On this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast, Gia & Claire are joined by Dan Stuart, President of EverCommerce companies Invoice Simple & Joist. Dan shares the moment he realized that the data his team was relying on to make growth decisions about their 400,000 customers wasn't actually helping them make real progress. The importance of continually validating core beliefs about your product. And the advice he would give to other SaaS leaders to get out of their own way and capture business critical insights.
Discussed
- Dan shares how an over reliance on assumptions stacks over time and how critical it is to continually re-evaluate and retest the customer experience you’re building.
- How Invoice Simple drastically improved their GTM experiments by transitioning from being a ‘data factory’ to incorporating real-world customer insight .
- How Invoice Simple measures success across key metrics like user acquisition to customer churn.
- Dan’s advice to other business leaders for how to support your cross-functional teams by providing them with the with and having that time, capability and expertise, not just for short-term success but to help them level-up overall.
- The importance of integrated planning within functional areas of your business and strategic pillars, and how an external team is often better equipped to handle internal competing assumptions and priorities.
Key Moments
[3:51] The Invoice Simple product and the broad range of customers they’re targeting.
[5:15] Dan talks about his growth from product and engineering to President and the ever-evolving need to adapt to new customers while keeping their long-standing customers happy.
[7:59] Invoice Simple was a data factory whose early success was primarily due to being data-driven and making experimentation-based decisions.
[13:33] Why Dan decided data wasn’t enough, his desire for more specific roles around research, and his belief that customer research has so much value.
[17:31] Finding cross-functional alignment within teams and across strategic pillars.
[21:15] Dan explains how his internal team decided which customer segment to go after, shifting, reorienting, and aligning teams towards this new segment.
[24:47] Dan talks about uncovering this new customer understanding and what it meant for onboarding new customers to Invoice Simple.
[27:21] Dan shares an example of customer messaging that he and his team prioritize now, thanks to customer research.
[32:40] What Dan thinks are the most significant results from using customer insights.