Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
First off, a big shout out to everyone that attended our 9th annual SAAS NORTH conference in Ottawa this month. We got to hang out with almost 1800 SaaS leaders and the broader tech ecosystem. New informative and entertaining features like the Masked Investor and Founders Feud were a big hit! Check out some of our highlights here. If you missed out, watch for our upcoming releases of full-length main stage sessions for the first ever this year, coming to an inbox near you!
Growth experiments need to deliver a potential outcome and give you data to both understand what happened and inform next steps. This is something April Hicke lives and breathes, as co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Toast, a career and mentorship platform for women in tech. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, April explained her approach to growth experiments within a social enterprise.
Key takeaways:
- Growth experiments can start with intuition first, but track as much data as possible to validate it.
- When doing research with existing customers, focus on ensuring you still understand the problem—or if it has evolved.
- You’ll never have perfect growth data; instead, it’s about continually collecting to get directionally correct signals you can use to make decisions.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
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Ottawa is the destination where great minds meet and where delegates can escape to the tranquility of a spa surrounded by nature.
Building a two-sided marketplace is no small feat. Just ask April Hicke, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Toast, a platform that connects women with career opportunities in tech.
Founded in 2022, April joined as co-founder to help build out the organization’s growth muscle.
Speaking with SAAS NORTH, April explained her approach to growth experiments.
Your problem is your secret
When April connected with Toast founder Marissa McNeedlands, she immediately resonated with Toast’s founding story.
Marissa started her career in talent acquisition; she noticed women were sorely underrepresented. When she inquired why that was happening, her talent acquisition team told her women simply weren’t applying. Even as she moved into the tech world herself, the representation (and pay) gap persisted.
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Step 1: Name your dependencies
Start by naming what you want and what’s blocking it.
A few examples:
- You want to fundraise to grow, but investors want to see traction first.
- You want to add customers, but prospects demand new features first.
- You want to apply for grants, but providers demand you have revenue first.
You may also have multiple of these problems—run a process for each, rather than combining them.
This led to Marissa “tapping” women and encouraging them to apply for roles—when she did that, she learned what became Toast’s unique insight.
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“We know women don’t approach the job hunt the same way that men do,” said April. “We know that women need community and support around them. So how can we scale that?”
Starting with a passion for the problem led to Toast’s double-sided marketplace approach.
The B2C community offers premium support and career resources, such as transparent conversations about salaries and access to HR lawyers. But there’s also a B2B side where Toast acts as a recruiting agency for companies looking to diversify their talent pools.
Focusing on the problem also led to another insight: Toast would be a social enterprise that always puts its mission at the forefront.
“We want to drive social change,” said April. “We want to increase gender equity in tech. So growth in that aspect means change.”
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Growth means balancing intuition and data
As Toast continues to grow—for example, planning its first in-person summit in 2024—here’s what April is focused on.
Validate your gut with data: Both April and Marissa thought events would be a great way to bring more women into their community and network with potential B2B clients.
This proved correct, but data showed it wasn’t quite in the way April initially thought.
“We thought [hosting] events would be really great for brand awareness,” said April. “And 60% of our clients came in last year from events. However, only 34% of those were events we hosted. So we were able to pivot—we don’t actually need to host events. It’s better that we attend events.”
Track everything, even if you have to do it manually: Sometimes someone will connect with you at an event, follow you on LinkedIn, and then decide to join the community two months later. But you won’t know any of that if you don’t ask.
While not a perfect science, Toast asks every community member and B2B client where they heard about the organization and what made them join or reach out. This, said April, gives the team strong directional data about which channels are delivering.
Research the evolution of the problem: When you have customers, you know there’s a problem and people are willing to pay to solve it. But in your customer discovery, you have to ensure that’s still the case.
“Has [the problem] evolved?” said April. “Are there new problems? Essentially we need to ensure that the problem that we’ve sought out to solve is still a problem.”
Operationalize the unexpected good: The majority of Toast’s members said they joined because they wanted community in their career. But beyond Toast’s existing community on Slack, April said survey respondents began making their own connections and doing 1:1 coffees or other meetups.
Rather than worrying about these ad-hoc connections, April is now looking to operationalize it with apps like Donut on Slack.
“Right now it’s something that’s happening organically, but if there’s a way that we can make it so that people that aren’t doing that [start to make connections], maybe that’s a value add.”
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Everything is an assist
While tracking growth experiments is critical for both success and resource management, you will never have the complete picture.
As Chief Growth Officer, April is less worried about specific data and more about ensuring the company’s growth ecosystem is chugging along nicely. That might mean someone connects at an event and doesn’t convert for a year—as happened with one client. It could also mean someone who finds them on social media first before trying out an event—a common occurrence.
Regardless, it’s about continuing to tweak, iterate, and capture all the data you can.
“It’s really tough to measure that ROI,” said April. “The best thing to do is continue to track all of those leads and build out that process so that you can kind of take a look at, ‘If you’ve got this pipeline open, how much is each deal worth?’”
