🚀 A B2B rocket ship fueled by negative churn

How HelloHailey is spreading virally through remote companies

Tim Jones

Mar 13, 2021

👋 Welcome to The MVP Sprint! I’m Tim.

I’m sharing my public process of taking HelloHailey from idea to thriving SaaS startup as a bootstrapped solopreneur.

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🧙‍♀️ Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is a magical thing

Think about the last time you bought a pair of shoes. You probably saw an ad on Instagram, YouTube, TV, or all of the above. The ad led you to a particular store or website, where you purchased your new footwear.

Several months later, your white shoes have turned gray. That same store has to pay for more ads to convince you to buy another pair. They have reacquire you.

Unlike Foot Locker, B2B SaaS companies typically acquire a customer only once. Then that customer shows up with a check every month like clockwork.

✨ That’s the magic of an efficient SaaS growth engine.

😱 If MRR is magic, a leaky bucket is its Voldemort

My sincerest apologies to those of you that don’t get this Harry Potter reference.

😩 Some products have high churn, AKA a leaky bucket. Since a large percentage of their customers cancel every month, it’s hard to grow.

🙂 Some have low churn - growth for them comes more easily.

🥳 And some have realized the B2B SaaS dream of negative churn - revenue growth from existing customers exceeds the loss from churned customers.

🚀 Negative churn is rocket fuel for a high-growth startup. And I’m starting to sniff it.

💸 Negative churn is powered by expansion revenue

Expansion revenue is revenue gained from existing customers. Note: I'm using active teams as a proxy for revenue until I start charging (next on my list!).

My first team signed up on January 5. Since then, 20 more teams across 9 total companies have signed up (366 total users), and 0 teams have churned.

I’ve seen incredible expansion within the 3 companies with >150 employees:

Company A grew to 6 teams in 2 months. 75% of the company now sees Hailey every single day.
Company B grew from 1 team to 7 in just 2 days 🤯.

At this rate, I’d keep growing even if I spent all of next month tanning on a beach somewhere.

As encouraging as these numbers are, it’s dangerous to draw conclusions from such small sample sizes.

So I took my own advice from my last post and and poured all my energy back into growing my single most important KPI - engaged Slack channels.

🐶 Making Hailey more engaging

A Slack channel is “engaged” if 50% of Hailey’s messages instigate one or more messages from users. I can improve this KPI in two high-level ways:

Make Hailey's messages more engaging.
Reduce friction for users to participate.

I’m doing both with Guess Who❓, Hailey’s first social mini-game. I’ll let Hailey explain how it works:

24 hours later, Hailey reveals the answer:

Guess Who❓ reduces friction - teammates can participate by just clicking a button.

Its messages are more engaging:

People love competition, even in small, inconsequential games like Guess Who❓.
Hailey “mentions” (with @) each participant when she reveals the results. These “mentions” will drive more engagement than a typical message.

After a week of testing and a week or two for the Slack review process, Guess Who ❓will be live for all teams.

📹 See Hailey in Action

If you’ve been curious about what Hailey looks like in Slack, today’s your lucky day! I recently put together a demo for a prospect, and wanted to share it with all of you.