Takeaways on building a SaaS (bootstrap, 300k users, x2.5 YoY)
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I want to share my experience, as well as what the FlowMapp team has learned while product development: Saas, bootstrap, no VC, 4 years, 300k users, x2.5 YoY, team 5→21, Productivity & Design tool (B2B + B2C2B).
I hope these will be useful for makers and teams that are launching now:
1/ Freemium is a must
My opinion about the freemium model is fully shaped by the values of the Product-led Growth strategy.
Being able to use your service for free (even with free plan limits) lowers the threshold for entering the product (no need to pay, no credit card needed, no monitoring the trial period) and creates a wave of organic mentions, recommendations, and shares.
Freemium for us is not only a “function” but a tool for user adoption and acquisition. It allowed us to build a growth model based on organic and WoM drivers.
Please consider freemium as an opportunity for users to test drive your product without any pressure. Users appreciate it.
References: Notion, Slack, Miro, Figma, Dropbox, etc. (explore these freemium models)
How this worked for us: Our paid users before purchase: 95% free plan, 5% 14-day trial.
2/ Onboarding is your infinite point of growth
Onboarding success lies in understanding what tasks your users have and how to deliver value through your product as simply+faster as possible.
Think not about what you want to say, but what your users need to get (what are their pains, challenges).
How this worked for us: Onboarding improvements: demo project, onboarding emails, project examples, explanation videos + tips inside the app, product tour, student and edu plans, external content.
3/ Paid traffic at launch leads to the wrong place
Based on my experience, a strong preoccupation with paid traffic leads to negative long-term effects. If you spend all the resources (time, money, passion) on this “quick audience dopamine,” other channels suffer. Paid sources don’t have the “cumulative” effect that search organics, WoM, content marketing, etc. do.
By launching paid growth channels right away, you lose the opportunity to find out what your early users love and value your product for, which is critical in the early stages of development.
I always recommend leaving paid channels for dessert when conversions, value proposition, and other attributes of a healthy product are optimized and won’t account for 100% of inbound traffic.
Paid traffic is the “fastest” option, but also the least useful in the long run. When the money in the “Facebook Ad Manager” runs out, the music stops.
How this worked for us: Growing to 300k users with a $0 marketing budget.
4/ Design will be even more important in 2024
First of all, I mean product design.
Watching interesting startups, I notice a low UI&UX execution level. It’s a big stopper for user adoption. No-code trend leads us to unprecedented dev speed, but also to template solutions.
We believe that product design is an incredible advantage in an era of competition for user attention.
How this worked for us: One of our early investments was into “clean & simple interface”: easy to understand, pleasant to work with, familiar working patterns. A lot of feedback from the users was followed.
5/ Launch priority is retention, not revenue
At a product launch, the most important thing is early feedback and user experience, not $30 you can earn. What’s more valuable to you?
Don’t be greedy.
You have to try hard to get your first early adopters, please don’t build paywalls before the product.
How this worked for us: We had no sales at the start, but we talked to the first 50 users and it influenced the further movement. We compiled all the feedback into a document, marked it up (product value / feature requests), and adjusted the backlog.
6/ Talk to users every day
You hear it in all the startup sources, but not everyone interprets it correctly. “Communicating with users” is often thought of as complicated UX Research, where you have to find users, make appointments, interview, transcribe the conversation. Not always.
There is a much simpler way.
How this worked for us: My partner and I were the only support managers in the “support department” for 2 years, talking to users daily.
It’s funny, but people who received support help willingly share information: use cases, problems, pain points, feature requests, functional testing.
Bonus: we sell a lot through personal communication (usually a subscription plan increase or entry into the product through a personal promo code).
People come to your therapy room on their own! Don’t try to get rid of this opportunity. Founders working in support get the most valuable data: user behaviour.
7/ Don’t be afraid to ask people to test your product
We have the imposed patterns of successful companies in our heads: automated sales, conversion funnels, segmented traffic, dynamic landing pages, etc. Startups spend a lot of time and resources to create something like this but inevitably fail (it’s impossible in the early stages).
Resources spent → no crowd of users → startup fails ❌
Here’s the secret: to get the first 100 users, all you have to do is ask them for it.
How this worked for us: After the launch, we didn’t hesitate to write directly to potential users (social, email, etc.) offering to test the product (very politely). No ads, campaign settings, funnels, or the like.
Try one of the simplest possible options, it still works.
8/ Start social & communications asap, even before launch
The regular situation: “we’ve been writing code for 10 months, and now it’s release day, 0 visitors, 0 users, f*ck”.
Create a landing page, let users join the waitlist starting the first day, start communicating with the audience, talk about the future product, create content, look for the right audience, create accounts on the right social networks, meet market experts, build lists for beta testing, start doing SEO (it’s a long story).
This will help a lot at launch time.
How this worked for us: We have completely failed at this, so I want to caution you against this kind of behaviour 😂
9/ Support is very very very important. The fast one is a game-changer
I have already touched on this issue above. The prompt and friendly user support is a delight.
And it’s also a completely unobvious promotional factor: wow effect, love, a wave of public reviews, mentions in social networks. People will appreciate your caring (and quick response).
How this worked for us: Solving user problems made up for dozens of annoying bugs at product launch.
10/ Do in-house-only product marketing
No one, ever, under any circumstances will do the marketing work for you at the level you want. Marketing is not a thing you can buy and put on the shelf. Marketing is an experience that has to be accumulated within the team. Grow the knowledge, find ways to improve, invent, test and reinvent.
Changing another freelancer/agency always means only one thing — you’re back at 0.
No money for a marketer? Well, congratulations, you’re a bootstrap founder, which means you have to do it yourself.
How this worked for us: We have experienced several generations of marketing strategies in all areas (content, SEO, SMM, etc.), but the important thing is that all have been lived, stored in an information base (Notion) and each next step was more effective than the previous one.
Okay, okay, except SMM :)
11/ Develop an A/B testing system from the beginning (“flag-function”)
The ability to experiment with functionality within Saas is a critical factor in the logical development of the product. The parallel distribution of people into cohorts allows a balanced view of the value of the functionality being tested (frequency of use, usefulness, necessity, effectiveness).
How this worked for us: Unfortunately, we are developing it only now. Why didn’t anyone tell us to implement it right after EVP? It would have saved us 2 years, hundreds of dev hours, the load on the system, money and nerves.
Please take care of this in advance.
