Edition 03 · The Checklist
The SaaS Funnel Optimisation Checklist
- 40 checkpoints
- 3 funnel stages
- Benchmarks included
- 90 minutes
Ninety minutes, dashboards open, one honest pass. Forty checkpoints across your acquisition, activation and retention funnel — each marked PASS or LEAK, each with the number to check it against and the red flag that means you have found one. If you cannot answer a checkpoint at all, that is a leak too: not knowing is the most expensive kind.
The rationale: your funnel is a chain of multiplications, so growth is set by its weakest links, not its average. The output is not a score — it is a ranked list of leaks, worst first.
Who it is for: Teams who need a ranked list of leaks, worst first.
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Three stages, forty checkpoints
A · Acquisition — checkpoints 01–14
Channels, CAC, positioning signals, pipeline quality. Can you reach the right people, repeatably, at a cost your ACV can fund? The stage fails as “we need more traffic.”
B · Activation — checkpoints 15–27
Signup to first value, onboarding, trial design. Does a new user reach real value before they give up on you? The stage fails as “people sign up and vanish.”
C · Retention — checkpoints 28–40
Churn causes, renewal motion, expansion readiness. Does the value hold once the novelty and the onboarding attention stop? The stage fails as “growth is up, net is flat.”
What a checkpoint looks like
CAC payback is known, trended, and under control
B2B SaaS median: 18 months and rising (Benchmarkit, n=148, 2025). Red flag: payback beyond 24 months means the channel is being financed, not run.
You know what share of signups reach activation, by cohort
SaaS median around 30%; B2B median 37% (Userpilot, 2024). Red flag: the number exists only as a one-off analysis from a former employee.
GRR is reported separately from NDR, everywhere both appear
NRR medians run 93%–105% by ACV band (SaaS Capital, n=1,500+, 2023). Red flag: only NDR is quoted — which means expansion is masking churn.
Reading your leak count
Tally the LEAKs per section and send next quarter to the leakiest stage: 0–8 is a tight ship (verify you scored honestly), 9–18 is normal for Series A, 19–28 means pick one stage and ignore the rest for a quarter, 29+ means run the full Growth Audit Framework before spending another pound on traffic. One override rule: upstream beats downstream — if acquisition and retention tie, fix acquisition, because its bad-fit customers are retention's churn on a delay.
The full checklist includes all forty checkpoints with their benchmarks and red flags, a benchmark strip per stage with named sources and sample sizes, the three moves to make first for each stage, and the honest-scoring rules.
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