Analyzing the user education & training strategy of one hundred SaaS businesses

I analyzed the education & training strategy of one hundred SaaS companies by checking which education initiatives they offer to their users. You can see the results in this spreadsheet where a green cell indicates that the corresponding initiative is in place and a red cell indicates that they don’t offer it.

I segmented the companies by stage (seed, series A, series B+ and public) and I also listed around 20 bootstrapped startups (all generating revenue) so that the analysis is not only about VC backed companies.

Finally, you’ll also find a column that indicates whether the company is a horizontal or a vertical SaaS.

Takeaway 1: Help center + guides = the basis of any user education & training strategy

There’s not a lot to add here, ”How to” guides and help centers (I include knowledge base and documentation in this category) are the two “must have” in terms of user education & training strategy (UEX in the rest of the post) at the early stage.

Takeaway 2: Webinars are the next “must have” from Series A on

The next “must have” in terms of UEX are webinars. When you look at our sample, almost 95% of the companies, from Series A to public ones, do webinars. From “top of funnel” webinars which aim is to convert leads into customers to “customer success oriented” webinars which aim is to upsell users, they are used for a variety of goals.

And it makes sense since customer success teams, which are in charge of these webinars, generally arrive around the Series A stage. 

Takeaway 3: Communities and online classes are making a strong push in the user education mix. 

Communities. I was really surprised to see that 50% of the companies in our sample provided a forum or group where their users can interact. This number grows to 70% if you take into account companies from Series A onward. The most common tools used were Facebook and Slack groups, Discord servers, forums (like Discourse) and specialized community tools such as Insided. 

We’ll dig more into user communities in a next post, but despite the rise in interest from SaaS businesses for user communities, the majority of the forums/groups I could check had low engagement. So there’s a real question on whether one should provide it or not.

Online classes. The second initiative which is getting more popular among SaaS businesses are online classes. Close to 50% of all startups in my sample provided at least one online class to their users. This number grows to 65% for companies at Series A onward. It’s definitely a growing trend among SaaS companies and in my opinion one that will accelerate.

Takeaway #4: Podcasts are the fifth wheel of the user education & training mix

This one was only half a surprise to me, but podcasts are the type of content the least used in our sample. It’s only in the public companies segment that it starts to be more popular with 57% of the companies listed providing a podcast (but I suspect that this percentage is actually much lower if we analyze more public SaaS). 

My best guess is that it’s one of the UEX initiatives which is the hardest to get going as it takes specific skills which are scarce on the market and it’s also super hard to build an audience for a podcast. It also tends to be more of a “marketing oriented” initiative which has a harder ROI to measure.

Takeaway 5: Bootstrapped startups have the same playbook as VC backed companies 

What is interesting with bootstrapped startups is that their user education and initiative playbook is similar. Smaller bootstrapped companies all have user guides and help centers, and as they grow their revenue they add the same initiatives: webinars, then user communities and online classes.

Conclusion:

What’s interesting about this analysis is that it confirms the user education and training playbook that we spoke about in the previous posts and that I sum up in this illustration:

Thank you for reading 🎉