At PayPal, we had over 10 million merchants taking payments through our system. Back when I was running a B2B team there, we decided to study signup cohorts based on which day of the week they signed up.
No surprise — Saturday had the fewest signups.
Big surprise? Companies who joined on Saturdays had higher activation rates and, on average, took in more revenue than weekday signups.
(My memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I think it was around 10-20% more. Oh, and Sundays were the second highest.)
Often in B2B, the number of signups is a red herring. What really matters is the size of your customers. PayPal has some merchants worth $200 per year, and others worth $2M. And a few of those big ones signed up “organically” with no sales process.(Probably on a Saturday 😏)
Simple next step
So what does this mean for your startup? If you’re in the B2B space, make sure you’re available on Saturdays! You may get less traffic, but the visitors who do come will be very motivated. This is as simple as keeping your ads turned on, staffing your live chat, and running onboarding / demo calls. (I might be wrong, your Saturday customers might be less valuable, but you won’t know until you try it and look at the data).
I realise this isn’t fun, and hopefully you can take turns on the Saturday shift. But PayPal founders who worked Saturdays were more successful, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.