Benchmarks
Split times for growth metrics, each with its source and its sample.
- Free-to-paid conversion rate benchmarks for freemium, opt-in trials and card-required trials
Median SaaS free-to-paid conversion is about 8%. Freemium is good at 3% to 5%, no-card trials 4% to 6%, card-required trials 25% to 35%.
- Email marketing benchmarks for SaaS by email type and industry
Software email benchmarks: click rates of 1.15% to 1.88%, open rates of 20.68% to 39.31%, unsubscribes near 0.22%, and why clicks beat opens.
- SaaS churn rate benchmarks by price point and segment
Private B2B SaaS companies lose about 9% to 10% of recurring revenue a year at the median. About 5% a year counts as good. See benchmarks by segment.
- What Is a Good SaaS Growth Rate, by Stage and ARR
Median private SaaS growth runs 22% to 26% a year, top quartile 50% or more, and the bar falls as ARR rises. Benchmarks by stage, T2D3 and Rule of 40.
- What is a good activation rate? Benchmarks by product type and how to define yours
A good activation rate is about a third of new users: a 34% average and 25% median in one survey, 36% for SaaS. Here is how to define and compare yours.
Tools for these pages
Calculators and templates these pages link to, each with its formula or method on the page.
- A/B test sample size and duration calculator, with the formula
A 5% baseline needs 31,234 visitors per variant to detect a 10% relative lift at 5% significance and 80% power. Formula, inputs and run time.
- Growth experiment template with ICE scoring, a weekly cadence and a backlog you can copy
A growth experiment template gives each idea a hypothesis, an ICE score from 1 to 10, one owner and one metric, then ranks the backlog every week.
- Growth model template for startups, with inputs, a cohort layer cake, a loop row and a sensitivity table
A growth model template in four sheets: inputs, a cohort layer cake, a loop row and a sensitivity table, with worked numbers you can copy this week.
- Onboarding Email Sequence Template With Six Emails, Timing and Metrics
Six onboarding emails from Day 0 to Day 21+, each with a trigger, one job, an exit condition and one metric, measured against a holdout group.
Elsewhere on Race to Scale
- Guides
How the mechanics work, with the evidence and the arithmetic.
5 pages - Tactics
Every tactic with the hours it takes, the days until a signal, and how strong the evidence is.
31 pages - Teardowns
Real pages redrawn as their structure, with what each part does.
3 pages - Tools
Calculators and templates, with the formula and a worked example on the page.
7 pages - Playbooks
Several tactics in order, with the timings between them.
7 pages - Cases
Short cited accounts of what a company ran and what happened.
43 pages - Digests
Public reports read for you, with their key numbers.
1 page - Glossary
Growth terms defined in a sentence or two, with where they apply.
12 pages - Agencies
Growth agencies for startups and small companies, A to Z, with facts checked on each agency's own pages.
- Voices
Posts from people who run growth that teach something specific, with our label and our take.
How these pages are made
Every factual sentence on a Race to Scale page is checked against a passage on a source page that was read for that page, and numbers are computed in code from those sources, not typed from memory. Each page lists its sources and links them where they are used.
Every page shows the day it was first published and, when a fact changes, the day it was updated; no date is set earlier than the day a page went up. The full method is on How we work.