I bet you have 20 things on your to-do list right now.
Should you do more marketing, improve your product, or try to keep your customers happy? I get it.
You see, when you want to grow your SaaS, everything feels important.
And it's not easy to know what to focus on.
So, most founders do 5 different things at the same time.
They tweak the landing page, ship a new feature, post on LinkedIn.
I did the same thing.
The problem is you burn a ton of time.
And your business doesn't really grow.
But you can fix this.
And the first thing you need isn't another to-do list - it's one clear goal.
Should you do more marketing, improve your product, or try to keep your customers happy? I get it.
You see, when you want to grow your SaaS, everything feels important.
And it's not easy to know what to focus on.
So, most founders do 5 different things at the same time.
They tweak the landing page, ship a new feature, post on LinkedIn.
I did the same thing.
The problem is you burn a ton of time.
And your business doesn't really grow.
But you can fix this.
And the first thing you need isn't another to-do list - it's one clear goal.
The big goal
Here's what I mean. I used to say "I want to grow my startup".
That was my goal. And it sounds fine, right?
But it's actually useless.
Try this right now - is your startup better this month than last month?
If your goal is "grow my startup", you can't really answer that.
There's no number to check it against. That's the problem.
"Grow" doesn't tell you what to focus on. It doesn't tell you what's important today. It's just too vague. It's like trying to hit a dartboard in the dark.
You can throw all day - but you'll never know if you're close.
So, I changed it.
I made it super specific. Instead of "I want to grow my startup",
I said "I want to get 200 active users in the next 2 months".
One clear number. One clear deadline.
Now, in SaaS, when you break it down, it mostly comes down to two things. Get more users or stop users from leaving. That's it.
I really want you to think about this.
What is the big goal you want to reach in the next 2 months?
Since my goal was more users, that's the big goal I'm focusing on.
The clear plan that gets you there
A big goal on its own doesn't help.
You need a plan that actually gets you there.
I like to do it like this: I've got a blank spreadsheet open right here.
First thing I do is to put the big goal at the top, right here.
Now we need 3 columns:
→ The steps people take to become a paying user
→ The real number
→ The percentage change
This will show us what we need to focus on right now.
In SaaS, the steps are usually - people visit our landing page - sign up for our free version and upgrade to the paid plan. Let’s write that down.
If you want to reduce churn instead, this works exactly the same way - there are just different steps. For example, you'd track how many people used your main feature and how many users are still active after 30 days.
Same system, different steps.
Now if you want help with all of that, that’s literally what my Startup Mastermind is for. I will help you find out exactly what you need to do next.
You can also connect with other founders who are working on the same thing. You can join here:
Ok, now we need the metrics.
Because we want to see if we get closer to our goal.
So, let’s fire up analytics and get those numbers.
We have 320 people who visit our landing page per month.
21 try our free demo and 2 become paying users.
Let's do the math - 21 divided by 320, that's 6.6%.
That's our conversion rate from visitor to free signup.
And 2 divided by 21 - that's about 9.5%.
That's our conversion from free to paying user.
Let's put those numbers in the spreadsheet.
One thing before you trust these numbers - make sure you actually have enough traffic. If only 20 people visit your website a week, and 2 sign up, that's 10%. Next week it could be 1 out of 20 - and suddenly it’s 5%.
And then you start doubting yourself, and think something's broken.
But you are not doing anything wrong - the sample size is just too small to mean anything.
As a rough rule:
You want at least 100 people going through a step before you trust the percentage.
Now look at these three numbers for two seconds.
Which one do you think we need to fix first? Say it out loud if you want.
We've got two drop-off points - visitor to sign up, and signup to paying users. There's a weak spot at every step.
But this one's the biggest: only 6.6% make it from visitor to sign up.
Six-point six. Out of every 100 people who land on our page, 93 of them leave without even trying our product. Ninety-three.
That’s a huge drop off.
Now, sometimes it's not this obvious - you might have two weak spots close together. When that happens, you just pick the one that is cheaper and faster to test.
So, we focus on the biggest drop-off point.
That's exactly the number you should check every morning instead of a random to-do list. Just this one number. We don’t run a new marketing campaign and we don’t build a new feature.
We only do things to improve that specific number.
And we do it with small, quick experiments.
For example, we could make the button on our landing page more prominent so more people sign up. Or we could change the copy on our pricing page to make the benefits clearer.
Because we want to see if we get closer to our goal.
So, let’s fire up analytics and get those numbers.
We have 320 people who visit our landing page per month.
21 try our free demo and 2 become paying users.
Let's do the math - 21 divided by 320, that's 6.6%.
That's our conversion rate from visitor to free signup.
And 2 divided by 21 - that's about 9.5%.
That's our conversion from free to paying user.
Let's put those numbers in the spreadsheet.
One thing before you trust these numbers - make sure you actually have enough traffic. If only 20 people visit your website a week, and 2 sign up, that's 10%. Next week it could be 1 out of 20 - and suddenly it’s 5%.
And then you start doubting yourself, and think something's broken.
But you are not doing anything wrong - the sample size is just too small to mean anything.
As a rough rule:
You want at least 100 people going through a step before you trust the percentage.
Now look at these three numbers for two seconds.
Which one do you think we need to fix first? Say it out loud if you want.
We've got two drop-off points - visitor to sign up, and signup to paying users. There's a weak spot at every step.
But this one's the biggest: only 6.6% make it from visitor to sign up.
Six-point six. Out of every 100 people who land on our page, 93 of them leave without even trying our product. Ninety-three.
That’s a huge drop off.
Now, sometimes it's not this obvious - you might have two weak spots close together. When that happens, you just pick the one that is cheaper and faster to test.
So, we focus on the biggest drop-off point.
That's exactly the number you should check every morning instead of a random to-do list. Just this one number. We don’t run a new marketing campaign and we don’t build a new feature.
We only do things to improve that specific number.
And we do it with small, quick experiments.
For example, we could make the button on our landing page more prominent so more people sign up. Or we could change the copy on our pricing page to make the benefits clearer.
Design the experiments
Let's quickly build that experiment. Let’s open a new table.
At the top - we write down what we want to try.
For us, that's "Improve the landing page so more people sign up for the free version".
• Then the current metric - we currently have a 6.6% conversion rate.
• Then what we want to achieve - let's say 10%.
• Then the concrete experiment - like - what do we actually do to get there.
In this case:
Make the call-to-action button more prominent on the landing page.
• Then when we started - today.
• The deadline - two weeks from now.
• And the status - ongoing.
That's it. That's the whole experiment.
Notice how specific that is.
It's not "get more sign ups" or "grow the funnel". It´s super specific.
Now, I like to use 2 weeks for the experiment length to get good data but how long you run it really depends on your traffic. If you get a lot of visitors, a week might already be enough. If you have little traffic, just give it more time.
And after two weeks, you check the numbers.
If you're closer to 10%, you keep the change. It worked.
If it didn’t work - like your conversion rate went down - you revert back to the old version and try a new experiment.
Maybe it's not the button.
Maybe it's the headline that’s not clear for people.
The goal is to run those quick experiments to improve your numbers.
That’s how you reach your big goal step by step.
Now, when you do these experiments - remember - don’t run them for too long - you rather want 4 small experiments for 2 weeks each than 1 big experiment for 2 months.
And also - make sure you test one experiment after the other.
Because if you run multiple things at the same time, you look at the results - and you’ve got no idea which change actually helped, and which one didn´t help because you changed five things at once.
Your next steps
That's the whole system.
Set one big goal, find the metrics that directly impact that goal, run small, quick experiments to improve them and check the results.
Double down on what works. And drop what doesn't.
This is the exact system that would've saved me months.
Months spent doing random stuff that honestly never had any real impact on my startup.
Remember those 20 things on your to-do list from the start?
You don't need to do all 20.
You need this spreadsheet, and the one number on it that actually matters.
If you want help with all of that - join my startup mastermind.
You can also join the community, connect with other founders, and learn what worked them. You can join here: