Pirate metrics: How do we measure the success of our business?
We decided to use Pirate Metrics to measure the successes of TalentBee and lead our growth through that.
In this post, I share what Pirate Metrics is & how we utilize it exactly.
What's Pirate Metrics?
It comes from the letters AAARRR = That's what the pirate said (there for the name pirate metrics).
The AAARRR stands for:
Awareness
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Revenue
Referral
The idea of the model is to have a clear metric for each stage and measure that metric. Then you want to identify the biggest growth bottlenecks in those 6 stages and focus on fixing those.
When we started to build the strategy around this, we wrote down the following things for each stage:
1) Why is this important to us?
2) North star metric for each level
3) What everyone at TalentBee can do to help with this metric?
Let's go through all the stages & how we measure those:
Awareness = How many people do we reach on social / our website?
Why is this important for us?
🌎 Brand is our biggest competitive advantage. People need to know about TalentBee so we can grow.
North star metric for this level:
🌎 Amount of website visitors each month
What can I do to help with this metric?
🌎 I can post to LinkedIn daily about Talent Acquisition & working at TalentBee
🌎 I can encourage our customers to share on social that they are working with us
🌎 I can write a blog post that is SEO optimized
Acquisition = How many people want to discuss with us?
Why is this important for us?
🌎 To get new customers, we need to talk with customers → The more we have discussions → The more customers we have.
North star metric for this level:
🌎 Number of 1st discussions with potential customers each month
What can I do to help with this metric?
🌎 Suggest meetings on LinkedIn & other channels with potential customers
🌎 Bring valuable information to potential customers → They want to talk with us
🌎 Write valuable content for our website → Convert to discussions
Activation = How many of these companies become our customers?
Why is this important for us?
🌎 To grow & invest in things, we need new customers. It allows us to invest in new colleagues, pay better salaries, and organize company trips & technologies.
North star metric for this level:
🌎 Amount of new customers each month.
What can I do to help with this metric?
🌎 Build great offers for potential customers
🌎 Build relationships with SaaS Founders & TA Leads
🌎 Everytime you see a potential customer → Suggest that we could work together
Retention = How many of these companies buy more / stay as customers?
Why is this important for us?
🌎 It’s 7 times easier to sell to current customers than new ones. Retention is important.
North star metric for this level:
🌎 Monthly Churn (% of customers)
What can I do to help with this metric?
🌎 If you see something the customer should benefit → Offer it to customers.
🌎 Make sure that customers stay happy & get results (Flag if there are some challenges so we can react before they churn)
🌎 Communicate to customers always (it keeps them super happy).
Revenue = How much revenue are these companies bringing in? Are they profitable?
Why is this important for us?
🌎 Business can only grow if we bring in revenue & it is profitable
North star metric for this level:
🌎 Our Monthly-Recurring-Revenue
What can I do to help with this metric?
🌎 If you sell add-on projects to customers → Suggest that we change the retainer to a bigger one.
🌎 Always offer ongoing partnership after a project with a customer.
🌎 Automate things: This gives us a better opportunity to be profitable when we don’t need too much manual time.
Referrals = How many reference cases do we have? How many referrals do we get from current customers?
Why is this important for us?
🌎 Best way of getting new customers is through referrals.
North star metric for this level:
🌎 Amount of intro’s & referral stories each month
What can I do to help with this metric?
🌎 Do a reference case from each customer always during the first month of partnership.
🌎 Go through your happy customers' LinkedIn profiles and ask for introductions of ICP connections.
🌎 Ask the happy customer to share on social media about us working together & learnings from that & the reference story when published.
How do we track all of this & how do we analyze where we are going?
We have a master excel file called: "AAARRR Data Business" and we go through this every month --> Collect the data (with some automatics) --> Analyze the data, --> Make decisions about where we need to focus.
I created a copy of our excel file if you want to try it out. First check out the video on how to use it from here:
Then access the file from here (create a copy of it so you can do edits yourself)
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What would you like to hear next?
-Samuli, CEO & Co-Founder @TalentBee.io