How did you figure out how much to charge your customers for UpKeep?
We first started with comparables to the market in order to get a good baseline for our subscription model and where to start our pricing. Then we really looked at the value in which we were providing to our customers. Since we normally sell to small to medium sized businesses, pricing was a big factor for them (much more so than a enterprise customer), so we didn’t only look at the value that we could provide that single customer, but also the likelihood that we could get value from them promoting UpKeep to their friends and colleagues. Some things that we used to gauge this were NPS scores and simply reaching out to our customers to figure out how happy they were with UpKeep! Using these engagement scores we predicted that an NPS score of 9 or better would give us a 50% change of adding an additional paying customer in that customer’s lifetime.
What metrics are important to you and why?
The most important metrics outside of revenue growth (so we can keep the lights on!!!) is our customer satisfaction score. We try to build rapport with all of our customers so that we can learn from them and make UpKeep a better application. At the end of the day, we know that this is what is going to lead us to creating a better product and overall, a better company if we are building something that our customers love.
How do you balance trying new customer acquisition strategies and doubling down on ones which are working?
We are always trying to balance these two different strategies. We run a LOT of different customer acquisition strategies, and once we find one that works, we don’t necessarily double down on it, but we focus all of our efforts on answering — how can do twice as much in half the amount of time? How can we optimize what is working so that it runs better and faster? Once we are able to automate some of these processes, we are then able to free up additional time to continue trying new customer strategies!
One of the best examples of this was how we used to send follow up emails to people when they signed up for UpKeep. We had a trigger in our system every time a new user came to the platform which would send us a notification. We would then look their company up, do some research, and then follow up with a personalized email saying “thanks so much for signing up for UpKeep! This is how UpKeep fits into Your Business”. We found that it actually worked taking the additional time to do that research and follow up… so we found ways to optimize this process. We used tools like Rapportive to quickly help us do our research on the company and Reply.io to help set up drip email follow ups!
What is the story behind your name, UpKeep?
The name UpKeep comes from what we do at the end of the day. We help facility maintenance teams upkeep their own buildings, equipment, and properties! The cause for the capitalized “K” was just because it looked cool!
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