February 2022 – Brandon Checketts

Make Sure You Are Calculating Net Promoter Score Correctly

The Net Promoter Score can be a pretty valuable metric for determining customer happiness, and, more importantly, how likely your customers are to tell other people about your product.

The basic idea is that you ask customers how likely they are to recommend your product to someone. Those who respond as a 9 or 10 are considered “Promoters”. When asked about your product, they’ll respond positively and encourage others to use your product as well. Customers who answer with a 7 or 8 are satisfied, but not likely to talk positively about your product. Customers who answer with a six or below are considered “detractors”. When asked about your product, they’ll respond negatively, detracting from your reputation. If you have a higher number of “promoters” than “detractors”, then your NPS Score will be positive. More detractors than promoters will result in a negative NPS score.

There is an excellent tool for calculating your Net Promoter Score at Delighted.com that helps to visualize this.

I was recently meeting with a leadership team and they mentioned that their Net Promoter Score was 6.6. That’s not a great score, but its not terrible. I don’t usually hear it expressed as a decimal, but I didn’t think much of it. After meeting with the team after several months, they kept mentioning NPS Score with a decimal and it had increased to 6.7. It was then that I began to ask questions into how they were calculating that. It turns out it was a simple average on a rating from 1 to 10. That is NOT an NPS Score! If anybody ever tells you their Net Promoter Score is between 1 and 10, make sure to dig in and make sure they are calculating it correctly! Scores should range from -100 (All detractors) to +100 (All promoters).

When calculated correctly, this product’s NPS score was actually negative. That helps to explain why revenue growth has been a challenge and marketing dollars are not moving the needle as they’d like.

Contrast that with another organization I meet with regularly. They calculate their NPS Score correctly and it’s a 60! No wonder this company has incredible growth and is doing well.

While your NPS score is negative, your first priority should be fixing the product and customer experience. Otherwise, every customer that signs up is likely going to detract from others using your product.

How to Think About Annual Contracts, Up-front Payments

I’ve helped several teams lately go through an analysis of when to consider annual prepayments for services. These are some of the decision criteria and metrics that I use to consider if an annual contract or pre-payment should be considered.

As a baseline, calculate the full amount that you would pay monthly. For most software products, this is the regularly advertised price. Make sure you are looking at the actual monthly plan proce though. A lot of services have started advertising as “$x per month billed annually“. Make sure to select the monthly payment price whe you see that. Some services, like commercial insurance charge a small per-payment fee for “installment plans” that should be included.

Next, calculate the full price if paid up-front. Of course, you need to include discounts that are offered. Sometimes, an offer may make it a period other than one year, such as “buy now and get 13 months for the price of 12”, which makes it a little more complex. In that case, you could consider the annual price as 12/13 of the amount you pay. Or, if the extra month is not really material, you may chose to ignore the extea month.

After you’ve got those two numbers (the annual and monthly prices), you should consider the other terms and internal needs.

Consider if your usage of the service is expected to change much over the next 12 months.

Also, consider how much flexibilty you lose with an annual pre-payment. Some services, like Slack give you a credit if usage decreases. Others have no flexibility and you pay that amount, even if usage decreases or you cancel.

In general, I expect around a 15% discount for a full up-front payment and very flexible terms for changes in usage or cancellation. If terms are more strict, I’d aim for more like a 30% (or more) discount for the commitment and up-front payment.

Finally, consider your own cash flow and capital positions. If you have an plenty of cash in the bank, you can lean toward the saving of an annual prepayment. If you don’t have a lot of cash, You’ll favor the monthly terms.

What are your thoughts and experience? What else should be considered when evaluation annual payments?

Using LastPass to Save Passwords and Log In to Multiple AWS Accounts With Two-Factor Authentication

I have multiple businesses, so I log into AWS multiple times per day.

That is a little tricky to do using LastPass since AWS has some hidden form fields that must be filled in
when using two-factor authentication through Google Authenticator.

In order to make it work correctly, I’ve had to modify the extra details in LastPass to add some extra hidden fields. If you set these up in your LastPass credentials for AWS, you should be able to log in with just a couple clicks, like usual, instead of having to type in some of those fields every time or having them overwritten.

Also, make sure to check the “Disable Autofill” checkbox an all of your AWS LastPass entries. Otherwise, one of them will overwrite the hidden form fields on the Two-Factor authentication page

Ubuntu 20.04 Cloud-Init Example to Create a User That Can Use sudo

Use the steps below and example config to create a cloud-init file that creates a user, sets their password, and enables SSH access. The Cloud Config documentation has some examples, but they don’t actually work for being able to ssh into a server and run commands via sudo

First, create a password hash with mkpasswd command:

$ mkpasswd -m sha-512
Password:  
$6$nq4v1BtHB8bg$Oc2TouXN1KZu7F406ELRUATiwXwyhC4YhkeSRD2z/I.a8tTnOokDeXt3K4mY8tHgW6n0l/S8EU0O7wIzo.7iw1

Make note of the output string. You need to enter it exactly in the passwd line of your cloud-init config.

This is the minimal configuration to create a user using cloud-init:

users:
  - name: brandon
    groups: [ sudo ]
    shell: /bin/bash
    lock_passwd: false
    passwd: "$6$nq4v1BtHB8bg$Oc2TouXN1KZu7F406ELRUATiwXwyhC4YhkeSRD2z/I.a8tTnOokDeXt3K4mY8tHgW6n0l/S8EU0O7wIzo.7iw1"
    ssh-authorized-keys:
    - ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1zzzBBBGGGg3BZFFzTexMPpOdq34a6OlzycjkPhsh4Qg2tSWZyXZ my-key-name

A few things that are noteworthy:

The string in the passwd field is enclosed in quotes

lock_passwd: false is required to use sudo. Otherwise, the system user account created will have a disabled password and will be unable to use sudo. You’ll just continually be asked for a password, even if you enter it correctly.

I prefer the method of adding the user to the sudo group to grant access to sudo. There are other ways to make that work as well, but I feel like this is the cleanest.

Adding any users, will prevent the default ubuntu user from being created.