Great stuff there Patrick. Also, I strongly recommend close.io newsletter for startup sales. Steli Efti is to startup sales what Patrick Mckenzie is to startup marketing.

A lot of the SaaS companies out there don't have a proper sales/marketing process in place. In particular regarding free trials, too many of them are doing only two things to interact with a user:

  1- when the user signs up, send a welcome email
  2- when the free trial expires, send a "free trial about to expire" email

And in between these 2 steps, crickets. The new user is left to figure out what to do on his own, and whether the product is even a good fit for him.

Any kind of process to move a user from "just signed up" to "paid customer" is better than no process. How do you move a user on that journey? By identifying the steps that a user has to go to realize the value of the product, and figuring out a way to move from one step to the other.

It can be automated (marketing) with lifecycle emails, in-app messages or with specific UX. It can be high-touch (sales) with a customer success/sales rep assisting the user to go to the next step.

Just don't leave the new users alone.