Revolutionize your non-profit organization with the B2b saas sales model for non-profit organizations

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wouldn't it be nice to take a peek behind the scenes at SAS businesses just like yours or even better businesses that are just a bit ahead of you so that you could see how your company Compares is your 6% churn good bad catastrophic could your growth rate be better if you didn't require a credit card upfront how might offering a free plan affect your lifetime value the answers to those questions are exactly what you'll find in this year's state of independent ass report we surveyed and compiled data from almost 700 bootstrapped and most mostly bootstrap SAS Founders and in this video I bring in Asia arangio founder of demand Maven who helped us create the report to go over a handful of the surprising results and if you stick around to the end I'll let you know where you can get your free copy of the full report since there was way too much to include in this video let's get into it Asia Rano thanks so much for joining me back on the channel thanks again for having me super pumped to dig into all this data I am too let's dig in to your first finding we we're going to each have four that we're sharing today but talk to us about founder count first and foremost solo founders of course you guys you know out there you're already making growth waves like you're already doing the thing and uh on average and also the median we typically saw on average it was around like 177% month-over-month growth uh when it came to the median I think most so just for context too median represents more of like the this is what most people are probably experiencing and the average of course is the number that you get after looking at the entire data set but even still month of month growth still looking pretty good uh what I think is interesting though is there's a little bit of like a very slight diminishing return on the average when you look at founder Duos meaning like there are two Founders but what I think is fascinating is once you get to founder trios meaning there are three co-founders this is when you start to see around 2 to 3x average growth month over month and I think that this is so interesting because the I think the connotation of of a trio is that maybe it goes a little bit slower but actually I think having the third person probably like my hypothesis is that the third person probably uh breaks a lot of ties so to speak uh however there are diminishing returns once you get to four or more we start to see a dramatic uh drop off when it comes to average month-over-month growth not that it's like terrible or poor or anything it's just not maybe as efficient as some of the other uh growth rates month over month but I still think it's really interesting this has been relatively consistent since we started asking this question over the P because this is the fourth report that we've done uh over five years I think and I've noticed this pattern in each of them we could go back through the others but I believe for some reason that and I've never been able to explain it that why three founders perform significantly better than one two and certainly than four I've always been with with bootstrappers like we have the numbers in the report I forget if it's like 70% of mostly bootstrap SAS are single Founders it's like a huge chunk and then another like 15 plus percent is two founder companies and that's just the most common I mean that's like the 85 that's a line share right 85% and the more you get like I've seen four co-founder bootstrap companies usually there's a weak link is what it is usually there's someone who shouldn't you know by my judgment shouldn't really be part of it and you get too many cooks in the kitchen and people can't like you said can't break the ties decision by committee you there's all kinds of stuff so it makes sense to me that at four it's too many but I've always thought like well three is probably too many as well but that's not what our numbers have shown us each year my first finding we asked when a potential customer registers for a free trial does your company request a credit card number to start the trial and what we looked at in this case is over the course of the four surveys we did from 2020 to this year's 2024 and the findings are that the asking for a credit card upfront has increased and then decreased again so the first year it was 73% asked for credit card upfront then it went up to 78% 78% in the next one and it's down this year to 71% so about a 10% drop so it's not precipitous but I am curious Asia to hear your thoughts on in the space especially like with bootstrap Founders that you talk to do you feel like the goalposts are moving for a free trials B freemium and and C you know uh credit card up front maybe start with credit card up front because that that's what this slide is about but do have you seen that goalpost moving over the past several years yes uh with the founders and the companies that I work with absolutely it feels like there's a communal aha moment happening around the opt out credit card requirement or the opt out free trial which basically means like you you're requiring the credit card I think there's a lot more movement towards opin free trial and I think we'll probably also discuss a little bit about freemium as well but definitely I'm absolutely seeing this I have some hypothesis about why but we'll we'll get into that in I think in one of the future slides that we're going to cover yeah my default has tended to be if if I don't have any other information I ask for credit card up front because usually I want I want to narrow the people who are going to try the software to folks who are actually interested and I think might pay now it depends though it depends on the space like if you're if you're the person who's going to use the software is different than who's going to pay for it probably not the best idea because they don't have a credit card right if a software developer at a certain company is going to use it but doesn't have a credit card then obviously um you might need to allow free trial without a credit card the thing the mistake that I've seen folks do is either enact fremium where they then have you know they bootstrapping and using fremium where they push Revenue down the line and maybe they don't have the the criteria place to do it but also then they get a lot of noise especially in the early days and similar with removing credit card you can get more people and you can get more feedback and that's the pro the con is you get more people in and you get more feedback and depending on how well you are at dealing with that like if you're a first-timer that can be completely overwhelming and so when I say I default to it I mean it's like a 6040 for me you know it's not an always and never but it's like with no other information that's what I do however I think there there's a lot of leeway here for it to go up and down that's so interesting I'm the because I'm the total opposite is it to get more data what's the reason that you would go with not having a credit card Upfront for a free trial if you already have a really dialed in sense of who your customer is then I think like why why put the limits on on the free trial um and and also I find that when you are able to get a little bit more information uh I don't I just feel like assuming that you have help and that you have like experience in this um i' I'm actually very confident in uh my ability to detect like okay who's who's actually qualified what do we what do we got to do to activate people um I think to your point if you're less confident in your ability to that then yeah require credit card up front but once you once you get to like 10 20 50 paying custom customers I think that you can take the credit card requirement off and create more of a pipeline for yourself but again the assumption is that you've got a pretty dialed in understanding of the customer considering that's literally what I do um I'm I'm I'm pretty confident in like okay yeah like we don't we don't have to require the credit card up front but um yes I I do think it makes sense though if you're very very early maybe very new first-time founder uh also New to SAS then requiring the credit card up front will be a really good litmus test so I do I see a lot of value for sure in that yeah that's the key is I was referring to if you don't really know your ICP yet and you're still trying to figure it out so that's the difference yeah once you know your ICP you're driving traffic your ideal customer profile for those listening or watching um that that makes sense I think I think we're on the same page all right Asia let's talk about target market yeah this might sound really obvious but I think that this this this slide just illustrates it I and makes it visual for people because the market that you ultimately decide to focus on is going to have a huge impact on your growth rates this also might not be that surprising when I say but if you are targeting Enterprise companies traditionally speaking your average month of month month-over-month growth rate was probably like in the 26 or so percent that's that's pretty high actually for uh for a company that essentially means that you potentially more than double year over-ear um but there there are some tradeoffs depending of course on who you Target so for example if I uh if I look in this chart here um towards the end we see consumers so on average month over month growth rate looked closer to 5% for consumers uh government was pretty pretty slow 1.75 now to keep in mind this is the average the medians reflected something very similar um but what was also interesting was depending on just how people respond to the survey if they selected other which to be honest I was kind of having a hard time of like what would other be but um but if you were not really targeting any of these uh ideal customer types then you probably saw contractions and growth this could actually be due to a lack of focus um this could also just be maybe there are some consumer customer categories that just don't fit within this model but at the end of the day who you target from a business perspective is going to have a lot to do with how you grow that should be both uh I think it should be seen a little bit as I don't want to say like blessing and curse but almost like uh setting expectations for yourself so if you're if you're targeting if you're going B Toc if you're going consumer just have a expectation that growth might look a little bit different than if you're B2B targeting Enterprise or even midmarket uh smbs fell right in the middle which probably not surprising so if you were targeting small businesses your average growth growth rate probably looked around like 12% month over month um but overall though something to keep in mind but yeah Rob I'm curious how how you see this and uh how this reflects for you yeah so for context the top three fastest growing Market Target markets are Enterprise and midmarket which is slightly smaller than Enterprise and NOS or non-government organizations I'm a little surprised the NGS are there but I you know it it is what it is so those are the top three which the first two certainly line up with you know my experience of at least having a dual funnel with Enterprise and mid Market plus SMB but with the tiny C companies we see the ones with the bigger acvs the ones with you know the bigger um average revenue per account per month or per year are do tend to be the ones that grow faster on the bottom end the bottom four are totally in line with what I would think aspiring entrepreneurs education so it's selling into schools and academics uh consumers and then government and yeah that none of those are really surprising to me yeah yeah NOS though that makes me think that those those software companies are solving a very big problem for them that's what makes me think that NGO is doing so well I think the NGS are probably Enterprise or mid-market companies is is my guess you know we've broken them out because people we we used to have well we do have other and people would write in NOS that's our target market and so we included it but if you think about it a lot lot of non-government organizations are actually large businesses and I I think kind of you the first three all all line up so for our next one we asked do you plan to seek outside funding for your company within the next 12 months and I I'm glad we started asking this I think we've only asked it for two years but it was insightful for me the first year to realize you know this really gets sent out to the microc conf Tiny Seed starts the rest of us ecosystem which is frankly it's just mostly bootstrappers like it's overwhelmingly folks who want a bootstrap and and that's fine that's okay um what I was surprised by was in 2022 30% of respondents said they plan to seek outside funding within the next 12 months and then in this year's report it's down to 23.5% now a couple thoughts on that number one it's interesting that across all the tiny seed companies that we funded somewhere around a third of them wind up seeking or raising additional funding so that a third onethird number seems to be it seems to be something you know this is even for for companies who've taken an accelerate around from Chinese seed the other takeaways from year to year if you heard me say 2022 is 30% and 2023 was about just under 24% so there's a decrease right of you know 20 20 something per. I think that's due to the funding environment I'll say this the 2022 results were actually surveyed in Fall of 21 when things were still gangb ERS it was so easy to raise funding everyone was thinking about it everyone was doing it the valuations were high there were all the there were spacks going on there was crowdfunding going out you know all kinds of stuff so I do think there was more of an appetite because it was just easier money was cheaper and this year's survey you know taken what uh a couple years later because we we skipped the year in between is down to about 24% and I'll admit that's just not that surprising I think with funding being harder to raise kind of makes sense you bootstrap until the money's available and If the money's never available you just keep bootstrapping funding being harder to raise but then also terms not nearly as appealing as maybe they once were there you go uh and then also I think there's just like a what was the quote from microcom most recently the exit strategy is death yeah yeah I think I think the culture is culturing when it comes to when it comes to bootstrap in general so uh yeah I but I also think it speaks maybe a little bit to the mental resilience of bootstrappers I think a lot of people are learning about how to how to grow sustain uh and also being maybe a lot more Discerning about like when does it make sense to get funding and Asia for your next slide we have a battle of the models talk us through this oh yes okay it is the it is one of my absolute favorite debates and it's just because there isn't really like a right or a wrong answer but the data is going to show us a couple of really interesting Trends so basically there's of course offering premium then there's the free trial you can do opt-in free trial which which basically means that you don't require a credit card UPF front and then there's the opt out free trial which means that you do require require a credit card up front you have to opt out of it so when it comes to growth churn and LTV which we're going to look at in here in a second when it comes to growth overall so what we find is uh free plans and free trials that do require a credit card we're going to see on average at least 10% and for free trial credit card required uh it actually is the highest so 14% month over Monon average growth for companies that do that uh so requiring the credit card up front does have a pretty big impact when it comes to um initial you know upfront growth and then not requiring the credit card it had the least amount of month-over-month growth this is about 7.6 we'll call it 8% on average um and at first blush that may seem like oh CC required for the free trial is the obvious answer and then maybe after that premium but not necessarily because now we have to look at churn so for churn for the free plan this was absolutely fascinating but basically your month over month growth average while it might have been 10.45% um churn was about the same it was almost 11% month-over-month uh average for turn so basically premium tended to see if you offered a free plan uh you probably saw a little bit higher turn as well um when it comes to the free trial credit card required the average for the month-over-month turn was 5.5% now this was actually shocking to me because traditionally speaking we tend to see really high turn numbers when you require the credit card up front because people forget to cancel and they you know they email you and they're like oh I forgot to cancel can you cancel my thing and then um profit well and a lot of other subscription metrics will actually count that as turn um even though they might have just forgotten so I was actually shocked to see that the average was about 5 .5% on credit card required and then finally not requiring the credit card on the free trial 6.34 so a little bit higher um now again that might make you think oh wow not requiring the credit card on the free trial is the worst one um but then we're going to look at LTV uh but first I'll pause here I'm so curious Rob like your gut reactions to this it's tough because it is averages um but my gut feel is typically that folks who are asking for credit card up front I I would think that the the churn for the first 30 or 60 days would be higher but if they have their stuff dialed in then beyond that as long as they're getting ICP their ideal customer profile in because they are gating it with a credit card kind of makes sense right that's why I say it's my default again it's a default it's a rule of thumb it's a just a thing that I lean towards so it it does kind of make sense it really makes sense to me that free plan meaning freemium has you know I'd say lower growth but that that the churn is high which I guess is this this isn't churn from the free plan this is churn from the paid plans which almost tells me like the business is broken and that's the thing just bootstrappers using premium in general usually means they don't know what they're doing like that's been my experience you know what I mean and it's like I and I don't mean that I I use that bad word only to imply that I just see it too often it's the same thing people want to do BDC they want to bootstrap at two-sided Marketplace and they want to have premium I don't know why they're drawn to this like moobs to a bug zapper but it really is the most common questions that I get I've just stopped taking these questions on the podcast so the premium part kind of being a train wreck and the business being on fire that makes a little more sense the fact that free trial with credit card require performs better at least with these averages um I think it's in line with my experience but it doesn't you know more more questions to be asked is how I feel about it this is where I would say uh the story flips a little bit so LTV ultimately what that kpi speaks to is the lifetime value of the customer so for as long as they spend with you how much how much like actual money do they do they spend on average uh across their entire experience um with your product and what we found was while the free trial credit card not required certainly did not look as appealing month-over-month growth wise or even turn wise what we found was it actually would have on average two times the LTV versus other plans so for context free plan and premium we saw an average of 3K LTV when we looked at credit card required on the free trial it was about 3.6k LTV free trial credit card not required 6.5k so easily 2x over premium or free plans and then a of course a slight bump over the over the free trial credit card required what this tells me is that while businesses might choose you know the free trial where the credit card is not required um what they're basically trading off is faster maybe upfront month-over-month growth for basically more money in the pocket which I don't think you can be mad about however that's not to say though that requiring the credit card UPF front is not a good option if anything this makes me think that maybe monetization is a little bit broken for companies that tend to do the credit card required up front um and then for premium it's exactly what you said before I think a lot of Founders just don't really understand how to make fremium work like how do you make it do the thing but it also could speak to lower pricing plans and uh charging Less in general because you've got freemium as your starting point so it could also speak to that as well so maybe monetization is a little bit broken here as well yeah this one's interesting for me because in our last slide we looked at growth rate and free trial with credit card acquire was growing significantly faster month over month than the others but free trial credit card not required has significantly higher lifetime value even though the turn is higher so it implies that without credit card required the basically the they're charging more right I mean because for the LTV to be higher with higher turn means they have to be charging more charging more keeping more I think too potentially this is where like data can be made to tell a story because Asia and I could go on Twitter X and we could say well obviously based on this slide you should not ask for a credit card and we have data for it and we could flip to the slide before we could say Obviously by this slide we you know a free child credit card require allows you to grow faster and it's I won't say it's apples and oranges cuz they're related but it's it's unclear and honestly this is why the answer is it depends it really does depend on your space it depends on your customer type your ICP it depends on your stage and for our last slide this one will be quick I just like looking at it because the question we ask is please select up to three advertising channels that have most significantly increased your revenue and the number one is with what 65 percenti is is Google AdWords number two with about half that so around 30ish is uh meta or Facebook ads and then next is other and fourth is LinkedIn and I every year I'm always like I think Twitter ads are going to do something so at some point they're gonna and they never do they're all they're always so far to the right it's like that Twitter ad ecosystem is terrible usually though I would expect LinkedIn to be third it just in broader experience it's like ADW it's Google AdWords it's it's Facebook and it's LinkedIn would be my top three that I would recommend to um you know to Founders B2B SAS Founders the issue though is the LinkedIn ad tools are not great and that's what I've heard and so we've actually tiny seeds invested in link low which is a SAS that it sits on top it's like it's it helps you manage and and deal basically get around linkedin's crappy ad interface you heard me say that's not their marketing that's me just saying it's pretty rough um the ad Tech of LinkedIn is significantly behind meta and AdWords the thing that I want to dig into and I wish I had this data with me today is other advertising I don't exactly know what that is and I bet we had a text field that people entered stuff I I'm curious if other advertising is like advertising on podcast advertising or sponsoring events or display advertis like I can imagine those being an other and so the fact that it's ahead of LinkedIn might be just that it's so varied you know there's so many different options that people kind of bucket it all in one yeah the the LinkedIn thing is also not surprising to me I I think um in order for LinkedIn to work you've got to be targeting audience that just actually lives on LinkedIn like I live on LinkedIn that's where I hang out now Asia thanks again so much for joining me here in this video today folks want to keep up with you you are Asia arangio on Twitter and demand maven.com into the state of independent SAS report you can head over to stateof IND sas.com if you want to get your hands on the rest of the report in it we walk through dozens of SAS metric benchmarks we talk a little bit about our methodology and comment on the most surprising findings and I also cover the content about hiring that was on my eth slide that we didn't quite have time for in this video if you found this video helpful make sure you like And subscribe I'll see you next time thanks for watching