5 things we learnt using Dave McClure’s pirate metrics at Piktochart

Once upon a time, startups had nothing but their wits and smarts to get them through the hard times. Facebook, for example, had no YCombinator to turn to for connections and advice.

Today, we have resources and advice in bountiful abundance, but this presents yet another problem: there’s just too much of it out there now. One day, there are 16 essential metrics that any SaaS startup should track. Barely a month later, yet another 16 are added to the list.

But there’s one thing that everyone can agree on – that growth is the key to success. YCombinator’s Paul Graham puts it well:

“You have to know that growth is what you’re after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.”

Over the past three years, we’ve been blessed with good growth here at Piktochart. Back in 2012, we started off with just three paying customers. Today, we have over three million users – and growing rapidly.

Not to rest on our laurels, our team works tirelessly to figure out what works and what doesn’t in order to delight our users. To determine this, we use 500 Startups founder Dave McClure’s famous Pirate Metrics(thusly termed because of its acronym AARRR), and here’s what we’ve learnt so far.

AARRR!

Many companies track metrics by the funnel, and then try to improve conversion rates from one of these stages to another.

For the uninitiated, AARRR represents the five key metrics that Dave believes maps out the customer lifecycle, as shown below:

To be sure, there are other similar models out there as well, such as Hubspot’s “Attract – Convert – Close – Delight” methodology, which we think is more relevant for B2B companies with sales models.

There’s also the age old AIDA model that was invented way back in 1893, and is as such slightly outmoded today:

• A stands for Awareness: Attract the attention of the customer.
• I stands for the Interest of the customer.
• D stands for Desire: To convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
• A stands for Action: To lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

As for us, we’ve been looking and utilizing the AARRR model as we found it to the closest one that models most typical user behavior in SaaS. Here are Piktochart’s big picture metrics right now:

What are some lessons we learned along the way?

What we could track better