Marketing is one of the hardest parts of growing a SaaS business

I feel marketing is one of the hardest parts of growing a SaaS business. Compared to engineering or sales, there are just so many more pieces that you need to get right. And most of these are fuzzy pieces, not black or white.

You have to get the attention of prospects who might be a good fit for your product. You have to get the messaging right, you have to get the timing right, and most importantly you have to get the channel right. A channel where a lot of your prospects are hanging out, yet is not so competitive that you cannot acquire users profitably. Once you get them to click, they land on your website where you need to expand on your value proposition in seconds, build trust with them and convince them to sign up. All of this while they have four competitor tabs, a notification on the phone and a colleague competing for attention. Once they have signed up, you have to get them to see the value immediately, tell them they are seeing value, convince them how you are better than the competition and hopefully they will convert to a paying customer. Get any of these pieces wrong and it can become a big barrier to your growth.

And this is only if you are looking to grab hold of the market that is actively looking for a product like yours. If you want to go after a bigger market share or are in an emerging market, you need to educate the market and build the need for a product like yours. You either need to create content that is really helpful and differentiated, buy ads, do a lot of events, or maybe some combination of all of them. There isn’t really one well-defined sure-shot way to go about this.

And this is not it. You also need to get the marketing backbone in place. The marketing technology, operations and team. You need to be able to track your funnel end to end. You need to pass on your leads to sales team with a qualification criteria you both agree on. You need to be up-to-date with the latest tools that can help you deliver better user experiences, the latest channels that can help you stand out. You need to build and train the right team, you need to keep them motivated while they are dealing with this beast of a challenge.

This is not easy. And I feel it’s one of the biggest reasons why a lot of promising SaaS businesses are not able to reach their full potential, or take a lot longer to get there than they should trying to figure out this complex beast. This is more pronounced if you are not in the Valley and don’t have access to experienced people who can guide you.

To be fair, I am not saying that there is no advice to be had if you are outside the Valley. There are great SaaS blogs from founders, executives and investors that you can learn a lot from. There are good answers on Quora and other communities where people share their experiences. There are conferences like SaaStr dedicated to SaaS. And of course, you can reach out to industry experts and get advice over email

But they either cost a lot of time or money, give you generic advice which might be meant for a different stage and generally do not take your context into account which gets all the more important as you are scaling up.

Get SaaS marketing advice from experts over calls

To solve for it, I am building something called MonkHD. It is a platform where you can get on calls with SaaS marketing experts to get tailored advice to your marketing questions over calls paid by the hour. The experts come from popular SaaS companies like HubSpot and Zendesk, or are experts in specific areas like positioning, pricing, marketing automation, analytics etc.

The model is inspired from Clarity.fm which I found very valuable as I was trying to learn about different markets. I learnt so much more on 30-min calls with experts compared to days of reading blog posts and articles. I could get answers to the specific questions I had with my specific context. I also got to know ground realities of the market which people don’t talk about in blog posts or conference presentations.

There are two key differences, however. The first is that Clarity is meant for startup advice whereas MonkHD is meant for advice for growing companies, which is harder to find. I don’t have a rock solid definition of a growing company but if I had to put revenue numbers to it, I would say somewhere between $500K to $25MM ARR. The second difference is that Clarity is meant for startup advice across the entire spectrum whereas MonkHD is focused on SaaS marketing so you can find answers to those really long tail questions that you just can’t find advice on elsewhere.

If you are a growing SaaS company (especially outside the Valley) and have marketing challenges that are becoming a barrier to your growth, you should give it a shot. Hit me up at sanket@monkhd.com and let me know the expert you want to talk to or the questions you need advice on. (If all goes well, I will automate a lot of this and make this experience much smoother).

And if you have any feedback or advice, please send that my way as well. These are early days, so it all helps 🙂