Intro
Folk is on a mission to build the next-generation CRM: a collaborative workspace for all team relationships.
To get there, the team is creating an app that is built to manage relationships (diverse, multi-player, ongoing) and not transactions (standardized, single-player, punctual) like the old CRMs.
Background
Folk started using June in December 2020.The team started by focusing on their user retention, then rolled out a broader understanding of their user journey.
The Challenge
In the last 18 months it is fair to say that Folk figured out product retention.
Now their challenge is more complex: improving the product to keep retention in a good state whilst acquiring and activating as many users as possible.
Put simply: they need to closely follow the whole customer lifecycle, and improve it.
This includes:
- Acquiring Users
- Activating Users
- Retaining Customers
The Solution
Each step of the lifecycle is extremely important and needs to be analysed on its own. Erwan, who drives Growth effort, takes care of Acquisition whereas Quentin, the PM, owns the rest of the journey.
Monitoring Acquisition
Erwan checks every day the New Users report to see how the growth looks like.
Specifically Erwan makes sure that:
- Go-to-Market initiatives are reaching the desired effect
- Enough pipeline is generated to meet revenue goals given the current free-to-paid conversion rate
To help answer the first question, Erwan uses one of New Users report’s insights which ranks the top sign-up Referrers. These are the top websites users visited before signing up for Folk ranked by the number of sign-ups.
Understanding where most of the sign-ups are coming from helps the team prioritize the best GTM channels to double down on.
Besides assessing the source of sign-ups, Erwan builds momentum on the growth side.
To track this he sets week-over-week and month-over-month growth rates goals every cycle. Frequent check-ins on these numbers help the team build urgency which, in the end, makes the whole company move faster.
Activating Users
Just after signing up, users go through an onboarding flow which, in B2B SaaS, is typically one of the main bottlenecks for user activation.
Recently, the product team shipped a whole new onboarding flow.
To make sure not to have major dropouts Quentin set up a funnel with all the steps. Here’s how it looks like:
Quentin found out that there was a big drop between step 1 and step 2. So Quentin, immediately prioritized an iteration to improve the conversion rate.
To build the right thing, the team needed some user feedback.
To get that, Quentin exported all the emails of the users that dropped between step 1 and 2, and asked them why they didn’t complete specific steps
Still, onboarding is only the first step of activation for Folk. Typically users should accomplish a set of actions that would enable them to get value from the product.
This set of actions has been determined by Quentin after looking into the behavior of the users that ended up becoming paying customers.
To measure, at a high level, how many users were likely to start using Folk regularly, Quentin set up Milestones
Quentin is driving targeted product initiatives to increase the percentage of users that accomplish all milestones over time.
Milestones are also useful for the Customer Success team.
Before supporting a user, they can quickly get context of where a user or company is standing in terms of usage.
Retaining Customers
As Erwan is focusing on getting more sign-ups, Quentin wants to make sure that paying customers continue to get value from the product on a weekly basis.
This is extremely important as retaining a customer is said to be at least 5 times less expensive than acquiring a new one.
To track this, Quentin set up on the June home, a User Retention report where he removed his employees and only looked at paying customers:
Thanks to this, the team can interact with the users that are not using much Folk before they permanently drift away and churn.
To increase paying customer’s usage, and retention in the end, Quentin wants to make sure that every new feature shipped gets adopted. This is because, many times users stick to the use cases they utilize all the time, not exploring the new capabilities.
The Outcome
Folk is growing quickly, and to keep doing so, they’re focusing on all the pieces of the puzzle: acquisition, activation and retention.
Thanks to great execution and precise analyses, in the past six months acquisition grew by 6x and retention improved. Congrats to them!
