The Productive Solopreneur — On SaaS businesses
Tools to help you continuously improve your SaaS business model, and what it actually takes to run a SaaS business.
Thoughts in this article are a reflection on personal process to build, continuously improve and operate a SaaS business, as a side hustle, most of the time on auto-pilot.
This blog is a part of “The Productive Solopreneur”, a series of articles about tools that help Solopreneurs to stay sane and productive. If you are more into technical stuff, read “AppEconomy” series instead.
Every business is different, I hope though that ideas expressed in this article bring some value to your specific use case.
Ideation
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In addition to being my project management of choice, Trello serves as my idea validation tool. Anything that comes to mind has a card in Trello. Time serves as a tool to elaborate why the idea matters. The frequency at which I revisit the same card serves as an indication that I should elaborate more on same idea. Which sometimes result in a blog post, or start validation if the idea actually matches any existing problem/pain. Likewise, cards that do not make sense as time evolves are removed. Validated problems or cards that still make sense are transferred to Github task as Issues (as stories/jtbd), and prioritized for implementation.
Pain
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Identifying pain comes either as ideas, or suggested by my surrounding. By surrounding I mean, people, situations and challenges found in my environment. Identifying a Pain is primordial for starting a new product or improvement during an iteration.
Tasks
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Having a large backlog can kill your product. So I try to keep my backlog small. Fix problems as fast as I can, so that new ideas/pains can find a place within product improvement timeline. Github tasks and Trello cards are really useful with my task management needs.
Build
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Whether building a new product from ground up, or fixing a pain in an existing product, I find it useful to move fast and iterate frequently. That makes sure I have enough time to get timely feedback and move to next pain as soon as possible.
Launch
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Soft launching makes it possible to improve things you failed to fix in earlier versions. Wasting time too long on something users may not love drains not only your energy, but also your pocket. Starting a new project, can start with just a blog post, or interview, or collecting feedback about a problem via polls. A Launch doesn’t always have to be a final product.
Production
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Any production requires smooth operations. Be digital or physical, any product requires anticipation just in case something goes wrong. Car makers always do re-calls when systems are failing. Likewise, digital products require monitoring to anticipate when things may go south, and fix before customers even notice. Therefore logging, traffic/uptime monitoring, security threat detection, backup and recovery plans, payment and reimbursement strategies are some key point to take into account when selling a digital product.
Operations
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Establishing support systems to keep in touch with customers is hallmark. Your product may kick-ass, but failing to support your customers will make you loose them forever. Aside from crafting support documents, and installing bots, human connection always rule.
Scaling
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Build things that do not scale first. But when demand increases, then be ready for supply to follow. Develop for one environment, one customer, whenever the second customer shows up you will know it is time to automate some stuff to make room for the second customer. For example, support one browser or mobile depending on what your customer is using. Concentrate on Chrome browser, if your customer is using Chrome, but when second customer is using Safari then make sure it gets supported asap.
Growth
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Scaling the user base is not the starting point but the result of previously satisfied customers.
Reading list and hacks.
- Prototyping using Google spreadsheet — Turning Google Sheets into a Backend Database
- Prototyping using Google spreadsheet — Using Google Sheets as a database with INSERT/DELETE functionalities
- Prototyping using Google spreadsheet — Spreadsheet CRM: How to Create a Customizable CRM with Google Sheets
