1.) The Right Product Sells Itself

...but you still need to market it!

In SaaS, sales is simple.

That's especially true if you own a space in your customer's mind. For customers, onboarding to SaaS is relatively easy, but the cost of switching is high.

If your SaaS isn't selling, make it better. Keep building until it's novel instead of competing with other providers. Make your own Coke, not RC Cola.

Of course, you still have to market your superior product. They can't buy it if they haven't heard of it!

2.) Yearly Plans

Yearly plans are your friend at the beginning.

Nearly 50% of my revenue in month one came from yearly plan sales.

Before I implemented yearly plans, I was running ad campaigns at $1 spent/$1 earned (after two weeks) -- which is great!

But making a few yearly plan sales brought that number up to $4/$1. That means I can scale my ad spend faster.

Plus, it gives you confidence to see someone believe in your product enough to commit to it for a full year.

3.) Raise. Your. Prices.

Patrick McKenzie says it all the time, and my first month numbers bear it out:

- 50% of gross sales came from high end plans

- 80% of revenue came from the high end

- High-end trials converted at ~ 80%

- Low-end trials converted at ~ 20%

- 80% of support issues came from low-end (50% of which were trial users that cancelled)

- The 20% of support requests from high-end were mostly bug reports or (useful!) feature ideas

Plus, the low-end subscribers that actually convert could easily pay 5-10x per month.

Raise your prices.

4.) Tracking and Analytics

This is a problem I've yet to solve.

You'll want to know:

- The source of your customers (social, SEO, paid)

- The content they interacted with (Which ad?, which article? which post?)

- Then be able to cross-reference that info with conversion rate, price tier, etc.

The end goal is to be able to focus on the channel and content types which deliver highest ROI.

The only service I've found yet that seems to do all of these is Kissmetrics.

Google Analytics is non-viable because of its URL-based event tracking. Mixpanel or Facebook Analytics might work with some elbow grease. Most likely I'll procrastinate on this until I can afford Kissmetrics.

Suggestions welcome!

5.) You'll Trash V1.0

Reid Hoffman says it best:

"If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

If you're successful, you'll be redesigning your app soon. It's a good problem to have. There are a few reasons for this:

a.) Scaling.

Some of your code will magically behave differently than you imagined once its running hundreds of times concurrently.

Not only will you have scaling issues, but they will by nature occur at the most inconvenient time -- when lots of users are signing up!

(I had to turn off my ads for a week to slow down sign-ups. Inconvenient, but a good problem to have.)

b.) Your users know how to use your app better than you do.

They will think of ways to use your app you never dreamed of. They'll also have good feature requests that you'll add.

There's a fine line in staying true to your long-term plan and accommodating your users.

6.) You'll love your customers.

B2B SaaS tend to work with other B2B SaaS.

You'll have some amazingly successful customers who themselves are making cool stuff and solving hard problems.

It's rewarding to see them succeed. There's a feeling that we're all helping each other up. Rising tide raises all boats, all that.

Plus, when they give you feedback or feature requests, you know that they know what they're talking about.

7.) SAAS is the World's Best Business Model

Cool customers. Automatic payments. Easy sales. Hockey stick growth. You're coding money.

You'll love your work day.

Fin.

My SaaS: alli AI for SEO