Chart revenue from new, upgrading, renewing and returning subscribers, then explain each spike

David BarnardSo you spent almost seven years at Babbel and recently transitioned to Yousician, and one of the things you told me when we were preparing for this was that the first thing you did at Yousician was you asked, "Where's your log of experiments? Where's your log of business decisions?" I don't think a lot of companies keep that kind of record. So why was that the first thing you asked and how do you recommend doing that?

Sara GranaSo when I start a company and also I started at Babbel in my role in revenue strategy, I really look at, okay, what is the map of our revenue over the years? So from your revenue, we come from subscription business. You can either get money from people that never had the subscription and start a new subscription, people that upgraded from a subscription to another, people that renew a subscription or people that used to have subscription then churned and then came back. So these four buckets, you have these four buckets. Having the history of how these four buckets evolve can also tell you a lot. So when sometimes you cannot find experiments or whatnot, you can see, "Oh, I see that from February 23, all of a sudden, the new subscriber revenue went really, really big, what happened?" And they're like, "Oh, yeah, this is when we started the lifetime subscription." Or this type of thing.

Sara GranaSo sometimes it's about finding... Yeah, it's great they have a log and then you can go through experiments, but you need to differentiate, okay, what is important versus not, because sometimes some companies run a lot of experiments, so it's not really useful to go through all of it. So I would also recommend, let's map the revenue, understand what are the big difference that you see, and then try to map, okay, something happened here, what …

David BarnardHow would you recommend actually tracking that or in your ideal state, is that just in a Notion Doc in a Google Doc or is it in a spreadsheet and the revenue changes that happen? What's the ideal state of something like that look like?

Sara GranaBasically, the revenue bucket, so to say, to me, it's like Excel. I would track in Excel how we're moving, and then from that, maybe have a little presentation for me or then to share and then you map, okay, "Here, this line, this happened because of this thing." And then you can link to whatever documentation that assist the company, or you can put within the same Excel file if you stay in Excel, the links of what happened when. But yeah, I'm a bit of an Excel person. But yeah, everyone needs to find their own way.

David BarnardWhen you're trying to optimize conversion, retention, when you're working on, as you do, revenue strategy at a company, all these little things add up to become the product in a way that is hard to untangle from each other. And so having this record means that you know when you ran this experiment, you can then go back and look at that cohort, did it churn at a higher rate? Did they engage in the app at a different rate? How did they engage in …