Can a SaaS product have too many applications?
I recently finished building V1 of my product (https://kritikos.app).
While reading various forums and articles, it seems there is a 50/50 split of people who believe that a product must focus on solving one niche problem, and on the other side the belief that a product should be a general solution for many.
I'm currently sitting on the latter approach. My feedback app is super simple, and a wide variety of users can leverage it as a bank for anonymous feedback. Teachers have used it with their students, doctors with patients, coffee shop owners with their customers (via QR codes), and the list goes on forever.
Because of this, I find marketing to be difficult. I've had potential users reach out to me confused on how it works, despite there being a clear 3 step plan on my landing page.
What approach have you taken with your project? Are you trying to sell a swiss army knife? Or a phillips head screw driver? I'd love to get your thoughts
Focus first. Expand later
I think it could have various options but have to give value to the end users.
I wouldn't say you had to focus on a single use, but I would narrow it down to the lowest common denominator.
For example, the platform I'm building - Tidze, I could have marketed and built it for every use case. Live streaming is so prevalent now and could be used by anyone. But that would have severely impacted our messaging, marketing and even the features we decide to build.
So we decided to focus more on performers, creators and entertainers who have similar traits, but also their own unique requirements. It's really helped to focus the product and we can spend less effort trying to market to all user groups.
We may find that we need to narrow this down further, but we won't know until we've launched and started to gather data and feedback.
I would avoid for general use, see how you can narrow it down.
Our SaaS HR platform is quite broad, in that it works well for many industry groups. However, we tend to modify our marketing depending on the audience we are talking to, in order to talk about use cases and example and terminology around their specific industry niche.
Whenever we get a booking for a demo, we find out what market they are in, and we try and tailor the demo around that, so when we illustrate a problem etc., we are talking their language.
We've always been told be advisors and mentors to 'niche down', but we find this tactic to be fairly effective without having to narrow our focus so much.
Does this concept stop at marketing? Or do you tailor your product to a market as well?
I'm thinking of extending this concept into the product, by using feature flags and domain specific language to tailor the functionality. I have already built the core app, it's ready to be extended to fit individual markets.
It is a great idea to put it in the app, but this increases your development workload quite significantly IMO.
Our platform is generic enough that we can usually just change some of the drop downs or add some custom fields etc. within the client's company to suit their industry and that is often enough for them to think that it has been built with their industry in mind.
it can have unlimited possibilities but depending on the customers you are speaking to or marketing to, you just need to show and discuss features that are relevant to them and will make sense to them.
Seems like a straightforward approach. What about landing page? Should you call it a general solution? Or try to target for users?
it would entirely depend on the product and how you are driving traffic to your website and landing pages.
If in case you are doing Paid Ads or SEO then you can have landing pages which specific use case for that "Particular Audience" which you are targeting.
if you are just starting, then you should just focus on Targeting One Segment [Biggest Segment] of customers who will find your product useful and highlight features and case studies that will be relevant to them.
This way you will have a very focused marketing approach that you will be able to measure.
This approach will also have many upsides like you will be quickly able to validate your assumptions i.e. are you solving some problem for your largest assumed customer segment. if the feature you are pitching them is useful from them or not and if instead of that particular feature customers end up using some different feature or start using your product for a completely different use case which you might not have imagined earlier
E.g. Real example
-Their is an online logo maker tool
-Name of the Tool is logo maker
-The Product creator made it with only one specific intention i.e. to help people create logo's quickly
-I found that tool while searching for a logo creation tool on Google a few years back
-No. of times I used that Tool for creating logo's - Maybe 3-4 (in past 3-4 years)
-No. of times I used that Tool to quickly create some simple graphics for my various projects - I Can't even Count [maybe 1000's of times]
This is the Product - https://logomakr.com/ [I'm in no way affiliated to this]
If you use your creativity, you can create so many things using this tool and not just logo's
I stopped using this tool sometime back as now I use a dedicated graphic designer
If the product creator would have made this tool with graphic creation in mind or would have pitched in that way, i would never ever have discovered it
Most of the people I recommended this tool are using it for everything other than logo creation
I hope this helps
Best of luck!
Wow. Thanks for this! That's a great case study. An example of a product being built for an over-specific use case. I'm currently considering an approach of marketing and showcasing a use case, while allowing flexibility in the product it self.
Best of Luck :)