[dxbydt]

frankly, there’s only a tiny handful of these mythical saas “1000 users each paying 1 mullion dollars” companies. the vast, vast majority of saas startups are serving millions of “users” - i put that in quotes because these aren’t real users or customers. they are real people checking out your product - but they aren’t users or customers.

if you set up a gas station near the off ramp of some major interstate, say I-65 North, you will see cars pulling in to fill up on gas. maybe buying a coffee. now, these aren’t your customers in the traditional sense of a Target or Walmart customer. Because you will never see them again. They were driving from town A to town B via the interstate- they started running out of gas and needed to refuel, so they are in your gas station now. Once they gas up, off they go. They aren’t going to come back to you and establish a customer relationship or something. We’ve all been to tons of gas stations on the interstate and we’ll probably never go back to the same one twice - unless we are plying the same route everyday like a truck driver. So the task is to find and convert these truck drivers, who are the true repeat customers.

I was working on an android app which had like millions of unique cookies. When they hired me they said we have million of users. No you don’t. If you put out an android app in some popular domain, say news, entertainment, tax accounting etc- people will download and “use” your app. they are checking it out. they aren’t users, in the sense they aren’t using it everyday or want to have a relationship with you, pay subscription etc. conversion stats are minuscule, like 0.01%. So maybe 1 out of 10000 users is the truck driver. The vast majority will never ever use your app again. To do data science with these millions of rows of user interactions and find some nuggets just because you know your way around pandas or sklearn is a fool’s pursuit. To ask foolish questions of your data, like why are all these people churning, is silly - they aren’t your users, they haven’t converted, they are just checking it out. In that sense, its a waste of time and resources to do so much data crunching. Look at actual conversions, which are probably a few thousand people, not millions. Reach out to those thousands and maybe a few tens will give feedback and then continue to iterate on the product based on that.

[thiele]

This is a really good analogy (gas station customers) that I haven’t heard before. I’ve often tried to describe this ‘low intent’ group but never had a good way to make it relatable.

[leetcrew]

it gets the point across, but it raises other interesting questions.

sure, most customers at an interstate gas station will only visit once or twice, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are less important to the business than the truck drivers that fill up every day. maybe the bulk of revenue actually comes from one-time customers. this could be a case where attracting new customers is more important than retaining the current ones.

[coldtea]

>the vast, vast majority of saas startups are serving millions of “users”

There are tons of B2B saas, including regional ones, that only serve a small number of customers way under millions.

[derefr]

Even more problematically, if you have a free service that could attract any kind of automation (e.g. an API SaaS with a free trial) then you're also going to get a lot of "users" who seem to be the "truck drivers" given a black-box usage profile, but who will also never actually convert. They use some free part of your service a lot, but they're not and never will be interested in any paid part of your service.

Maybe a close analogy would be: truck drivers who stop at your rest stop every time they come by... just to use the washroom. But who never go into the store itself.