5 SaaS Metrics Tools for Bootstrappers
Tracking SaaS metrics as a bootstrapped Founder is key to growing your business and helping buyers see the value of what you’ve built. Because it’s true — you can’t manage what you don’t measure. But when we’re reviewing potential acquisitions each month, everyone seems to have a stack for tracking metrics that’s set up slightly different from the others.
If you’re not sure which numbers you should be tracking in the first place — start with our saas metrics guide for bootstrappers.
In terms of tools, you don’t need a super expensive stack to track all of your metrics. As a bootstrapped Founder, there just isn’t a ton of value in a suite of expensive additional tracking tools.
There’s no one-size-fits-all app, but after analyzing thousands of SaaS businesses over the years, we’ve learned quite a bit about which analytics tools are best at keeping data organized, clear, meaningful, and cost-effective. And honestly, there’s only a handful of them that we’ve found essential to our business — check them out below.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most highly underrated tools for bootstrapped Founders. It’s completely free to use and gives you insights on who your customers are, where they are coming from, and if they’re converting. To make sure you’re looking at all the right data, you’ll want to set up Google Tag Manager and Search Console and configure them with your analytics account. With Tag Manager, you can set up events to track things like new trials, new paid customers, and cancellations, which you’ll be able to see in Analytics. And with Search Console connected to your Analytics account, you can see which keywords people are using to find your website and where you’re ranking in search results.
Ninety (for EOS)
This analytics app is specifically designed to help keep track of the data gathered if you’re using the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to run your business. You can customize your dashboard with all the data points you need your team to track each week. That way, when you go to run your meetings or want to check in on your business, you can view all the metrics at a glance and quickly get a pulse on what’s working and what’s not.
Partnermetrics (for Shopify Apps)
If you’re running a Shopify app, Partnermetrics breaks down super helpful data points on revenue, like one-time revenue, recurring revenue, affiliate revenue, refunds, etc. It’s one of the most helpful free tools you can have in your analytics stack.
Stripe
For SaaS products that use Stripe, you can gather tons of valuable data from the dashboard. At a glance, you can see how your product is performing in real-time, as well as filter through reports and charts with information on:
- Gross volume
- Net volume from sales
- New customers
- Successful payments
- Average revenue per customer
- Dispute activity
- High risk payments
ProfitWell
If you plan to sell your business one day, having a revenue analytics tool like ProfitWell is super important to be able to show potential buyers your SaaS performance. It’s a free reporting tool that helps businesses analyze and improve their churn, pricing, and subscriptions models. Plus, you can connect it to your other revenue reporting tools, like Stripe.
If you’re trying to clean up your analytics stack or just starting to build yours out, these five tools will save you the most time and money, as well as help you see into your business and make revenue-generating decisions. And if you’re not sure which exact numbers you should be tracking inside those tools, check out Everything Bootstrappers Need to Know About SaaS Metrics.
