
A KPI dashboard for early-stage SaaS startups  - marban
http://christophjanz.blogspot.de/2013/04/a-kpi-dashboard-for-early-stage-saas.html
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feniv
If anyone else is wondering what the acronyms stand for:

KPI : Key Performance Indicator

MRR : Monthly recurring revenue

CAC : Customer Acquisition Cost

CTLV : Customer Lifetime Value

ARPA : Average monthly recurring revenue (MRR) per customer

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Paul_D_Santana
SaaS: Software as a Service

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service>

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alxbrun
Interesting but only works if you have a consumer or SMB product. Enterprise
sales is a completely different game, where granularity (at least at the
beginning, when you have just a few sales a year) prevents you from doing sexy
dashboards like this one.

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chrija
Agree - which is why I called it "A simple KPI sheet for early-stage SaaS
startups with a low-touch sales model". I would argue that one can create a
sexy dashboard for an enterprise sales based model too though. :)

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mindcrime
If you have any interesting thoughts on that ("a sexy dashboard for enterprise
sales") I, for one, would love to hear them.

We're an enterprise software startup, and both founders are techies, not
salespeople. I'm working on learning enough about sales to get up past the
initial "hump", until we can hire real salespeople. In the meantime, any
thoughts on what metrics to track and their value / usage, would be much
appreciated.

FWIW, we are working on developing a sales process largely rooted in Solution
Selling and the ideas from Jeff Thull ("Mastering The Complex Sale", "The
Prime Solution", "Exceptional Sales", etc).

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chrija
Did you take a look at David Skok's posts and templates already?

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mindcrime
Not yet, but I absolutely will. :-)

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jackdb
We're an early-stage SaaS startup[1], and some of these metrics have proven
very useful for us. Highly recommended.

 _Edit:_ Inbound leads are another important metric to track.

[1]: <http://www.jackdb.com/>

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kpras
For SaaS startups I found this post by David Skok to be very informative and
comprehensive <http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/> . It is a bit
old now but is still very relevant. Author talks about David Skok in the
article too.

Edit: Added ref to David Skok

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tosh
I just recently rebuilt our KPI dashboard for Blossom.io and read through the
following spreadsheets/posts/pdfs …

* Christoph Janz – [http://christophjanz.blogspot.de/search/label/financial%20pl...](http://christophjanz.blogspot.de/search/label/financial%20plan)

* David Skok – as mentioned in the article (<http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/>)

* Ryan Carson – <http://bit.ly/9w8eJ5> (talk: [http://video.seedcamp.com/video/867124/seedcamp-week-2010-me...](http://video.seedcamp.com/video/867124/seedcamp-week-2010-metrics-for))

* Bessemer Venture Partners – <http://www.bvp.com/cloud>

Had a ton of a-ha moments and learned a lot. Highly recommended.

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casca
Google Docs version here:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkJVUDhVuAHldE1...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkJVUDhVuAHldE1kY04wbWpYQUtpdXpMdmgzdjAzbWc&usp=sharing)

Excel version available by emailing the author

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aymeric
What tools do you guys use to be able to track these metrics? Mixpanel I
imagine is one of them?

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tosh
At Blossom.io our KPI dashboard is powered by KISSmetrics, Google Analytics
and billing information from Saasy (FastSpring).

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hu_me
Interesting. are you guys manually updating the dashboard? How frequently?

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bwertz
Great template - most of my SaaS portfolio companies use very similar metrics
templates. One addition would be YoY numbers so that you can better account
for seasonality.

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chrija
Great suggestion re. YoY numbers, Boris. I didn't include it in the template
because I've entered only a few months of sample data, but in real-life this
should definitely be added and I will keep it in mind for the next version.

