How to grow your SaaS with 'sticky' features
Hey there,
I'm Charlie, a Product Manager in B2B SaaS đ
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to get customers to love products so much they could never even comprehend leaving or moving to a different platform.
This is what being 'sticky' is all about. It's building a product customers can't live without.
Ask yourself this question:
âWhat would happen if a user stopped using your product tomorrow?â
If the answer isn't "all hell would break loose...", then your product needs to be more sticky!
For indie hackers this is super important as often we're building in a space where there might already be 2/3 established competitors. You need to make sure that customers are going to choose you - and stick around.
Let's jump in...
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1. Measuring 'stickiness'
While answering the question above is a useful exercise, there is a more definitive way you can measure stickiness.
Put simply, the higher the 'stickiness ratio', the more reliant your users are on your product:
Stickiness = Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users
For example, a stickiness ratio of 15% (average for SaaS) means for every 100 users that are active each month, 15 of those are active on a daily basis.
The key is defining what âactiveâ means for your product. Every product is different, but you shouldnât rely on sign-ins alone.
Try to think of what users need to do to achieve value with your product.
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Do they need to view a specific page?
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Or click a certain button?
Once you know this, simply track the frequency of these interactions over time with a tool like MixPanel or PostHog and calculate stickiness.
2. How to be more sticky
The best way to be sticky is to allow customers to generate their own unique value from your product. Let me explainâŠ
In the B2C world, think of features like:
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Spotify playlists
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Netflix recommendations
Streaming is in a particularly âsticky situationâ (đ) right now, but these features help keep customers around by personalising our experiences.
And that personalisation ties extra value to the product that gets better the more we use it.
Itâs even more so in B2B SaaS. Think of features like:
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Custom reports
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Automated workflows
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Collaboration tools
These allow businesses to build their processes around a SaaS and make it very difficult (and costly!) to comprehend shifting to something new.
Again, the more a customer learns their unique way of using these features, the more difficult they are to give up.
And if youâre a solo founder or small team, thereâs likely a tool that can take away most of the legwork of adding something like this to your SaaS.
Hereâs a few examples:
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Recombee - Plug-and-play AI recommendations
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Cord - A suite of live collaboration tools in a few lines of code.
But itâs not all about the product. There is one way even solo founders and small teams can be more sticky than the goliathsâŠ
3. Provide killer customer service
In todayâs world customer service is a big differentiator. And most big SaaS suck at it so it presents a massive opportunity for indie hackers.
When your customers contemplate switching to a bigger platform, make them think twice about leaving behind that personal relationship youâve fought hard for.
Big SaaS will rarely do these 3 things, so you definitely should:
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Resolve support tickets in < 1 hour
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Know every customer by first name
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Personally reach out and ask how things are going
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That's all! Thanks so much for reading!
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Yes once users have generated unique content and flows it would make them difficult to switch.
Although would you agree that getting people to being comfortable in generating content on our platform is the main challenge?.
I belive its a tug of war between keeping the process simple (Few steps for the user to get the setup done via auto selects and templates) versus making the process completely user controlled (No handholding per say).
I think overall getting people to your core value as quickly as possible should be the goal.
Things like onboarding can get in the way of that if its too involved.
If you keep it simple, over time that will increase engagement.
Yes agreed.
Also stickiness is directly proportional to perceived value.
If your user spends more time on your app, they'll feel that it's very useful and valuable.
Whether it actually is or not is immaterial, because perceived value is all that matters in business.
Great post
I'd add this little gem from a great book by B-school professor and marketing expert Jonah Berger.
TLDR: ask yourself, why is my customer trying to solve the problem I'm fixing? Is it pure profit? Then ask, why are they trying to increase margins? Get to the core of your customer's motivation and tap into that. That's why if you go to Netflix's "about" page you'll see this:
"Stories move us.
They make us feel more emotion, see new perspectives,
and bring us closer to each other."
Notice they don't talk about streaming or entertainment or their great UX. That's because their customers have a problem--they don't have enough great storytelling. It's not "content" or entertainment, it's a specific need for stories.
Yes, it seems SaaS is a far cry from a highly creative B2C service, but the lesson still stands.
Now, Berger's quote:
"In their wonderful book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath talk about using the âThree Whysâ to find the emotional core of an idea. Write down why you think people are doing something. Then ask âWhy is this important?â three times. Each time you do this, note your answer, and youâll notice that you drill down further and further toward uncovering not only the core of an idea, but the emotion behind it. Take online search. Why is search important? Because people want to find information quickly. Why do they want to do that? So they can get answers to what they are looking for. Why do they want those answers? So they can connect with people, achieve their goals, and fulfill their dreams. Now thatâs starting to get more emotional. Want people to talk about global warming and rally to change it? Donât just point out how big the problem is or list key statistics. Figure out how to make them care. Talk about polar bears dying or how their childrenâs health will be affected."
Google used this to great effect in an advertising campaign that is one of my favourites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aFdEhEZQjE
Good points. I'm stuck with how to get traffic, especially my targeted users to my website.
I made a launch list, but it still feels like not enough. Any suggestion on how to successfully launch a subscription-based design agency?
Interesting take @IndieCharlie !
A couple questions:
Correct? How would I do that for our video editing/hosting service? Is the player that they embed (hosted by us) already doing this, or should I dig further?
SĂ©bastien
If you have any other questions feel free to post here or reach me on Twitter!
Hey SĂ©bastien,
Thanks for the comment.
We use DAU/MAU as it only takes into account the users that are actually 'active'. The size of the total user base will be larger than just those that are active. So using DAU/MAU gives a reflection of that . It also means that it can be compared between different SaaS products independent of the size of the user base. So you could have a SaaS with 300k users and a DAU/MAU of 6% or a SaaS with 100 users with a DAU/MAU of 40%. Using the ratio gives us something consistent we can use to compare products.
In part yes. Having sharable features can increase stickiness as you're right, sharing a playlist with friends can add value. I was also saying that something like a playlist is used by Spotify to inform recommendations. Over time those recommendations get better and it feels like Spotify 'just knows' what you want to hear. So if someone were to e.g move to Apple Music - they would lose that immediately. So it's a 'sticky' feature.
For your video hosting embeds - yeah make them really stand out and reflect your brand. Each time someone embeds a video using your service it's free marketing for you.
Stickiness ratio -- I like this wording :)
Right on! It is impossible to exaggerate the value of effective communication.
Great one
Good post! Communications are really big!
Thanks @niko7!
However you look at it, what you are offering and how much value it bring to the user will determine the stickiness of your product.
A broom stick have more stickiness than other product online that have implemented thousand of tricks and method for stickiness mainly because broom stick bring more value to the customer and they need to use it and reuse it else they will live in a mess.
Thats why I would recommend you guys read the 100 million offer by Alez hormozi
It teaches you about how to make offers that the user cannot say no and need to use it else they are wasting the opportunity
This comment was deleted 10 months ago.