How we built a SaaS business and got our first paying customer in 60 days

On 1st Sep 2013 we started with three business ideas… on 25th Oct 2013 we launched a Software as a Service (SaaS) product — tasktub.com. Here’s the story so far

We’re an agency in the UK… and we’d just finished a client project… We had some small projects lined up but nothing that was going to take up 100% of our time. So we decided we’d build a few of our own ideas….

#1 Focus! We needed fewer ideas

Being a bootstrapped company (running an agency) we set a few ground rules on the types of products we’d incubate internally. We felt it was important to have a some framework to help us focus. Here were a few of our rules:

• A clear business model — we couldn’t afford to build an audience and figure out monetisation later. Things like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and eCommerce came top of the list.
• Local defensibility — we’re based in the UK. Launching a new “social app” from here was going to be difficult. This pointed to B2B and e-commerce as well as “location-centric” opportunities such local search
• A product we would use — building a product that scratched our own itch should speed up customer development, and allow us to find similar people to talk to

These weren’t hard and and fast rules — you’ll notice that we kind of broke one of them with the SaaS product we built. There were a lot of ideas that we started with… but eventually we narrowed it down to 3. Here they are:

1. A marketplace for consumers to buy produce (food) direct from the producers (farmers)
2. A tool to help teams build better software
3. A platform to allow businesses to easily set up subscription e-commerce offerings

#2 Measure and track progress

Each idea had an owner… a champion, and they could draw on the skills of the other team members… we built lean canvases to outline each business and identify risks that needed mitigating and assumptions that needed proving.

We wrote down the key question or risk factor we were trying to answer — just one for each idea at a time. We were turning assumptions into facts

To do this we built landing pages, talked to potential customers, suppliers, tested competitor offerings, integrated with APIs... We learnt a lot! Do you know the difference between a cow, heifer and beast?

After a few weeks two of the ideas were losing momentum. This happened as we found feasible alternatives and some barriers that required more time / money to solve. We began to focus more of our time on the “tool to help teams build software”… A problem we’d experienced at previous companies.

#3 Start talking to customers — now!

So we’d begun focusing on just one idea “a tool to help teams build software”. More specifically we were interested in solving the challenges of turning company strategy into lines of code.

As we were scratching our own itch, we knew we had a least one potential customer but we needed to speak to more people… We started “customer development”; the process of talking to potential customers to understand their problems, how they solved them and how we might offer a solution. Here are a couple of simple tips we learnt along the way:

• Validate the problem, not the idea. This is can be very hard as you’re often keen to tell them about your great idea. Early on you’re trying to find out if there is a problem worth solving
• Check for facts not opinions. Don’t ask if they would use your hypothetical product but ask how they do something today and how much the pay for solution

Start doing this now! Even before you build anything…

This will be an ongoing process for us as we iterate towards finding a scalable, repeatable business model…

#4 Don’t build more wheels — building on the shoulders of giants

Don’t reinvent the wheel. The internet is full of wheels… and most of them have APIs. Email sign-up? Just use Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin + Sendgrid/Mailchimp. In fact it’s getting even easier with what I’d call “feature-as-a-service” providers (you heard it here first). These can be stitched together with API keys e.g. Subscription e-commerce?Just use Chargify + Shopify + Stripe… (that’s why we stopped idea 3 BTW).

These products might not be perfect for you business forever.. but they’re probably perfect for you now. When time and money are your scarcest resource.

The other benefit of building on top of platforms can be distribution & audience… having a ready established community of users can lower barriers to sign-up when convincing new customers to give you a try.

Here’s what we used:

• GitHub — a platform for collaborative software development. It brings a ready established user base of over 4.5m users. It also has a great API that has allowed us to offer collaboration and ticket management with minimal development work
• Chargify — a service to manage subscriptions. Free trials, coupons, it’s all there
• Stripe — a simple payment gateway to take card payments. Getting a merchant account, payment service provider integration could have taken weeks!

#5 Build quicker — with modern tools for rapid development

The platforms above gave us the building blocks for our first product but it was new development frameworks that gave us the tools to build something polished quickly.

UX and design are critical in digital products today… even B2B. We use software every day, on laptops, tablets and mobiles… but it’s not easy to make things work… keeping things simple and easy to use. Simple things like making your site work well on mobile used to take days or weeks…

Luckily, large tech companies and the huge community of open source developers have been working hard to make other developer’s lives easier. Tools that were developed in-house have been open sourced. Here are a few that we’ve been using and how they helped:

1. Angular JS — a Javascript framework developed by Google. This has allowed us to build a rich client side app that leverages MVC, data binding and AJAX to enable a better separation of concerns, faster development and a richer user experience.
2. LESS — simple and flexible CSS allowing us to make global styling changes very easily
3. Twitter Bootstrap — a front end framework to speed up web development… it allowed the entire team contribute to prototyping ideas (even me as a newbie coder). This really streamlined our iteration process

What next?

So, that’s a quick run through of how we built TaskTub.com in 60 days whilst running an agency. Now the hard work really begins… our next test is focused on customer acquisition!

Thanks to Piotr, @lpsoltys and @glennawalker‎ for all their hard work over the last few weeks…