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10 Things I Learned Working at Jottful

September 1, 2023

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but as you’ll see, it’s A LOT to have learned:

1. There is nothing like the start-up experience. You just have to go through it. Dawn was true to her word - she shared everything with me - the numbers, the strategy, the investment conversations, the learnings, the marketing, product questions, and the difficult stuff. I was involved in nearly every decision. I learned how to build a business from the ground up. That education is gold. 🌟

2. Working alongside someone who has such perseverance and resilience - the ability to never be set back by failures - has also been invaluable. Dawn is incredible at this. In the first few years especially, we failed at so much. That’s just part of it. Fail often and fail fast. Learn, learn, learn. I was able to adopt more of that approach: test, observe, assess, learn, try again. Repeat. Out of set-backs come new possibilities. Just keep learning: read more, watch more, talk to more mentors, keep learning. Everything is figureoutable. 🧩

3. I’m not a designer, but now I know how to design websites. I worked alongside designers and learned a lot of their language, but mostly what and how they saw things. I developed my “design eye”. 👁️

4. I’ve never considered myself a technical person. That has changed. I realized when helping our customers set up their third party softwares like Mailchimp, Ecwid, Calendly, Stripe, Square, or their Google Workspace accounts, Google Business Profiles, or launching their websites with tricky domain situations, that I’d stop at nothing to help them figure this stuff out. That was in stark contrast to how quickly I’d get frustrated setting up my own technical stuff. If I can pretend I’m tackling technical problems for other people, I can solve them. 💡

5. I already knew a lot about business coming into Jottful from my various jobs, BUT, I have now been introduced to countless types of businesses and industries. 🏢 🔨

6. These last two years, I was giving SEO trainings (search engine optimization) to customers who wanted to learn how to write their own page titles, descriptions, and alt tags. I learned enough along the way about how SEO works from Dawn, SEO consultants in Jottful Community, and online videos to be helpful. 👩‍💻

7. I know more about marketing now than I ever cared to know! Don’t get me wrong…you should never hire me to run your Google or YouTube ad campaigns (I’d outsource those in a heartbeat), but how marketing works: creating your personas, nailing your messaging, which channels to try, content marketing vs paid advertising, branding, email-marketing, social media techniques. 🤯

8. How to start a business. When I set up Brick & Cedar Homes, I knew what to do:

  • How to pick a name
  • Which entity type I wanted
  • How and where to get a logo designed affordably and quickly
  • How to design and build a website
  • How to write compelling copy
  • That I should set up a separate bank account
  • How to buy my domain and set up my Google Workspace email
  • Which marketing software to use; and 
  • How to design graphics in Canva for various marketing purposes.

It felt so good to just do this! Fast forward to 2023, I needed to set up another LLC quickly for some People Ops consulting work post-Jottful. I cut the start-up time investment in half. 🙅🏻‍♀️

9. I learned first hand that sales in for-profit work is just like fundraising in non-profit work, and customer success and service is just like donor relations. I didn’t need to do these jobs to know this, but I did, and so I know it intimately. 💵 

10. How a SaaS business works. SaaS metrics. I know all the acronyms: MRR, ARR, CAC, LTV, NPS, NRR. 🙌 For those who know SaaS, skip this, for those who don’t care about SaaS metrics, skip this. For the other 1%, read on! 

  • MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue - that golden metric in SaaS - the monthly subscription fees your customers pay. Love that about this model.We watched this number like hawks.
  • AAR - Annual Recurring Revenue - MRR x 12. Customers would pay either monthly or yearly. Regardless, ARR is the subscription value for the year. 
  • CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost - how much does it cost us to bring on a new customer?  SUPER hard to predict at first - you spend so much to get your first customers, but this is huge lever - the quicker you can lower the CAC, the better off you’ll be, and the quicker you can scale. 
  • LTV - Lifetime Value - The value that each customer will pay for as long as they’re with you. You want this to be as long as possible. LTV:CAC is a signal of profitability.
  • NPS - Net Promoter Score - The number customers rate you when asked one question - how likely are you to refer us to a friend? Jottful’s number is a 96 5.5 years in. Crazy high. 
  • NRR - Net Revenue Retention - This calculates total revenue minus revenue churn NRR measures our ability to retain and expand customers. It helps us understand the overall health of our business.
  • CR - Churn Rate - The rate at which customers end their subscriptions. A typical churn percentage when serving the small business market is 3-5%. We were way under that for the first 4 years. It has ticked up closer to that 3% mark mostly due to customers coming from cold traffic. To be expected. 

Jottful University, I’d say! Lots of learning. Lots of growth. #grateful

Wondering if you should join a start-up? Check out my next post on this topic!