SaaS Breakthrough – Featuring Spencer Mann

About Spencer Mann:
Spencer’s passion for data based innovation has made for an interesting career. After getting a B.S. in Biological Engineering at USU, Spencer went to work at OSU where he converted hog manure into electricity and earned an M.S. in Biosystems Engineering for his trouble. While he enjoyed his OSU coworkers (the hogs), his wife encouraged him to find a job that only required 1 shower a day. To this end, Spencer went to BYU where he earned an MBA. Upon graduation, Spencer begun work at Celanese, a large chemical company in Dallas Texas.

During Spencer’s 5 years at Celanese he held various and sundry positions but ultimately ended up running a P&L. In 2014, Spencer joined Lucid Software and started the growth team. Spencer is currently the VP of Growth and is responsible for the full self serve conversion funnel. After many years of conducting optimization experiments, Spencer still finds the field fascinating and gets excited with each new test.


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Show Notes:
03:58
Jumping into Early Startup Mode with Two and Half Million Customers
06:06
The Challenges of Prioritizing Activities Without A Customer Persona
08:34
Segmenting and Optimizing for Regions, Persona Types or Channels
"So our efforts on SEO and PPC, you go after a very general approach and capture that low hanging fruit there. And that works out just fine. But you reach a point where that, the impact of that begins to plateau right. And you realize you've got to start segmenting and changing behaviors to optimize for either regions, which is a big initiative to share or for persona types or even for channels of how people discover your product."
09:39
Initial Wins: Integrations and Nailing SEO and PPC
10:36
What Makes a Great Hire for SEO
11:01
Forecast and Goals
"Your performance is measured against that forecast and so getting it right is really important to us."
"It definitely took both of those perspectives from top down bottoms up."
14:19
Success Rate On Experiments
14:45
Experimenting with Local Currencies for Regions and Pricing
18:20
Experimenting with Positioning Pricing on a Page
20:57
What Initiatives You Should Start with For Growth In The Early Stage
"I think you got to nail that top funnel traffic which means a solid PPC guy and solid SEO guy because if you don't have those things in place, your opportunity or ability to experiment is going to be much less. Right. Experiments only work because you have a statistically significant amount of visitors to make informed decisions with. And if you don't have that figured out, like your ability into optimizing experiments it's going to be really limited."
22:53
Analytics Platforms Spencer Recommend
23:24
The Metrics Spencer Looks at Daily
24:20
How to Avoid Vanity Metrics and Prevent Outliers Drive Your Decision Making
26:01
How to Create a Strong Hypothesis
29:12
Lightning Questions
Resources:
Lucidchart: Online Diagram Software & Visual Solution:
https://www.lucidchart.com/
Connect with Spencer:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencer-mann/
Follow along on Our Journey to $100k MRR
A shaky start? No doubt. Yet, three years later, we've got our eyes set on $100k MRR. We'll be sharing everything along the way.