CHURN FM
CHURN FM is the podcast for subscription economy pros. Every Wednesday we hear how the world’s fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention & engagement to fuel their growth.
CHURN FM
E249 | Optimizing User Acquisition for Long-Term Retention with Planable's CMO, Miruna Dragomir
Today on the show we have Miruna Dragomir, CMO of Planable.
In this episode, Miruna shares her experience in optimizing user acquisition for long-term retention.
We discuss her transition from large corporations like Uber and Oracle to an early-stage startup, Planable, and how she built and scaled the marketing team.
Miruna also delves into the integration of customer success and marketing, the retention strategies she used at Uber, and effective reactivation tactics.
We wrap up by exploring the challenges of B2B versus B2C marketing and the importance of creating user habits for sustained retention.
Mentioned Resources
Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.
[00:00:00] Miruna Dragomir: Don't try to figure out the entire funnel in one go all the time, because it's just, you end up with so many segmented ideas and tactics that you can do like a few years of all these things. And at the end, you cannot draw a line of what works and what doesn't because you end up doing so many things out of just pure, you know, inertia.
[00:00:30] Andrew Michael: This is churn.fm, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.
[00:00:43] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely boosts the strategy, profitable and growing.
[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.
[00:01:08] Andrew Michael: Hey, Miruna, welcome to the show.
[00:01:11] Miruna Dragomir: Hi, thank you. I'm glad to be here.
[00:01:33] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Miruna is the CMO of Planable, the content collaboration platform that makes marketing teamwork a breeze. Prior to Planable, Miruna spent time at Uber and at Oracle and so my first question, I guess, for you today is what was it like joining Planable after your experiences at both Uber and Oracle?
[00:01:11] Miruna Dragomir:That's a very good question because it was a big transition. I have to say that. I mean, you know, and the journey was interesting because Oracle, like the biggest corporations out there and then Uber, which was a scale up, it was very, very dynamic. It was very fast growth, fast-paced act now type of environment. And then Planable, which was just at its beginning, I was the second employee.
[00:01:57] Miruna Dragomir: It was, yeah, it was a very big difference. I didn't really know what to expect. I mean, I didn't really think about it. I was excited at the opportunity to be so empowered to do whatever idea I had in mind to just implement it and have that 100% freedom. I wasn't expecting the immense feeling of responsibility that comes with it. When you're the first marketing employee and when the company is relying on marketing on and on your plans to make it or not, then that type of responsibility was very unexpected for me. I didn't think of it. And that was a tough pill to swallow. It was hard to deal with it at the beginning. But you know, I rolled up my sleeves, I kept at it trying to smuggle my imposter syndrome to kill it slowly and to grow into the shoes that I was given. And yeah, I learned to do it.
[00:02:52] Andrew Michael: Interesting. Yeah. I think it speaks to a lot of the cliches you hear about like small versus large businesses, but actually hearing it like directly. And a lot of times as well, you speak like earlier stage founders and then they join these big organizations and then they complain a little how slow things move and how little autonomy they have. And you sort of did the inverse.
[00:03:12] Andrew Michael: Like you started at these big companies, like very, very structured, like very fast moving, fast pace, where probably like your work is not going to have the greatest impact on the grand scheme of things where, like, as you say, going into an early stage startup, being employee number two, like everything you do counts. Like, and really like the team is depending on you to perform. So I can see how that pressure must have been building in the early days. And so how has that evolved? You've been there six years now, like how big is the team overall? And what does marketing look like?
[00:03:42] Miruna Dragomir: The company is at 40 people now, 40 employees. It's grown quite fast in my point of view. And the marketing team is about 10, 11 people of that. And the way we employed is basically when we figured out a channel or a tactic or something that worked and, or we had, you know, preliminary results that showcased its potential, then we hired someone for it. Of course, the first few couple of employees in marketing were very hybrid roles, just like you'd expect in a startup.
[00:04:15] Miruna Dragomir: I don't know what's working. So yeah, generalists, whatever. If you can come in and know anything, then just try it and see if it works. And yeah, now the team is split into a big part of it is paid, mostly PPC. Then we have the SEO team, which is quite huge and a very big pillar for our acquisition. And then we have the customer success team, which includes both support and the proactive retention side of things. As well as creative and yeah, that's about the team.
[00:04:49] Andrew Michael: And customer success falls under marketing at Planable?
[00:04:53] Miruna Dragomir: Yes. And I don't know how often that is. Not very often. We haven't, yeah, we might still, we're still thinking, always considering maybe we should ungroup them somehow. But the reason for my skepticism is to end up breaking up the funnel, right? And then, you know, telling the marketing team they only have to focus on acquisition, whatever that translates to in terms of money or in terms of churn or ARPA or all of the other metrics that count when you do acquisition and then giving very little control to the customer team that that's kind of my biggest fear and why I still want these two teams to work very well together, very close.
[00:05:37] Andrew Michael: I think it's an interesting one when you think about the model of the business, if it's like high touch or low touch and in terms of like the price points as well influences, because also what I found in the past is that like a lot of the time, the biggest impact you can have when there's low touch is really on the life cycle marketing side of things. And then there tends to be this big overlap between what are the roles and responsibilities between like a life cycle marketer and a customer success manager and trying to figure out like, okay, can we support growing a team in the space?
[00:06:09] Andrew Michael: Or does it make more sense in doubling down on like the automation and figuring that out? So definitely is interesting the way you have an, and an equipment from long, you have more of a low touch model and I'm assuming like the ASP is not extremely high to support sales.
[00:06:23] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah. We're pretty much, we're quite PLG, quite marketing driven and yes, the companies are SMBs with quite, you know, more of a more B2C in the B2B spectrum.
[00:06:35] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Got it. Cool. And you mentioned as well, like as you were hiring was for specific channels. And actually one of the things that caught my attention when I sent out the invite was you were previously at Uber and you worked on retention as part of like the acquisition side of things as well. And I was keen to dive into hear a little bit about that today. Like what that looked like for you at the time, jog your memory back a little bit, and then maybe we can talk about how you bringing those lessons into Planable as well, but maybe if you could just set it up for us a little bit, like what was the context during that time and what was your role at Uber?
[00:07:09] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah. So I came in as quite a generalist for all just marketing person and, you know, my attention moved around. There were acquisition campaigns, yes, but the more frequent work and at least, I don't even know if I'm saying the right thing here, but the way I remember it is probably skewed to what I enjoyed most. And that was the conversion tactics and the retention tactics. Uber was quite focused on its funnel. It's, you know, B2C. You can win a customer and lose it just as fast.
[00:07:46] Miruna Dragomir: With people's behavior that just checks multiple apps and looks for the best price sometimes, or they get into a specific habit, the fluctuation of that funnel is very high. So it's important that you are on top of those tactics and we would look into buckets of users. We would have categories depending on the frequency of use in terms of number of rides last time they took a ride, we would have dormant user, riders, stale, churned, I don't even exactly remember these categories, but what I know is that you would have some automations, of course, to keep the fun as optimized as possible, but there were also a lot of one-time tactics to test out, to maybe spike when you have a low season, a low month, a low week you had these big categories of dormant people that you would want to activate.
[00:08:45] Miruna Dragomir: One more thing that I do remember is that we tested a lot what type of activations worked best. There were these researches that were done globally or regionally to see what drives people back. Is it discounts? Is it a specific number of free rides? What prompts them to act and what prompts them to retain. Cause if you give like one time free ride, I remember that didn't work that well. I mean, people would use it and then you'd never hear from them again. So all of these tests were fascinating.
[00:09:20] Andrew Michael: Right. And then you got to run these tests. And obviously, like you mentioned, there was different research done at different locales and geolocations and your team, were you focused on a specific area or was it global operation?
[00:09:34] Miruna Dragomir: So the teams were focused on their own market. So me working in Romania, we were focusing on the Romanian market, but there were collaborations. Like when you wanted to do a bigger research in order to have the most statistically significant results, you could pair up with other regions and run the test in multiple areas to drive to a conclusion that can be applied globally.
[00:09:57] Andrew Michael: Nice. And these tests and these sort of campaigns, were they, did it involve paid campaigns at all? Because I think this is probably one of the most underutilized channels, I think, for retention, is that we see paid channels as a great way to acquire users, but it's very rarely do companies think about it as an opportunity to actually retain users and to reactivate them. So I'm keen to understand, like, was paid part of these channels?
[00:10:22] Miruna Dragomir: I mean, honestly, I have no idea whether it was or wasn't because paid was a different team that worked with an agency and we had no contact whatsoever. It was like a whole isolated thing. So I don't know exactly if, if it was used that way, but yeah, there was no, there was no collaboration.
[00:10:42] Andrew Michael: And so maybe talk us through like some of the things that you did and you tried that worked and you mentioned like one or two things surprised you like what were they and how did the team operate then?
[00:10:52] Miruna Dragomir: So this one, and now I really have to jog my memory. Honestly, one thing I remember is that most of the reactivation tactics were based on trying to re-induce the habit. So because it's a habit to open one app and to use that one. And we tried to stay away from reactivation tactics that were limited, that were very, you know, like, again, one ride one time and rather focused on giving a more generous discount or a less generous discount, but for multiple rides until you can again recreate that habit of opening your app. And that would be usually, I remember there were some tests done if I remember correctly, and that was like three to five rides that would create further on retention rather than just bring you that beautiful spike and no return.
[00:11:49] Andrew Michael: No return. Yeah. That makes sense as well. Not having one off, but really trying to establish a habit. I think, like thinking through these products as well, like delivery, food delivery as well, like ride sharing things like Uber's and stuff is that, I think there's probably different personas that react differently to different types of offers or different types of reactivation campaigns. Like if I think to my behavior here, like locally in Cyprus, I'm a huge fan of one of the delivery companies, but just purely because they were friends that founded it. And I have affinity to the brand.
[00:12:22] Andrew Michael: But if that wasn't the case, I think the company that is now starting to be the market leader, I think their user experience is just hands-down way, way better. So I think I would normally gravitate more towards a user experience rather than a saving in my mind, I think, for a habitual habit. But there definitely are customers who are a lot more drawn to a specific brand because of the savings. It's interesting thinking through like these different types of campaigns and how you can focus on retention is that it really differs depending on user to user, what is going to enable that retention and keep them sticking.
[00:12:55] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah.
[00:12:55] Andrew Michael: Nice. So you did a lot of this work then at Uber as well, a lot of the life cycle marketing, like as you said, like really trying to think through this, like, how did you bring that into Planable then as well joining, like, was there something that you, you wanted to get started at the beginning of your journey there, obviously, as you mentioned, a lot of pressure trying to deliver results. What was your first go-to when you arrived at Planable?
[00:13:19] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah, I was very, very excited to think of that funnel on my own and to transfer the know-how that I learned while I worked at Uber and tried to apply it to this whole new audience, whole new company and basically build the funnel into macro and micro stages and micro moments and all of that. And to activate, we had back then Planable was on a freemium model. So we had a free plan that was quite popular, of course, just like free plans are.
[00:13:54] Miruna Dragomir: And then I really wanted to turn that to focus on activating those users and converting them to paid and basically drawing this same funnel and try to optimize it as much as possible. The shocker was that I put a lot of work into that funnel and into those activations. And my first realization was that conversion isn't really as impactful when there's not a lot of people coming into your pipeline on a regular basis.
[00:14:29] Miruna Dragomir: So you either, you even may have some leads that were built in time, but if they're not coming recurrently, there's very little impact that you can have. I mean, it's, you know, we had a few hundreds of visitors, I think, per month that was on the website. So if you don't manage to touch the conversion of the website, then you're left with very small numbers. And that was conclusion number one.
[00:14:55] Miruna Dragomir: And conclusion number two was that there is actually a big difference of behavior in B2B versus B2C. Mostly the big power of discounts and freebies is not as powerful in B2B, not even close. I mean in B2C just give people free stuff. You get your activation just like that. You just have to have the audience to market it too, but then that works great. And B2B, those are not people's money, wallets, direct revenue that they're spending. That in itself is not enough. It may be a point of attraction.
[00:15:33] Miruna Dragomir: It may help sometimes with conversion, maybe depending on how small these businesses are. But it's not as powerful. And I tried at first a lot to converse those free users, like with discounts, with all these types of tactics that I used to do at Uber and nothing really worked.
[00:15:55] Andrew Michael: I think it is definitely a good point. And it's, as you mentioned, like the main thing I think is it's not really their money at the end of the day from the most part, and it's not really that decision they need to have made. So things like discounts or giving away freebies is not what typical people often, I think also the same thing applies to referral programs. Referral programs can be extremely effective when it comes to B2C environments, but then in a B2B it's less so.
[00:16:19] Andrew Michael: And it's like very challenging to figure out like what could be a meaningful offer that you could give to somebody in order to be able to get them to refer the product or service.
[00:16:28] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah, imagine I just came from Uber, like the referral based acquisition. And I was so thrilled. And then, you know, I was like, wait, these people own businesses or they work for some corporations. What exactly like giving them credits to that invoice gives nothing to them really.
[00:16:49] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Exactly. Nice. So you came to the realization then as well, obviously, B2B, B2C and customers are completely different. And the impact that you have when you have sort of low volumes of signups when it comes to working on a life cycle campaign is not what you would think it would be. What did you do next then from that perspective?
[00:17:11] Miruna Dragomir: After I, you know, I did optimized that funnel and once I created some automations, I realized I have to leave it alone. No more tweaking it and no more trying to slowly move the needle there. I left it aside and then I started working on acquisition just filling the pipeline. At first that was very chaotic. I didn't really know what would work and what wouldn't so just went all over the place trying anything. It was also in the era of the almighty growth hacking and tactics were pouring every day.
[00:17:47] Miruna Dragomir: There was this new tactic that you could try and then become, you know, 10x by tomorrow, very realistic standards. And, you know, the efficiency, the life efficiency of that tactic was about 24 hours. But yeah, I started chasing those. I feel like most people during that time. Until slowly after I think about a year, we started to really break it down and focus on one, two, three things at a time and try to ensure that we work on those and really get to a conclusion. Does it work or does it not kill it or continue doing it?
[00:18:29] Miruna Dragomir: And yeah, and that's how we got to having some main channels. And that's how we got to a strategy that was mostly, let's start with the active buyers, let's start by capturing those who are actively looking for a solution like Planable now, and then we'll figure out the rest.
[00:18:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think definitely like in the early days when you first get started as well, like it is you wanted to go after every sort of shiny object and this way over time you realize it's like critical. And I think for me, the more I start companies, my first go-to now is almost like Google ads, high intent search keywords, because you know, like people, as you say, like they have the problem now, they're searching for it. It's not the most cost efficient. It's not the best channel over time, but it's probably one of the, still one of the best ways where you can learn really fast and iterate.
[00:19:14] Andrew Michael: And if you can get good at it, you can actually get a long way with it which gives you time to open up other channels and yeah. Nice. So today though, like you've diversified in different areas. You mentioned as well that mark like customer success falls under marketing. I'm keen to understand like at Planable. What does retention work look like and what sort of area of ownership does it fall into marketing as well?
[00:19:38] Miruna Dragomir: So first of all, each let's say channel owner looks at its entire funnel, right? Cause you have a paid lead marketer that drives the entire efforts on paid. So we each have that responsibility of how the funnel compares to the rest of our tactics and how they can drive that from website conversion to onboarding numbers to actual retention and churn. Some of it is default. Most paid customers are usually less quality than organic customers and so on.
[00:20:16] Miruna Dragomir: But still, it does inform you of how well you're doing your targeting. But in terms of buckets, you of course have acquisition and conversion of the website that falls more into the marketing side. Then the onboarding is sort of like a hybrid team that we've recently assembled from the customer, product side of things, design and technical, and they form what we call an onboarding squad. And that's, you know, we're still testing that out.
[00:20:48] Miruna Dragomir: So working with the idea of cross-functional teams, it's quite new to us and it can be difficult to split responsibilities. And then everything after that, mostly the retention post upgrade still falls under customer success and a bit into product marketing.
[00:21:09] Andrew Michael: Nice. So to understand as well, you mentioned sort of from the paid side, they need to look at the full funnel. They would be looking from acquisition to retention and seeing their metrics, they measured against performance as well and what retention looks like. Not only just pure acquisition numbers, I hate to say.
[00:21:26] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah, yeah. And even I mean, we look at because when you look at paid, you look initially just as this is how much I put in this is how many customers we brought maybe before us everything is in terms of acquisition channels. If we're talking about direct acquisition channels, then we talk about ARR targets directly. So then retention impacts those how they reach those targets if customers are churning from the beginning, or even later on, they always look back like last year, they look at the money in the bank, how much they are, why actually look like on paper physically, not just projected based on LTV and the general life cycle.
[00:22:08] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And then you're looking at something like maybe LTV to CAC.
[00:22:12] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah.
[00:22:13] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And cause yeah, I think also like one of the interesting things, the early days like payback period is a very good metric to take a look at and sort of figure out how efficient paid is, but really like going a step further and understanding over time, how good are the customers that you're acquiring and what is the overall LTV to the CAC can tell you good, how efficient your paid team is as well.
[00:22:34] Andrew Michael: So how are the teams in working together through this? Obviously, it's one thing for paid, so okay, so we're gonna go out and acquire users, but then if they're being measured as well to a final ARR metric that is influenced by channel retention, do the teams coordinate and collaborate to understand like their influences on the final output metric, which is churn.
[00:22:54] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah. First of all, we try to really share the way we're bringing customers because that counts a lot and that can influence onboarding quite a lot. We have this map that we call levers of acquisition. So that entails the pain point that you attracted them with, right? Cause for Planable, for example, again, we're a content collaboration tool. There's so many different areas of content collaboration that can draw a customer in, right?
[00:23:24] Miruna Dragomir: You can talk about the marketing calendar. You can talk about social media scheduling. You can talk specifically about planning an Instagram grid. All of these are levers that drive customers to us. And they, we assign percentages of how much we pull from one of these levers. And that helps the onboarding squad and the product team understand how they can personalize a bit the experience or tweak the experience within the product to answer to the biggest pain points that we're using to drive acquisition.
[00:23:59] Miruna Dragomir: Because if 80% of our customers would come, that's not the case, but let's say they would come from Instagram and then your Instagram page is somewhere hidden within the product and it's not at all visible, then a lot of onboarding will suffer just because of that. Just of because of bad alignment between what you're marketing and what you're presenting within the product.
[00:24:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think there's obviously that there's always this gap and tension between what marketing wants to sell and promote and what the product delivers at the end of that. When marketing stretches things too far, you end up also end up getting unnecessary churn because people are being promised one thing on the one end. And as you said, like coming in and not seeing that one getting the same expectation can be a cause for friction. And it's very difficult to figure that friction out as well, because it's not really something that you'd get the opportunity, like the user would just get frustrated and leave.
[00:24:51] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah. And in terms of, you know, some of the churn is just, it's so interesting to segment it a bit. For example, we have an amount of churn that I don't even, I wouldn't even call it churn because it's people that pay before they test a product, even though it's free to test. But you know, they have the habit of just putting the card to make sure that I experience all the features and don't necessarily, even again, if they do have access to all the features.
[00:25:18] Miruna Dragomir: And then they churn because the product isn't what they expected it to be. But that's more like a paid trial and onboarding an activation period rather than churn. So we try to deep dive into these reasons and try to understand how to best segment our turn to truly understand what we can impact and what we can't.
[00:25:39] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's very interesting that point as well. I think, especially in the context when you're serving more small SMBs, I think Emeric Ernoult from AgoraPulse talked to us a little bit about how they go about doing it. And back then, what they said was like, he, they did some form of analysis, trying to say like, what percentage was within the control? Because like small businesses, for example, like the project has ended or they've gone out of business, these are like reasons that you really, you have no control of and when you take a look at your overall churn metric, like a good percentage can be just those two reasons alone.
[00:26:12] Andrew Michael: And if you're trying to set targets and goals to try and reduce that number and it's backed off of a gain sack, something that's outside of your control. It really can be demotivating for the team as well, just to sort of not even have a grasp and understanding of where they can influence things. So I think it's very, very important to sort of get that grasp and understanding of what's in your control to, to change and what's not. And then being proactive and thinking about ways to influence those channels and those opportunities.
Nice. What's one thing that you know today about channel retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?
[00:26:46] Miruna Dragomir: This needs to break it down in order to influence it. It took us a while to understand that and really internalize that idea. Because of course, you know, from the beginning, that retention is impacted by onboarding. It's impacted by targeting. It's impacted by absolutely anything you do as a company. But I think for me personally, it took a while to internalize that and to reflect it into how we establish our targets, how we establish our goals because okay, it's influenced by anything, but if you still look at it, at the big number because everyone's talking about MRR.
[00:27:19] Miruna Dragomir: Everyone is putting their benchmarks up. Everyone is super, let's say confident that that's the thing you have to focus on. Okay, but it's not really one thing to focus on. It's a key metric, maybe a north star metric of one's company. So breaking that down and taking it step by step in terms of focus, that is something that I wished I knew from the beginning. Let's assign two quarters to upselling and that's it. No more, all the automation that goes into churn is perfect, but nothing else. We either stay up upselling, we figure that out, and then you systemize, but one at a time.
[00:28:03] Miruna Dragomir: Don't try to figure out the entire funnel in one go all the time, because it's just, you end up with so many segmented ideas and tactics that you can do like a few years of all these things. And at the end, you cannot draw a line of what works and what doesn't, cause you end up doing so many things out of just pure, you know, inertia.
[00:28:24] Andrew Michael: Yeah, no, definitely. I think getting the alignment, I think a lot of times, well, especially earlier stages in companies, like at some point, like they're problem appears and like we have an issue with churn and we need to fix it. And that discussion starts, but then there's never really a good discussion around like what are all the different inputs that influence it and how each team member is involved in those inputs and what can the impact be to it.
[00:28:47] Andrew Michael: And I think as well, like even at Hotjar in the early days, like it was, there's one point in time where everyone was like, yes, we know churn is a problem, but like, what do we do about it? It's like, and so I think like until we sort of set that out and put together these are the different influences, these are the inputs. This is how each team in the company has an influence over the overall metric. And then through OKRs really started making it a priority where the whole entire team aligned and focused on, as you said, like a specific strategy. It was really just trying to like making many different moves, but nothing really moving it until like you got that really strong alignment.
[00:29:22] Andrew Michael: Like everybody said, okay, like, there's what we're going after. This is the stage of the user journey that we're going to focus on. This is how each team is going to influence that stage. And then that's when you started to see the big results and actually being able to move that final metric. But yeah...
[00:29:38] Miruna Dragomir: Yes.
[00:29:39] Andrew Michael: Very nice.
[00:29:40] Miruna Dragomir: Yeah. And putting that, sorry, just to add to this, it's dangerous to put all of that pressure on one person, right? Cause you can have, first of all, you know, you can have a KPI that is not part of your OKRs and that is fine. Cause if you know, like so many other OKRs are, you know, driving retention, it's not absolutely mandatory to always also have a key result that is retention. And then putting that onto one person that does customer success or something along those lines becomes a bit, you know, a lot of pressure.
[00:30:15] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think that this is an interesting one as well. This is my general belief as well. I think that retention is a company metric. Like everybody should be responsible. Ultimately, if you're running a subscription business and people are canceling subscriptions, like don't really have a business. So it should be everybody's problem. But as well, like David Sakamoto from GitLab as well, one time on the show, he made the counter argument that if you don't have one person that's sort of the champion for it, that's rallying the troops, that's get everyone organized and focused, it can also be an issue in its own right as well.
[00:30:47] Andrew Michael: So while I don't think it should be a single individual or team that owns the metric, it's the case to be made of like having a champion for it to make sure that everybody's aligned makes sense. But who that champion is and how accountable they should be to the metric I think is, is up for debate.
[00:31:01] Miruna Dragomir: Yes.
[00:31:03] Andrew Michael: Well, Miruna, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today. I see we are up on time now as well, but is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? How can they be keep up to speed with your work?
[00:31:13] Miruna Dragomir: Well, I try to stay active on LinkedIn. So if you've retreat to follow me there and I try to share my own lessons and things that I implement. And in terms of final thoughts, I guess I stay on top of benchmarks a lot. There's so many reports coming out all the time about SaaS metrics or tech businesses and revenue metrics. My thoughts there is that they can be super helpful to ground you to reality every now and then and to not... for you not to compare with the TechCrunch companies only because there's so many others that do not get featured on all the websites. So that can be a breath of fresh air. And yeah, just look at that, compare and share with the team to see where you're at.
[00:32:01] Andrew Michael: I think that's one of the reasons why I never really go into metrics on the show because I think they vary so drastically, especially when it comes to churn and retention like your stage, your segments, like the product you're serving, the price point of your product. There's just so many influences that can be variable. So just to take these blanket sort of benchmarks and say, okay, this is where we should be at. It's bullshit. It's like, I think you need to figure out for your business at the ultimate point.
[00:32:27] Andrew Michael: But yeah, not getting discouraged by what we read on TechCrunch and then thinking, okay, things aren't performing, but very cool. Well, thanks so much for joining. I really appreciate the time today and I wish you best of luck going forward. We're for the listeners. We'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes. And yeah, thanks again.
[00:32:44] Miruna Dragomir: Thanks. Thanks for the invite.
[00:32:46] Andrew Michael: Cheers.
[00:32:01] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm.
[00:33:09] Andrew Michael: Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew at churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.
