer ads, so this is that new thing.

They're not really declining yet. They're maybe slowing their growth, but like that's pretty good anyway. And let's suppose they had that 5% cancellation I just said. That would look like this over time as they as they grew. This is math. And as you can see, uh-oh, they stop growing here because cancellations catch up and then win because it always win

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