Maslow's hierarchy of needs states that people are motivated by five basic categories of needs:<ol><li>Physiological refers to basic physical needs like drinking when thirsty or eating when hungry.</li><li>Safety needs are seen in childhood, as children have a need for safe and predictable enivonments and may react with fear or anxiety when these are not met.</li><li>Love and belonging. Feeling loved and accepted by family and friends and social circles.</li><li>Esteem involves our desire to feel self-confident and good about ourselves.</li><li>Self-actualisation refers to feeling fulfilled or living up to our potential.</li></ol>

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

<ul><li>Maslow believed having things like freedom of expression or a just society makes it easier for people to achieve their needs.</li><li>Maslow also said a learning environment helps to better understand the world around us.</li><li>Maslow acknowledges that people don't have to satisfy one need completely to move to the next need. Instead, most people tend to have each of their needs partly met.</li><li>One behaviour might meet two or more needs. For example, sharing a meal with someone meets the physiological need for food and the need for belonging.</li></ul>

How people progress through the hierarchy of needs

Maslow's idea that we go through five specific stages hasn't always been supported by research. In a 2011 study of human needs across cultures, researchers found that meeting six needs was linked to well-being: Basic needs (similar to Maslow's physiological needs), safety, love, pride and respect (similar to esteem needs), mastery, and autonomy. However, the order in which people go through these steps is not a strict rule. For example, people living in poverty might struggle to meet their needs for food and safety but feel loved and supported.

Testing Maslow's theory

Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory puts forward that people are motivated by five basic categories of needs.

Stashed ideas

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Explained

The sociology of the internet is a subfield of sociology where researchers focus on how the internet plays a role in facilitating communication and interaction and how it affects and is affected by social life. In the late 1990s, the sudden widespread adoption of the internet in the US and other Western nations drew the attention of sociologists. Internet technology allowed for new forms of communication and information and new ways of spreading it. Sociologists wanted to understand how these would impact people's lives, the cultural patterns, social trends and larger social structure.

The sociology of the internet

Paul DiMaggio and colleagues wrote the earliest sociological essay about this subfield, titled " Social Implications of the Internet." It outlined the concerns within the internet, such as:<ul><li>the digital divide</li><li>relationships between the internet and community and social capital</li><li>the impact of the internet on political participation</li><li>how internet technology impacts organisations and economic institutions and our relationships to them</li><li>cultural participation and cultural diversity</li></ul>

Historical view of sociology of the internet

The roles of internet communication technologies (ICTs) have evolved in our lives, their impacts on social relations and society overall. So, too, the sociological approach to studying them has evolved. Digital sociology now considers the variety of ICT devices we use in our lives, how we use them and the implications these technologies have for social life and society.

Digital sociology in today's world

Since 2012, a handful of sociologists have focused on defining the subfield of digital sociology. The subfield became formalised in the UK when the British Sociological Association members created a new study group designed to develop a set of best practices for digital sociology. In the U.S., there is no formalised organisation around the subfield, but many sociologists have turned to the digital in research focus and methods. They can be found among research groups, including the American Sociological Association's sections on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology.

Development of Digital Sociology

<ul><li>The impact of ICTs on social relationships. For example, the role that social media plays in teen friendships today, rules of etiquette.</li><li>How ICTs are a part of the processes of crafting and expressing identity.</li><li>The impact of ICTs and social media on political expression, activism, and campaigning.</li><li>The role and impact of ICTs and the web in processes of building group affiliation and community, particularly among marginalized groups.</li></ul>

Key areas of study of digital sociology

Digital sociology offers a way of addressing the changing relationships we have in digital societies.

The sociology of the internet emerged in the 1990s, and over the years morphed into the fascinating and growing subfield of digital sociology.

From the Sociology of the Internet to Digital Sociology: An Overview

An economic indicator is simply any economic statistic, such as the unemployment rate, GDP, or the inflation rate, which indicate how well the economy is doing and how well the economy is going to do in the future.Investors use all the information at their disposal to make decisions. If a set of economic indicators suggest that the economy is going to do better or worse in the future than they had previously expected, they may decide to change their investing strategy.

Economic Indicators

<ul><li>Procyclical: This indicator is one that moves in the same direction as the economy. The GDP is an example.</li><li>Countercyclical: This indicator is one that moves in the opposite direction as the economy. The unemployment rate gets larger as the economy gets worse so it is a countercyclical economic indicator.</li><li>Acyclical: This indicator is one that has no relation to the health of the economy and is generally of little use. The number of home runs the Montreal Expos hit in a year generally has no relationship to the health of the economy, so we could say it is an acyclic economic indicator.</li></ul>

Economic Indicators: Relation to the Business Cycle / Economy

<ul><li>Leading economic indicators change before the economy changes. Stock market returns are a leading indicator, as the stock market usually begins to decline before the economy declines and they improve before the economy begins to pull out of a recession.</li><li>A lagged economic indicator is one that does not change direction until a few quarters after the economy does. The unemployment rate is a lagged economic indicator.</li><li>A coincident economic indicator is one that simply moves at the same time the economy does. The Gross Domestic Product is a coincident indicator.</li></ul>

Three Timing Types of Economic Indicators

These tend to be the broadest measures of economic performance and include such statistics as:<ul><li>Gross Domestic Product (GDP) [published quarterly]</li><li>Real GDP [quarterly]</li><li>Implicit Price Deflator for GDP [quarterly]</li><li>Business Output [quarterly]</li><li>National Income [quarterly]</li><li>Consumption Expenditure [quarterly]</li><li>Corporate Profits[quarterly]</li><li>Real Gross Private Domestic Investment [quarterly].</li></ul>

Total Output, Income, and Spending

These statistics cover how strong the labor market is and they include the following:<ul><li>The Unemployment Rate [monthly]</li><li>Level of Civilian Employment[monthly]</li><li>Average Weekly Hours, Hourly Earnings, and Weekly Earnings[monthly]</li><li>Labor Productivity [quarterly].</li></ul>

Employment, Unemployment, and Wages

These statistics cover how much businesses are producing and the level of new construction in the economy:<ul><li>Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization [monthly]</li><li>New Construction [monthly]</li><li>New Private Housing and Vacancy Rates [monthly]</li><li>Business Sales and Inventories [monthly]</li><li>Manufacturers' Shipments, Inventories, and Orders [monthly].</li></ul>

Production and Business Activity

This category includes both the prices consumers pay as well as the prices businesses pay for raw materials and include:<ul><li>Producer Prices [monthly]</li><li>Consumer Prices [monthly]</li><li>Prices Received And Paid By Farmers [monthly]</li></ul>These measures are all measures of changes in the price level and thus measure inflation. Inflation is procyclical and a coincident economic indicator.

Prices

These statistics measure the amount of money in the economy as well as interest rates and include:<ul><li>Money Stock (M1, M2, and M3) [monthly]</li><li>Bank Credit at All Commercial Banks [monthly]</li><li>Consumer Credit [monthly]</li><li>Interest Rates and Bond Yields [weekly and monthly]</li><li>Stock Prices and Yields [weekly and monthly].</li></ul>

Money, Credit, and Security Markets

These are measures of government spending and government deficits and debts:<ul><li>Federal Receipts (Revenue)[yearly]</li><li>Federal Outlays (Expenses) [yearly]</li><li>Federal Debt [yearly].</li></ul>Governments generally try to stimulate the economy during recessions and to do so they increase spending without raising taxes. This causes both government spending and government debt to rise during a recession, so they are countercyclical economic indicators. They tend to be coincident to the business cycle.

Federal Finance

Learn about economic indicators including prices, federal finance, and international trade, and why are they important.

Economic Indicators: A Beginner's Guide

Aha moment is when a new user first realizes the meaningful value in your product. This moment <a class="idea-content-link" href="https://productled.com/training/">turns users into happy, paying customers</a>.

Three things happen when you (or a user) "feels" an aha moment:<ol><li>You understand exactly how a product can help you.</li><li>You experience the core value of a product.</li><li>You’ve achieved something very quickly that might have taken you hours previously.</li></ol>What aha moments look like in real life, for real companies.<ul><li>For <a class="idea-content-link" href="https://www.airbnb.com/">Airbnb</a>, it's making your first booking.</li><li>For <a class="idea-content-link" href="https://www.google.com/">Google</a>, it's finding an answer to something complex.</li><li>For <a class="idea-content-link" href="https://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, it's connecting with your friends.</li></ul>

What does an aha moment feel like?

They are the ones who become amazing at whatever it is that your product enables them to do. Your mission when speaking to such users is to identify what a success story looks like for this type of user. The easiest way to contact them is via email. Also, talk to your churned users to identify the value gap (discrepancy between what a customer expects from the product and the value received or perceived) The gap could be due to the customer not understanding the product’s capabilities or how to use it, negative mental or emotive response to the product, or friction.

Talk to Power users

Look at the customer behavior of both your good and bad customers. Doing this will help you to identify <a class="idea-content-link" href="https://productled.com/blog/how-to-build-a-user-journey-map/">successful user journeys</a>. Follow the 5-step process<ol><li>Put a list together of all your product's features.</li><li>Pick a list of your most successful customers and analyze what features they used early on, continue to use regularly, and stopped/didn't use.</li><li>Write down what features got adapted and didn't.</li><li>You need to find the behaviors that, when performed, best correlate with continuing to use your product for an extended period of time.</li><li>You want to lead with the features that get people to upgrade.</li></ol>

Look for patterns

Here are a few to get you started…<ul><li>Using a specific set of features.</li><li>Achieving a particular outcome within a product.</li><li>Using your value metrics.</li><li>Using the product several times in the first week.</li><li>Watching an onboarding video before diving into the product. etc</li></ul>Prioritize experiments and keep track of them. Organize your potential experiments to test in an Experiment Log.

Shortlist and test potential behaviors

The aha moment is when the user realizes the value of a product. This is a complete guide on how to identify your aha moment, with examples from top companies like Slack, Zoom and Airbnb.

How to Identify Your Product's Aha Moment

The product-led flywheel is a framework that promotes product-led growth. It focuses on the user experience at the various stages of the user's journey. <ul><li>On the inner circle of your flywheel, imagine the different segments of your users based on where they are in their product journey. For example, product qualified leads, customers, active customers, loyal customers.</li><li>On the outer layer of your flywheel are the different stages of product growth: Onboarding, adoption, retention, and growth.</li></ul>

The product-led flywheel

<ul><li>It's a better fit in the modern SaaS market that depends on recurring revenue to succeed. The flywheel assists in proving immediate product value.</li><li>It leads to higher NDR. It delivers excellent experiences to both the new and existing users.</li><li>It speeds up over time. The growth stages feed on one another to produce faster growth.</li></ul>

The benefits of a product-led flywheel

<ul><li>Understand the customer experience through tools such as in-product analytics, in-product engagements, and surveys.</li><li>Use a smarter approach to segmentation. Do surveys and customer feedback loops to develop different user segments. Identify user pain points and user's objectives, then plan to deal with the pain points.</li><li>Focus on product qualified leads.</li><li>Make onboarding easy.</li><li>Use in-product analytics to power your product-led growth flywheel.</li></ul> Improving your product-led flywheel will lay the groundwork for faster growth and a user-first product.

Jumpstarting a successful flywheel

The SaaS industry can tap into a growth plan that gains momentum over time.

Discover our top tips and tricks for building a product-led flywheel that fosters real growth for your SaaS business.

Tips and Tricks for Building a Product-led Flywheel | Customer Success and Product Experience Software | Gainsight

There is no real reason any software should cost anything in particular.<ul><li>Competition will frame you. So at least try to be the Cadillac of your space.</li><li>Try to double your pricing on the high end. Learn from it.</li><li>If you don’t have direct competition yet — create a Comp a few value layers up the App Stack.</li><li>Be more enterprise. Embrace security audits, SecOps, disaster recovery, penetration testing, etc.</li><li>Redefine your comp. Ask your existing customers how you can solve an even bigger problem.</li><li>Charge more for higher editions.</li><li>Don't let existing budgets define you.</li></ul>

It's all relative

You could spend days reading about pricing and pricing strategies in software on the web, but a lot of this content doesn’t really hit one, basic fundamental point — there is no real reason any…

All Pricing is Relative. How To Make That Work in Your Favor.

When most people talk about customer experience, they think about customer service, customer satisfaction, customer success, customer engagement or customer interactions.&nbsp; But customer experience is also much more. On the most granular level, customer experience is about the perception each customer has of your company, brand, and product. This perception is based on all the touchpoints, interactions and engagements a customer has with your employees, brand, messages, and product across every channel and device.&nbsp;

Understanding Customer Experience in SaaS

<ul><li>Touchpoint → exposure. That moment a customer comes in contact with a company's brand, product, employees or message. When a customer walks into a store and gets exposed to products and brand messages, that's a touchpoint.</li><li>Customer interaction → a two-way communication process between a customer and a company's brand/product.</li><li>Customer engagement → commitment/agreement of a customer to act.</li><li>Experience → perception. All the touchpoints, interaction, and engagement combines for the overall customer experience.</li></ul>

Touchpoint, interaction, engagement

<ul><li>Exposure to a digital or physical ad&nbsp;</li><li>Seeing a company’s social media post in the feed&nbsp;</li><li>Recognizing a corporate logo at the conference&nbsp;</li><li>Reading a press release, annual reports, blog posts&nbsp;</li><li>Receiving and opening email&nbsp;</li></ul>

Touchpoints of SaaS and software-first companies

<ul><li>Commenting on a company’s social media post&nbsp;</li><li>Messaging with a company’s customer support&nbsp;</li><li>Chatting with an employee at an industry conference&nbsp;</li><li>Sharing a company’s article or social media post&nbsp;</li><li>Visiting the company’s website&nbsp;</li></ul>

Interactions of SaaS and software-first companies

<ul><li>Signing up to a free trial or freemium&nbsp;</li><li>Signing up to attend a webinar&nbsp;</li><li>Agreeing to a call with a sales rep&nbsp;</li><li>Buying a product or service&nbsp;</li></ul>

Engagement of SaaS and software-first companies

It seems every company these days is embracing a customer-centric strategy and talking about optimizing the customer experience. But it’s impossible to do either of those without truly understanding…

<ul><li>Their customers — what they want, what they need, and how to bridge the gap between what your product does and this desired outcome. </li><li>The Onboarding process is where new customers tend to get stuck, where they drop out, and what can help them get over those hurdles.</li><li>Usage — how well is the product working for the customers? Where they stop using it. What they’re hoping to find — and don’t. </li><li>Growth opportunities are when the customer will benefit from using more of the product.</li></ul>

How to Get Product Managers Excited to Work with Customer Success

A customer success team is only as good as its information. But why aren't other departments clamouring at their door for these insights too? most of us come from a tradition of strict departments. You do your thing; I'll do mine. Which, along with Territorialism and downright inefficiency, leads to data silos. You need a way to get your insights heard. Because you can’t give your customers what they need by yourself.&nbsp;

Customer Success: Information

Product managers and engineers have a very different way of communicating than Touchy-Feely customer success agents. Just like a good marketing campaign, lead with benefits to them (rather than the customer) and put them in bullet points with Metrics if possible. Product managers and engineers have a very different way of communicating than Touchy-Feely customer success agents.

Bridging the language barrier

Customer success data can pinpoint the trouble spots that matter most. But cs can't fix these problems themselves; they depend on Dev to come up with the solutions. What you think should be a "simple" change isn't actually asking for an overhaul of the entire Website. You can help Dev bridge that gap by understanding what the customer wants and making sure it Aligns with what they truly need. If you want a product to work,

Persuasive Benefit #1:  Do better work, more efficiently

When support tickets rise en Masse, many Ceos hit the panic button. This sends Dev into a flurry of activity (disrupting what they were doing) what if we built a new feature? What if we did one big update? What if we asked each departing customer why they’re leaving and solved all of those issues? It’s the fast track to the dreaded "next feature fallacy" and the "product death cycle"

Persuasive Benefit #2: Be less distracted by support tickets

Customer success already builds out ideal customer profiles, in which the ideal customer’s pain points and ideal outcomes are recorded. It’s not a great leap to also create user stories that help Dev answer the question, “why are we doing this?” and Prioritize accordingly. Success can even take on some of the burden of Prioritization, using user stories, as long as it’s part of a group effort — everyone has to agree to a unified scheme based on user impact, effort required and company priorities.

Persuasive Benefit #3: Feature Requests

The “ right” kind of feedback comes from ideal customers. The wrong kind of feedback can lead to wasting time on features that don’t serve your target audience. Customer success has already identified ideal customers. That means they know who to survey, and when they send the survey, they’ll get higher response rates.

Persuasive Benefit #4: Right feedback

Show Product Dev how their hard work impacts real people. Share customer stories and anecdotes. Share your numbers and stats. Celebrate successes.Too often, Dev is removed from the effects of their work. They don’t get to see the end users succeeding. They don’t see how what they do makes peoples’ lives better.This is a vital element to engagement and a big part of enjoying what you do.So give Dev credit where it’s due, and introduce them to the customers they’re really working for.

Persuasive Benefit #5: Have more fun

Which means that the company benefits, because you’re effectively maximizing lifetime value (aka. minimizing churn), which leads to growth.&nbsp;<ul><li>According to Bain and Co., a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 25% to 95%.&nbsp;</li><li>Retention had a 6.71% impact on a company’s bottom line. Acquisition only had a 3.32% impact.</li><li>Gartner Group found that, on average, 80% of a company’s future profits come from 20% of their existing customers.&nbsp;</li></ul>

The Partnership Between Customer Success and Product Development Benefits Everyone

This is a guest post by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré. Nichole is SaaS Consultant & Customer Success Evangelist. Founder at Authentic Curation. Moderator at Product Hunt & GrowthHackers. Previously…

What’s in a name? Turns out a whole lot. Basecamp 3 comes with a core set of 6 tools: Message Board, Campfire (chat), Automatic Check-ins, To-dos, Schedule, and Docs &amp; Files. But maybe in a particular case Announcements nails your use case better than Message Board. Or maybe instead of Schedule, you want people to focus on Deadlines. Now it’s entirely up to you. You can rename any of the core tools in any Basecamp.

Renaming the 6 core tools

Prior to this update, when you clicked on an image in Basecamp it would pop the image full-size into another window. Now you can zoom the image right in place. It makes it faster and easier to get a bigger look at something.

Better image zooming

We built an entirely new system to help people get brand new Basecamps set up properly. Now when you create a Basecamp you’ll see an option at the top that asks you if you’d like a hand setting it up:

Guided setup

<a href="https://basecamp.com/3/work-can-wait">Basecamp’s Work Can Wait feature </a>gives each person control of their own work hours. You set up your notifications schedule and Basecamp won’t send you an emails, pings, or push notifications when you’re off work. It’s a brilliant way to take back your nights and weekends. And now we’ve made it better — when you return to work, we’ll send you a gentle summary via email, or a push to your phone, giving you quick access to anything relevant that happened while you were away.

Welcome back summary after Work Can Wait

A paper printout of a discussion, decision, schedule, or list is still very handy in all sorts of situations, so we’ve drastically improved the quality of the printouts that come from Basecamp 3.

Much improved printouts

By popular customer demand, we’ve made it possible for your clients to see all the discussions on the <a href="https://basecamp.com/3/clientside">Clientside </a>without having to have a username and password. This means they see exactly what you see, and they don’t have to use their email inbox as their only point of reference. You can <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/new-in-basecamp-3-keep-your-clients-on-the-same-page-just-like-you-6fd8870c77a4#.fs66z6rwq">read more about these updates in this separate post as well </a>.

Clients can now see the Clientside

Basecamp 3’s Android app is fantastic, and the team is constantly pushing updates and improving the user experience. <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/all-new-in-basecamp-3-for-android-141efc6264eb#.2adkuq50c">Here’s a list of some of the latest updates </a>including more personal control over notifications, replies without launching the app, making it easier to move around without having to backtrack, <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/all-new-in-basecamp-3-for-android-141efc6264eb#.cfb3u3ht3">and lots more </a>.

Major updates to the Android app

The Ios team is also hard at work making Basecamp 3 on the iPhone and Ipad better than ever. In addition to all the major improvements above, we’re shipping smaller updates, fixes, tweaks, and performance improvements often — sometimes daily. A lot of these improvements start out life as customer requests.

Major updates to iOS as well

Over the past few months we’ve been working on a bunch of great improvements to Basecamp 3. Here’s a list of some of the big stuff that we’ve shipped recently, and live in your very own Basecamp 3…

Loads of new stuff in Basecamp 3!

Many young Companies/Founders do not Prioritize tracking their most important B2B Saas Kpis. This hinders a good management of the company as well as a fruitful exchange with potential investors. We think the most important Kpis every young B2B Saas company should start tracking as soon as revenue streams arise.

The key B2B-SaaS metrics every start-up should track

Monthly recurring revenue (Mrr) is the sum of the total recurring licence revenue normalized (I.E. Deferred) into a monthly account. It’s important that the Mrr only includes Software-Related license revenues. Other revenue streams (pilots, Pocs, one-time payments, services, Onboarding,

Without a detailed definition of your calculation the Churn rate is not very valuable in our opinion. Companies calculate, report and understand the logo Churn rate in different ways. If one out of hundred customers churned in a month you could easily report 1% monthly logo Churn, however if only 5 customers were able to Churn (due to contract terms) this number is misleading. You should better report 20% (Cohort)

Churn Rates

Build a comprehensive financial model including a plan for the next 2–4 years. Ideally calculations are based on operating Kpis like Churn, Acv, sales Metrics, Headcount payments etc. Saas recommends building a comprehensive financial model including a plan for the next 2–4 years.

Burn & Cashflow Management

To get a good feeling of your next months’growth you should also be aware of your sales pipeline and sales funnel. Both are important, and the difference is small but crucial. The sales pipeline gives you the value and amount of deals at this reporting date at a specific stage. It gives you insights on what deals you or your sales Reps are working on.

Sales Pipeline, Funnel & Cycle

Customer acquisition cost (Cac) is the sum of all sales and marketing spending divided by the number of new customers in a given time period. It also allows you to calculate how long it will take to turn a customer breakeven when you subtract one-time revenues and divide it by the Mrr (I.E. Payback-time) a good Saas business model is driven by a Cltv that exceeds the Cac significantly (at least 3 times)

CAC & Payback

Founders should build a decent reporting which allows for tracking the aforementioned most important B2B Saas Kpis. Build a decent financial plan which is driven by sales and/or marketing spending. This plan should Optimally lead to the same Kpis so you can benchmark your progress and review your assumptions on a monthly basis. There is no right or wrong and there are no fixed definitions on B2B Saas Kpis.

Summary

When we started a due diligence (at least one call with a founder) in the last 5 years we experienced that many young companies/founders do not prioritize tracking their most important B2B SaaS KPIs…

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Explained

From the Sociology of the Internet to Digital Sociology: An Overview

Economic Indicators: A Beginner's Guide

How to Identify Your Product's Aha Moment

Tips and Tricks for Building a Product-led Flywheel | Customer Success and Product Experience Software | Gainsight

Shannon Klein