Learn what velocity really is, why it’s the most important aspect of a SaaS business, and how effective management of your product and velocity requires laser focus on a few key metrics. Understand how the leading SaaS businesses in ANZ create velocity, and why in the SaaS world the ‘fast will eat the slow’.

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SaaS Velocity = Product + Metrics
Tom LeGrice, SaaS & Platform Lead

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Optimised
Resources
Better
Products
More
Feedback
Amazon Flywheel SaaS on AWS Flywheel

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Developers
Users Business
Product
I hate this!
You need xyz!
Your competitor
has abc!
We are not on the
latest tech!
Be worried!
I want shiny toys!
Customer needs 123
otherwise we lose this deal!

6. How long do
they stay? How much do
they pay us?
How many
customers
do we
have?
How much
do they cost
to get and
serve?

7. LTV
(lifetime value)
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
Churn rate
Cost to serve (CTS)
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Xero growth in their Annual report
• graphs
Xero Annual Report, FY18

9. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Xero Annual Report, FY18
RDS
serverless
AI/ML

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Cost per Transaction

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How much does it cost me in platform costs to execute this transaction?
Which customers/ industries/ channels should I invest in?
What is the cost of supporting certain customers?
What about people overheads like developer resources?

12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Business
Costs
AWS
Platform
Costs
User
Metrics
Tagging via AWS Cost Explorer API
Kinesis Streams /
Clicks
ERP or SaaS API
DECIDE HOW TO RECOGNISE A USER
S3

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Data Sources Ingest Store Process Analyze
Clickstream
Databases
Events
Transactions
AWS Glue
Amazon
Kinesis
Firehose
Amazon Athena
AWS DMS Amazon S3
(Raw Data)
Amazon S3
(Data Lake)
Amazon
QuickSight
QuickSight
Dashboards
Amazon Sagemaker

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
“At Airbnb, we use machine learning to
build customer lifetime value models (LTV) for
guests and hosts. These models allow us to
improve our decision making and interactions with
our community at very granular levels (down to the
user level if we like). We improved our CLTV by
over 5% as a result.”
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/automated-machine-learning-a-paradigm-shift-that-accelerates-data-scientist-productivity-airbnb-f1f8a10d61f8

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/10/25/airbnb-ai-sketches-design-code/
https://airbnb.design/sketching-interfaces/

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
1. Invest in Product as the Cultural Triage Point
2. Implement Business Cost Per Transaction Metrics
Ensure it is real time dashboards!
Agreement across the business for decision process
3. Build competency in Product + Metrics to achieve
Velocity

17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Visualise AWS Costs using Athena & Quicksight
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/query-and-visualize-aws-cost-and-usage-
data-using-amazon-athena-and-amazon-quicksight/
Web Beacons with Kinesis
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/real-time-web-analytics-with-
kinesis/components.html
Airbnb Auto-Sketcher
https://airbnb.design/sketching-interfaces/
Xero Annual Reports
https://www.xero.com/au/about/investors/financial-info/annual-report-2018/
tlegrice@amazon.com

18. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
APN Webpage https://aws.amazon.com/partners/
APN Blog https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/
APN LinkedIn Group https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12101129
Twitter @AWS_Partners
Join the AWS Partner Network!

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
TechShift Accelerator Program
Accelerate migration of
your software to cloud-
native service
Differentiate by offering
premium features through
AWS advanced service
integrations
Broaden customer reach
through AWS field, partners
& programs
Register Your Interest: https://aws.amazon.com/events/techshift/accelerator/
SaaS
Modernize
Migrate
Sydney 5th February 2019
Melbourne 7th February 2019 Sydney 14-15th May 2019
Melbourne 16-17th May 2019 TBC