5 stupid simple things I learned by launching my first SaaS startup

I recently built and launched my first SaaS product and I learned a lot just by that. Interestingly, I realized afterward how trivial these things looked after I learned them. They are so simple, I can’t believe how I didn’t consider them from the beginning. I will share these elementary learnings so that you don’t do the mistakes I did and save your precious time to work on your project.

A short background before we continue. I recently launched my first SaaS project which I named Respium, inspired by the word “response”. Respium builds simple storefronts to sell your responses — which might be professional advice, casual Q&A’s, etc where the consumer is ready to pay for. It is like Shopify, except for selling text responses instead of physical products. An example storefront looks like this.

Let’s jump to the learnings I promised to list. I will start with my favorite.

If you don’t know enough potential customers to ask for feedback, then try advertising

Sounds weird, right? But I think it is smart. Let me explain. Founders are very lucky when they themselves actually belong to their product’s target user group, meaning they already have first-hand user insights to help them evaluate their idea. In my case, I was the target consumer of my product, meaning the customer of my customer. I started working on Respium because I wished there was such a tool that I could use to get advice/recommendations/tips from the respective field professionals, content creators that I follow, etc. I didn’t have enough potential customers whom I knew personally, but I realized that Online advertising is actually a great tool to solve this. The ad networks have great tools like audience targeting, A/B tests which you can use to find out who is your audience and what catches their attention based on one single metric — CTR (Click-through rate = count of people clicked your ad / count of people saw your ad). This hack can actually be even more valuable if your primary marketing strategy will be advertising.

Don’t start optimizing from the end of the acquisition pipeline

Let’s say you have the dashboard of your SaaS where your existing customers hang out, a signup page, a landing page, and the marketing materials (online ads, blog posts, etc). During the first few days of the launch, I was continuously adding new features to the app, doing minor UI improvements to the user dashboard, and some other similar changes. As I observed the analytics results, I noticed I was losing a lot of visitors either on the landing page or on the signup page. I realized that I had started optimization from the wrong end of the pipeline. To understand this better, let’s consider the following pipeline: ad copy → landing page → signup page→tutorial →real usage. Theoretically, the count of people who interacted with each step would be less than or equal (in the perfect world) to that of the previous step (considering this is the only possible flow). That means, if your ad copy sucks almost nobody will ever see your landing page and if the landing page sucks then forget signups and so on. Each of these steps can have a metric representing its conversion rate. I will choose to assume that your product itself is not the worst part of the pipeline. Because if it is and the left side of the pipeline still performed well, maybe you should stop what you are doing and switch to marketing. 😉

If you are able to improve the conversion rate of any of these steps in the pipeline by 5%, mathematically, the total rate (count of users completed the tutorial / count of people who saw your ad) would increase the most if you added the 5% to the step which has the worst rate currently. That means if you know what is your weakest point, it is more fruitful to try to improve that one. But if you don’t know that, I would choose to start optimization from the beginning of the pipeline.

Don’t use a site/app template

The internet is full of paid or free templates for a variety of categories. If you are not talented on web design it might be so tempting to use an already available template. Don’t they all look perfect? They do because that is what they are supposed to do to sell well. But there are some issues. First of all, these templates are not built for exactly your product. They are just dummy examples, which might look appealing but make no sense actually. You might fall in love with this design and end up adapting your product to the template instead of doing the opposite.

The second thing to run away from is templates bloated with cool effects, fancy animations, etc. For the first version of Respium’s landing page, I used an MIT licensed free template. When I checked the Performance Score of the page using Lighthouse I got a shocking score of 14/100. I threw everything away and built a new simpler one using Bootstrap. The page got much simpler and faster.

All these said, I still think you can get some great inspiration from these templates.

Build simple interfaces

It is fine to be proud of how complex problems does your product solve, how big is your codebase (unless you couldn’t possibly simplify it). But having a complex user interface is not something to be proud of. For an engineer, it is not very unusual to mirror every aspect of the codebase in the frontend. In the end, this is how our brain works. Try to have an interface so simple, that any user would say “pff, my nephew can build it during the weekend”.

Keep your infrastructure simple and cheap

The smaller your team is the more important this tip should be for you. Instead of building a highly available, super-resilient auto-scaling cluster of multiple EC2 instances, an expensive load balancer in front of them, premium SSL certificate build the same thing with Serverless architecture and pay next to nothing. Reduce maintenance effort, use the time saved on improving the end product, and the money saved on marketing.

Final words

Although most of these items sound very trivial, it is very easy to fall into the trap and ignore these. I hope this post would help some founders like me.

Also, I invite you to check out Respium.com, and if you like this story clap it and follow me on twitter: @jtogrul