Anatomy of My SaaS CEO Dashboard

Growth-Stage SaaS CEO Dashboard Example from Married2Growth

I spent the last eleven years or so as a SaaS CEO — growing from $1M in ARR to $10M+. I’ve always been data-driven, but when I discovered live dashboards, it changed my day-to-day life. Metrics are important, but access to and visualization of key data are much harder to come by. So here’s the anatomy of my SaaS CEO dashboard.

Revenue

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard — CAC is vitally important to me. It illustrated the overall capital efficiency of growth through the lens of sales & marketing efficacy. I like to look at most metrics over time — typically trailing eight quarters — for perspective and trends.

LTV (Lifetime Value)

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard — Customer lifetime value (LTV) is another favorite of mine. It encapsulates ARPU (average revenue per unit) and retention/expansion trends into a mighty important number. Another way to look at CAC and LTV is as a ratio, but I preferred to see the dollars in my CEO dashboard.

Gross & Net Churn

Gross Churn and Net Churn Gauge from SaaS CEO Dashboard — Churn is what we all work to minimize. I like to track gross churn (all losses) as well as net churn (gross churn minus expansion revenue). These two metrics really reflect on two entirely different things — unsatisfied customers (spending less) and uber satisfied ones (spending more).

New Contract Value

Pipeline

Customer Health

Customer Growth Potential

Growth-Focused SaaS CEO Dashboard

Different companies have different priorities. My CEO dashboard was growth focused because that was our stage and objective. Important things like gross margin and expenses didn’t make it to my dashboard, because they weren’t current challenges. At our stage, we managed to percents of revenue for most of that and were highly predictable in the P&L.

In addition to the income statement exclusions, I also didn’t surface cash flow or balance sheet items to my CEO dashboard. Again, those were tightly watched, but not on a daily basis as they were also predictable and stable.

Another candidate that makes it onto many a CEO dashboard, but not this one, is ARPU (average revenue per unit). Again, in my case, that was due to stage and priorities. If our ARPU wasn’t stable and predictable, or if we were working to raise or lower it, it would surely be here. And any variance in LTV would lead to ARPU pretty quickly.

I’d recommend limiting your metrics to ten or fewer; including only those metrics that have significant volatility or variability; and only ones that align with current goals and initiatives. You don’t need a dashboard to watch paint dry.

A Note on Execution — Dashboard Tech

We liked our dashboards. In addition to my CEO dashboard, the leadership team had one, and there was one for almost every department. Links to them were posted in department-specific Slack channels and TVs showed them all over the office. I’m partial to Geckoboard for low-overhead business dashboarding. And I like Enplug for the TV/digital signage piece to reliably show those dashboards all over far-flung offices. There’s nothing worse than a black screen where there’s supposed to be insightful, motivational data.

And a (Hopefully Obvious) Disclaimer

All of these gauges are examples, not actual data on my company or any other.

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SaaS CEO Temperament: Urgency vs. Stress - SaaSX says:

January 20, 2019 at 3:45 pm

[…] blocks for meetings, calls, direct reports, and time-boxed personal deliverables. I also had live dashboards of everything I needed to know. And short meetings to keep everyone productive. All of this […]