How I Increased Product Growth Rate By 10% Last Month

I loaded all of my paid accounts and spit out some numbers that I was curious about:

* have they invited clients? how long into the trial did they do this?

* have they invited team members (only applied to certain accounts)? how long into the trial did they do this?

* how many projects have they created?

* how many tasks have they added?

* how many comments and other activities did they create?

* have they integrated with a 3rd party? when did they do this?

I realized that some accounts use all-encompassing tasks, and some are pretty granular. But almost all of them had at least a few - but truthfully, that's a no brainer. Planscope's only useful if you've loaded in some tasks.

What I quickly began to realize was the obvious: when you go out of your way to bring your paying clients into some new software, you're probably going to stick with it. After all, no one wants to say to their client "Oh, yeah, so that Planscope app we've been using... well the trial ran out. Let's move on!"

The less obvious was how important having a 3rd party tool was. If someone is paying for Harvest or Freckle, they obviously spend money on their business. +1. Likewise, if they use one of these tools they specifically signed up to Planscope because they hate tracking time and want to log their time from within their task management product. Once someone sees the magic of working on a task in Planscope and having their time logs synced, they're likely going to convert.

Actual metrics:

93% of paid customers have invited at least one client, most did it within the first few days. This is a chick-and-egg situation - some people sign up to Planscope when they hear about it, but their trial will likely expire before they have a new client project to work on. I'm working on ways to improve this.

78% of accounts have linked to a 3rd party tool. Not really sure yet if the remaining 22% don't know they can, don't have a tool we support, or don't have a tool at all.