Show HN: Revenue Forecasting for SaaS Apps | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Revenue Forecasting for SaaS Apps

saascast.io

45 pointsDoches19 comments

Bit of pricing advice: businesses making a lot of money don’t mind paying for software. I think the $10 flat fee will come back and bite you in the future. SaaS metrics was so important for us and we were dropping $150 a month on ChartMogul when our MRR was only $3000.

Interesting. Did it help figuring it out your pricing?

I wouldn't say we used Chartmogul as a basis for our pricing. I do think a forecasting feature in Chartmogul would have helped us realise much quicker that our current pricing had us on an unsustainable path.

We got Chartmogul to be able to gauge the health of our startup, and for that it's been worth every penny. I can't sing their praises enough.

Interesting. Why it was an unsustainable path?

I am trying to figure out pricing for my own startup and it’s no easy task.

a bigger player is https://www.zodiacmetrics.com/, who have many peer-reviewed papers and are thus transparent with their (general) forecasting approach. i would love to see some model details given the maturity of other teams.

(disclosure: i took a class with the prof whose research drives zodiac)

Zodiac is definitely worth a look. They did a pretty good job of predicting our long-term user’s future revenues. Also all of the academic papers around it are good reads.

That said, that didn’t solve our problem because what we really wanted was predictions of our new customers. So we could quickly see whether or not their quality was changing. I just wrote something up about where we landed. https://engineering.ezcater.com/early-prediction-of-customer...

I, too, took a class with one of the profs whose research drives zodiac (Peter Fader). He's incredible; probably the best at combining mathematics and practical notions of business value (and, frankly, charisma) that I encountered at Wharton. Made me fall in love with both bayesian stats and calculus all over again.

One feature that I think will help smaller SaaS businesses: Revenue Calendar.

For example, on Jan 1, $500 will be charged, Jan 2, $250 will be charged, etc..

Sure, it's great that in a given month you will process X in MRR, but knowing when that ends up being charged is always a plus for SMBs.

Does this do anything more than just chart some KPIs and extend a trendline from your revenue?

Out of curiosity: Did you try to validate your hypothesis that people will find this useful?

No need to share juicy detials, I'm genuinely wondering. I'm very much thinking about "on top feature" small SaaS projects and Stripe is a prime candidate, but I wonder if I would use this.

General Stripe reporting solutions are there. I'm having a hard time seeing how nominal revenue predictions are actionable. In case things go up I should be able to gauge by actionable metrics (churn, sign up rate, conversion rates), and wouldn't care to end up with $ estimates (will be slightly off either way).

Would love to chat about the idea/ topic in general in case you're interested.

I believe there are already many solutions for this, https://baremetrics.com/ offers a paid service for reporting churn, sign up rates, conversion rates etc, https://clearbanc.com/ offers a free solution for the same metrics. I believe they both support stripe data as well.

Yup, I kno of baremetrics and the like; hence I would use them to check on general, actionable SaaS metrics and am wondering about the perceived value of Saascast for customers of those tools that already have a feeling where their business might be going in the next one to three months.

With changes in the product I'm not sure whether longer time horizons make sense.

I believe ChartMogul are adding revenue forecasting to their product shortly.

Really?? That would be great! What’s your source?

Yep, forecasting in ChartMogul is coming.

Source: I looked at our backlog :)

Great name, rolls of the tongue.

What problem does this solve?

You should consider using a production build of react for your front-end!

Staring at a blank screen, wondering why.

2.3MB JS on your home page...

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