Not Quora, but we’ve set 2+5 other core goals.
For the 2018 SaaStr Annual, our goals are:
- $10m in top-line revenue
- >10,000 attendees (nominal target 20,000)
- 20% gross margin (minimum to pay salaries, rent, etc).
- Speaker NPS of 80
- Sponsor NPS of 50
- Attendee NPS of 40
- Have fun & empower community.
So those are our main goals at the moment. You don’t see page views or media revenue in there (although we do about $300k a year in ‘media’ revenue). You only achieve what you measure …
How do we achieve those first two goals (revenue + attendance)?
Well, it turns out the only thing we can track / measure that sells tickets to the SaaStrAnnual.com is our newsletter, and more specifically, our list. “Word of mouth”, and “no source” are our top ‘lead sources’ for ticket sales, but the only thing we can measure that sells tickets is sales from our subscriber list.
[We also need sponsor revenue of course, but assuming we hit the attendee goal, the sponsors sort of follow …]
Our list is only 31,000 in size which is pretty small for (an admittedly quixotic) mix of properties that gets up to 3m views a month (blog, Quora, podcast, etc). I give us a “B-” grade here when I look at comps:
So our main content goal is to get the list up in size to 100,000 without impacting quality of the list.
It turns out, Quora does not help here directly. Twitter does not help here directly. Although with both, our engagement is high. The podcast does help directly, but modestly, in selling tickets. Basically, only the SaaStr blog helps drive the list directly — today. Because it’s the only place you can sign up for it …
But we should probably do more there.
It’s a bit of a wasted opportunity that the channel with < 50% of the total impressions (SaaStr.com) is the only place you can subscribe to the list.
It would probably also help if our newsletter had more unique content not also in other channels. We need to do more of that, and recognize that.
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