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Shopify sees an 80% annual merchant churn rate, warns Romain Lapeyre
“What was interesting is that the yearly churn is 80% for Shopify. It's pretty frightening, because at the end of the year, there's only going to be 20% of the stores that work here at the beginning of the year that will still be around and still be your custom…”
Founders should build data-driven growth machines at just 50 customers
“So I would argue that since now we have access to we have lots of data points about like trade shows we go to, the payment information, the sales data in our CRM. We can combine all these data points and start building the machine early on as soon as you have …”
Startups should hire a growth stack manager as a single-digit hire
“I think you should do the same thing for somebody who manages all this growth stack. They should be a single digit higher as well, because it's gonna help you get faster to a thousand customers.”
Gorgias tripled identified leads using a 10-tool enrichment waterfall script
“We've built what we call a waterfall, which is essentially a script that starts with the cheaper tool... And essentially what we've done with that is that we've managed to roughly triple the amount of leads that we're able to identify from that process.”
Targeting outbound emails based on tech stack signals doubled reply rates
“Instead of sending the vanilla email, we say, Hey, like just notice you use recharge. You're probably getting those three questions from your subscribers. And we know like they can add up quite a bit and it turns out we integrate really well with them and we c…”
Gorgias employs a full-time BDR solely to send leads to partners
“We hired a BDR whose job is to send leads to partners. Like that's their full-time job.”
Gorgias increased ARR 6x in two years scaling to 10,000 customers
“So by optimizing all the steps I just described, we increased the AR by six X over two years from a thousand to 10,000 customers.”
SaaS partnership channels take one year and dedicated staffing to work
“I think the learning here is that it takes one year. It takes a full-time person who's just going to focus on that. And it pays pretty pretty high dividends, so I would definitely invest in partnerships early if it's a fit for your business, because it's a fly…”
Dedicated DTC VC partnerships generated only $200k-$300k ARR for Gorgias
“Working with the VCs that focus who focus on the direct-to-consumer brands, so we hired a, this time we hired a person to focus on that full-time, and what we found is, like, it was just, like, 200 K-R, 300 K-R per year, so not enough to justify a full-time fo…”
Most SaaS companies hit a growth wall at $1M–$3M ARR
“Most companies, when they get to 1,000,002 1,000,003 million AR, they don't really have the machine yet. So what they, so they typically end up hitting a wall for a few months because they don't really know how, where the growth comes from.”
Startups with eight-month runways cannot rely on three-year marketing horizons
“The thing is when you are an early stage company, you cannot really afford to plan your growth based on something that's going to happen in three years because you only have money for like eight months.”
Gorgias tripled its sales close rate to 50% in 12 months
“In our case, the close rate went from, ah, like, around 15% to 50% in the course of 12 months. So we tripled the close rate by having this hyper-targeted approach, giving the right pitch to the right people, and talking to the people that are ready to buy.”
Automating CRM updates saves sales teams 20% of their time
“To be able to automate the deals that move in your CRM, that will save your team, like, about, like, 20% of their time.”
The best time to engage users is directly inside the product
“The best time to engage a conversation with a customer or a potential customer is inside the product when they have decided to invest time on your product.”
Gorgias reached 95% post-payment customer activation via tailored onboarding
“After we did that, we went to 95% customer activation after they paid, meaning that people made the decision to buy, and 95% of them start using the product and getting value.”
Gorgias reached roughly $2M ARR at 1,000 customers
“Two years ago I was at Saster and did a session on like how to do this the zero to one and get to this thousand customer mark. And for us, it was about two million AR at the time.”
Lapeyre: 700k of 2M Shopify Stores Form Gorgias's TAM
“So for us, we sell mostly to Shopify stores. There are about two million of them. I think there's about like 700 K of them that are on our TAM.”
Gorgias hosts roughly one co-marketing event daily with ecosystem partners
“So we do about one event a day, which is which is pretty intense. And so that helps the partners essentially like attract their own leads.”
Pure outbound sales generate approximately 10% of Gorgias's ARR
“Outbound how effective is it it's about 10% of our AR today. So that, that gives you an idea and that's like pure pure outbound.”
Gorgias raised average customer experience score from 2 to 3 out of 5
“After one year, we increased the customer experience score from two out of five average to three out of five.”
Gorgias customers with higher CX scores retain roughly 20% better
“They retain about 20% better if they have a higher customer experience score.”
Gorgias gave $1,000 iPhones for referrals against a $3K ACV
“So incentives for us where we offer an iPhone if you refer us to customers. So if you just do the math, an iPhone is like a thousand dollars, ECV is a three K, and then you have a NR that is like around like 90 90%. So it's like super worth it because your iPh…”
Gorgias: Referrals Grew from 0% to 5% of New ARR in Two Years
“And so what we were able to do is get the referrals from zero to five percent of the new AR that we add after two years.”
Shopify stores account for approximately 95% of Gorgias's business
“We focus on Shopify right now. It's about like, 95% of our business, and we're starting to go on Magento and e-commerce and build those partnerships there.”
Purely self-serve product leads generate 20% of Gorgias's revenue
“We have about 20% of our revenue that comes from the product leads that we don't engage with, and 80% that comes from The blend of inbound leads, post-product leads that we do engage with.”
Installing a chat widget signals a customer service purchasing window
“When you install a chat app on your website, it's likely that you are on a free trial for a customer service app.”
Gorgias outbound cohorts average $2,000 deals with mediocre churn
“So let's look at the one from Adbound. The average deal size is 2000 dollars, NPS is okay, and churn is not that good, like we have some customers leaving.”
Gorgias finds trade show leads yield $5,000 deals and negative churn
“The contrary is trade shows, so let's look at them. They spend 5000 dollars on average, so the deal is bigger. NPS is better, so which means they like the product better, and they're gonna tell their friends about it. And we have negative churn, which means, l…”
Startup employees can learn sufficient beginner SQL in five days
“All the people I've seen learning SQL, it took them, like, four or five days to get, like, a beginner level that's enough to start understanding things”