We have never lost money on an acquisition.
The secret is in our process.
Here are the 3 questions we always ask when taking over a company that you should steal:
1. What is the most annoying thing about X?
A playful question that shows you are a human and care about the product experience.
These are often little things you can fix/add quickly. Easy wins.
2. What feature(s) would you most like to see added to X?
Gives you ideas for bigger new features that users may be willing to pay more for.
Only build what people want to save on development costs.
3. How likely are you to recommend X to a colleague or friend?
This sets the baseline for your Net Promoter Score (NPS). A measure of how happy / satisfied your customers are.
You should track this over time to see if you are improving or declining.
Constellation loves to focus on the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
A high NPS with low market awareness is the ideal combo for vertical market software companies.
Sticky product with happy customers that just needs marketing.
The perfect setup to grow quickly.
Process:
I like to use Typeform for surveys.
I just blast this out to all "users" tagged in Intercom with a few lines introducing ourselves.
If you don't have Intercom set up, you can export all users from Stripe and email a survey link as a BCC. Email responses are chaos.