How we do planning for our $13+ million business

Every month, 36+ million people use our AppSumo Originals products like TidyCal and SendFox.

Also every month, we get 200+ pieces of feedback from users, prospects, and customers.

A lot of the feedback is helpful. Some of it is threatening (“if you don’t release this feature, I’ll refund your product.”).

Either way, we don’t have enough hours in the day to release all suggestions. We have a small, 10-person team — so we complete only 5% of user requests every month.

But, we’ve still built a $13+ million SaaS business.

And, it’s one that’s consistently grown: Over the past 5 years, our number of new customers has increased by at least 37% yearly. (And this year, we’re pacing for 50%+ YoY growth.)

As the saying goes: “The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing.” Too many SaaS founders, CEOs, and leaders I meet are trying to do too many things with their products.

Most often, it’s because they’re:

• Scared to say “no” to a customer, and risk churn
• They’re doing last-minute planning and aren’t thinking about their ideas strategically enough (often because they’re too busy getting pulled in so many directions)
• They think they can do more than they really can — which often results in half-baked products that don’t do anything well, don’t have strong PMF, and ironically have high churn anyway

We’ve had all these issues at different times with Originals.

But after 5+ years, we’ve refined a process where 10 team members can support 36+ million monthly users — and succeed building a million-dollar business 40% of the time (10x industry average).

Here’s how we’ve accomplished a process of focused product planning.

Step #1 – We define our KPIs of success for each product

Too often, CEOs and leaders are bad at setting goals and KPIs.

On one extreme, it’s surprising to me how many leaders don’t define a goal clearly. Or, on the other extreme or define way too many KPIs and then overthink everything and take no action.

Both lead to inaction.

These are things I’ve heard from founders/CEOs about planning, and all of them are bad:

• “I just want to grow my business this year” (Growth is subjective, so clarify your success clearly.)
• “I have 16 different KPIs, here’s what we’re tracking” (<$5 million ARR businesses usually only need a few KPIs.)
• “Right now I care about churn” (only next week to care about user/ToFU growth… we have to pick a lane and stick with it for a while)

One of my mentors, and the CEO of Sumo Group, Noah Kagan often talks about his experience working for Mark Zuckerberg. In the early days of Facebook, one of the most important things Zuck taught him was alignment on a singular goal (1 billion users).

Another example comes from a recent podcast episode with former NFL General Manager Michael Lombardi. He talked about the importance of “one voice” for a football team. There are parallels for business: The team needs to have clarity on the direction they’re marching.

If I were to distill one of the biggest reasons why our team at AppSumo Originals has generated $13+ million in topline revenue over the past few years with such a small team, it’s because we’re clear on the direction of success.

For example, this year our goal is driving a certain number of New Buyers. These are buyers who have never purchased from appsumo.com before — and we want their first purchase to be an Originals product.

But, it doesn’t stop with the goal.

Often, the goal of revenue/buyers/NPS/whatever is a byproduct of different behaviors. Further downstream, it’s important to understand the levers that impact your goal. We identify these levers as our KPIs.

For example, these are the KPIs we have for our product KingSumo:

We could have more KPIs, but the more we add… the more we have to track… the more distracted we get… the more we’re paralyzed by decision fatigue or uncertainty… the more we don’t take action…

So we keep it as simple as possible.

With our KPIs, we focus broad strokes on the funnel approach:

1. Top of funnel (ToFU) — actions at the very top of the funnel that help generate the earliest action into the products (like signups)
2. Middle of funnel (MoFU) — actions in the middle of the funnel that are typically usage-based and are indications of a sticky product (like integrating a calendar, creating a giveaway, uploading contacts, or anything else that displays action)
3. Bottom of funnel (BoFU) — Anything that is VERY closely aligned with our goal (like CVR of a free user into a paid customer, which is the last step for our goal)

Once we have the KPIs established, we leverage these metrics to direct our product release plan and upcoming product features.

Step #2 – We create a product release plan

A mistake I often see with founders, CEOs, and executives is they’re too broad with their planning — and they think they can accomplish MUCH more in the short-term than they actually can.

One of my favorite recent books is called Essentialism. The author Greg McKeown puts it simply: “Do less, but better.”

Our KPIs help us understand the direction of our product releases, updates, and improvements.

Depending on the size of your business, you can product plan in three ways:

• If you’re <$100,000 per year and still trying to gain traction, I recommend monthly planning
• If you’re <$3 million per year, quarterly planning
• If you’re >$3 (but less than $10) million per year, bi-annual or yearly planning (this is what we do)

When you’re further along ($3+ million), you’re distilling a lot of information — and you need more time. So you plan more future-facing, as the business success isn’t dependent upon quickly releasing a feature and getting traction (like a $1,000 per month product may be). When you’re a newer business (like many of the clients I coach), you’re trying to get customers, and quickly iterating/improving for your ICP.

With our deca-million dollar business, we look at a few sources of feedback to help us pattern match ideas that we think will impact our KPIs:

1. Customer requests
2. Online reviews
3. Internal team member wants
4. External “VIP” customer feedback (i.e. prioritizing our best/favorite customers or ICP)
5. Competitive landscape

For us, this planning takes about a month. But, the time can vary wildly depending on how well you collect and organize customer data, if you know your competitors, if you have easy access to online reviews, and more.

With so much data, our documents can get large. For example, our TidyCal H2 planning doc was 51 pages!

The KPIs give us direction on how to record requests, study competitors, understand our users — and ultimately ideate.

For example, there are a ton of different directions that we can go when looking at competitors. Do we look at their onboarding flow? Certain feature set? Their integrations? Their copy?

To keep it focused, analyze according to the KPIs you established. For example, like KingSumo, one of TidyCal’s ToFU KPIs is the number of signups per day. When we looked at one of the competitors (Calendly), we analyzed how our registration page compared.

The registration page is a big part of TidyCal signups, and therefore the KPI, so we wanted to see where we could optimize.

Research is only part of the planning, though. A lot of executives stop here — but it’s critical you distill the learnings, observations, and ideas into action steps.

Once we completed the research, we put together a roadmap of projects.

Step #3 – We execute 10-15 dev updates per month

Ultimately, the information collected results in a handful of key “paper cut issues” and big projects.

As Jeff Bezos puts it, it’s easy to focus on big problems — but you can’t lose sight of the smaller issues that are easy to miss but can have big impact.

Here’s an example of how our targeted updates looked for Q3, with color-coding for the month I expected us to execute each project. (The ones that are crossed off are completed.)

Instead of going “panic planning” at the last minute, this targeted update list helps us understand what is most important according to our KPIs (and, ultimately, our ICP and business success).

Since these projects are written in layman’s terms without much scope definition or context, to flesh these projects out more, I bring the ideas into a monthly document, define the scope, and share with our team.

This monthly document gives full details, the KPI the project impacts, the team member responsible, and the estimated ROI.

Every month, we’re able to complete between 5-15 development projects (depending on if it’s a big feature or papercut idea). And we aim for 80%+ on-time completion of projects.

The reason for 80% is because we always overestimate what we can do in the short-term (i.e. monthly planning).

With non-perfect targets, we give ourselves wiggle room to handle any big bugs, to cancel a project that has unexpected issues — or upon further analysis has lower-than-expected ROI — and to allow us to spend an extra bit of time on a project here or there.

But you can’t get to the project execution — and identify the right projects — if you don’t do the right type of planning.

Even with a small team and limited resources, these steps will help you:

1. Identify your business goal and KPIs to optimize your ideas and projects towards
2. Create a monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, or annual planning document — with data from your customer requests, team members, ICP, and competitors
3. Distill the information you learned into action items (aiming for 5-15 projects per month)