3 Common Opportunities to Accelerate Growth
In the last two months I've talked to and/or worked with 9 bootstrapped SaaS founders wanting to grow faster.
Here are some of the most common areas where they could make small changes to reap BIG rewards...
- Tracking Conversion Rates - This is the MOST common
Way too often, founders are looking at their Stripe data every day, but not looking at how these numbers are changing from month to month and trying to figure out what's happening, what's changed, and what you can do to improve it.
Site visitors -> lead -> demo/trial sign up -> moving through sales stages -> converting to customer -> churn rates
- Better Onboarding - This is a close second for the most common.
Sometimes I see almost no guidance to show a new user how to be successful. Sometimes it's that the guidance is ONLY about how to use the product and not about how to use the product to solve your ideal customer's problems/achieve their goals.
Make sure you're onboarding users in multiple ways -- in app and via email, but also through formats like video, written tutorials, and screenshots walking them through the process.
- Social Proof
Ideal customers need to see how you've helped someone like them. It builds trust and helps prospects see the potential of working with you.
If you haven't listed your app on sites like G2Crowd or TrustPilot, do it now and reach out to your happiest customers to get them to add positive reviews.
Keep in mind, these are only 3 of the most common EASY opportunities to help you grow your startup faster.
What else has worked well for you?
Thanks, Kasey. #2 is huge for us.
Another one for us is knowing who our customer is and ignoring everyone else.
We spent years going after one type of customer without realizing they were completely mismatched for what we were selling. What made things super confusing was the that they’d sign up, use the product every day for a long period of time, then just cancel.
It wasn’t until we truly knew and understood our ideal customer did things take off.
YES! I love this. It's really interesting...my many years in B2B sales taught me that the biggest difference between amazing sales people and mediocre ones was how efficiently they disqualified BAD opportunities.
This is totally true for SaaS products too...when we spend time on serving our perfect customer, everything becomes easier.
How did you figure out who your ideal customer was?
This is what we had to learn! Our egos would not let go of the idea of going after the whales in our industry (Maritime) simply because we thought they would be the most lucrative.
We figured out who are perfect customer was by having tons and tons of in-depth conversations with existing customers and potential customers. We sell a hardware component along with our software which the customer installs on their ships, which means shipping around the world. If an opportunity popped up where I could visit a ship myself, I'd hand deliver and watch customers interact with it. I'd ask tons of questions, not just in relation to our product but also about their company and their place in it.
We quickly learned that from the outside, all the potential customers looked the same. Same company type, same products/services sold, same roles, etc. But once we looked inside, we got a true glimpse of how they operate, how they're structured, what their goals were, who they reported to, who was responsible for what, et al. and we realized how vastly different they were form one another.
With this info in hard, we were created a clear picture of who we'd best be able to serve and were able to disqualify BAD opportunities, like you said.