Worked examples

Series A SaaS

B2B SMB SaaS at ~$3M ARR. ARPU $185, 78% gross margin, 3.2% monthly churn.

Consumer subscription app

Mobile fitness/wellness app on a monthly plan. ARPU $9.40, 68% gross margin, 8.5% monthly churn.

Struggling early-stage tool

Pre-PMF tool for freelancers. ARPU $52, 72% gross margin, 7.5% monthly churn — the cautionary tale.

PLG SaaS

Self-serve B2B tool, mostly content + community + product virality. Quarterly: $185K spend, 820 new customers.

Sales-led enterprise SaaS

Six-figure ACV product with AEs, SDRs, SEs. Quarterly: $2.4M spend, 18 new customers.

DTC consumer brand

Shopify-based skincare/apparel, mostly Meta + TikTok ads. Monthly: $84K spend, 1,650 new customers.

Early-stage B2B SaaS

1,000 customers at period start, 65 cancel during the month — 6.5% monthly churn.

6.5% monthly churn compounds to ~55% annually and reads as poor against the blended B2B benchmark — early-stage churn this high caps growth before acquisition can outrun it.

Consumer subscription app

50,000 subscribers at period start, 4,500 cancel during the month — 9% monthly churn.

9% monthly churn is normal for consumer subscriptions but limits average customer lifetime to ~11 months — LTV math, not retention heroics, has to carry the business.

Enterprise SaaS

200 enterprise accounts at period start, 2 churn during the month — 1% monthly churn.

1% monthly churn means a 100-month average customer lifetime — this is why enterprise businesses can justify CAC that would sink an SMB product.

Fast-growing SaaS

$500K starting MRR. +$80K new, +$30K expansion, −$10K contraction, −$25K churn → +15% net new MRR.

+15% in a month is a pace very few SaaS companies sustain — and even it can hide an installed base that is quietly shrinking: NRR lands just below 100%, so all the growth is new logos.

Mature plateau

$2M starting MRR. +$100K new, +$50K expansion, −$30K contraction, −$120K churn → flat net new MRR.

Quick Ratio of exactly 1.0 means every new dollar only replaces a lost one — the business runs hard to stand still.

Net negative

$300K starting MRR. +$20K new, +$5K expansion, −$15K contraction, −$45K churn → contracting.

With a Quick Ratio of 0.42 the business loses about $2.40 for every $1 it adds — acquisition cannot outrun churn like this; fix retention first.

Quick-win feature

$40K engineering cost, $15K/month gain — 2.7-month payback, 350% ROI in year 1.

Sub-3-month payback with 350% first-year ROI is the no-brainer quadrant — when you find one of these, fast-track it past the roadmap queue.

Platform investment

$400K cost, $20K/month gain — 20-month payback, 80% ROI over 3 years.

Platform bets pay back slowly — a 20-month payback only clears the bar if the option value it unlocks is real, so name that value explicitly in the business case.

Marketing experiment

$25K cost, $8K/month gain for 6 months only — break-even in ~3 months, 92% ROI net.

Time-boxed benefits change the math: a campaign that stops paying after 6 months still clears 92% ROI, but only because the payback landed inside the benefit window.

B2C good/better/best

A $9/$19/$39 consumer SaaS ladder with a 50/35/15 mix across 20,000 customers — blended ARPU comes out at $17.00.

Blended ARPU sits below the middle price whenever the mix skews to the entry tier — plan revenue on the blend, never on a list price.

Bottom-heavy mix problem

A $5/$15/$30 ladder where 80% of 5,000 customers sit on the entry tier — blended ARPU is dragged down to $7.75.

When more than ~70% of customers land on the cheapest tier, the entry tier is doing all the anchoring — fix the packaging before touching prices.

B2B two-tier with elasticity check

A $49/$99 team-tool ladder (third tier off) with 800 customers and a -0.6 elasticity assumption — the +10% sweep point wins on revenue.

With inelastic demand (|e| below 1), a price increase raises revenue even after losing some customers — but the elasticity number is an assumption until you test it.

Series A SaaS roadmap

Six features for a B2B SaaS at ~3,000 customers.

Consumer mobile roadmap

Six features for a mobile app at ~600K MAU.

Marketplace roadmap

Six features for an early-stage two-sided marketplace.

Growth team backlog

Seven ideas mixing high-confidence quick wins with speculative big bets.

The 'transformational' AI-pages idea (impact 9) scores 108 — far below a humble checkout fix at 512 — because ICE multiplies: confidence 3 cuts any idea by 70% on its own.

Onboarding ideas

Six ideas that all target the same new-user audience.

When every idea reaches the same users, ICE ranks as well as RICE without reach data — the 162-336 spread here comes mostly from ease and confidence.

Marketing channel tests

Six channel bets where confidence varies wildly.

Confidence is the honesty dial: channels you've already run (Google Ads at 432, email at 405) outrank shinier untested ones — run cheap probes to earn TikTok a higher confidence score, not a bigger budget.

Onboarding optimization

Ten onboarding ideas spread across all four quadrants.

Three tooltip-sized quick wins can ship this sprint while the flow redesign earns a planned project — and per-vertical customization lands in the time-sink quadrant where most custom work belongs.

Growth experiments

Ten growth ideas, from a referral CTA to a new pricing tier.

The referral CTA (quick win) and the pricing tier (big bet) both deserve investment — the webinar series is the classic time sink: real recurring effort, diffuse impact.

Tech debt vs features

Ten items mixing debt paydown with feature work.

Debt that unblocks speed — query caching, flaky CI — scores like feature work; ground-up rewrites and blanket coverage mandates are where debt projects go to die.

B2B SaaS feature audit

Six features across all five Kano categories for a B2B SaaS roadmap review.

Basics like SSO and audit logs take the top priority scores despite zero delight upside — missing must-bes drive churn faster than delighters drive growth.

Consumer mobile app

Six features for a consumer app, including a fully-built Reverse feature.

The forced login is 90% implemented and still classifies as Reverse — implementation level measures completeness, not whether users want the feature at all.

Marketplace trust audit

Six features for a two-sided marketplace where trust is the product.

Verification and secure checkout classify as must-bes in marketplaces — chat and recommendations can only delight buyers who already feel safe.

Q3 SaaS roadmap

Five roadmap candidates scored on impact, value, feasibility, and risk — the billing work beats the AI feature on the math.

Weighted criteria make the tradeoff explicit: a flashy idea that scores low on feasibility and risk loses to boring-but-broad work.

Vendor selection

Four options (three vendors + build in-house) scored on cost, features, support, and security.

The cheapest option rarely wins once support and security carry their real weight — change the weights and watch the ranking flip.

Next hire

Four headcount options scored on revenue impact, team leverage, urgency, and ramp cost.

Hiring debates stall on vibes; scoring each role against the same weighted criteria turns them into a comparable number.

Healthy B2B SaaS

$100K starting MRR, +$6K expansion, −$2K contraction, −$3K churn, 200 → 196 customers.

GRR of 95% with NRR just above 100% is the plateau shape of a healthy retention curve — expansion from the surviving base covers the leak.

Strong consumer mobile

$50K starting MRR, +$1K expansion, −$1.5K contraction, −$4.5K churn, 10,000 → 9,100 customers.

Consumer products lose users fast up front — a 91% monthly logo retention is survivable only if the curve plateaus, so watch whether the same cohort keeps declining.

No PMF warning

$80K starting MRR, +$0.5K expansion, −$4K contraction, −$12K churn, 400 → 330 customers.

NRR near 80% every month compounds to losing most of the base within a year — a curve that never flattens is the clearest quantitative signal of missing product-market fit.

Consumer messaging app

8M MAU with 4.8M DAU — a 60% stickiness ratio.

60% means a typical monthly user shows up most days — social/messaging territory, well above the 40% bar this calculator rates as exceptional.

Productivity SaaS

250k MAU with 75k DAU — a 30% stickiness ratio.

30% is strong for a workday tool: a user active every working day caps out near 73% (22 of 30 days), so weekday products should never be judged against consumer-app ratios.

Weekly-cadence B2B tool

40k MAU with 6k DAU — a 15% stickiness ratio.

15% looks weak next to consumer apps, but a product every user opens exactly once a week would sit near 14% (1 in 7 days) — this tool is at its natural ceiling, not failing.

E-commerce checkout

50,000 monthly visitors, 1,200 purchases — a 2.4% conversion rate.

2.4% sits inside the typical 2-3% e-commerce band — the optimization target is the 97.6% who left, starting with the checkout steps where they dropped.

SaaS trial to paid

10,000 trial signups, 1,800 convert to paid — an 18% trial conversion rate.

18% matches First Page Sage's opt-in trial average, yet ChartMogul's broader study puts the median nearer 9% — trial benchmarks vary wildly by study and trial model, so name your source before declaring victory.

B2B demo to opportunity

800 demo requests, 96 become qualified opportunities — a 12% conversion rate.

Small funnels swing hard: at 800 demos, ten deals either way moves the rate by 1.25 points — trend B2B funnel stages quarterly, not weekly.

B2B SaaS at 50

240 responses: 60% promoters, 30% passives, 10% detractors across enterprise and SMB segments.

60% promoters minus 10% detractors nets NPS 50 — excellent territory — and the segment split shows enterprise (65) carrying SMB (43).

E-commerce at 25

400 responses: 45% promoters, 35% passives, 20% detractors — below the 40-50 average for consumer retail.

NPS 25 is below the e-commerce average of 40-50, and the 35% passives are the bigger risk: they don't subtract from the score, but they're one bad delivery away from becoming detractors.

Telecom at -10

300 responses: 30% promoters, 30% passives, 40% detractors — bottom-of-category telecom territory.

When detractors outnumber promoters, NPS goes negative — the telecom category average sits near 20, but the lowest-rated ISPs and cable brands post scores like this; benchmark against category peers, not the global 'above 50 is excellent' bar.

PLG dev tool

Developer tool with a crisp milestone: 1,080 of 2,400 signups create a first project — a 45% activation rate.

Product-led tools with a single obvious first action tend to clear the strong (40%+) band — the milestone does the onboarding.

B2B SaaS trial

Team-collaboration trial: 980 of 3,500 signups invite a teammate — a 28% activation rate against a two-person milestone.

A stricter milestone lowers the rate by definition — 28% against 'invited a teammate' can be healthier than 50% against 'logged in'.

Consumer app with onboarding friction

Fitness app burying its value moment behind a 12-step setup: 2,600 of 20,000 installs finish a first workout — 13% activation.

Below ~20% usually means onboarding friction, not bad traffic — fixing the path to the first value moment beats buying more installs.

NPS survey

Survey a 50,000-customer base at 95% confidence with a ±5% margin and a 20% email response rate.

A 50k base needs only 382 completes for ±5% at 95% confidence — sample size is driven by precision, not population — but a 20% response rate means planning 1,910 invites.

High-precision launch survey

Large audience at 95% confidence with a tight ±2% margin and a 15% in-app response rate.

Precision is quadratic: tightening ±5% to ±2% multiplies the sample by (5/2)² ≈ 6x to 2,401 completes — about 16,000 invites at a 15% response rate, so budget weeks of fielding, not days.

Pricing research

2,500 eligible customers at 90% confidence with a ±7% margin, analyzed across 5 pricing segments.

131 responses meets ±7% at 90% confidence overall — but split across 5 pricing segments that is ~26 per cell, so recruit ~30 per segment (150 total) rather than trusting the topline number.

E-commerce checkout test

Checkout flow converting at 3%, testing for a 10% relative lift with 8,000 visitors a day.

Six figures of sample size sounds scary, but healthy traffic clears it in about two weeks.

Low-traffic B2B signup test

Signup page converting at 5%, testing for a 10% relative lift — but only 400 visitors a day.

At 400 visitors a day this test runs for roughly five months. Raise the MDE or skip the test.

High-traffic onboarding test

Onboarding step converting at 40%, testing for a 5% relative lift with 50,000 users a day.

Huge traffic hits significance in hours — run a full week anyway to capture weekday-weekend cycles.

B2B SaaS Series A pitch

Bottom-up sizing for a horizontal SaaS tool: 250K addressable companies at a $1,200 entry-tier ACV, targeting 3% share in 4 years.

Bottom-up TAM (customers x ACV) is the credible half of a pitch deck — pair it with a SOM share you can defend (1-5% of SAM by year 3 is the realistic band).

Consumer subscription app

80M potential users at $84/year ($6.99/mo), narrowed hard by geography and segment, chasing 1% of a very competitive market.

Consumer TAMs look enormous until the SAM filters bite: geography, segment fit, and payments routinely cut them by 20x before share is even discussed.

Enterprise vertical SaaS

Top-down sizing from a $4.5B analyst market figure: a mature vertical where a well-funded specialist can defend a 5% share over 5 years.

Top-down sizing is only as good as the analyst number it starts from — use it to cross-check a bottom-up estimate, not to replace one.

Steady scale-up team

Six devs, six sprints, ~45 points per sprint with under 5% swing — the predictable team every roadmap wants.

Predictability beats raw speed: low sprint-to-sprint variance is what lets you commit to dates with confidence.

New team finding its pace

A five-dev team in its first quarter: velocity climbs from 18 to 34 points as estimates calibrate and carry-over shrinks.

A new team's average velocity is a moving target — plan from the recent trend, not the lifetime mean, until it stabilizes.

Interrupt-driven team

Plans 40 points every sprint, lands anywhere from 19 to 41 — unplanned work of up to 16 points keeps blowing up commitments.

When volatility comes from unplanned work, the fix is intake discipline, not better estimation — the average velocity is meaningless until interrupts are contained.

Elite flow

Sixteen small work items with a 1-day median and ~2-day 85th percentile — the small-batch cadence DORA calls elite.

Elite teams do not finish faster by working harder — they keep every item small enough to finish in about a day.

Typical sprint team

Fourteen items with a 4-day median but a 7-day 85th percentile — the gap between the typical item and the honest commitment.

Forecast with the 85th percentile, not the average: 'most items take 4 days' and 'we can promise 7' are both true.

Review bottleneck

A 5-day median hides four items that sat 13-20 days in code review — the 85th percentile blows out to ~16 days.

A healthy median with an ugly p85 is the signature of a queue — look for where work waits, not where it is worked on.