A KPI dashboard for early-stage SaaS startups – new and improved!

[Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called ChartMogul (which we invested in) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below. Check it out!]

[Note: This post first appeared as a guest post on the blog of Totango. In case you don't know Totango, it is a powerful analytics product which gives online services the information they need to increase user engagement, conversion and retention. If you're a SaaS company you should check it out. Thanks to Guy Nirpaz and his team for publishing my post, which I am republishing here.]

In talking to a pretty large number of SaaS entrepreneurs in the last few years I've observed that there's a considerable amount of uncertainty around metrics: Which KPIs are the most important ones, what's the right way to calculate churn, CACs, MRR and other key metrics, how can I estimate customer lifetime value – these and other questions come up all the time, and the answers aren’t always obvious.

I've tried to address some of these questions in a couple of blog posts:

• 9 Worst Practices in SaaS Metrics
• Excel template for cohort analyses in SaaS
• The 8th DO for SaaS startups - Stay on top of your KPIs

I also put together a template which I thought SaaS startups could find useful and which also makes it easier for us as a VC to communicate what KPIs we're looking for when we talk to SaaS entrepreneurs. Needless to say a template can only be a starting point, as every SaaS startup is different and needs to build its own, customized dashboard. Nonetheless it seems like the template, first published in April of this year, struck a chord with many SaaS founders and investors: The blog post got more than 60,000 page views (which I assume is quite a lot for a niche topic on a VC blog, at least if you’re not Fred Wilson :-) ) and I get requests for the Excel file every day.

In the meantime I’ve put some more work into the dashboard. You can download it here. (And if you like it, tweet it!)

Here’s how the charts look like with some sample data in it:

Click for a larger version

The main improvement of this version is that it now includes different pricing tiers and annual plans. This makes the spreadsheet considerably larger, but I feel it's necessary if you have multiple pricing tiers and contract lengths, and you can collapse a lot of the rows to get a concise view of the top KPIs.

I hope you find it useful! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to email me at christoph@pointninecap.com.

OKRs – objectives and key results

Last night I returned from a 2-day offsite with the Point Nine team (in Schlepzig, of all places). Our (small) full-time team more than doubled in the last six months, and this was the first time for all of us to spend some time together away from the daily bustle. We had a long list of topics that we wanted to discuss, ranging from investment theses to portfolio companies and to a number of projects that we're working on.

I wanted to kick off things with a session about our OKRs (objective and key results), and we had scheduled two hours for this agenda item. If you haven't heard about OKRs before, it's a methodology invented by Intel and popularized by John Doerr, the famous VC who invested in Netscape, Amazon and Google. The idea is (simply put) that a company needs to have clear objectives and that every department, team and person in a company needs to have objectives – and a set of key results for hitting those objectives – which are aligned with the company-wide OKRs.

We ended up spending the entire first day and some more time of the second day on this topic. This is particularly funny because I wasn't even sure if it's worth talking about our OKRs since I was wondering if they aren't obvious anyway.

Now, to be precise we didn't spend ten hours talking about our high-level long-term objectives. At a high level our goals are pretty obvious and I've written about them here. But diving in deeper and deeper brought us from one question to the next question, and by the time we were finished with the OKR session we've covered most of the topics which we had planned to discuss in other sessions. So on the one hand we completely screwed up the schedule that we had put together, on the other hand we covered most of the stuff that we wanted to get done in the end.

After this experience I am now even more convinced than before that every startup should use OKRs or a similar methodology to ensure that everyone in the company is on the same page and that there are clear and measurable goals. Scott Allison, founder & CEO of Teamly, wrote a great summary of the benefits:

• It disciplines thinking (the major goals will surface)
• Communicates accurately (lets everyone know what is important)
• Establishes indicators for measuring progress (shows how far along we are)
• Focuses effort (keeps organization in step with each other)

But isn't this a no-brainer, don't all companies have a plan for the company as well as targets for most employees? Yes and no. All bigger company presumably have a budget and plan in place which is aligned with the company's objectives, but my guess is that what's often missing is linking that high-level plan to every employee's targets and communicating it throughout the entire organization. I'm pretty sure that if you randomly picked 100 employees of any Fortune 5000 company and asked them about the objectives of their companies you'd get lots of different answers. And in a fast-growing startup which doubles headcount every year and where each individual employee can have a much bigger impact than in a large enterprise, it's even more important that everyone is on the same page.

If you want to learn how Google (where John Doerr helped introduce OKRs) sets goals, watch this video from Google Venture's startup lab.