SaaS ‘Lessons’ from Yoda
A Star Wars post that we can’t can’t stop ourselves from not writing
From cereal boxes to chop sabers. Sleeping suits to themed fruits. The craze of Star Wars has crept into almost everything that you can (or can’t even) think of.
But honestly, we feel a little sad for leaving the SaaS world behind. So here’s the obligatory Star Wars post for SaaS businesses.
Yoda might have been the Jedi Master. But turns out he was also a SaaS superstar. His pearls of wisdom although could make grammar nazis cringe, were inspiring enough to bring out the knight in Luke.
If you’re running a SaaS business, here are a few pointers that you should borrow from the master mentor — Yoda.
Build or buy — There’s no try
Ah! A Yoda classic.
As a SaaS business, there are a lot of additional functions that you would have to take care of. Now you might have the best developers in your team who can build off all the tools over a weekend’s hack night. But is your developer working on the items that matter?
May the force be with your customer
You simply can’t overlook customer success. Chuck all the 87 other metrics that you’re looking at. This is the only metric that matters.
“The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is”
SaaS pricing is all about transparent pricing and trust. And nothing breaks trust more than a sneaky upgrade in pricing, without proper communication. Although it might seem tempting to step towards the dark side, keep up your promise, grandfather your prices forever, and give customers sufficient notice.
“If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are… a different game you should play”
This one’s pretty obvious. Experiment you must. From your welcome email, to your sign up flow, pricing and even your exit flow. There’s no fixed recipe.
“Judge me by my size, do you?”
It doesn’t matter if you have to take on the Salesforces or the Oracles of the world. If you have the right solution to solve your customer’s pain, you can carve your own niche. It’s not a Winner Takes All in SaaS.
“Patience you must have my young, padawan”
Nobody said it better than Gail Goodman of Constant Contact in this blog “The Long Slow SaaS ramp of death”.
Thanks for reading this. End this post we must.
Fin.
Anusha Murthy is a product marketer at Chargebee. You’ll find her writing about the lessons, observations, and stories on the business of SaaS on the Chargebee blog.
