Rocketship Scholars: Starting with Why.

Rocketship Scholars Series: Written by Maddy Drachler

This week was all about setting up our tool stack, which was a big draw card of the SaaS Trial Rocketship program for me. I love setting up and experimenting with new technology. 

I went into the exercises with gusto, but struggled quite a bit trying to put together a tracking plan. I found myself essentially trying to re-create a relational database - trying to map out all of the possible data points and how they relate to each other. I started down that path with employee leave requests, mapping out a user table and a leave request table, each with its own data points and the user ID linking them together. I felt like I was re-inventing the wheel, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the task at hand.

It was late in the week by the time something clicked. Segment is a CDP, which is a fundamentally different tool to a data warehouse. It can push updates to the warehouse, but the true value of Segment is in its ability to send those events to other destinations, enabling non-engineering users to leverage them to drive growth.

The basic B2B SaaS events like creating an account, adding a user and upgrading a subscription plan are important, but at the end of this SaaS Trial Rocketship program I want to be able to draw a path to supercharging our growth. I need to be able to demonstrate that by leveraging a tool like Segment and enabling the revenue operations team with a customer journey architect, we could more effectively grow annual recurring revenue and monthly active users. Showing how Segment can capture account sign up events is not going to cut it. I fell into a trap that I often find myself in, not starting with the why!

Why is Segment valuable? Why should we invest time and effort in a CDP? What challenges do we face today that could be alleviated with this tool? Once I started asking myself these questions I felt like things started to come together. 

About Rocketship Scholars:

The Rocketship Scholars program offers participants special access to Unlocking Growth’s world leading SaaS Trial Rocketship program with course content and live coaching in theory and practical skills to grow your startup.