Metrics to Pay Attention for Product Scale | With Expert Santi Bibiloni

Um, talking about kind of the growth strategy, I'd love to hear kind of more sharing with, you know, different marketers or founders listening in, how are you kind of strategizing and what has worked in terms of scaling and growth with Core so far? Yeah, what has worked best for your business model?

You mean what, what, what made us grow very, like, what took us here?

Yeah, so once you, once you made that pivot, what's the, what's the marketing and growth strategy that's, that's worked well so far?

Great. So for us, As we were financing a lot ourselves with clients paying upfront, doing upfront annual upfront payments, we at one time we decided to continue growing. We are doing today 8.5% month-over-month growth. Well, we think it's good, but it's not great. And we— the good thing here, the good news is that we know how to put this over 10%, and we will see a 10% growth in the next 2 to 3 months. So that's when we are raising our new round, right? What we defined is great unit economics with a great lifetime value versus CAC. We have today over 20 times lifetime value versus CAC.

Wow.

What is kind of crazy for the industry we are in. And most of our go-to-market strategy came out from outbound.

Hmm.

What we do is we have a very specific industry we target, that is professional services firms. And from that, we decided to start with our first addressable market, which is creative agencies, right? So within creative agencies, we find our ideal ICP, who is the CFO. This buyer persona has specific pains, but we know them very well because of our previous experience on agencies. And what we do is cold email to this person asking how this person is solving X, Y, and Z. And we show them 3 success stories from other companies like his or hers and ask them for a quick conversation. Yeah, a quick call. So then the SDR the sales development representative does the discovery call where they— and you will probably know this very well— they discover budget, authority, need, and time. And after this is qualified, this goes to the account executive and we open the opportunity in CRM, we negotiate, and we close. We are having today a 84 days sales cycle.

Nice.

And a conversion rate over 30% in some markets.

30% from initial kind of list or after kind of qualification?

From qualified.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

Yeah, since we open the deal and we close it, we close 1 out of 3.

That's really good. I mean, generally I hear kind of around the 20, 20, 25. So if you get up to a 30, you're on the higher end. So you guys are very account-based marketing outbound. So you're positioning all that in the first email, right? Just to be clear, this is the kind of pains you're solving. These are how we're solving it for others. Let's have a call. Is that accurate?

Yeah, of course. At the same time, we build a lot of success stories with our clients as to give more credibility and to help more to the enterprise clients we are targeting, right? And then we do more when we do kind of like massive and inbound stuff for the smaller end, for the smaller companies. And that works as well. Cool.

So you mentioned closing rate, days to closing, LTV to CAC. What are some other metrics or KPIs you guys are paying attention to on a weekly or daily basis and that are helping you kind of make improvements to help you guys scale?

So, you know, Akeel, we started the company working with OKRs. But before OKRs, we had a bunch of KPIs. Then we moved to OKRs and we had— it was very confusing. We were measuring a lot of stuff and we decided to— we remembered 500 Startups' recommendation to go with the one metric that matters, the OMTM. And we put it, we put 3, so one metric that matters for, on the revenue side of the company, one metric that matters on the product side.

Mm-hmm.

And then we have like one metric for when it comes to customer satisfaction, Right. So what we measure, the 3, our top 3 KPIs today are ARR, NRR, net revenue retention.

Retention, right.

Yeah, and churn. So yeah, and then if we wanna do a double-click, we go into month-over-month growth. And then the KPIs we already gone through, like LTV to CAC and more.

Love it. Yeah, that's super important. I think churn is huge. I mean, if you can solve churn at the top, I mean, that's product, that's activation, that's a lot of things, right? So just that churn, that number alone tells you a lot about a business.

Yeah, sorry, I forgot to say NPS, right? So NPS, NRR. So it's It's MRR or ARR on the revenue side and churn on the customer success side. But NRR is like a double-click on the revenue side. Then we have— so it's ARR, NPS, and churn.

Makes sense. That's something a lot of people skip and don't pay attention to. But setting up an NPS, I think, is huge. I think if you guys are listening today and you don't have an NPS, Set that up today. I think you're gonna get a lot of value from what your customers tell you.

And NPS for us was critical. I mean, it helped us change a lot of things.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, so you talk about what kind of worked well. Can you share any failures or, you know, coming to growth experiments that maybe you've tried in the past that didn't work with, you know, growth, paid ads, you know, other kind of SEO, any other strategies you've tried and just didn't work?

There are a lot.

A lot?

Okay. So things that we did that didn't work. I can start with, yeah, you mentioned paid media, for example. We started, so first of all, we built a robust solution for the enterprise market, but we were selling to the SMB market. And we started with free trials and our product was not prepared for being self-serve, right? And we invested in paid media to get a lot of people, a lot of leads on this free trial. So that was also another mistake. So we did the free trial and we invest on getting leads for that free trial. That helped us to learn some, like we received a lot of inputs, but I wouldn't say it was a good move. I mean, if I would start another company today, I wouldn't, of course, I would decide rather going like sales-led company, sales—

Right.

growth-led? Or are you doing like product-led growth or sales-led growth? You need to decide one channel.

Right.

And then after you found continuous, continued progress on that channel, that distribution channel, then you can think of others, but not at first.

So you focus on sales-led growth, um, but you were targeting— your marketing was based on product-led, right, is what you're saying? And it wasn't a match. And now what you're saying is if you were to do it again, like if you're going to run paid ads and, and drive sales, you've got to be really, really focused on product-led, right? Is that accurate?

Yeah, that's totally accurate. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with that. Uh, so this has been fantastic, uh, Santi. I appreciate you kind of digging in and giving us kind of, you know, The real details of what's going on behind the scene. Switching gears, I wanna get into the kind of the rapid-fire questions here and a little bit more personal. So, what's one advice you wish you had known and you would tell your 25-year-old self knowing what you know today?

Nice. One advice I will give to myself. Well, probably that's the one we mentioned about how to start, like either just choose one distribution channel Yeah, that's one thing. Other stuff I will tell myself is that PR and media doesn't get you so far if it's not the right place to be at, right?

Mm-hmm.

I mean, I remember myself. On our previous company, I was excited to be on a lot of places and it helped on credibility, but it wasn't for sure the best ROI or—

Your time.

I mean, yeah, or inbound channel. Right. So that's, that's one thing. That's other thing.