SaaS Metrics Course

Lesson 1 • Key Stakeholders and Metric Consumers

Identifies who uses SaaS metrics—founders, investors, and operators—and what decisions each group drives. Aligns metric selection to audience and purpose.

Lesson 2 • The SaaS Customer Lifecycle

Traces the customer journey from acquisition through expansion and churn. Provides the lifecycle framework that underpins cohort and retention analysis.

Lesson 3 • What Makes SaaS Unique

Contrasts SaaS with perpetual-license and on-premise models across revenue, delivery, and cost structure. Sets the conceptual baseline for all metrics studied later.

Lesson 1 • Revenue Waterfall Analysis

Constructs a period-over-period revenue waterfall to visualize net revenue change. Integrates MRR movement categories into a single diagnostic view.

Lesson 2 • MRR Movement Categories

Breaks MRR into new, expansion, contraction, churn, and reactivation components. Enables precise diagnosis of revenue growth drivers and drags.

Lesson 3 • Annual and Monthly Recurring Revenue

Defines ARR and MRR, explains the conversion between them, and clarifies what qualifies as recurring. Anchors all downstream financial and growth metrics.

Lesson 4 • Average Revenue Per Account

Calculates ARPA across segments and tracks its trend over time. Connects pricing strategy and mix shift to overall revenue trajectory.

Lesson 1 • Lead and Pipeline Conversion Metrics

Tracks conversion rates from lead to opportunity to closed deal across funnel stages. Links marketing efficiency to CAC and revenue outcomes.

Lesson 2 • Customer Acquisition Cost Defined

Establishes the full-cost CAC formula including sales, marketing, and overhead allocations. Prevents underestimation errors that distort unit economics.

Lesson 3 • CAC Payback Period

Calculates how many months of gross margin are needed to recover CAC. Connects cash efficiency to growth sustainability and fundraising narratives.

Lesson 1 • Churn Root Cause Identification

Applies qualitative and quantitative methods to diagnose why customers churn. Connects churn signals to product, support, and pricing interventions.

Lesson 2 • Customer Churn Rate Fundamentals

Defines logo churn, calculates monthly and annual rates, and clarifies cohort vs. aggregate measurement. Establishes retention as the inverse of churn.

Lesson 3 • Net Revenue Retention

Calculates NRR by incorporating expansion revenue into the retention formula. Demonstrates how NRR above 100% enables growth without new customer acquisition.

Lesson 4 • Revenue Churn and Gross Retention

Distinguishes gross revenue retention from logo churn by weighting losses by contract value. Reveals the revenue impact of losing high-value accounts.

Lesson 1 • LTV Inputs and Sensitivity

Examines how ARPA, churn rate, and gross margin each affect LTV magnitude. Builds intuition for which levers most efficiently improve LTV.

Lesson 2 • LTV to CAC Ratio

Combines LTV and CAC into the unit economics ratio used by investors to assess business quality. Establishes target ranges and interpretation guidelines.

Lesson 3 • LTV Calculation Methods

Presents simple, gross-margin-adjusted, and discounted cash flow LTV formulas. Clarifies when each method is appropriate given data availability.

Lesson 1 • Product Health Scores

Combines usage signals into a composite health score that predicts churn and expansion risk. Enables customer success teams to prioritize interventions.

Lesson 2 • Time-to-Value Measurement

Quantifies how quickly new customers reach their first meaningful outcome in the product. Connects onboarding speed to activation rates and early retention.

Lesson 3 • Daily and Monthly Active Users

Defines DAU, WAU, and MAU and explains the DAU/MAU ratio as an engagement depth indicator. Links user activity to retention and expansion probability.

Lesson 1 • The SaaS Magic Number

Calculates the Magic Number to assess sales and marketing efficiency relative to new ARR generated. Benchmarks the ratio to signal over- or under-investment.

Lesson 2 • Burn Multiple and Cash Efficiency

Measures net burn relative to net new ARR to quantify cash consumed per dollar of growth. Connects burn efficiency to runway and fundraising readiness.

Lesson 3 • Gross Margin Analysis

Decomposes SaaS gross margin into hosting, support, and implementation cost layers. Establishes gross margin targets that support long-term profitability.

Lesson 4 • Rule of 40 and Profitability Balance

Applies the Rule of 40 to balance growth rate and profit margin as a single performance indicator. Guides strategic trade-offs between growth and efficiency.

Lesson 1 • Selecting Metrics by Company Stage

Maps which metrics matter most at pre-product-market-fit, growth, and scale stages. Prevents vanity metric traps by anchoring selection to strategic priorities.

Lesson 2 • OKRs and Metric-Driven Planning

Connects SaaS metrics to OKR-based planning cycles to drive accountable goal-setting. Ensures that targets are grounded in historical performance and market benchmarks.

Lesson 3 • Board and Investor Reporting

Structures board decks and investor updates around key SaaS metrics with narrative context. Builds credibility through consistent definitions and transparent trend data.

Lesson 4 • Metric Definitions and Data Governance

Establishes a metrics dictionary and governance process to ensure consistent calculation across teams. Eliminates definition drift that causes cross-functional misalignment.