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What are your biggest learnings about building a SaaS product?
It can be anything.- Growth- Product - Marketing- Building in public
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Best
- Build your first version as fast as you can - focus only on the top 3 features
- Talk to your users/potentials customers. Do it MORE!
- Don't be afraid to through your MVP away to try a new version
- Be as open as possible (use Twitter to build in public)
@angezanetti I would also add to be part of other communities like IndieHacker, Makers, NoCodeFounders, MakerPad, etc
@angezanetti Exactly as u said but i will add another comment of discover the product very will from business perspective as most of time SAAS products are built for B2B more than B2C for that you have to study the business field you building very well as there's no direct touch with the enduser.
I'm wrote a full article about how we build our SaaS products at Speakol you can discover it from here:
my website: mkryad.com
@angezanetti Thank you for the super useful nuggets. I've got lots of new learning from your pinned tweet which is a thread of threads. Super excellent stuff and please keep up your good work!
Subscribers count doesn't matter. I built a list of ~5000 subscribers who wanted to get early access on https://automatio.co, for a pre-launch.
Since I didn't engage those subscribers for years, most of them even forgot what they subscribed for. If you are building an audience first, it's important to keep them in the loop, by posting updates or something valuable and relevant to them.
Otherwise, people will forget why they even subscribed for, and mark you as SPAM or just unsubscribe.
@stefan_smiljkovic Thats totally have sense. What was a people response overall, why they unsubscribed?
@stefan_smiljkovic I would add up that is also important what email/newsletter service provider you are using, because that can significantly impact on your delivery and engagement with your audience
@stefan_smiljkovic I actually am planning on a SaaS soon in the productivity region, having said that, i have been on this side of the spectrum where i forgot why i was subscribed to something because receiving messages/updates with huge gap intervals does have that effect.
@karanveer I know the feeling. It happend to me many times. I subscribe to newsltter or app, and after a week or two, I already forgot why and when I subscribed.
That is why is also good practice to reminder subscribers in every email why and when they subscribed.
@stefan_smiljkovic Useful and hard lesson for sure. Engagement and consistency in communication helps a lot. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Based on my Saas experience (FlowMapp, 230k users, x2.5 YoY):
— Don't be afraid to ask people directly to test your product.
— Design will be even more important in 2022.
— Hire smart, start HR branding as you can.
— Talk to users every day.
— Start social & communications asap, even before launch.
— Follow Product-Led Growth strategy.
— Freemium is a must.
— Onboarding is your infinite point of growth.
— Do not use paid traffic channels at the start. They lead to the wrong place.
— Organic and WoM are the best channels of effort.
— Don't be greedy. Your launch priority is retention, not revenue.
— Support is very very very important. Fast one is game changer.
— Find mentors and advisors.
— Do inhouse-only product marketing.
— No worries, bugs are normal :)
— Update, analyze, update.
— Develop a A/B testing system from the beginning ("flag-function").
— Look for partners, find out their expertise.
I hope it's helpful for makers.
@mituhin I absolutely agree. Thanks for the summary it is very succinctly put. Talking to users everyday is such a must. We try to do the at least once a week. I remember a particularly long streak that we had gone without being in touch with our users and when we finally did we realised we'd built something quite unhelpful.
@mituhin Great suggestions! BTW, I think your user personas could in some way be the same as my SaaS (ReactBricks.com). What do you think about it?
@rucha_joshi8 +++ yes, I fully agree with you and also have such an experience. Definetely, User Research is that we should do all the time.
@mituhin Totally with you on this. Your experience clearly shows up as super useful and helpful.
Just a quick question on what makes you say freemium is a must. Freemium attracts a bit of noise, wonder how did you solve it for yourself?
@devaonbreaches Fremium model is the main driver of organic product growth. By giving value to users on a free basis (limits are ok) we give a very strong impetus to product distribution.
A trial-only system is more of a limiting factor, setting a paywall on the long term use of the product.
All the products that inspire us use the freemium model: Notion, Slack, Figma, Dropbox, etc.
Building a community is absolutely essential for any SAAS currently !!!
We at Vadootv have built a community of 3000+ users with which we regularly engage on Facebook and the results have been super awesome.
We got 430+ reviews on G2 and 350+ reviews on Capterra because of community
Word of mouth publicity via community is the biggest growth hack
@matcha_anil +1 Have you folks tried webinars too? We're kicking off our first webinar for customers, so would love to hear more on what to do and what not to.
@k3sava We haven't tried webinars but we started creating a lot of youtube tutorials and started growing our youtube channel which has been growing good so far
@matcha_anil Awesome! We're starting a series of small and personal webinars with new customers - sharing best practices, answering questions and taking feedback. Videos are next! 🚀
@matcha_anil Community participation helps very much during the initial phases. I am super curious on how you built the community. Care to share your learning/experience on building such an awesome community who helped you with G2/Capterra which is super good for an organisation?
@matcha_anil Please share your experience on how you managed to build such a community, and also how you manage the incoming feature requests
Be open to feedback and that doesn't mean wait for feedback. Go find it! It is more important than early traction for a scalable SaaS product!
Build an MVP, launch fast, get feedback from real users, validate and improve.
That's what I wish I would have done with my first 2 startups. Did it better the 3rd time around with KatLinks 🚀
Building and nurturing human relationships. The basics of the business remains the same, right to this age.
Even with a SaaS, and even if you're a solo- bootstrapper, you do business with people, and for people.
what I learned by building SaaS business as a non-developer:
1. Don't code everything yourself, use no-code tools as much as possible. Only a small percentage of products go from the development phase to real businesses. Prepare to fail a lot. No-code tools will shorten that failure loop.
2. Validate, validate and validate your ideas. Don't just choose to take the world from the start. First, validate your ideas by building simple MVPs and test them out.
3. Analysis paralysis. Don't just listen to every podcast or read every book. Just start building right away and you will learn by doing.
4. Create personal OKR's. (Objectives and key results).
5. Don't overwork, life-work balance.
6. Use sites such as [indiehackers.com](http://indiehackers.com), [producthunt.com](http://producthunt.com), or dev.to for inspiration
or marketing, validation ideas.
8. Do a product hunt launch correctly. I failed once, it's not that simple. Need some time to prepare.
It feels overwhelming trying to make any progress as a part-time solo founder,
- reaching out for customer interviews
- defining the roadmap
- building the product
- QA/Security testing the product
- managing the infrastructure
- testing the product with customers
- researching new opportunities
- doing documentation
- marketing
- support
While trying to have a personal life.
My biggest bit of advice is work with others to make sure you can explain it well. Video-Explainers are KEY. Here are some tips for making good ones that explain your saas. https://www.video-production.co/...
I also recommend avoiding animated explainers. We provide live-action explainers at a cost of just $2200 which uses stock, your screen grabs and voice over. Live Action explainers work better than animated, and with us, you can actually have actors in them, shot on great cinema gear for just $5000. Check out www.video-production.co
My learning is don't enter a crowded space, after I built a stock news API with quite an effort.
https://github.com/hczhu/TickerT...
-Building an easy to use , intuitive user interface is a hard job.
-Deciding a revenue model is a hard job.
-Avoiding feature creep is necessary.
-Build an MVP. Can not stress this enough.
-Talk to people, do some surveys, get beta testers from your target user group.
-Have a sales and marketing strategy ready
-Have budget for marketing.
-Build a community around your product
- Build in public from the very beginning
- Run many experiments early on
- Build with a no-code tool to allow for fast iterations
The best resource I discovered recently on running experiments is the one on Minimum Variable Tests by @gagan_biyani . Wish I had read it sooner!
https://review.firstround.com/th...
@gagan_biyani @dafnihnd Interesting concept and thank you for sharing the Minimum Variable Tests. Super useful stuff :)
Take time to understand what you’re building and why. Don’t let yourself run blindly towards getting something to market. You have to understand your reason for being in the space, and why customers should align themselves with your brand and offerings.
I need to to thank you for this wonderful read!! I definitely loved every bit of it. I have you book-marked to look at new things you post…|
On the technical side: automate as much as possible, DevOps, microservice architecture (where applicable).
Productwise: Iterate rapidly and in small steps. Get feedback early on.
I agree with the selling part. Build an MVP, get user feedback, iterate and improve the MVP.
Intellifluence