HowToGrowSaaS
A comprehensive dictionary for early SaaS founder
About
Most SaaS advice is written for founders who already have traction. howtogrowsaas.com is built for everyone else, the founders at zero, figuring it out in real time with no audience, no budget, and no playbook to follow. We're building the resource library we wish existed when we started. Every guide is researched from real founder stories, validated by people who actually did it, and written to be immediately actionable, not inspirational. First resource: Get Your First 100 Customers. More coming.
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FounderPlaybooks.
What other founders did to grow.
2722 dispatches from hundreds of founders, pulled from the week's best podcasts.
If it's an app that provides good value to users, almost everything else falls in place: they rate it well, they have affinity for it, organics are sustainable. It sounds boring but it gets back to the core.
Acquire apps that already provide genuine utility — almost everything else follows
After 37 acquisitions, Michael's primary acquisition filter is simple: is the app genuinely useful? Apps with real utility self-generate good ratings, organic growth, and retention. He's not trying to engineer those outcomes — he's looking for products where they already exist as a natural consequence of value. The M&A screen is a product-quality filter as much as a financial one.
What we started testing was alright what happens if we just ask people more questions? We don't necessarily care what the answers are; we just make onboarding longer. Our trial take rates went up double digits as onboarding got longer, and we basically just kept making it longer until we got diminishing returns.
Just made onboarding longer — trial take rates jumped double digits
From 2018 onward Lose It! reversed the 'minimize friction' philosophy. Simply adding more questions — some not even used to set up the product — drove double-digit gains in trial start rates. They kept extending onboarding until diminishing returns. The mechanism is psychological investment, not personalization.
There's a play for whatever you're stuck on.
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