Start-up SaaS Growth Hacks

31 Aug

Here’s a list for you

I was talking this week to an agency CEO with product aspirations and he asked me. “what do you think about copying successful SaaS products, but just doing it better and cheaper?” It got me thinking about the tactics that early-stage SaaS businesses can use to compete against incumbents.

Incidentally, ‘better usability’ and ‘cheaper’ aren’t differentiated values. If that’s all you’ve got going for you, you may score a short-lived tactical advantage, but it’s not a long-term strategy. Having said that, making sure your product looks great and being competitive with your pricing is an obvious place to start during your nascent phase. But what other things can a start-up SaaS do to get ahead when they don’t have massive budgets? Here are some ideas.

Niche

Being deliberately targeted is a good strategy. It allows you to really get your product right and is a more efficient way to deploy limited time and resources.

Focus on one vertical to begin with. Make your public face all about that vertical. If you’re a lawyer and you have a choice between a product you’ve heard of that can be used by anyone and an unknown product designed especially for lawyers, you’ll at least consider the specialist one. After all, it’s been designed with you in mind.
Keep your functionality paired down. Early stage your features will likely be fairly limited anyway. But rather than pretend that you’re something you’re not, make a public point of it. Boast about how basic your product is: it does these key three things really well. An incumbent might be able to do 100x more, but nobody wants to feel like they are paying for stuff they don’t need. Focus on getting the core value to be the best it can be.
Write about your vertical. Talk about your vertical. Create webinars about challenges unique to your vertical. It doesn’t mean you can’t go for adjacent markets down the line, but for now, do everything you can to get in front of your niche target.

Be generous (not cheap)

Yes, your pricing can be competitive, but you don’t want to come across as desperate. Here’s some other things you can do,

Offer really generous affiliate deals. If someone is going to bring you customers, to begin with, why not make their cut so generous that they can’t stop thinking about how to get you more customers? You can always change the offer down the line (make it clear that is what your intention is).
Same goes for resellers and partners. Don’t penny pinch in the early days. Customers are way more important than margins when you first start.
Give some of your product away for free forever (for early adopters). Maybe the basic tier, or a basic complimentary product that won’t bankrupt you to give away.
Offer your time for free (to begin with). Free 30 minute strategy review with our CEO for every new customer.
If your product has a physical component (ScreenCloud, for example, needs a media player to plug into the screen), can you afford to give those away for free for early adopters? If not, can you cover some of the costs?
“Pay with your data” option. We’ve all been offered a copy of some research report if we provide our data to the researchers. This is how SaaS Capital produces its annual SaaS Capital Index. Is it helpful for you to ask for extra information in return for a reduced price (or free for a period)?
Member-Get-Member. If you are focused on a core vertical, how can you encourage your customers to talk to others about you? DropBox lets you earn extra storage by recommending them to friends/colleagues. The value of extra storage for the customer is huge, the cost to Dropbox is tiny. Do you have anything similar?

Scarcity/Urgency

Everyone (except me it seems) is panicking about getting Oasis tickets. What can you do to add a bit of scarcity/urgency that ties in with you being a new product?

Limit numbers. It’s a bit of a tired concept now, but it still works. We’re bringing on a handful of new customers over the next few months. Join the wait list. Just don’t make the wait list so long that they end up getting bored and choosing an alternative.
Invite-only tier. You only get this level of service if you qualify.
Free usage credits with an expiry date. Encourages engagement as well as a sense of urgency.
Offer time-limited discounts (such as Black Friday). It won’t seem desperate to drop prices if you are just doing it for a week.

Customer Success

You’ve got a handful of customers, you have the bandwidth to shower them with love. Not forever, but in a way that the established competitors couldn’t do at their scale.

If your product-led SaaS has some gaps in its automation that you have to plug with a real human, then turn that into a plus. Shout about how you have a real person to on-board customers (rather than the video that the incumbent uses, even if that video is awesome).
Personal welcome note from the CEO. Early days, can you do a personal note from the CEO with an offer to reach out if they need anything? At ScreenCloud we had our automated emails for new customers, but the one email that got the best response was the ‘personal welcome from the CEO’ - and a response from the CEO if anyone replied to it.
Offer your customers a ‘Migration Manager’ to help (or physically do) all of the content or data migration from their old system to yours. It’s painful, but if that’s the big thing putting people off, then take it away by doing it for them. At least when you have the bandwidth to do it.
Free training course. Double-down on your niche and create some simple video training courses as part of the product. If your SaaS is for lead generation and you are focusing on lawyers, create a “lead management strategies for law practices” tutorial.
What do successful customers do that unsuccessful ones don’t? By success, I mean, ones that either convert from a trial, or expand quickly, or just spend more. Figure it out and then encourage that behaviour across the board. As an example, ScreenCloud trialists who added video were more likely to convert to paying customers. So we encouraged people to add video during their trial. What’s your equivalent? It could be usage/logons. It could be adding colleagues to the account.

Community/Engagement

The nice thing about early adopters is a) they’re very forgiving (don’t ask me why, they just are), and b) they often love to get the inside track. It’s like they have a personal vested interest in you succeeding. You should exploit this (in the nicest sense of the word).

Customer Advisory Board. Build one. Treat it with seriousness. Meet up regularly (even if it’s just virtual). Give them something in return. Have an agenda. Write up notes. Report back on actions.
Create a public roadmap. Let your customers contribute publicly. Let them vote.
Customer conferences, or just customer meet-ups? These are what the larger companies tend to do, but you don’t have to do it on a massive scale. Maybe it’s just a meet up for all of the marketing folk in law firms based in your city. Pay for the drinks, or buy them breakfast. Set a topic that is close to their hearts. Invite a guest speaker. You know the drill.
Hero your customers. Send a video crew round to interview them. Give them awards. Feature them as examples of best practice. You can do this in a way that would be impractical for larger companies.
Randomly send people thank you cards or merch. Thank you for being our 100th customer. Thank you for uploading the most videos this month. Imagine how chuffed you would be if you signed up for a lead management tool and you got a thank you card and a t-shirt in the post.

Bottom line

You might not have the budgets and you won’t have the fame of the big players in your market. But you do have cunning and agility on your side. Go to a big company and everything will need to be signed off. Everything will need to be considered against the rest of the Go To Market efforts. But early days, you can be quick and reactive. Play that to your advantage while you still can.

David Hart