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Guides, stories and questions from the makers here.

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The decoy effect mostly did not replicate

The decoy effect is the most confidently repeated idea in SaaS pricing advice, and the evidence for it's much weaker than anybody tells you. Add a third option that's clearly worse than one of your existing two, and...

Swarogan26d ago0
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Your two thousand word page gets read as four hundred

Nielsen Norman Group have been measuring this for twenty years and the answer hasn't moved. On an average page visit, people have time to read at most 28 percent of the words. Twenty percent is the likelier figure....

Swarogan26d ago0
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A fifth of the customers you lose never decided to leave

Somewhere between a fifth and two fifths of the customers you lose never decided to leave. Their card failed. The average subscription business loses about 9 percent of monthly recurring revenue to failed payments....

Swarogan26d ago0
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Every form field past the eighth costs you five percent

The Baymard Institute has been running checkout usability studies for over a decade, and their finding on form fields is one of those numbers that should change what you build on Monday. The average checkout shows...

Swarogan26d ago0
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The median SaaS takes 16 months to earn a customer back

The median SaaS business takes 16 months to earn back what a customer costs to acquire. The top quartile does it in under 6. The bottom quartile takes 47, which is longer than most small companies survive. That spread...

Swarogan26d ago0
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Asking for a card triples trial conversion. Here is where that stops paying

Asking for a card at the start of a free trial roughly triples your conversion rate. It also cuts your signups, and almost nobody works out where those two lines cross. Published benchmarks separate trials into...

Swarogan26d ago0
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A tenth of a second was worth 8.4 percent

Deloitte and Google ran the study most people cite badly. Thirty seven brands, thirty million user sessions, four weeks, and they isolated mobile page speed as the variable. A tenth of a second was worth 8.4 percent...

Swarogan27d ago0
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You can discount annual billing by 27 percent before it stops paying

Annual billing is the highest return pricing change available to most small SaaS businesses, and almost everybody underprices the discount they attach to it. Here's the arithmetic that tells you how much you can...

Swarogan27d ago0
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Four email rules that decide whether your password resets arrive

In February 2024 Gmail and Yahoo made a set of email rules mandatory, and by late 2025 they were rejecting mail that failed them. If you send anything automated, a welcome sequence, a password reset, an invoice, this...

Swarogan27d ago0
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Your churn rate is mostly a fact about your price

Your churn rate is mostly a fact about your price, not about your product. That's an uncomfortable thing to read when you've spent a quarter trying to fix retention, and the industry data is fairly blunt about it....

Swarogan27d ago0
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Say what it does before you say what it is

Everyone tells you to lead with what your product does instead of what it is. They're right. They've been right for twenty years, and that's also exactly where every article on the subject stops. What nobody tells you...

Swarogan27d ago0
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I tracked my hours for six weeks before hiring anybody

Delegation has a break-even point and it isn't where people think. It sits at the handover overhead, not at the hourly rate, and if you don't know your number you'll either hire too late or give up six weeks in. Ten...

Swarogan27d ago0
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My first ten customers came from seven places, none of which scale

Three of my first ten customers came from one forum answer. One came from a cold email. For about eight months I treated that as a three to one result and put my time accordingly. It isn't a result. Here's what three...

Swarogan27d ago0
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We cut the welcome sequence from seven emails to two

Our welcome sequence was seven emails. It's two now, and more people do the thing the emails were asking for. The reason is in one number. The first two emails carried 44 percent of all the attention that sequence...

Swarogan27d ago0
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Eight customers asked for the same feature. I said no to all of them

Eight customers asked for the same feature over a year. I said no to all eight. Here's the arithmetic that made it an easy decision, and it's arithmetic almost nobody runs, because the cost of yes arrives in a form...

Swarogan27d ago0
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Nobody reads your blog. They read your documentation

A page that answers a question people type is worth roughly forty times a page about your company. Not as a slogan. You can calculate it, and the calculation is why I stopped writing a blog. Traffic from search is...

Swarogan27d ago0
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Six weeks building a feature three people use

Before you build anything that takes more than a week, work out how many people need to use it before it pays for your time. It's one line, and the answer is usually much larger than you expect. I built a feature over...

Swarogan27d ago0
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I tagged every support ticket for six months. It replaced my roadmap

Here's a thing almost nobody checks. You count your support tickets by category, you rank the categories, and you build whatever sits at the top. But ticket counts are random, and if you don't know how random, you...

Swarogan27d ago0
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The customer story nobody skips starts with a Tuesday

Most customer stories are unreadable, and the fix isn't better writing. It's putting the good part where people still are. Assume each section of a piece loses some share of the readers who started it. Then after n...

Swarogan27d ago0
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We killed our free tier and revenue went up

A free tier is a bet with a number attached, and you can work out the number in about a minute. Almost nobody does, which is why so many of them run for years while quietly losing money. The bet pays off when the...

Swarogan27d ago0
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