Self-serve strikes back
About a year ago, in a SaaS company in the USA...
Startups are a winding road. We turn one direction with a certain degree of conviction, and we adjust based on what we learn. That’s the game we play, over and over, until we figure it out. Whatever that really means. I mean, do we ever actually figure it out? At every level of scale, the challenges just seem to get different.
Today, we make our latest adjustment to Equals. One we’ve made before, but this time, the situation is different.
After successfully onboarding hundreds of customers, including Descript, Attio, Oso, and LaunchDarkly, we’ve designed, built, and shipped a new ARR reporting solution for Stripe.
For all the world-class ARR reports we set up at Intercom, Stripe, Notion, Atlassian, and many other world-class companies, now all you have to do is click… sync.
It’s 100% self-serve. No call required. There’s even a free trial.
Here’s the story of how we got there.
Our journey (back) to self-serve
If you’ve followed along for the few years we’ve been going to market, you’ve heard us share our story pretty openly. From sales-only to free, to self-serve, back to sales-only. 😅 And now self-serve again.
Every step along the way has been a necessary step in our learning. You can read our stories on why free didn’t work, why more friction in onboarding seems to outperform, why the challenge was really in the breadth of the product, which hurt us more than free.
Sales-first worked, but frankly, we’re just not growing fast enough with that alone. We needed a wider aperture for the number of people that can use Equals. Not a problem with the category of product we’re building—our TAM is infinite—but certainly a problem that’s a byproduct of our go-to-market strategy.
As Ben puts it, we freed ourselves to explore our Idea Map. And it’s paid off.
Things are different this time
The biggest benefit of turning off self-serve was being forced to get closer to prospects. We spoke directly to hundreds. Hearing first-hand the challenges they were facing. The pain points they had. The problems they wanted to solve. Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, it boiled down to two things:
1. Time
Founders and operators know they need to report on their revenue—not just for their internal team but also for their board and investors—but it was hard to prioritize among all the other things they also had to do in building their company.
2. Difficulty
ARR is an intricate beast. It’s why we wrote a 72-page book on it. While there are plenty of “out-of-the-box” solutions out there, none of them get it quite right. One-size-fits-all solutions simply don’t work when every company is uniquely different.
Ultimately, it was obvious that ARR reporting is a necessary evil. Prospects wanted to report on their ARR. And do so accurately. They needed reports that they, their board, and their (future) investors would trust. And here’s where things started to click.
We didn’t set out to solve reporting on ARR. We set out to build a spreadsheet. However, it turns out a spreadsheet is an excellent tool for solving ARR reporting problems for SaaS companies. It enables folks to do the customizations they need from a reporting perspective, that no other reporting tool on the market can handle. As long as they’re working with the right data.
We had the spreadsheet. And it was connected to the data (Stripe). But that data wasn’t “clean”. It wasn’t in an analysis-ready format. That’s where most of the work and complexity lies in accurately reporting on ARR.
So, we “cleaned” our customers’ data for them. For each customer, we created a set of views of their Stripe data. These simple, analysis-ready tables are the secret sauce to powering all their ARR reports and any analysis they want to build based on ARR.
With this, we’d solved the problem of reducing the time and effort involved on their part to stand up ARR reporting. However, since every business is different, we had to find a way to tailor each customer’s reports to reflect how they calculated ARR. And do so at scale.
Enter the blueprint. A dead easy way to configure ARR reports to map to specific revenue logic. Things like when new and churned ARR is recognized.
And that brings us to where we are today. For the world’s most accurate and only tailor-made ARR reports, all you need to do is click.
Ready to self-serve?
Twelve months after we decided to turn off self-serve, we learned that our “backwards” approach to building Equals has been a massive advantage for ARR reporting. It actually works and is nearly impossible to replicate.
If you’d like to see for yourself, head to our website and click Get started. It’s risk-free:
You connect to Stripe
We sync (and clean) your Stripe data
You get world-class ARR dashboards
It sounds too good to be true, but I promise you it isn't.