Trajectory

Alright, I’ll admit it. I used to be a DocuSign guy until I realized I was paying hundreds of dollars per month simply to send and receive signed documents. Then I found Agree.com.

Agree made e-signature free for everyone… and then loaded the platform with dozens of convenient features that make my CFO one happy camper.

My favorite feature? Automated invoicing.

Why? I can now streamline contracts and invoices all within the same document… while Agree tracks the payment, recovers lost revenue, and syncs transactions in real-time. Yup, so no need to overpay for Bill or QuickBooks either.

✅ Automated workflows
✅ Beautiful UI
✅ Entirely free

Imagine there was a notable list that ranked people based on some criteria.

Let’s introduce Tom, who was ranked #2 on this year’s list… and Ashley, who was ranked #50. You would be right to assume that Tom is more satisfied with his position than Ashely; he was ranked second in the entire world, 48 spots ahead of her.

But that’s only true in a vacuum.

If I then told you that Tom was ranked #1 the previous year, and Ashley #100, then that changes everything.

If that was the case, then Tom had just been dethroned from the top spot and is on a negative trajectory. Meanwhile, Ashley just soared 50 spots ahead in the rankings and has a ton of positive momentum.

Despite being 48 spots behind, Ashley likely feels much happier than Tom.

The takeaway from all of this: trajectory matters more than position.

That’s a super valuable insight and one that I’ve been obsessing over lately. Here’s why…

The ultimate measure of success for a business is revenue, which you scale by acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. The simplest way to retain existing users is to maximize their “happiness” using the platform.

And as we just learned from the earlier example — happiness isn’t measured in a vacuum, rather it’s measured relative to prior performance.

For beehiiv in particular, I have a very simple thesis as to what makes users happy:

So here is where I fucked up, and unless I’m the dumbest founder in the world (possible), there’s a chance you might be too.

I’ll use the beehiiv Ad Network as an example. I always carefully track the overall publisher earnings each month — if we paid out $1.5M in earnings this month, up from just $1.25M last month, then the overall trajectory of the Ad Network is healthy (or at least on the surface).

But that high level analysis can obfuscate a lot of underlying issues. Ultimately, the Ad Network is made up of thousands of individual paying users, all of whom I’d like to remain active and paying.

Rather than only looking at the aggregate values, we should also be measuring the percentage of users who are earning more this month relative to last month. Based on my thesis, those who are earning less are much more likely to be a churn risk.

The Ad Network is just one example, but the same analysis could be done for paid subscriptions, Boosts, or overall audience growth as well.

During our company offsite in Mexico last month, I gave a 90 minute presentation covering the latest company metrics, initiatives, and principles that I find to be critically important. This was one of the principles that I highlighted.

I began by asking the team which of these two users was happier using the platform. Unless you browned out reading the above text, you’ll already know where I’m going with this.

Despite User B earning 20x more revenue in April, they are likely far unhappier on beehiiv than User A. That’s because User A just 5x their earnings month over month, while User B saw their earnings cut in half.

Each user is playing their very own single-player game. Their success is based on their own metrics, relative to their prior performance… not external comparison to other users.

That last paragraph has unlocked an entirely new paradigm of thinking for me. It’s changed everything about how we build and measure things at beehiiv.

That said — it’s still early. We’re still doing the work in building the dashboards, creating new LTV models, and optimizing accordingly.

If you’re already doing something similar to this, or have any interesting takeaways or learnings… feel free to hit reply and let me know 🤙.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/trajectory

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