Launching a SaaS product
By: Danail Hadjiatanasov
Tags: Software Product, Software, Guides And Tutorials, Startup, SaaS

Build yourself a roadmap

Now that you have some ideas about the customer base, and you have decided that your product is worthy of being sold, you can focus on building a roadmap.

Goal, Mission and Statement

One of the first things that you should do is to identify a goal. For instance, let’s assume your goal is to get a $5000 profit every month. This is not a random figure. You should calculate the figure by aligning the price with the value of the product.

Once you have done that, you should focus on the mission of your company. It is something that should be simple and on the landing page so everyone can remember it. For instance, try to do it Nike style. Don’t mention the product. Just what the brand stands for.

Your positioning statement should also be here, and ideally, not something that is less than 5 attributes. Remember, the positioning statement must only pass three tests. It must be something that the customer wants; it must be something that you can deliver and of course, it should be better and different from the competitors.

The goal here is to make it so simple that a potential user can understand the basic concept of what you are offering in a matter of seconds.

Month 1

Now that you have covered the basics, you should provide the product for free to customers for life. This could help you with the growth of the software product. It could also help you get more customers. These existing customers can tell their friends and family about your products, and before you know it, you have a vast customer base. Remember, it pays to have existing customers talk about your business. It is much easier for the business to grow that way.

Of course, you can also try the formula of viral growth and see how it goes from there. Your customer base will grow exponentially by networking, collaborating, and sharing stuff on social media platforms. At this time, you should focus on community building.

Building a community requires a clear mission, openness, and regular interaction with people. Once you do that, more people will hear about the product and want to use it. Bear in mind, when you are building a community, it can become difficult to maintain the quality and you should set up strict standards at your earliest to prevent this stuff from happening. If in the event, you are having trouble building a community because you do not have enough audience members, you can always bootstrap from a common group of followers. It will get easier from there. At this point, you can just promote your landing page on Reddit or Quora as a thread and see how people respond. Remember, avoid promoting the product on startup business; it will ruin your credibility. Perhaps when you have established yourself, you can do so.

Month 2

Here, you can beta test with 100 users and launch the customer referrals scheme. For instance, you could ask your customer to refer people, and those who do will not have to fees for three years. You should also look into the practice of community building. This time, you could promote on Instagram. The trick is to show the results, not the product. Keep it like Nike. On Twitter, you could have ads targeted at the Instagram channel where you are showing your results.

Month 3

Dig a little deeper. Analyze how many people are going through your ads and then tweak accordingly. You should also answer questions like ‘Are the customers happy? Are we happy? What can we do to make it better?’ you’ll get your answers and will be able to improve more there.

Month 4

Here, your focus should be on marketing. Focus on building content to help customers perform better. You could also reach out to influencers and offer your products for free. You also have the option of giving them without tax. Go strong on your engagement game on Twitter and Instagram and get a stronger customer base.

Month 5

You can focus on giving freebies, books with optimization tricks or some other kind of giveaway. Your aim should be to nurture the clients so that they will be there for the long run. You could also select some users and feature the success stories to become more integrated with the product.

Scaling

There is really no generic solution for scaling. If you are at this point you should go and check what has worked for you in the past months in terms of customer acquisition channels and focus on those. Remember you don’t need to higher people in order to scale you will be surprised how much more you can accomplish by keeping your operation lean.

Last words

Yes, it might seem impossible to launch a SaaS product, but you will see it paying off. Just follow the steps, and you’ll get there!