Als Blog

My new Limo

Well summer is here and the family is on the move again. I had to figure out how to get both kids to school and transport us around when we don't need to take the car but still need to travel at a decent speed. Here is the result a cycling limo with me at the helm, my six year old on the trailer bike, and my three year old in the covered bike trailer.

I am not so convinced that the product designers intended this but hey as long as the brakes on my Kona hold out FORWARD HO!!!!

Key's to good trial to paid conversion ratio

This was a reply to a forum comment regarding our trial to paid conversion ratio that I though I would share here. The commenter said that they would like to know what our secret sauce is for our conversions and this was my reply

Obviously every company wants to keep their secret sauce to themselves as it directly relates to their competitive advantage.

I will say that conversion ratio's for trial to paid in my experience are the result of 5 factors.

1. How niche you product is.
2. How big of a problem you are solving for that niche.
3. How quickly a user can learn your product.
4. The level of free support you give to your trial users.
5. How well you are targeting your web traffic through marketing efforts. (The more broad your marketing on driving traffic to your web page the lower your conversion ratios will be.)

Balance those and you will have as good of conversion as you can for your product , market, and industry.

Transparency in SaaS

Wow I have been overwhelmed with the amount of email and comments I have received praising our decision to let our conversion stats be public domain. Most of the comments revolved around how much people appreciated this decision in an industry where we typically keep all this close to our chests. My mind got to thinking why is that and what good is keeping them to ourselves?

While I admit there are certain stats you want to keep to yourself and out of your competitions hands I see some good reasons to let the public know about the rest of them. Here is why I think some transparency is a good idea.

It Keeps Your Team Focused:

If you are in the practice of sharing certain data publicly you will naturally want to make sure those stats are as good as possible. I can guarantee that if you regularly publicize certain stats you and your management team will have those stats at the top of their mind whenever they are making decisions. Every company worth it's salt monitors some key figures that dictate the success of a company. Share as many as you can publicly and you will see your team take note of them daily which only helps you focus them on what's important. Outside scrutiny is the best form of accountability for your management staff.

It Helps The SaaS Industry:

Lets face it we are still a fairly young industry with a huge runway ahead of us. The more information we have in the public domain the better the world can understand us and what we do. I must say that I love the little exchange letters between Mint.com and Intuit. It warms my heart to see such good public press for SaaS. We need more of this to fuel the industry and make it move forward faster. The more we share the more real we become as an industry. If you are hiding your information people think you must not be doing that well. We need momentum in the SaaS world and being transparency is a good start to that unless you have something to hide.

It Helps Us All Get Investment:

How many times have you been at the table with a potential investor and they pull the "lets value your company on future revenues card" only to turn around and tell you that there isn't really enough good data to support your revenue claims thus undervaluing you due to perceived risk. The more data we put in the public domain the more we can support our revenue growth projections when looking for investment.

It Helps The Start Ups:

In my mind the more startups in the SaaS world that succeed the better it is for all SaaS companies as we map out our future growth. If we share our stories with start ups they will have better data for projections and planning (which means hopefully then won't go to investors with silly over states stories). If our industry has a track record of success in the start ups our job becomes easier. Easier to attract new talent and get growth investment.

Basically if we have good stats we should be sharing them. Obviously we have to be cautious as companies that we don't give away our secret sauce that is helping us with our fast ramps but lets face it some data is just helpful. I say go for it and post your information and show your support for the SaaS industry. Lets get this industry going and prove ourselves to be extremely viable and competetive.

Oprius conversion ratios for 2008

Well I must say as the CEO of a hosted sales tool SaaS company I never see people putting their conversion stats out there on the web. I know that stats will change based on lots of different factors so you have to take each one with an idea of what's behind it. What the company does, who they are targeting, and the amount of money going into their sales effort.

I don't mind sharing out data for others to look at. If you are familiar with Oprius and what we offer you will find these stats more useful. I am personally very happy with our stats for 2008 If I had gotten a report card like this is high school my dad would have been very happy.

Just to give you some back ground we launched our product at the end of January 2008 and as of January 2009 we are profitable. Our growth has surprised even us and we have to thank our users so much for their support over the last year. I have never been the CEO of a company where people send us so many cards and brownies in the mail saying thanks for building such a great easy to use tool with top shelf support. 

I think it has been our support that has driven the retention rate so high. We have unlimited toll free telephone support for users and people in trial. It is amazing to me to pick up the phone (yes even the CEO takes the some of the support calls) I am greeted by someone thanking us and praising us before they ask their question. I wish I had money for every time someone was amazed that they got a real person on the phone and on the first ring usually to boot!

If any of you have ever questioned how far you should go with your service the answer is way farther than your competitors.

Batchbook copies Oprius ...... it happens all the time.

You know i'm not really surprised when people copy the features of our software. We drive our software development off of what our users ask for. We listen and communicate with them all the time. We even have toll free UNLIMITED phone support that we actually answer! No one in our company is exempt from answering the support phone if it rings, not even me the CEO. We track users requests and build them out as they become popular. 

What surprises me is companies that grow from copying other companies features and don't really do anything innovative. Wouldn't you rather work with a company that is continually innovating, not just tweaking their offering and copying competitors, but creating sweeping new ideas on how to sell through software. 

Here is a screen shot of Batchbooks support forum, and we see this all the time (not just Batchbooks theirs is just the most recent)

Here is the link to it: 

What's next are they going to copy our call assistant, our built in IMAP email client, or our automated customizable relationship plans. Who knows! I know that I will probably get hate mail from someone for this but I just can't believe the amount of times we see this on the internet. People trying to imitate what we do at Oprius.

I particularly like this one lol 

Here is it's link:

Someone once said "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" so I guess I should just say a big thanks to Batchbook and the others that are copying everything we do here at Oprius. Thanks!

Tweeting more than blogging

Wow I really have been slacking on blog posts but I am realy enjoying twitter more and more. I light of this I have decided to post mostly on twitter and then like to here from twitter when I have more to write. So make sure you jump on twitter and follow me as opriusceo. See you on the twit side LOL.

Forget Google Video!

Wow did a test of the newly launched www.tokbox.com with 22 people in on video chat and it was not to bad. Check it out for yourself and get lots of your friends in so you can try to kill it. You can Download a mac app that has it right on your desktop so you can easily chat with friends and business partners any time. Thanks Steve Bristol from www.lesseverything.com for the demo today.

New Fitness Craze..

Ok well maybe it's not a fitness craze it's jsut fitness crazy. I've decided to start bicycling on a regular bases and did a ride tongiht. Here it he ride I did. My goal is to work up to doing a century which is 100 miles in one day ... oh boy ... what am I thinking.

iPhone has come!

Well I am writing this from my iPhone.

That's right I finally droped the greenbacks on the phone I have been drooling over for a long time.

What drove me to finally drop the cash and make the leap after all this time you ask? Well I finally realized that I could wait forever to see the exact piece technology come out that would cover all my needs. Also I have the need to be extremely productive and organize lately so this is going to be my main tool for being extremely effective over the next few months.

I will let you know how it goes.

This is me jumping in with both feet.

Networks are like banks

Nothing gets my goat up more than people that don't understand how to network in a healthy way. You've met them. The person that tries to get to know you and you KNOW that he is only caring about you because they want something from you. They want to sell something to you or pick your brain on business ideas with NO intention of a relationship that is mutually gratifying or beneficial.

Add to that that everyone is told that their network is the most important thing in their lives that they could build and we have an epidemic of people that just want to add to their network just in case they need something from it.

What these people don't realize is that in building their network this way does nothing for them and really renders their networks useless. You can have a MASSIVE list of people that you have had contact with but a completely USELESS network because you have no relationship with any of them other than a name on contact list.

When you are building a network it should be one in which EVERYONE gets benefit from it. Both the person building their network and the people that are a part of it.

IT"S ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS. Mutually beneficial relationships. Think of it like this. Each person is a bank account and you can make deposits and withdraws. Unless you have done sufficient deposits there is nothing to withdraw and you are asking for a loan or an overdraft. It is very important that if you want to get the most out of your relationships you have to have deposited as much as possible before you ever withdraw.

So when you are working on building your networks please make sure you are depositing in the people that you are asking to be a part of your network. Not only will you have a more effective network you will gain some life long friends along the way. I know I have.