Patrick Campbell

The number one thing to figure out when you're thinking about the different pricing pieces, pound for pound, it's the pricing metric or the value metric. That's how you charge per user, per thousand visits, per thousand what's its, whatever it is.

Values aren't values unless there's an actual trade-off. And so we had things like optimize for the long-term. There's a clear trade-off when we optimize for the long-term, you probably give up short-term revenue.

Real professional ship. At the end of the day, real... I don't care if you're a marketer or product person, engineer, ops person, people ops, real professional ship, and they ship at a pretty high frequency for whatever they're doing.

If you are going to be that large company, you need to get to a billion in revenue per year. It doesn't have to be overnight, it can be over 20 years, it's not something that has to happen quickly, but that's how I think about it.

Bootstrapping is for lifestyle businesses that want to cash flow. Funding is for companies trying to create a billion dollars in annual revenue.

We probably, if we had taken money, we could have had a billion-dollar exit or we could have kept going. And we should have taken money earlier in our life cycle. This was actually a big mistake because we got hooked on the efficiency and that was great, but we could have moved even quicker than we were.

80% of sales and marketing budgets tend to go to the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. So sales folks and ad-type spend, field events, whatever it is, that's where it goes. The problem is bottom of the funnel efficiency and top of the funnel efficiency has plummeted the past decade, just plummeted.

You just have to do something once a quarter. That's it. I've been trying to teach about pricing for a decade now. I've done a lot of different approaches on this, and I think the easiest thing is, listen, you have three growth levers. You have acquiring customers, monetizing them, and retaining them. You're spending a lot of time and money on acquisition. You're spending some time and money on retention. You're probably do nothing on pricing and monetization.

Put a number on a whiteboard. You're going to have 10 customer conversations a month, just 10 non-sales conversations. You're just going to talk to 10 people. Or you're going to send one survey. And people are terrible at sending surveys. Surveys are actually great. You just have to be good at sending them.

Only one in five companies have buyer personas or ICPs, only one in five. So we talk about this all the time, we retweet the articles, we give the advice, so many of us give the advice. But then we look at our own companies, only one in five have some sort of segmentation ICPs. And then only one out of 10 companies actually do customer research or development on a quarterly basis.

Most of the time that there are two types of retention. There is strategic retention and then there's tactical retention. Strategic retention is all the stuff that you as a great product leader, a great product team are doing. Your ICPs, your time to value, road mapping, the right features, figuring out your mission metric, agonizing over every little thing, all the paper cuts of being a great product leader. But because you're so focused and so biased towards that, you miss out typically on this thing we call tactical retention, and these are things like payment failures, term optimization, cancellation flows, offboarding, et cetera.

If you're past product market fit this area, this tactical retention, it's typically about 25 to 40% of your churn problem, which is a significant amount, but you don't really look at it because again, you're like, 'I've got to go focus on features, I've got to do this, and I'm going to go be this great product leader.'

I looked at two million cancellation flows. We built some products for this, that's why I have this data, just to be clear. But looked at two million cancellation flows and we found you have about 18 to 30 seconds when someone hits that cancel button, we found you should ask two questions. One, 'Why are you leaving?' Multiple choice. Don't do the free response. You get one out of 100 great responses, and the 99 are not great. And then the other question we found works really, really well is, 'What did you like about the product?' And the reason that works so effectively is because that person's on a freight train to basically cancel. They're like, 'I'm already done. Oh yeah, this is why I'm leaving.' The minute you ask them what they like, you're basically tapping into this nostalgia effect and you're stopping that freight train.

We confuse team by being everything to all people to accommodating to every single person, and especially in tech the last couple of years, maybe that's going to change a little bit now, but it was always like, 'Oh, everyone needs to be happy.' And I think that's a really, really big misconception because you're not there to make everyone happy. You're there for some sort of mission and some sort of goal and you want to set up the culture and the team in a way that gets to that particular goal.

Everything in your business, it does not matter what type of business you have, everything is used to drive someone to a point of conversion or justify the product or the price that you're offering up. That customer is a human being you're driving to that point of conversion and it's your job to understand how they perceive you, how they perceive their problem, how they perceive the world around them, around your products.

People like to buy from people, but we as operators get so excited about the scale of the internet that we forget the basics of humanity. Here's some fun data points, we did a bunch of studies on this. So prospects who meet you in person, and this is not just for profit, all the data I've shared, it's all global-level data or segmented depending on how we did it. It's not just our findings, it's like we looked at probably a minimum of 2,000 companies per factoid and most of the time much more. But prospects who meet you in person have 10 to 30% higher willingness to pay than those who didn't. Churn for those folks who you meet in person is typically 20% lower than those folks who have never met you. Expansion revenue is typically 15 to 20% higher.