Saas Metrics for Investors and Execution Decision Making - with Nick Franklin, Founder and CEO ChartMogul

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Nick Franklin, the founder and CEO of ChartMogul. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Nick. First, the top SaaS metrics that really matter to early stage investors. Second, the top SaaS metrics that really matter to early stage founders and CEOs. And third, the value of creating a metrics-driven culture early in a SaaS company's journey. Nick, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Nick Franklin** (1:08)
Sure. Thanks so much for having me, Ray. I really appreciate it. My name is Nick, CEO of a company called ChartMogul. What led me here? I mean, I've been working in tech for, I don't know, perhaps about 15 years and 12 or 13 of those years in SaaS. So I was five years at ZenDesk. Very early there, I ran their European business and then their Asia business.
And really on the sales and international expansion side, but also setting up support teams and these things. And it was a great ride. ZenDesk was scaled rapidly. I got to learn a lot about the business side of a SaaS business. But my heart was always definitely more in product. And I guess I always had that ambition to try and create a startup and see if I can do it myself. So after five years at ZenDesk, I decided to leave and start this company, ChartMogul, which does subscription analytics. So it's a SaaS product that you plug your subscription billing system into, be that it could be Stripe or ChargeB or a Curly or it could even be a mobile app store, like Apple App Store or Google Play. You plug those in and we automate the process of calculating all your key subscription SaaS metrics and some other marketing and trial and things like that, Metrics. We automate that and there's a whole bunch of tooling around that for data cleaning, data management, data export, things like that. But that's the key of what it does. I've been running this business for eight years now. We just celebrated our eight-year anniversary a month ago. Yes, I guess that's the short version.

**Ray Rike** (2:43)
Well, Nick, when I first saw your background as I was doing research on you as a guest here in Metrics and Measure Up podcast, I'm like, wow, maybe we should talk about product-led growth because that experience at ZenDesk had to be so amazing. But that'll be a different show. So today we're going to talk about your subscription analytics and specifically about SaaS metrics because that's what we focus on here on the show. So ChartMogul is a great platform for presenting performance metrics for SaaS companies. So let's start with why. Why are understanding those performance metrics so important in the early stages of SaaS companies' evolution? I understand it when you're 20 million or 50 million AOR, but why is it so important in that early part of the journey, Nick?

**Nick Franklin** (3:26)
I mean, I think it's just important at any stage of the business to know how you're doing, to understand the dynamics of the business, especially in the early days, you're probably still figuring out a whole lot of stuff. You're probably figuring out pricing, for example, pricing and packaging and how that works. So you want to understand, we haven't changed our pricing in more than three years now, but in the first five years of the company, we definitely had quite a few iterations of the pricing. So being able to track the data on what is the conversion rate on certain plans, what is the churn rate and retention rates on certain plans, which plans get more upsell within the plan, expansion revenue.
The LTV of each pricing plan is super important to understand all those dynamics. So I'd say that's already one big reason to have in the early stage, to figure out pricing and packaging. That's a big use case for our product. It often gets cited as helping do a lot of the informing of decision making during any pricing change. Definitely in the early years of the SaaS company, there's a lot more pricing changes than there are in the later years when usually people have figured it out. But then there's all sorts of other reasons like you might want to raise money. You might want to pitch investors. So having accurate up-to-date comprehensive set of business metrics, very, very useful if you're going to pitch investors or if you already got investors and you need to update them once a month or once a quarter or whatever that cadences. It's ideal not to be spending a lot of time on that and have it mostly automated. So there's a whole ton of good reasons why tracking this stuff early on makes sense. I think one thing that we've done from day one is have the whole company have access to our ChartMogul Metrics dashboard. And I think that's been great. It makes everybody in the company aware where we're at, how we're doing as a business, and it just gives them context around what's happening in the business. This helps also the whole team rally behind the metric, I suppose, as well. For us, it's usually ARR, something like that.