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
Tracking and Analytics.
KissMetrics is totally too expensive! And tracking things in GA is totally not that hard. Lets go through this:
Now... the BEST thing you can do is to add E-commerce Tracking from GA and pass the value of the sale/subscription from the confirmation page to GA - this will assign sales/revenue to the appropriate channel automatically and you will even know what landing pages the user originated from, like the blog posts.
IF your product has free trials, then the only way you can track ROI for any channels outside of using 3rd party product is to implement your own tracking by recording referral source (check HTTP referer and/or utm_ params on query string) into a cookie, then on signup step record account and source from cookie into your DB. You can then do long-term analysis on conversion to paid and LTV by referral channel or even granular sources.
Here is a full post on this topic: https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/a-guide-to-conversion-tracking-with-free-google-analytics-and-more/
Happy tracking everyone!
Hey webbie, this is a great reply.
Since the post, I've figured out how to do most of these with GA. Just added events to fire on click with $value for leads, trials, etc.
Last thing I need is to finagle a callback from Stripe to GA when trials convert or cancel.
Also, going to look into just sticking everything in a cookie and rolling my own analytics plus heavy GA customization.
Also, curious, but do you have a preferred email provider for emails? I'm using Sendgrid for transaction but their marketing is
awful.
I've tried Mailchimp, Sendgrid and EmailOctopus in the last month. Not entirely happy with any but leaning toward EmailOctopus.
Edit: I see now the link you posted was from BigMailer. Haven't heard of them until now. Do you use them/work with them?
Thanks again for the post. Super helpful!
I am the founder of BigMailer.io and you should check it out. I wasn't ready to share this post publicly yet, but here is how BigMailer compares to SendGrid: https://www.bigmailer.io/blog/sendgrid-vs-bigmailer-comparison/
BigMailer.io is built on Amazon SES, like EmailOctopus, but we support unlimited custom fields (strings, dates, integers) on contacts, powerful segmentation and targeting on marketing campaigns, more automation triggers. We also offer a generous free tier (up to 5K contacts) and simple linear pricing after with volume discounts.
I am offering 20% discount to anyone from IndieHacker community
I think his issue is that he wants to track actions not reflected in the URL.
This is possible with GA, which i didn't fully realize at the time (doh!). Just fire events on button click or some other action. It's actually simple.
Ah well there you go. I have also only done it via URLs.
Right, event-based.
What kind of marketing / ads did you to get your sales?
Facebook ads to generate leads. Then I send ~ one email a week or so. Really simple.
Was there a certain pitch angle / targeting? I've tried B2B Saas before with Facebook ads before and it didn't work well. A lot say to try the article-content-based ads, but I've not tried those yet.
my service itself cheaply solves the biggest problem people have when trying to do SEO -- finding good links
So that's the angle. "Try this for free. It'll solve your bleeding neck problem"
congrats on all the early success! looks great. have you thought about how to get deeper into the sales funnel? especially for b2b, you could probably help your clients target their end customer really effectively..
Thanks, Ryan! And yes I have thought about that =)
Pretty cool and inspirational, thanks.
P.S what's the behind the scenes technical details of your service, if you don't mind sharing? Is it using ML or is it more of an expert system / rules based?
Thanks, Ali!
Re: Tech specs --
It's a vanilla Rails app (though I'm porting to BulletTrain https://bullettrain.co/ ) with a lot of background jobs. Mostly rule-based recommendations for all the SEO stuff -- links, on page, site optimization, etc.
But now that I'm getting a lot of data feedback from users, I'll be adding some ML to fine tune the recommendations.
That's awesome. Great work for a v1, getting it out there to start getting data. Congrats, super impressive!
Hey Kyle!
Great read. I'd love to chat more about 4). You said "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." Why is Google Analytics non-viable because of its URL-based event tracking? URL tracking can actually be very accurate. If you spend the time mapping out sources, campaigns, mediums, etc in the UTM parameters, you can track everything you NEED. It may not give you the fancy event data, but you'd be able to see and track everything in GA. Once someone is tracked with UTM parameters and they enter a CRM like Hubspot or Salesforce, they have all that data with them.
I'm considering developing a marketing analytics dashboard that helps marketers focus on what's most important by pulling analytics and reports from your marketing stack into one dashboard. I'd love to get some insight from you on what you use, what you want, and what you find value in.
PM me if you want to talk further :)
Hey Corey, thanks for the kind words!
"spend the time" -> that's the crux. I get the impression that everything is possible with GA, if you spend the time to set it up.
From a marketing dashboard, what I want to know is what I said in the post:
"- 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."
Like a dashboard that says "You're Facebook ad ABC sent XYZ customers this month with average value of $XXX. Your SEO content FOO sent BAR customers with average value of $XXX."
As far as I know there's nothing out there that will do this kind of tracking automatically; it's always going to take a bit of elbow grease to get it all set up. I personally also use Segment to collect all the data, then send it off to Mixpanel for in-app/authenticated user analytics and GA for the marketing analytics.
Yup, think you're right, Keith. Just gonna have to bite the bullet and code things up how I want them.
I'm implementing Segment as well then going to use GA and either Heap, Mixpanel, or Kissmetrics
Cool, good luck! Always feels good to be getting some useful data in so I think you'll find it time well spent.
Yeah that's awesome. Thanks for the insight. That's definitely the holy grail. It's a marketers dream to be able to simply and quickly get answers like that.
Have you looked into something like Segment to feed data between GA, Mixpanel, your CRM, ad platforms? When implemented correctly, Segment can help standardize the events used and give you a much more complete picture of your customer.
A lot of reports happen at the end, in the CRM, when a final action is taken like "became a customer" and then you can see the bunny trail behind them of all the events and touch points that took place. What CRM are you using?
Not really using a CRM yet. Just chatting with people on Intercom, then have on-boarding in the app itself. People can try it 10 days for free, so i just let it sell itself.
And i'm porting to BulletTrain which has Segment pre-integrated =) hopefully that will help!!! Cheers
I'd recommend looking into HubSpot for a CRM. Free and easily integrates.
What is BulletTrain? Link to website?
BulletTrain est ici https://bullettrain.co/
"SaaS-in-a-Box" for Ruby on Rails
Wow! Never heard of BulletTrain, but that seems awesome! Thanks for the tip
Laravel Spark is the equivalent for PHP/Laravel if that's more your cup of tea.