SaaS Startup Operating System

Start here: how this workspace runs

Customers

Every account with its plan, monthly revenue, health and renewal date.

Support tickets

Questions, bugs and feature requests from customers, each tied to the customer and, where it applies, to a roadmap item.

Roadmap

Everything the team might build, with its stage, target date and how many customers asked for it.

Monthly metrics

One row per month for recurring revenue, new and churned accounts and cash.

Signup cohorts

Who stays, by the quarter they signed up.

What lives where

The week

Your rhythm

Who does what

Founders own revenue, pricing and the roadmap. Customer success owns health, onboarding and renewals. Support owns reply targets. Engineering owns sizes and dates.

Definitions we use

MRR is what active customers pay each month, with annual plans divided by twelve. Churned MRR is the monthly revenue of customers who left or moved down a plan. Expansion MRR comes from customers who added seats or moved up. Trials count only once they pay.

Making it yours

Rename plans, cohorts and churn reasons to fit your product, set your own reply targets, and delete the sample rows once your own are in. Edit any cell in place; cohort numbers, run rate and churn update by themselves.

The business at a glance. Charts read the live tables.

Renewing in the next 14 days

Tickets waiting on us

Roadmap items in build

How to read the numbers

MRR by plan

Reply targets

1. Revenue

Open Monthly metrics. Last month's New MRR, Expansion MRR and Churned MRR explain how MRR moved. A healthy small SaaS company keeps monthly MRR churn under about 2 to 3 percent; if MRR churn is above that, it is the first thing to fix, before more selling.

2. Customers at risk

Filter Customers to At risk and sort by MRR. For each: what is the Health score, how many Open tickets, when does it renew? Agree one action and one owner for each.

3. Cohorts

Open Signup cohorts. Accounts kept shows how many paying accounts from each quarter are still with you; Revenue kept shows whether those that stayed grew. If a newer cohort keeps fewer accounts than older ones at the same age, look at onboarding first.

4. Support

How many tickets missed their Reply target last week, and why? A missed target on a High ticket from a Business customer is a call from a founder the same day.

5. Roadmap

What shipped, what slipped, what is next. Every item on the roadmap should name the tickets and customers asking for it.

Before the meeting

Decisions log

Write each week's decisions as a short note at the bottom of this page: what, who, by when. Read last week's first.

Example

In Monday's review, MRR churn is 3.4 percent: two Team accounts left for a competitor that has calendar sync. Customer success has already called both. The founders move two-way calendar sync up the roadmap and the engineering lead gives a date. Next week the review checks the two at-risk Business accounts that asked for it too.

Scoring health

Each week, give every paying customer a Health score from 0 to 100. A simple recipe:

Below 50 is At risk. Keep the recipe the same so scores can be compared.

The playbook

When a customer leaves

Expansion

Customers who add seats or move up a plan are the cheapest growth. When a customer's seats are full, offer the next plan before they hit the wall.

Weekly check

Example

Lumen Dental's score falls to 42: only two of eight seats logged in and a bug ticket about duplicate texts. Customer success calls the office manager, learns the team never moved their schedule over, and books a training session. Three weeks later seven seats are active and the score is 76.

Collecting requests

Every feature request arrives as a ticket. Link it to a Roadmap item, creating one if needed. Never promise a date in a ticket; promise that it is recorded.

Scoring each item

For every Idea or Planned item, look at:

Build what scores high on reach and revenue for its size. Large items need a strong reason.

Planning the quarter

Shipping

Bugs come first

A bug that loses customer data or blocks scheduling jumps the queue, always. Smaller bugs are batched and fixed in the first week of each month.

Saying no

Move items you will not build to Dropped with a one-line reason. Tell the customers who asked. A clear no is kinder than a forever maybe.

Example

Two-way calendar sync is linked to six tickets from customers worth $1,100 of MRR, and two churned accounts named it. It is Large, but the evidence is strong, so it moves into this quarter with a target date. Dark mode had one request and stays Dropped.