Launching a SaaS

What are the key stumbling blocks?

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Launching a SaaS, especially out a consultancy, is complicated because there are so many moving parts. Here are the most common things that can trip you up (and what you can do to try and navigate them).

Broadly, it’s split into three areas: the decision to get going; the launch; and scale post-launch.

01. Getting Started

These are the things I see happening (and some of them I was guilty of myself):

Fear of the Unknown

The easiest thing to do when an opportunity presents itself is nothing. We do it all the time. Why start something now when you can put it off for a few months?

My advice is that if you have ambitions to create a product, just start the ball rolling. You don’t have to commit to anything beyond what you feel comfortable with. Start with creating a plan and see how that feels (don’t forget to validate the idea): then spec out your MVP, then try to get to your first 10 customers… etc. You can get off at any point if things don’t look like they are panning out as you’d hoped.

Failure to Validate

We built 15 products, sold four of them and then launched the big one, ScreenCloud, which eclipsed everything else we ever did. But that still means that of the 15 we launched, 10 were flops. One of the reasons they failed was that we didn’t do any real validation. We once spent over a year building a product that not a single customer even saw, let alone bought. I wrote about this here.

You can validate your product idea before you even write a line of code. Either read Chapter 5 of my book, or reach out to me if you want to know how.

Failure to launch

What’s worse than failure to validate? Failure to launch at all. I mean, we didn’t validate and still managed to get four minor hits and one major success. But if there’s one thing guaranteed to lead to failure, it’s not launching at all.

I get it. Nobody wants to launch something and get egg on their face. Or launch something with a big fanfare and then just hear crickets. But being 99% there is the very worst place you can be. You’ve put in almost all the effort (and the time and money that equates to) and had zero return.

As long as the product does what it’s supposed to do (ie it’s not broken or completely deficient in the core service it’s delivering), then just launch it already! Seriously, what are you waiting for? You don’t have to have completed your entire product roadmap on Day 1. You don’t have to have the perfect marketing website. You don’t even have to have mitigated against every use case you can think of.

“What if someone logs in with multiple fake email addresses just to extend their free trial?”. So what if they do? If it happens, deal with it. At least they care enough to set up lots of free trials. That’s much, MUCH better than nobody ever seeing your product.

Just launch it. Now.

02. Launch

You got your MVP and you dragged it kicking and screaming to life. But it’s not really getting much in the way of traction. Why does this normally happen?

Not positioning it properly

Even though buying a product is often not a big expense, it can seem frustrating when someone who is a prime target, just won’t hand over their credit card. It might well be that they just don’t get what you’re selling. Or perhaps more importantly, they don’t get why they should care: what your product is going to do for them.

Sometimes it can be as simple as the messaging being more about the product, or worse, the company behind the product, rather than what the product will do for them. As an agency owner you might be used to talking about your company because your priority has always been to credentialize what it is you do. for example:

“We’re the world’s leading digital demand generation agency”

But when it comes to product, the customer is less worried about who you think you are and more interested in what they get out of any engagement with you.

“Generate double the leads in half the time”

You get the difference, right?

Not being focused

When you’ve just launched something that has contributed precisely zilch in revenue, you may be limited on how much time and money you can throw at it until it’s proven itself.

At the same time, you don’t have any real data about who’s going to really love it. In your attempt to justify the product to your colleagues you might have listed all the different types of customer who would benefit from it.

”It could be used by schools, shops, restaurants, bars and offices.”

And yes, if you were huge you could develop Go-To-Market plans for each of them. But with your finite resources you probably need to pick one to start with. Ideally you would figure this out before you launch, but it may be your initial job is just to get the product out there and see where it’s resonating the most. Once you get that, double down. Really go for it. Update your website so it’s focused on that niche. You worry will be that you are turning away other audiences, but what you want to avoid is feeling so generic that nobody feels it’s for them.

As Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross say, you have to ‘nail a niche’. Get your niche sorted, then worry about all of the adjacent markets you could appeal to.

03. Scale

You got your MVP and you dragged it kicking and screaming to life. You’ve made some sales, but it’s not really getting much in the way of traction. Why does this normally happen?

Not positioning it properly

See above. If you’ve sold your SaaS to anyone (who wasn’t already a contact), then you have some differentiated value. Someone has chosen you over the alternatives. The key is to figure why they care so much.

Product Market Fit

As I wrote about recently, Product Market Fit is the key to scale. It’s something you have to strive to unlock. And it’s, annoyingly, a constantly moving set of goalposts.

Go-To-Market

The way you attract leads, the methods you use to convert them, how much they pay, their onboarding process and their potential to tell their peers about you. It’s a massive subject of course, but a first step would be to break it all down to its component parts and make an honest assessment of each. Where are you strongest? Which bits need the most attention?

Scaling your product is the hardest part, but it’s also important to understand that it may be that something is misfiring. Fix it (or more likely, fix them) and you could see a rapid inflection point.