BSSA #73 - How to choose what to work on 🚀

Hey! How are you doing?

Quick question before starting. If you have a Shopify App (or SaaS business), what’s your MRR range?

Thanks for your response to the poll above.

And quick update, we just reached $51,000 MRR. What’s crazy is that we reached it 1 week after reaching $50K.

At the same time, we’re finishing a few features on our app that we’ll push to a new monthly plan to increase the MRR.

I’ll also test a new pricing strategy in the coming weeks to see the impact, I’ll let you know about it.

What should you work on today on your Shopify App?

I had this conversation with Nico from my team yesterday.

We talked about focussing on something rather than another.

And we were like: “Should we focus on acquisition?”

And the question is interesting because many times you’ll face one of these situations:

1) You have no idea what you should work on

2) You have 2 choices, doing A or doing B, and you don’t know how to choose

And as your team grows, you don’t necessarily have to choose because you can work on everything.

But if you’re a small team, to have to prioritize.

And the right way to take it is to think about: Where will I have the biggest impact?

Most technical founders will always try to work on a new feature, because they’re more comfortable doing so.

But it’s probably not where you’ll have the biggest impact.

So here is the framework:

1- Look at your core metrics (Activation Rate, Churn, Conversion Rate, Growth Rate, etc)

2- List the metrics that aren’t good

3- Review the current actions or things you have for these metrics

4- Think about why something isn’t great (Make assumptions)

5- List specific actions you can do to improve them

If you have a huge activation rate (let’s say 80%) and a lot of features, and you look at your conversion rate and notice that it’s only 10%, and you’re still working on a new feature, then it’s a problem.

Because in that situation you can just double your conversion rate (it’s not that complicated by following the framework and considering it’s very low) and you’ll have twice as many users.

So the biggest impact would be working on the conversion rate.

Now let’s say you have a very poor churn and everything else if great.

You list the things you do to improve it. You make assumptions. You test.

And during that process, perhaps you’ll have to talk to your power users and they will all tell you that it would be great if they had this new feature (Feature A).

Then to attract more people like them and reduce your churn, working on that feature would be the way to go.

So to get back to the question "Should we focus on Acquisition?” the answer was simple:

• Do we have other metrics that need to be improved?

• Will working on Acquisition prevent us from improving these metrics? (If the team isn’t big enough for someone else to work on it)

And perhaps you don’t even have enough users to track the other metrics so the answer would be: let’s go for a bit of acquisition.

That’s it for today’s email!

I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to share my newsletter with someone else: https://news.matdesousa.com/

And let me know what you want me to discuss in the next email!

See you next week,

Mat 😁