Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about back of the envelope business model test. This episode is loosely based on chapter 2 of the book, Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth. Some of the points discussed include defining your minimum success criteria and converting revenue goals to customer acquisition.
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Transcript
Mike [00:00]: In this episode of ‘Startups for the Rest of Us,’ Rob and I are going to be talking about back of the envelope business model tests for revenue. This is ‘Startups for the Rest of Us,’ episode 294.
Welcome to ‘Startups for the Rest of Us,’ the podcast helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products; whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob [00:25]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [00:26]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How you doing this week, Rob?
Rob [00:30]: I’m doing pretty good. I’m coming off a series of split tests that we’ve been running on the homepage of Drip. And actually Zack on my team took that over recently. And after I had run a couple split tests with – basically the normal result of a split test is that you’re not going to have an improvement. If you run ten split tests you’re going to get improvement on one or two that’s significant. And so, my split tests were just chugging along and just taking forever to run. And then the first one Zack runs, he made some more dramatic changes, he saw a 41 percent improvement in the click-throughs. And so now we’re taking it another step and we’re actually installing – something we should have done from the start – but we’re installing the pixels. So we actually know if it’s not just click-throughs but it’s actually leading to trial sign ups and that kind of stuff. But it was pretty cool to see that kind of jump because that’s definitely a notable percentage.
Mike [01:19]: Nice. Now that you’re doing that and when you go back, are you going to track everything through because obviously you have to have some sort of a benchmark, right?
Rob [01:25]: Yeah. We’re going to track it through. We didn’t talk today about whether we’re going to rerun the same test now that we have the revenue pixel in place, or if we’ll just use this as the new benchmark and start from there. But either way this stuffs always fun. I geek out on it because it’s like the engineer – this is engineering marketing. Nowadays it’s called growth hacking but this is what we’ve been doing for ten, 12 years, where it’s like applying the engineering mindset to marketing. Which isn’t something that was commonly done, or maybe it just wasn’t talked about very much, except for by direct response guys before a few years ago when kind of this growth hacking thing became popular.
Mike [02:03]: Cool. Well, I just recently kicked off my Twitter ads for Bluetick again. And I’m hoping that they aren’t completely messed up like they were the last time. I think that I talked about that a little bit on the podcast, where just before MicroConf I had put a bunch of new ads out there on Twitter and people were tweeting back to me and commenting to me like, “You’re doing it wrong”. And I was just like, “What ae you talking about?” And I didn’t really think to go back and look to see what it was. I just thought it was people trolling a little bit. I got enough of them that I went back and took a look at it and, of course, the Twitter lead cards were all screwed up and it was like people had to click on them and then click on them again. It was just messed up so I had to redo not the entire campaign, but at least different parts of it. Hopefully things will go well this time.
Rob [02:42]: Good luck with that. It’s always touch and go when you first start any type of ad campaign, especially if it’s not proven because you just have to monitor it really closely. Once you get to that point where you have something that’s working and you have history behind it and numbers behind it, it’s so much more – I don’t know, comforting. Or it’s just less nerve-wracking I guess when you start it up. Because you generally know the range that it’s going to fall into. But at the start, man, you can turn it on and be paying crazy click amounts or you can just get no impressions and not know why and stuffs always frustrating when you’re trying to figure it out.
Mike [03:11]: What happened before was I was getting lots and lots of impressions but very few click-through rates. So I wasn’t actually paying for very much, which on one hand that was nice, but on the other hand I just wasn’t seeing any sort of results that I was looking for and I just hadn’t had time to go look at it at the time. At least now I have a benchmark of what I should not be getting.
Rob [03:30]: For sure. Cool. So what are we talking about today?
Mike [03:32]: Today what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through back of the envelope business model tests. And this is loosely based on chapter two of a new book that just came out called Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth. And this is by Ash Maurya. And he’s written a couple of other lean startup books or at least books that are in that particular realm or genre so to speak.
But what I wanted to do was go through chapter two specifically and take a look at what some of the different thoughts are from him about how to look at a business model and determine what the forward looking plateaus are going to look like. And you can use this either for an existing business or for a brand new business that you’re getting off the ground. Some of the calculations that he has in the book are especially relevant just because they greatly simplify what he calls ‘customer throughput,’ which is your customer acquisition. And it kind of measures that against your customer churn rate as well, on a yearly basis. So taking those two things into account, you can sort of look at where your business plateaus are going to be and figure out whether or not you’re going to be able to have enough of a customer acquisition channel or channels in place in order to be able to just maintain the business – whatever your revenue goals are for the business.
Rob [04:43]: And keep in mind that unless you’ve run a business before and you kind of have some loose rule of thumb numbers that you use, some of the stuff we talk about today is going to be less applicable if you have no business at this point. Because you’re just pulling numbers out of the sky and you’re going to find that you’re pretty far off. But if you’ve already started and you have at least a few thousand a month in revenue, you have some numbers and you know your kind of trial to paid, and you know how something should go, you can be much, much more accurate with these calculations because you just have a concept of where you are and where you need to get to. Realizing that the numbers will change but in much smaller increments than if you’re just kind of throwing darts at a dart board as you would if you really do have a business with no customers to date.
The other thing I wanted to mention is keep in mind with books like this that they are written for a broader startup audience. And so not everything – if you do go buy the book, which I’m guessing is pretty good – if you do go buy it you got to take some things with a grain of salt. And we’ll try to point some things out specifically with chapter two, here, that I think may apply more to bootstrappers or ways that these could be shifted to people who are self-funded rather than the examples of the ten million dollar ARR after three years. It’s like that’s just so irrelevant to our audience in particular. We’ll try to call that out as we go through.
Mike [05:55]: Let’s dive right in. And the first step of chapter two is to take a look at the business itself and define what you would consider to be the minimum success criteria. And as I said before, the business model that’s shown in here can be applicable to either an existing business or to a new business that you’re trying to get off the ground and you’re trying to figure out whether or not it’s going to be a viable business. Take a look about three years out and try to think about what the business looks like specifically in terms of revenue. Now those two different things are extremely important. The first one is that you’re looking no more than three years out. And the second one is that you’re looking specifically at a revenue dollar amount so that you can make some sort of calculations.
If you try and go out further than three years, you’re probably not going to be nearly as accurate. And in addition, if it’s a business you’re trying to get off the ground, three years, trying to look beyond that and plan beyond three years is not going to be helpful to you because the business may just not be there or you may have a really hard time getting the customers. So looking at those in a much shorter time period, essentially time boxing your problem so to speak, is going to be really helpful.
The other side of it is being able to take a look at a firm dollar amount. You can adjust that later on, but the idea here is that you want to have a dollar amount in terms of the yearly recurrent revenue that you want to shoot for, that you can base most of your other calculations on. And we’ll talk a little bit more about how you can play with the numbers to kind of reach that revenue target based on lifetime value, customer acquisition rate, how long those customers stick around, etcetera. But those are just the two basic things that you need to think about when you’re talking about the minimum success criteria.
Rob [07:24]: And I’ll admit, to even think about thinking three years out feels crazy to me. It feels very MBA to even be talking about 36 months out because so much is going to change after you launch. When I’m first starting a business I tend to look six months out and think what can we get there. And if we hit product market fit where can we be at 12 months. With that said, this exercise, by the time we get to the end of it, it gives you a cool formula that I’m impressed with. It’s a high level way of trying to find plateaus and figure out where the business is going to plateau based on lifetime value and based on how many customers you think you can pull in.
So there’s a give and a take here. I don’t love the idea of looking three years out because I just think that you’re going to be way off. Even with the business as consistent as Drip, if I looked three years out I’m going to be way off and I know the numbers like the back of my hand. Take that with a grain of salt and realize that if you are projecting out and you’re thinking I need 120k per year, and maybe you want that after the first 12 months and you want that to be you quitting your job. But then you want the business – you’re thinking you want it to go to maybe double in the next year, and then go to 360 of 500k, kind of in that range is ambitious but I’ll say it’s not impossible for a bootstrapper to get there. Those are the kind of numbers that you should probably be thinking about in terms of this exercise. Assuming that you’re not going to have funding at the start and then you’re not going to try and grow a seven, eight figure business super-fast in the style of Silicon Valley; that you’re going to build it like a real business and hire based on profit and that kind of stuff.
Mike [08:56]: The second step is to take that revenue goal that you came up with and convert it into what he calls customer throughput. And this is your customer acquisition rate over time. And there’s a number of different steps to doing this. And the first step of that is if you’re building a new product you have to come up with some sort pricing on it. And if you don’t know what your pricing is, the recommendation is to use some sort of value based pricing to estimate the base price. This is essentially pricing your solution on the value of what it provides, not on what it costs to build and deliver. So that’s a difference between the solution value to your customers versus the cost structure on the back end to you.
Something else that you might look at is using cost based pricing, which is essentially taking your costs to deliver the solution, and then adding a margin on top of that. There’s a lot of business models that fit this particular mold of a service based model of any kind; productized services. Those tend to fit that. But those tend to fit that particular type of model. But if you can get away with it, if you can provide some sort of a value based pricing, you’re much better off. And going back to what we said before, if you have an existing business in place, you already have your pricing. You can essentially just use that number.
Rob [10:02]: For SaaS, I’d say it goes without saying that you’re going to want to shoot for value based pricing. That’s just kind of the way it’s done. You look at the value you’re providing, figure out if there is any competitors that are doing similar things and you either price above them if you want to be premium, or you price similar to them if you just want to be a better product. And I think another example – you mentioned consulting and such of using cost based – another example of that is kind of metered pricing, like how Amazon EC2 does it. I’m sure that they just look at their costs and then add some kind of margin on it. So, I think for the purposes of bootstrappers and folks listening in this, value based is 99.9 percent going to be the direction you want to go.
Mike [10:39]: The second step is to calculate the total number of customers at the end of the time period that you want in order to identify what your active customer base needs to be in order to make your ends meet for the revenue target. So let’s say that your revenue target is $180,000 a year, if you’re charging $30 a month then you need 500 customers in order to be able to reach that revenue goal of $180,000. That’s the kind of calculation that you need to be able to do. And this is why it’s so important to come up with not just the time periods but also what you are selling your product for and what your average price point is going to be for your customers. Obviously, if you have different pricing tiers then you kind of have to guess a little bit. So if your pricing tiers are $50, $100, and then $200 a month, your average price might be something like $75 a month or $90 a month. It really depends on where in the pricing spectrum the largest number of your customers fall. And obviously it can go in the other direction, too. You might have an average price point of $175 even though you have a bunch of people on the $50 a month plan. So take those things into account, but you’re trying to get down to an average price point per customer, and a lifetime value.
Rob [11:48]: Lifetime value is very hard to calculate if you don’t have a product. I think we’ll come back to that point. If you really are spit balling this, you’re going to have to use some rules of thumb and you’ll be off by a factor of two or three. If you already have a product this is much each because then you should know this like the back of your hand.
Mike [12:03]: I think if you don’t have a product at all, then using benchmarks from other similar companies to get to an estimate or just using what their pricing models look like – again, going back to what Rob said about determining whether or not you want to be a premium priced product or commodity based product or something along those lines. Just use a conservative estimate if all else fails. If you’re really not sure, come up with some sort of a conservative estimate for most of these numbers.
Now that said, once you have the numbers for your lifetime value and for the yearly target that you’re trying to reach, the calculation that he offers up is to get your customer throughput. And to do that you would take your yearly revenue, divide it by the customer lifetime value. And this comes out to the number of customers per year that you need to add into your business in order to be able to maintain the business at that level, at that point in time. Now that’s not on day one. It’s not on the 12 months in. It’s at that multi-year mark that you came up with in the beginning. So the recommendation was three years, if you’re using three years. And for sake of an example let’s go through that. If you’re trying to get to $500,000 a year at year three and you have a $50 a month product with a two-year lifetime value, your lifetime value is very easy to calculate, it’s $1200 lifetime value. But your customer throughput is that $500,000 divided by your lifetime value. And that comes out to 417 new customers per year that you need to add.
Now again, this assumes that your business is at year three. And if you just look at the raw numbers of the customers who are paying you on a monthly basis, your business would need 833 active customers to get to 500k in yearly revenue. But if you also take a step back and you look at that lifetime value, you’re churning out 417 of these customers every year. Which means that at 500k a year you need to add 400 every single year in order to just maintain the business at that level. And this is really where those calculations start to come into play and you can start figuring out where your plateaus are if you’re going to hit them at that particular level.
Rob [14:00]: And when I first saw this calculation, which again is called customer throughput, and it’s your yearly revenue target. So, like Mike said, that 500k divided by your lifetime value. And when I saw that my first question was why are we dividing by lifetime value? Shouldn’t we be dividing by the annual revenue per customer? And as Mike and I batted this back and forth offline, and in fact this formula works, the one that he’s given works. And he’s doing some clever math and canceling some things out, but suffice to say we tweaked around with different lifetime values, different lifetimes and different monthly price points and in all of them the math works. So, what I like about this is it’s a high level thing. Don’t get me wrong, this is not something that you’re going to sit down on day one and it’s going to dictate everything about your business. But what I like about this is it’s pretty fast to calculate.
And based on when I’ve launched products, you have a general idea of what your price is going to be. You know it’s going to be maybe around 30 bucks, or around 50, or around 75. You know that your average revenue per year should kind of be that based on what you’re launching into. And then you can always take a guess at your lifetime. When in doubt go with 12 months. That’s kind of been my rule of thumb for people who are starting a new business. You’re going to start off way lower than that when you kick off because you’re not going to have product market fit, your customer lifetime’s going to be like four or five months. But as you improve it you’re eventually going to hit that one-year mark and move beyond it. So a one-year lifetime is reasonable, and a two year means you’re doing pretty well.
In certain spaces like, let’s say Web hosting, where people just don’t churn out nearly as much, you might have a four year LTV or even a five year LTV. And big enterprise software is also like that. Maybe a HubSpot or a Salesforce, those guys have these really long customer lifetime values. And with lower price point software, typically let’s say average revenue fees are 20 to 99 bucks a month. You’re just going to have higher churn, you always will. So you’re going to have between, let’s say a one and three-year customer lifetime. So it’s pretty easy to kind of run a couple different scenarios on this. If it’s 50 bucks a month and you’re doing one year, then it’s $600 lifetime. And if you’re doing three years then it’s $1800. And then you can pretty quickly get an idea of how many customers you’re going to need to bring in each year in order to replace the people that are leaving and to maintain that revenue level.
This is not a projection of where you’re going. That’s a whole separate conversation. To project where you’re going you want to sit down with an Excel spreadsheet and it’s a whole different set of numbers. But what this is telling you is where the business is going to plateau based on your customer acquisition. So if you see this number of 400 new customers per year, if you’re already in your business and you’re trying to grow this thing, it’s going to be pretty obvious to you whether or not you can bring in 417 new customers per year. Because you know your numbers. And you know your traffic sources. And you know your trial to paid. And you know how many trials you get based on unique visitors and you can pretty quickly see you’re either going to be above that or below it and where you’re going to plateau. That’s the fun part.
From here I would actually take this estimate – it is a higher level, more ballpark estimate – and I would dive into real numbers so to speak, of like your exact churn rate. Because I have a big Excel spreadsheet that I use to do this but anyone can put this together if you have your true trial to paid and your true visitor to trial and your true first 60-day churn and post 60-day churn. It’s just much more complicated though, and it’s going to take you a few hours to put together. And you’re going to see an exact projection. But the cool part is that this one that you can throw together in like five minutes is going to be within the ballpark. Close enough that it’s a nice first cut to give you an idea of where your business is going to plateau if you’re accurate enough with your churn and your lifetime value numbers. So this could be more useful when you’re first starting out if you do use those benchmarks of other existing businesses you might be competing against. If you can get any idea about their pricing and their churn and that kind of stuff this can give you an idea of how many customers you need to acquire right up front. And just give a sanity check on, “Boy, can I really bring in 4,000 customers a year if that’s what it takes to maintain that revenue level?” It just stands as a decent five-minute sanity check, I think.
Mike [17:47]: The other thing that I think that this is really helpful in showing you is that because you have that high level number of – whether it’s 400 or 4,000 new customers that you need to add per year – you can backtrack a little bit and say let me divide that by 12 and figure out how many new customers I need to add per month. And let’s say that if comes out to 100. If you’re only adding two customers a month or three customers a month right now, then you know that looking forward to that particular point in time that it’s probably going to be really challenging to find enough customer acquisition channels to get from two to a 100. So it does give you that ballpark sanity check that you may need in order to be able to determine whether or not this is a business that is going to take you to where you want to go. Or whether it is something that you should probably offload and go look for a different business or just try a completely different business to start with depending on whether or not it’s an existing business that you have or an idea that you’re trying out.
Let’s move on to the next step. Once you have this customer throughput number, then you can go back and take a look at revising some of your previous estimates. And the first one that you can obviously adjust is that high level revenue target. That’s probably the last one that you want to adjust but it’s the first one that shows up on the list because that’s the high level, big, hairy, audacious goal that you’re trying to reach. You can adjust that; you could up or down. Chances are probably good that based on your estimates it will most likely end up going down. But that is one option.
The other option is to take a look at the lifetime value and try and figure out whether or not there are ways to either increase the lifetime of the customer, which is going to raise your lifetime value. Or raise prices in such a way that it also raises the lifetime value. And those are essentially the two ways that you can adjust this number. It’s either adjust that revenue target or increase the lifetime value. And those are really your only two options available to you.
Rob [19:30]: And again, if you’re doing this on paper before you started a business it’s harder because you’re just guessing at the LTV. But if you are a year or even six months into a business, you’re going to have a reasonable idea of your LTV and probably some ideas about how to increase that, whether it’s by reducing churn or increasing prices.
Mike [19:47]: The one thing I do like about this particular piece of it though is that – even if you are at a pre-revenue stage and you’re trying to validate things – if you have to look at your lifetime value and ten X it or 20 X it, or raise prices by ten or 20X then chances are good it probably points to the fact that this may not be a viable business model at all for you. Obviously, there’s probably other costs and stuff that you’re going to take into account. But again, you want to be using conservative estimates to begin with. So if these numbers do not pan out on paper then they’re probably going to be significantly more difficult to make work in real life.
That kind of leads us to our takeaway. And that’s the first takeaway. If you can’t make this business model work on paper then you’re never going to be able to make it work in real life, barring some form of miracle in terms of doubling your LTV or quadrupling it. Because those things are going to be very difficult unless your initial estimates were way off. Which is possible, but you also have to take into account that when it comes to math like this, if you have a bunch of estimates – there’s various theorems out there that say if you have all these different estimates or a number of different data points – chances are really good that your final number, because it’s an average, it’s going to come out in an average range. It’s not going to be at one of the extremes.
Rob [20:59]: And to give you ballpark ideas about lifetime values, it ranges very broadly because if your churn is high and your price point’s low, you can pretty easily have lifetime values in the $100 range. Like if you’re charging, let’s say $9, $19, $29 a month, if those are your tiers, you’re probably going to have a lifetime value that’s between – assuming you don’t have just crazy churn – you’re going to be looking at around somewhere between 80 bucks and a 150 bucks because that’s just where lower prices apps tend to churn out more than higher priced apps. And getting something into that range, let’s say that the 150 to 250 range is harder to do than you might think.
Now with that said, if you’re able to build an app that businesses depend on and that they really are using as kind of a core piece of their business, you can pretty quickly jump that above $1000 to $2,000 is completely reasonable for a business or for a SaaS app that has a monthly fee. Maybe the tiers are 50, 100, 150 and even on up for enterprise. If you’re building something people are relying on and they’re sticking around for a couple years – two to three years – that quickly gives you a lifetime value in that $1000 to $3,000 range, let’s say.
And moving on up, of course, you get a Salesforce or a HubSpot of whatever, which have lifetime values of tens of thousands of dollars per customer. And some even into six figures. And that is because the price points are so high and because they lock them into annual contracts, and because their entire business if focused on it. And so that’s your real range.
But if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re just starting out, you’re probably going to want to think my LTV’s going to be between 50 and 100 bucks. 150 bucks once you know what you’re doing. But it’s going to start out really low. Unless I’d say if you’re a repeat entrepreneur and you kind of know more of what you’re doing, you’re going to be able to push it into the several hundred dollars and then potentially into the low thousands. These are kind of ballpark guesstimates based on all the apps that I’ve seen.
Mike [22:44]: Another key takeaway is that the calculation for the customer throughput is really heavily dependent upon the inputs and the outputs to the model. And those inputs and outputs help you to define what is and is not actionable. So when you’re taking a look at the lifetime value, for example, that’s one of the inputs into this. And you can take action on that. You can raise the lifetime value of the customer by either increasing prices or increasing the lifetime of the customer.
In terms of the outputs, the number of customers that you need to reach on a yearly basis, you do have influence over that, and it is dependent upon the types of marketing channels that you use, advertising, whether you’re doing some sort of affiliates or leveraging other people’s networks. A lot of those things you have some level of control over. But obviously the math itself has to work. If you can’t make those final numbers work for you based on the inputs and the output, then the business model itself is not going to work for you at that point in time.
Rob [23:36]: I think some other things to keep in mind are this type of calculation, it estimates the viability of a business. It doesn’t give you an exact answer but it does give you a ballpark sanity check on whether or not this thing’s going to fly. In addition, Ash points out that time-boxed goals are more concrete and thus better than kind of simple revenue goals of I want to get to 500,000. It’s like without it being time-boxed what does that mean? And that’s something that I’ve always liked. I look ahead, like I said, six to 12 months and have a spreadsheet that’s looking at that. Because without the timeframe, it has so much less meaning because you have no concept of how many customers you’re going to need and how low your churn’s going to need to be. And therefore, how many trials you’re going to need. And therefore, how much traffic you’re going to need. If you know one step to the next what the conversion rates are, you can just back calculate from a 12-month revenue goal, you can back calculate to exactly how many unique visitors you need per month in order to make that happen. And if you’re complex enough you can include things like churn and upsells and downsells, and upgrade revenue and downgrade revenue.
It gets complicated but the idea is that this calculation that we talked about is that first swipe at it to give you the sanity check, and then you can dig into it as you get numbers that are better and that are real once you’re into the business. And then you can start plugging those in and figuring out how to improve them and how close your original estimates really were.
Mike [24:56]: Now I don’t know if this is something that Ash covers in a different section in the book, but one thing I think that we should probably talk about is a little bit about the difference between something like this versus your growth targets and your growth goals and how to look at those. Because what this gives you is that back of the envelope test to say at such and such point in time what does the business have to look like, how many customers do I need to acquire and how many will be leaving at this particular time. But that can be heavily overshadowed by your growth or your current growth. So if you’re growing at a very fast clip right now, it can be very easy to be distracted and look kind of micro focused at the business itself right now; how it’s doing, how you’re acquiring customers, doing split testing on all these different things and onboarding customers, doing support. And not really think about this down the road because you’re so hyper focused on that three to six-month timeframe.
But if you don’t take a step back and look at something like this then you can easily run into a situation where your business essentially flip flops and you almost drive it into the ground because you’re not paying attention. You’re hiring ahead of the curve or ahead of the need because the business is growing so quickly and you don’t realize that 18 months, 36 months down the road you’re probably going to run into serious customer acquisition problems or business problems because your customer acquisition needs are going to become so high based on your lifetime values.
Rob [26:12]: That’s the key here. These are not growth targets we’re talking about. These are plateaus. This is a heads up about a potential plateau. And this is something you need to be looking ahead at constantly as a subscription business. We had Ruben Gamez from Bidsketch on 50 episodes ago, I guess, to talk about how to identify and overcome plateaus. And this is the biggest hurdle that I see new SaaS founders hitting is not looking ahead and projecting. Given my churn, given my average revenue per user where are we going to plateau and how do we get past that? And the answer can be add more trials into the funnel. Sometimes that’s what it is. Sometimes the answer is we know that our funnel has no optimization so it may be running a bunch of split tests because you should be, at that point when you’re projecting, that you should be at scale. And I don’t even mean big scale like venture capital scale, but even if you just have 10,000 uniques a month or something, you can start running some split tests or even just making improvements on conversions on the site.
So there are a bunch of different ways to do it, but the idea is that when you’re running this business you have to be thinking ahead and projecting when am I going to hit the next plateau? And that’s what this calculation is about rather than growth projections. That’s probably another episode entirely.
Mike [27:24]: Sure. And then once you’ve identified what those plateaus look like and where they are likely to occur, then you can backtrack to where you currently are, plug in your numbers into a growth model and say, “when do I think that I’m going to end up actually hitting that plateau?” Because the business model might say it’s two years out or three years out, but looking at where your business is right now, if you’re growth rate is much higher then you could very well hit it in 12 months. And you really want to be in a position where you are looking at how to adjust the lifetime value of your customers well in advance of that. As Rob said, if you’ve done all those optimizations and then there’s not really other ways to address that, then you can start looking at your lifetime values and say, “how can I keep customers on longer? Are there ways for me to raise my prices or offer additional services?” And what that will do is that will increase your lifetime value, which will essentially push out that plateau even further.
Rob [28:15]: That wraps us up for today. If you have a question for us call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690. Or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from ‘We’re Outta Control,’ by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for ‘startups,’ and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
