The Money Moments Framework: How to Find Hidden Revenue in Your SaaS Customer Journey

A common problem that SaaS companies run into when they start to think about working on their lifecycle is the question of, "What should I do first?"

There are so many things you could do in lifecycle and email marketing. 

The challenge is that most people come up with ideas by looking at best practices online, asking what competitors are doing, or signing up for a bunch of products to see what others have built.

Here's the problem with that approach: 

First, you have no clue whether those things actually work for the other companies.

Second, best practices are based on the average, but your business is not average. No software business is average.

What I recommend instead is a simple concept I call Money Moments. 

The concept is extremely simple: 

Map out every moment where someone could increase or decrease your MRR, prioritize those into a roadmap and then work through it systematically. 

In this post, I'll show you:

• Why the "best practices" approach to lifecycle marketing leaves massive revenue on the table
• How to identify every Money Moment in your business
• A simple framework for prioritizing which moments to optimize first
• Real examples of companies that added $10K+ MRR by filling lifecycle gaps

By the end, you'll have a systematic way to find hidden revenue in your existing customer base without spending more on acquisition.

Why best practices don’t cover all the lifecycle gaps in your SaaS company

When I first start working with a SaaS company, they almost always have one or two onboarding sequences, maybe they have a post-churn sequence. 

And they’re often focused on optimizing those things while missing many more obvious opportunities to increase their revenue.

I understand that, of course. 

Many founders and marketers tell me that they find it really hard to know where to focus when there's so much happening in lifecycle marketing. 

So the common approach is that lifecycle becomes a pile of ‘taped together’ email sequences with no real strategy behind them. 

Over time, someone might come along and say "Hey, you should have this sequence I had at another company." So they create that sequence, and then maybe they move on or it was done by a contractor who moved on. 

The result is a mishmash of ‘best practices’ masquerading as good strategy. 

This is a big missed opportunity. 

If this feels familiar, the results is that you're leaving a heap of money on the table because your lifecycle marketing only reflects an abstract and generalized version of the SaaS lifecycle rather than the lifecycle of a customer in your actual company. 

How Money Moments changes avoids the ‘best practice’ trap

I had a client with an add-on business model. 

The add-on was pretty simple: it added extra functionality and was an additional cost, but optional. 

When I started working with the company, I found that the new signup onboarding sequence mentioned this add-on product to try to get new users to buy both the core product and the add-on product at the same time. 

But here's what we discovered by pulling user data and conversion data: 

There was almost zero potential to convert somebody to this add-on plan while they were still in the onboarding sequence. 

There was a gap in the lifecycle. 

Buyers of this add-on actually started to buy from the end of the onboarding cycle, which was 30 days long. 

They had missed a Money Moment – the moment when customers were actually ready to pay for the add-on.

We restructured the flow and wrote a new email sequence targeted at only upselling the add-on. It ran for 30 days. 

In the first four months, it drove an additional $10,000 of MRR just from new people and converted 12% of people who were enrolled in that sequence. 

The previous version was converting something like 2% of people.

Simply by looking at the way people actually buy in the lifecycle and asking "What's the opportunity here?" we were able to add an additional $120,000 a year of ARR. 

That's a huge moment. And those Money Moments exist in every area of the lifecycle.

How to find and fill the Money Moments in your SaaS lifecycle

The three core steps of the Money Moments Framework are:

1. Make a list of every way in your company that somebody could either increase or decrease the MRR
2. Prioritize those moments by both qualitative and quantitative measures
3. Create the content that makes most sense for that moment

Let’s work through each of those steps now.

Step 1: Map Every Money Moment

Most companies approach lifecycle optimization sporadically. They hear "you should have a free trial conversion sequence" and build that. 

Then someone mentions annual upgrades, so they add that too. The result is a hodgepodge of disconnected sequences with massive gaps in between.

Mapping Money Moments systematically means you optimize for your business, not for general SaaS best practices.

Start at the beginning of your customer journey and work through to the end. I recommend using the AARRR framework: 

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Revenue
• Retention
• Referral. 

At each stage, ask: "What are all the ways someone could give us more money or give us less?"

For acquisition, that might be:

• Lead magnet signup
• Free trial signup
• Demo booking

Or for activation:

• Creating their first project
• Inviting team members
• Completing key setup steps
• Adding a credit card

Money Moments change from business to business. 

When I work with clients, we typically find 5-10 uncovered opportunities within minutes. That's almost universal and they fall into two categories: increasing MRR and decreasing MRR. 

Once, I worked with a company that does company searches, and when search volume dropped for an account, that was both a churn signal and an upsell opportunity. 

We built a sequence that showed them other features beyond just credits, turning a decrease Money Money into an increase Money Moment.

Other decrease signals:

• User inactivity on multi-user accounts
• Usage pattern drops (four meetings → two meetings → one meeting)
• Downgrades between tiers

The framework also adapts as your product changes. 

On a recent client project, they shipped an add-on that fundamentally changed their growth model. 

By mapping Money Moments around that launch, we discovered we weren't just launching a feature – we were launching a new business model. 

That completely changed how we positioned it and how we communicated that with customers.

Go through your lifecycle and map every moment where MRR could increase or decrease.

You'll likely discover you're covering about 10% of your actual opportunities. 

That's a huge gap.

Step 2: Prioritize Your Highest-Impact Money Moments

Your resources are limited. You cannot do everything at once. 

But by prioritizing across a number of different dimensions, you can come up with a roadmap of activities that will help you not just cover the lifecycle holes, but find the most meaningful ones.

I recommend thinking about Money Moments in terms of both quantitative and qualitative priority. 

For example, on the quantitative side, you might ask: 

• How many people are hitting this moment?
• What is the current conversion rate of people at that moment?
• What's the potential conversion rate?
• What's the MRR impact per conversion?

An onboarding sequence is usually a high-priority Money Moment because it's usually where the most people are going through. Everybody who enters the product goes through the onboarding sequence to help them get activated. 

If it turns out you're actually activating only 1% of people and 100,000 people go through that a year, that's a huge opportunity. You have a large margin, so the expected value of increasing that would be a high-impact moment.

But there could be other opportunities. 

I recently worked with a company who realized they had opportunities to improve their onboarding for product-led signups. 

But also, because of their product-led motion, people from large ‘big fish’ companies were signing up and going through the same onboarding sequence that everybody was going through. 

That was a big missed opportunity because people in big fish companies might be 100 or 1,000 times the value of a person in a small company. 

Yet they were receiving the exact same lifecycle sequences and those sequences didn’t answer the buying questions people in big companies have. 

There was a lot of average revenue per user being left on the table. Even though the volume of potential signups was actually smaller, the opportunity was significantly larger. 

If you struggle to look at a lot of numerical data at once when making a choice, optimize for only ‘potential MRR’ – having an expected value column in a spreadsheet where you talk about the MRR impact per conversion will give you more clarity than any other combination of metrics.

In addition to quantitative metrics, also consider qualitative insights. 

Another company I worked with experienced massive downgrades in plan numbers month to month. 

On the surface level, they should obviously fix that one because it's costing them a lot in MRR. 

However, at the same time, the company had recently launched an enterprise motion, and they were trying to build out their lifecycle around that.

In this instance, even though there was no expected deal value on those enterprise accounts because they didn't have a track record, it made more sense in terms of the business's strategy to choose the qualitative insight: "Some of the reason we're experiencing this churn is because these people actually are enterprise potential customers, and yet they're not being addressed as such in our lifecycle." 

That's why having a spreadsheet with your Money Moments mapped out and also qualitative and quantitative prioritization makes a lot of sense.

Step 3: Optimize Your Top Money Moments

Once you've prioritized, work through each opportunity systematically. 

Some sequences are straightforward—an annual upgrade sequence is almost the same every time. 

My recommendation: send annual upgrade sequences at a cadence of once every 50 days instead of every 30 days. 

This means the upgrade ask hits different points in the calendar month, increasing your chances of catching customers when their budget cycle aligns.

Other optimizations require more creativity. 

I worked with a company whose customers were manual laborers – gardeners, pool maintenance, snow removal companies. 

Churn patterns didn't follow typical SaaS logic. 

When we segmented by job function, we discovered churn was seasonal and weather-related. 

Snow removal businesses churned in summer. 

So we built sequences to be sent leading up to each segment’s off-season with tips on how to use the product during the lull turning predictable churn into retention opportunities. 

This is what happens when you optimize for your actual Money Moments instead of copying best practices. 

You find retention and revenue strategies that are directly related to how your customers actually behave.

What's Next?

The Money Moments Framework is simple:

1. Map every way customers can give you more or less money
2. Prioritize by MRR impact and strategic fit
3. Build sequences for your top Money Moments

Most SaaS companies are covering about 10% of their actual Money Moments. 

That means there's massive revenue sitting in your existing customer base – you just need to systematically find it and capture it.

If your revenue has plateaued and you're thinking about spending more on acquisition, pause. You probably have 5-10 Money Moments you're not addressing that could add $10K+ MRR each.

That's exactly what we do in a Lifecycle Sprint. In 4 weeks, we:

1. Map all your Money Moments
2. Prioritize the top 3 by MRR impact
3. Build the sequences to capture that revenue
4. Write 27 email broadcasts to get you sending more email from week 1

Most clients see results in the first 30 days—additional MRR from moments they were completely missing before.

Book a Lifecycle Sprint →