5 solid tips for early stage SaaS
Being at the helm of a SaaS company is a fun, exciting time. You’ve created something from nothing, still have a head full of dreams, and aspirations of making it big.
But you only know what you already know, here are some tips to help keep you moving up the ladder
1. Start tracking everything, now
You don’t need to know what you want to do with the data yet, but get into the practice of tracking every little thing. You’ll thank yourself 6 months down the track when you decide for example you want to uncover what the key tasks users take that lead to a converting customer versus those that don’t.
If you’ve already got 6 months worth of data, you’ve got something to make a decision on now, rather than implementing some analytics then waiting for enough data to roll in to make a data backed decision.
If you’re unsure how or what to track straight away, look at using something like Heap, they automatically track all user interaction, and you can create reports much later down the track. It’s a great way to uncover trends that you would never have initially thought to measure. We’ve found it truely useful.
2. Learn to say no
In the early days, every customer you get is a celebration. That feeling doesn’t go away, it just changes. You start getting bigger and bigger customers coming on board and trusting you.
But all throughout this period, you’ll be tempted to bend over backwards and do anything to get the next customer, including making changes to your product just for them.
Don’t do it.
While it is true that at the early stages you should do things that don’t scale, this doesn’t mean build technical debt.
The only time you should be making updates to your product (particularly for customers that aren’t paying you yet) is if you can see that it makes total sense for your existing or future customers to also use.
You don’t need to bluntly say no if you’re worried about offending, just let the customer know that it’s a good suggestion but not a fit right now, and that you’ll keep them in the loop should that change in future or others request the same feature.
3. Price according to your value, not your expenses
A potential customer doesn’t care what your server costs are, or staff, or third party services. They care about the value you’re going to provide them. And often, it’s more than you think… provided you can deliver what you promise.
The folks over at Price Intelligently have put together a pretty detailed eBook on the topic of pricing your product, definitely worth checking out.
4. Customer education is critical
You might think your service is easy to understand and master, but that’s because you know it from every angle. Your customers don’t.
If you want your site visitor sign up to your service, they need to understand what you do and how you operate well enough to be intrigued into trying it out for themselves.
Once they’ve registered though, you’ve still got a lot to do in educating them on how to use your service to its highest potential.
If you want any hope of converting them to a paid customer and staying that way, you must educate them. Simply having a knowledge base isn’t enough, what good is support content if nobody reads it?
Instead, the right help needs to be instantly accessible in context, right at the point of friction or confusion. If this still isn’t enough to get them past a roadblock, an assisted support channel should be available as a last chance fallback.
Contextual customer education just so happens to be the area that we at elevio have put enormous effort into solving, and wrapping up in a neat platform companies of any size can use to improve their customer education and drop their support loads, I recommend without shame that you check it out.
5. Finally, have fun and look after yourself
If what you’re working on does well, there’s every chance that this will be what you work on for the next 10 years of your life. You have to be comfortable with that.
This venture needs to be something you genuinely get joy from working on and solving. If it’s not, then when the tough times come (and they will come) it’s going to be incredibly hard to stay motivated.
There’s a lot of research out there that confirms that simply taking time for yourself to relax, contemplate, and generally be well not only has a positive impact on your happiness, but it’s also during these times that you think clearer and in a more inventive way.
When it’s in play mode the mind is more creative, use that to your advantage and give it the environment it needs to thrive.
A great book that goes through the benefits of looking after yourself without getting too new age, is The Happiness Track by Emma Seppala.
After all, what’s the worst that could come from looking after yourself?
