Building a Deals Marketplace: What We Learned from the SaaSBF Launch
By: Ovi Negrean
Tags: Black Friday, Marketplaces, Black Friday Deals, Marketing, Lessons Learned

TL;DR:

What went well:

The Outreach process — via email, Slack & Facebook Groups, DMs,

Including over 100+ participants in the first edition, 5M+ emails sent from the participants,

Great feedback when it comes to generated sales.

What went bad (/not smoothly):

Designing the Marketplace in WebFlow,

Not having all the participants actually promote the Marketplace,

Not being able to honor all post-deadline applications.

Improvements:

Use more automation for repetitive tasks,

Use commitment contracts for all participants,

Outreach & Plan with 2 months ahead.

Intro

Marketplaces offer one of the easiest, fastest & most convenient ways to shop online by having several choices at hand. Not only those marketplaces have competitive prices available on products/ tools/ services, but their simplicity and utility also enable sellers to connect to possible buyers in a new way.

No wonder more and more consumers have come to prefer marketplaces in the past years, compared to doing their own research and comparing prices on everything that’s available online. Marketplaces are their secret shopping weapons in terms of curated tools and deals.

That’s why we, at SocialBee, created SaaS Black Friday, a marketplace that brought together 100+ tools with Black Friday Discounts. The total shared-audience of all our participants exceeded the 10-million milestone we only dreamt of when setting goals and expectations.

One of our secrets was that we dared to “go for it”, even if:

1. We had one month to put it all together, 2. We never worked in a website-building tool like WebFlow, 3. We didn’t have all the contacts we needed at our fingertips, 4. We never managed over 100+ participants under such circumstances, 5. We knew we’d make mistakes along the way.

Launching the marketplace during Black Friday turned out to be extremely beneficial, as almost everyone had already prepared a deal with specific landing pages — talk about convenience at its finest!

We wanted our participants to promote it to their list as it was possible to be done without great effort, and there’s power in numbers, and by supporting the marketplace they were able to support themselves.

The main reason why we decided to launch the Marketplace was exactly that, to be able to help many businesses at once through a simple solution that would not require extensive resources from their side. Happily, SaaS Black Friday was able to bring together businesses of all sizes, kinds, and industries for a shared-cause. Not to mention that it has been a tough year for most businesses and we thought it would be a win-win for everyone.

In this article, we’ll show you what it took to build, launch, and manage a Marketplace of this size during Black Friday. We had available one month to:

Put it all together, To mobilize one and a half people from our Marketing Department.

Research

Before we started working on the Marketplace, we needed to know what has been done so far in terms of Marketplaces. Three of the best Marketplace we knew of served as the main inspiration for building our own marketplace:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Newton

By being included before in several Marketplaces with SocialBee, we knew that one of the drawbacks of having several tools gathered together would be that some of them will get more exposed than others in terms because of their placement.

That’s why we decided we should have 3 levels of visibility, Gold, Silver, and Bronze.

The levels were the equivalent of the position the tools would get in the Marketplace. In order to decide how to assign participants to their level we took into consideration:

Size of the mailing list that was about to be emailed, Willingness to promote — either through a dedicated newsletter/ as a mention, Frequency of promoting between November 23 and November 30.

Once we had a clear organizational structure we worked on the Application Landing Page and Form. We used a Google Form to collect the answers and export them in a Google Spreadsheet.

Branding

At first, we needed to define the Branding for our project so we can move to express it visually.

We wanted the Marketplace to be a stand-alone brand, compared to a “SocialBee Black Friday Marketplace” because our vision for it was to be a fair, unbiased, and open marketplace for anyone who wants to join. Even if it meant direct competitors of SocialBee.

Naming

We wanted the Name of the Marketplace to be:

Short & simple,

Easy to memorate

Suggestive, even self-explanatory.

SaaS Black Friday was the name that had all these attributes.

Visual Identity

We gave free hand to our designer when it comes to colors, logo, main banner, and logo.

He went for a space-based theme, using different shades of the following Colors Palettes: Blue, Purple, Red, and Yellow.

Branded colors for SaaS Black Friday.

Logo of SaaS Black Friday.

Web Design

Webflow

We used Webflow for the Design of the Apply Page and the Marketplace itself. For anyone working in WebFlow for the first time, who does not have some background in HTML & CSS, the learning curve can be a potential challenge, but not impossible.

Having advanced experience only in Divi, Elementor, and WordPress, this was our case, therefore, our Designer needed to allocate extra hours to understand WebFlow’s specifics.

There were several reasons why we decided to go with WebFlow and not with a WordPress site, some of them included:

1. Design freedom:

We knew we would need our Developer to help out with the website if we were to go with WordPress, while with WebFlow we were able to start from canvas and even use some templates we later on customized, without code or plugins.

2. Traffic overload:

A high traffic spike could have made the website fail. Even if we had an approximate predicted number of visitors for each day, precisely predicting the timing and magnitude of traffic spikes was difficult to nail down.

3. Easier to maintain:

What we needed was something extremely flexible to maintain and even drop easier if the project wouldn’t have turned our a success.

What you also need to know about Webflow is that they have certain limitations when it comes to their plans. What was of extreme importance to us was the number of monthly visits we’d get for our plan. Other than that, the pricing is fairly affordable, starting at $15/ Month.

We wanted a visual representation inside the Marketplace of the three levels we previously mentioned, and offer certain benefits of being part of a certain level. This way, we were able to motivate more participants to put in more resources to promote the marketplace in exchange for a higher position. Having unique and personalized designs for Silver and Gold, made a big difference and elevated the marketplace.

The participants that were attributed to Gold had a full row to themselves to add a logo, an extended description about themselves, a description of the deal, a CTA button, and a banner image/ video, additionally to a branded background color.

The participants that were attributed to Silver had a 1/2 of a full row to themselves to add a logo, a medium description about themselves, a description of the deal, a CTA button, a smaller banner image, additionally to a branded background color.

The participants that were attributed to Bronze had 1/3 of a full row to themselves to add a logo, a short description, a description of the deal, and a CTA button.

Once we were ready with the Web Versions for our pages, we worked on optimizing them for Mobile and Tablet visualization.

You can see the final results here:

The Apply Page Here: https://saasbf-apply.webflow.io/,

The Marketplace here: https://saasbf.com/.

Website Setup

Google Analytics

In order to track the traffic on the Marketplace, we’ve integrated a new Google Analytics account we created for the Marketplace, by adding Google Universal Analytics Tracking ID.

Here’s a step-by-step article on how to set up your Google Analytics account: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009694?hl=en

Domain

We used NameCheap to purchase the Domain: saasbf.com. Then, we connected the Custom Domain in WebFlow which was fairly easy to do by following their Help Documentation.

Zapier

For the Application Page, we added a “Subscribe to get notified once the marketplace is live ” Section. In order to move the people who subscribed to our

We used Zapier to connect Webflow to our Email Provider, Drip, where we’ve also created a new account to store all email addresses related to SaaS Black Friday. Here’s the already-made Zap from Zapier to put together such integration: https://zapier.com/apps/webflow/integrations.

Outreach

We went multi-channel in terms of outreach. That’s why we used:

1-on-1 outreach for participants we badly wanted to be part of our Marketplace,

Posts on Slack Communities and Facebook Groups for general promotion.

In order to keep track of our outreach efforts, we create a spreadsheet with contact information and details about the participants, and we kept updating it. We obtained some of the contacts by using Hunter, RocketReach, and LinkedIn with Phantombuster.

The messages we used varied depending on the channel where we reached out. For DMs and emails, we tried a more personal approach, while for the Group Posts a more informal tone.

Some of the messages we used.

We had Google Docs with templates for everything that helped us do the work fast and efficiently. Additionally, whenever we saw that a question was asked by several people, we would add the question to our FAQ section on the website, and/ or create a canned response giving the answer to that particular question.

In terms of email follow-ups, we counted on Streak — CRM for Gmail to make sure our emails were seen and replied to. We had over 500+ emails sent specifically in regards to SaaS Black Friday. There were general emails announcing major steps/ To-Dos for the participants, follow-up emails where we received no answer/ where they said they’ll join but haven’t, or emails to support and motivate the participants to promote the Marketplace to their lists.

What we would do differently here is making sure there are more resources available where we can direct people that touch upon almost every little detail. Rather than preparing an extremely long email to cover everything that needed to be said, a landing page/ folder available for everyone to access would have been best.

Moreover, one of the main causes of received a bigger influx of emails was because we weren’t explicit and clear that all participants need to promote the marketplace to their lists as a condition to join.

Partnership management

Once we had our first positive responses and the Application Form filled out, we were on a mission to support as much as possible our participants.

Email 1: We confirmed their participation in the Marketplace and shared the Timeline for the following weeks so that they can plan internally all that was needed from their side.

Email 2: We announced their placement in the Marketplace based on their promised promotion efforts and sent them a private Link to the First Draft of the Marketplace. Additionally, we sent a link for the Swipe Files, where they were able to find creatives and copy ideas for their newsletter and social media.

Having a set of materials ready for our participants was extremely important and helpful to the great majority, we even had people asking for a link to more resources earlier than we anticipated.

Since the Marketplace went live on November 23, and Black Friday started only on November 27, we informed all the participants that it would be beneficial to have their offer available earlier.

Email 3: We notified everyone that the Marketplace went live and that everyone will start sending traffic to it. Something that was of extreme importance was using “=ref” for each participants’ like, this way we were able to see concrete results coming in from each participant and their level of commitment.

Moreover, we created sheets with the dates and hours our participants decided to send their newsletter/s, just to make sure the promotion is well-balanced throughout the week.

On this note, 50,8% of participants (from a total of 124 participants) promoted the Marketplace to their lists, either to their full list or only a segment of it, through a dedicated newsletter and/or a mention inside one of their usual newsletters. In the future, we might consider using contracts to make sure we filter and include participants that are engaged and interested in such a model.

We wanted to be involved and present for them, whether it was feedback and inspiration on the Landing Pages, sharing Swipe Files, help on defining their final offer, and so on.

Launching the Marketplace

The Marketplace was live between November 23, until November 30. Before being officially live, we did the final checks for everything, and made sure we had affirmative answers to the following questions:

Are our participants’ profiles correct and complete?

Are there any last-minute changes coming in from our participants?

Is everyone to whom we confirmed their participation in the marketplace included?

Are the Web, Tablet, and Mobile versions of the Marketplace in proper shape?

Is Google Analytics functioning properly?

But the most important question of them all when you’re launching anything, where we wanted a negative answer….

“Did we forget anything?…”

Launching on Product Hunt

As we wanted an extra push for the Marketplace and therefore more exposure for the participants, we decided to launch the Marketplace on Product Hunt.

As this wasn’t our first time launching on Product Hunt, we just went back on one of our Extended Guides on How to Launch on Product Hunt published on Foundr, and did extra research to see any changes that may have occurred ever since.

We launched on Product Hunt and got over 100+ upvotes in less than an hour. We emailed our participants about it, started mobilizing everyone on our contact list, post on all the groups dedicated to Product Hunt Launches, and more.

All seem to go perfectly until…it hit us:

SaaS Black Friday doesn’t appear on “Popular” on Product Hunt, even if we got a solid boost in a short amount of time and it was steadily growing.

The answer to our question was easily found out: Product Hunt blocks access to “Popular” to such Marketplaces, as they have their own Marketplace they want to bring forward. That being said, we still got some traction from Product Hunt, but not as much as we would have hoped for.

Monitoring the Marketplace

Each day, several times a day we checked our Inboxes and Google Analytics, just to make sure everything goes smoothly. The frequency of doing it and the speed of our response time were the two attributes that helped us manage the big influx of emails that we were getting each day.

What also helped us was snoozing email, using labels, updating the spreadsheet with all the participants with canned info so we can contact them in bulk if needed certain participants.

Managing the new influx of new applications

As the Marketplace got launched, we started getting lots of emails per day with people wanting to join at the last minute. This burdened in a way our capacity of managing everyone. On one side we had current participants that needed to be helped, and also a limited amount of time to onboard everyone.

We weren’t able to honor all the requests we had after the marketplace was launched, as our main priority throughout the weeks was to be there for the participants 100%, unconditionally.

👉👉👉 What we learned here is that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Wrapping Up

After the Marketplace Closed we created an internal report on how all went. The main metrics we looked at were: pageviews, unique page views, and traffic split by source.

We analyzed for each participant their involvement and commitment to promoting the Marketplace and emailed everyone with our findings.

👉👉👉 One of the main conclusions regarding the principle of the Marketplace — that everyone will promote it to their list as well, was that for our next edition we might use contracts to make everyone keep their promise and have a fair place for our participants.

Part of wrapping up the Marketplace was also asking for feedback from our participants. Where we weren’t extremely proficient was in making it extremely clear for everyone that the condition to join the Marketplace is to promote the Marketplace to your own mailing list.

Without the participants that promoted it to their list, the Marketplace wouldn’t have had the success it reached. Once again, having great partners by your side is key!

Thank you! We were very happy with the outcome. Thanks for the opportunity. Congratulations on putting the marketplace in place. Great job!

David, Founder & CEO at BIGVU

Awesome, thank you guys for organizing that marketplace. That’s all about leadership and you did your job well!

Refat, CEO at SpreadSimple

Thanks for letting us take part in the Marketplace! Hope to collaborate again in the future.

Anastasia, Marketing Manager at Chanty

The experience was great! We also got some new customers from the promotion. Thanks so much!

Christopher, Founder & CEO at Woorise

That was an awesome idea and realization! Congratulations 🎉We’d like to participate next year. Count us in next time.

Mary, Content Manager at Chatfuel

It was a pleasure collaborating with you! We’d be happy to collaborate with you next year.

Lidia, PR and Outreach Specialist at HelpCrunch

Conclusion

We have big plans for next year’s edition, now that we have all these learnings at hand. While some choose to see those as shortages, we chose to see them as opportunities to grow, learn, and help other businesses in the process as well.

As our final words, we want to thank all our participants for trusting us on this journey and for making this Marketplace possible.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

See you next year, SaaS Black Friday Team

P.S. Some of our learnings will be implemented next year in the second edition of the marketplace. Stay tuned!