We stopped tracking SaaS vanity metrics. Usage went up 4x.
For a while, we were tracking the usual SaaS stuff like signups, pageviews, DAU, WAU, and retention charts. Useful to know, but none of it told us whether people were actually succeeding with Causo. So we started using PostHog properly and built our own dashboards around the things that matter for our product.
Causo now has two sides:
Causo for Fundraising has a database of 1,000+ funds and 17,000+ investors. It helps founders find the right partner at the right firm, understand why that person is relevant, and write outreach specifically for them.
Causo for Sales uses the same technology to research almost any niche live. You describe the companies you want, and it finds them, checks why they fit, identifies the right people, verifies contacts and writes the outreach.
So instead of obsessing over registrations, we started tracking questions like:
-Did the user find companies or investors they would actually contact?
-Did they accept the matches?
-Did they understand why we recommended them?
-Did they find the right decision-maker?
-Did they create outreach they would genuinely send?
-Where exactly did they get stuck?
We also started contacting some users manually based on what they had actually done. We fully killed our automatic welcome email. The automation is now me emailing people within minutes of signing up or encountering an happy / unhappy event :)
That small amount of human work taught us more than any normal SaaS dashboard.
Weekly active users went from roughly 50 at the end of June to more than 200 in July. Daily activity went from around 5 to 15 users to regularly hitting 35 to 55, with one day around 75.
Our biggest source of traffic is still dogfooding. We use Causo to find and reach the founders and companies that should be using Causo. If the targeting is bad, the contacts are wrong or the messaging is generic, we feel it ourselves immediately.
Now the main focus is conversion, but not through more popups, reminders or email sequences. We are building better guidance inside the product so users understand what to do next and reach a real result faster.
Huge shoutout to Posthog. Both for an awesome product - setting up a data warehouse and tracking absolutely everything that happens in our app was super easy - but also for being a massive inspo for our own raccoon branding 🦝🦝
Replies
WebCurate.co
I like this approach. Metrics are much more useful when they're tied touser success instead of just activity.
Tracking whether someone actually reached a meaningful outcome gives you clearer signals on what to improve than watching signups or pageviews alone.
Causo
@hosseinyazdi agree! I think in my case it was a bad habit leftover from days in a 250+ people, VC overfunded org where Number Go Up is the main thing people look at, whether or not it drives revenue :)
The "better guidance inside the product" direction resonates with me. I've been moving the same way this month with my own app. My version of your insight was realizing signups told me nothing. What actually mattered was whether a new user actually generated their first result, and whether anyone else joined them in it. Those two events are the whole story of activation for me.
How you're approaching the in-product guidance without it becoming the popup noise you're trying to avoid? Contextual hints at the moment of hesitation, or more of a guided first-run path?
Causo
@satchmo_saunders Exactly. We’re leaning toward a guided first-run path, then contextual guidance based on actual behavior.
The goal is not more popups. It’s to help someone reach their first real win: accept a strong match, find the right person, and create outreach they would actually send.
@ivan_sem "First real win" is a sharper frame than "onboarding" and I'm stealing it.
For my product, that win is probably the moment a second person joins your trip and edits something. That's when it stops being a tool and becomes a shared plan. Guided path to that moment, then get out of the way. Thanks for this exchange, it clarified my own roadmap. :-)
Causo
@satchmo_saunders highly recommend Matt Lerner's book on growth - delves quite a bit into north star metrics that correspond to aha / activation moments :)
@dawid_baranowski Adding it to the list, thank you. "Second collaborator joins and edits" as a north star candidate is exactly the kind of thing I should pressure-test properly, instead of assuming. Good luck with the conversion focus, I'll be watching how the in-product guidance approach plays out.
Causo
@satchmo_saunders Appreciate you man!
For us, we're still deciding on the north star metric, but it probably is user reached out to their second decisionmaker. Amazon's cited metric in Matt's book was iirc 'customer made second order'. Lots hinging on repeat uses of products generally:)
killing the automatic welcome email for manual outreach within minutes is the part that actually explains the 4x, not the dashboards. that's real work though - at 35 to 55 daily actives you can still personally email people. what's your plan for when that number is 10x higher, do you keep doing it manually as long as possible or is there a point where you accept some automation back in?
Causo
@omri_ben_shoham1
Exactly, the dashboards only told us who to contact and why. The human follow-up is what moved the needle.
We’ll keep doing it manually until the patterns are obvious. Then automate the repetitive cases, but keep high-intent users and weird edge cases human. The goal isn’t zero automation, it’s earning the right to automate something we actually understand.
Causo
@omri_ben_shoham1 will definitely keep it manual as long as humanly possible. Automation starts making sense when product paths are SUPER clear and there isn't that much room for improvement based on user feedback in those particular parts of the product imo :)