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EP57: Why your SaaS product is losing value (and what to do about it) | DemandMaven: Strategic growth partner for SaaS & Software Companies Value decline is why your NRR is stuck at 70%. Learn the three causes of preventable value decline and the discovery process to actually fix it.

Customers can't tell you what to build. They can tell you bugs and quality of life fixes. But value generators? The features that extend how long they stay? You have to discover those yourself. demandmaven.io/ep57-why-yo...

Monthly churn: 3-4%. Looks fine.

NRR at 12 months: 70%. Not fine.

This is value decline. Your product isn't getting worse — it just stopped growing with your customers.

Three causes, all preventable.

New In Demand ep - demandmaven.io/ep57-why-yo...

EP56: The busy founder's guide to activation | DemandMaven: Strategic growth partner for SaaS & Software Companies Most SaaS founders think they've handled activation. They haven't. Learn the repeatable process to improve free trial conversion rates and stop losing users in the first 24 hours.

Talked about this and the full activation process on the latest episode of In Demand 👇 demandmaven.io/ep56-the-bu...

And I promise you: by interview #3, you'll already know exactly what's broken.

If you've been throwing pop-ups and tooltips at your activation problem and wondering why nothing's moving the needle, this is probably why. 👀

Step 5: Make meaningful design and UX changes. Go big. Then do another round of 3–5 interviews with a fresh batch.

The whole thing — start to finish including design changes — can run in about 6 weeks if you move with urgency.

Take what they say with a grain of salt. Pay more attention to what they're doing and when they're pausing.

Step 4: Screenshot every screen. Annotate it in a Miro board. Now you've got a map of where your product is bleeding activation.

Note: keep in mind that users will literally blame themselves for not understanding something. They'll also lie — despite watching them struggle for their lives, they'll convince themselves something was easy.

Step 3: Watch where they get stuck, confused, or lost. Pay attention to the three culprits — cognitive overload (too much happening), uncertainty (not knowing what's next), and limited attention (too many steps, too much friction).

Step 2: Have them share their screen. Give them a prompt tied to your product's core value moment and watch them try to accomplish it. Do not help them. Do not guide them.

Recruit High-Quality Participants for User Research | Respondent Find research participants for surveys, user interviews and focus groups from our pool of 4M+ verified participants. Respondent simplifies research recruitment.

Step 1: Source 3–5 qualified strangers through platforms like userinterviews.com or respondent.io. Budget roughly $200/person. You can have people lined up within 24–48 hours.

The real work is seeing your product through a stranger's eyes. Not a customer (customers are survivors of your experience — they give you a false sense of security). Not a session replay. An actual person, in your ICP, who has never touched your product before.

Here's the process we use:

It's not going to do what we hope it's going to do.

But in most products, nothing really changes. When you think about it, it makes sense: if we're depending on pop-ups or screen overlays to do our activation work despite gen pop being *extremely* pop-up blind and screen-overlay-adverse, then yeah.

They add tooltips. They build a checklist. They install a walkthrough.

In rare cases, the needle moves.

In most of the growth troubleshooting I do — which spans qualitative research and a deep dive into product, marketing, and subscription analytics — activation is almost always where the opportunity is hiding.

And the #1 mistake I see? Teams treating activation like a box to check.

demandmaven.io/ep56-the-bu...…de-to-activation/

Your customers are survivors. They made it through whatever friction exists in your product. They're not representative of the people who left. That's why UX research with strangers beats research with customers every time. New In Demand episode on activation:

EP54: Why copying your competitors might be killing your growth | DemandMaven: Strategic growth partner for SaaS & Software Companies Copying doesn't get questioned the same way that original strategy does. There's way more pressure to "do what works" than there is to figure out what's right for your unique context. And it makes sense – when you're trying to survive and grow, looking at what successful companies are doing feels like the safest bet.But here's what happens: you see a competitor invest heavily in community, or watch Notion crush it with brand ambassadors, or notice Intercom's gorgeous content marketing – and you think, "We should do that too." You make the decision quickly, based on what you can see from the outside, and then… you basically never question whether it actually makes sense for you.

Check out our latest episode of the In Demand Podcast demandmaven.io/ep54-why-co...

Watching your competitor crush it with community, content or sales-led growth? Before you copy their playbook, ask yourself:

-Do we have their funding?
-Their team structure?
-Their stage of growth?
-Their customer base?

Context is everything. Copying without it is a waste of time.

"You can't do research for everything." Agreed. But if you're changing pricing without interviewing a single customer, you're wasting your time.
Data can show you patterns. Only customers can tell you what they actually value and will pay for.

demandmaven.io/ep53-why-re...

Sell the full picture, not just the insights.

Kim and I unpack why research projects fail on the latest In Demand episode → demandmaven.io/ep53-why-re...

Here's the thing about research projects:

Clients aren't paying you because research is "cool" or "fun" (even though it is).

They're paying for the outcome research unlocks — better activation, smarter pricing, stronger retention.

Research = 1/3 Translation = 1/3 Execution enablement = 1/3

That slow growth you're experiencing? It might not be a marketing problem. When we troubleshoot growth with SaaS companies, pricing is often one of the first things we look at. At DemandMaven, we start by talking to customers then running a survey. demandmaven.io/ep52-the-bu...

Stop shouting "we have product-market fit!" when you've got 5 customers and 6 months in business.

It's way more accurate (and honest) to say: "I have early intuition that we might have PMF, but I won't know for sure until I see 12+ months of retention data."

Contact Us | DemandMaven: Strategic growth partner for SaaS & Software Companies Book a discovery call today and learn more about how we can help you grow.

IYKYK sooo many founders collect growth tactics like Pokemon cards.

LinkedIn ads, influencers, referrals.

But our client 4x'd revenue by optimizing 3 areas: messaging, pricing, onboarding. Each reinforced the others.

Ready to build your growth system? demandmaven.io/contact/

Want to dig deeper into how to measure product-market fit properly? I break down all the metrics that actually matter in our latest podcast episode demandmaven.io/ep51-you-do...

You can feel like you have product-market fit, but your Net Revenue Retention will tell you the truth. I talk to founders all the time who are convinced they've nailed PMF because they have some paying customers and good feedback, but they haven't looked at their NRR.

You may not think about operations, but operations is thinking about you.

You're executing processes every day whether you've documented them or not.

The question is: are they good processes? And are you aware of them?

That awareness is what unlocks growth.

Contact Us | DemandMaven: Strategic growth partner for SaaS & Software Companies Book a discovery call today and learn more about how we can help you grow.

Your churn might *look* healthy at 3% but what if you're losing 55% of revenue every 12 months? With stats like that, no wonder growth feels impossible. Step 1: A free growth audit (with me), so we can identify missing metrics. Let’s chat: demandmaven.io/contact

Partnerships and community programs launched too early rarely hit the scale you want.

Not because they're bad strategies — but because the network effects haven't had time to mature yet.

Timing matters.