Do you need an “audience first” to launch a SAAS?
I was watching a YouTube video about how to launch a SAAS and this is a direct quote from the video:
“If you don’t have a large follower count yourself, you need to find people that have. I can say with almost 100% certainty your product is going nowhere without this factor.”
I’m highly skeptical of this. I’m about to launch a product and we don’t have a large audience.
What we do have is a lot of people google searching for solutions to the problem that we solve… which I would much rather have.
Oh here we go again. How many more times will people keep asking these questions.
Please. Think. About. It.
an SEO guy told me you need to get SEO right at the start
a web designer told me my site needed re-designing
a twitter expert told me I must post heavily
a social ads expert told me social ads work really well
a youtube influencer told me I need a following of fans
Can you see the pattern!?
The only thing you need to focus on as an early-stage startup is sales. Pick up the phone and talk to potential clients.
no revenue == startup death
You wouldn't happen to work in sales, would you?
i cannot stop laughing.lol
I absolutely am as far from being a sales person as you can imagine. But I do it. Because it works.
For example, I have just launched a crowdfunding campaign at https://www.venture.cards and I know that the only way to get people to back me is to reach out and ask them.
If I were to message my "followers" on twitter/linkedin, etc, most of them frankly will give me a thumbs up emoji - which is about as useful in launching a business as a chocolate teapot 😊
Hey Steve, as a data/research guy you need to find those people. I can prepare a contact list for potential clients. :) Since you are great at converting you shouldn't spend a second on finding them.
Thinking about it, maybe that suggestion about picking up the phone coming from a person who's more inclined in sales. Who saw its benefits already. That's what we do, we suggest what we believe it works and we invest our time on it to become a so-called guru to "sell" our methods.
So all of the points that listed can be separately leveraged imho. None is required or necessary but all of them are bonuses. But overall I agree about reaching to clients at first. "Picking up the phone" is the barebone. I never done it and so my bank account still displays $0.
Steve, I loved this answer cause I'm having this same debate with my co-founders on a regular basis I just took a screenshot and passed to them and I'm going to sleep 😴
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Indeed. Most of us have common sense, but instead we read advice from "experts" who make us question our own self-belief. We end up thinking we must follow their wisdom or we will fail miserably. When actually, and frankly, most of us know just as much as them and should just follow our hearts. No two startups are the same so how you found success won't necessarily be the same way I find it.
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Yes the answer to the question always seems to directly relate to the person's personality and their ability to get people to follow them.
If audience building seems hard/impossible to them then they don't need it and cite examples (of way larger companies that benefit from guaranteed media exposure and WOM).
Or they start building and audience and see success but the group of startup founders above still finds this additional work superfluous because it can't be easily replicated.
Better rename these types of post, "It's uncomfortable, too expensive, too time consuming for ME so I'm going to prove while NO ONE should do this" lol
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Great points! Definitely don't want anybody to be discouraged by audience building. Thanks for the response :)
I'm not the same since the day I saw an influencer selling farts in a jar.
However I can say with almost 100% certainty you'll better stop watching him/her. What I read in those quotes; "You can't do influencer marketing without an influencer".
That's right but influencer marketing just a topic under marketing.
There is no need to "have" that audience but it's good to be around them. It's possible to do guerilla marketing under influencers' content for example. Overall SEO seems to beat them all on the long run.
Lol!
I’m going to be more careful about who I’m following now and being aware of what they’re trying to sell me.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessary to have an audience first but it obviously does help.
So, to answer your question: No, it’s not something you need to have first.
I’ve been thinking about the audience first approach a lot and how it might actually hurt.
For example, loyal followers will tend to give you false positives. They’ll tell you things they think you want to hear. They’ll say “That looks awesome!” When they know they’re never going to pay for it. And this gives false expectations for what the product will actually do at launch.
Also, who is trying the product because they follow me and who is trying the product because they actually have the problem? The former are not the customers I want.
I definitely see the value of audience first with selling books, info products, communities, etc. But I’m skeptical of audience first with SAAS.
As someone who has built a B2B SaaS, struggled with growth initially, then found success later on, my answer is "No...but".
No, you don't need to have a ready made audience to succeed, but you DO have to know where you audience hangs out so you can reach them effectively.
In our case, my SaaS is an HR platform, and in the early days, I was posting about it on BetaList, here in IH, on ProductHunt, Twitter etc. - problem was, I was getting great vanity feedback from people. But not a single paying customer. Turns out that solo founders and freelancers etc. don't need a full featured, complex HR system!
It was only when we switched our marketing to Capterra, G2 Crowd, LinkedIn etc. that we started to see success. Turns out our customers (business with ~100 employees) were on all these other platforms looking for solutions, and we would have saved a lot of time and effort if we had just focused on there from the beginning.
So, it depends on your product and potential customers. If you are building a cool new developer tool or design app, then ProductHunt or IH will work well for you. Not so much if you have an inventory management system. In that case you will have to see where warehouse managers hang out so you can reach them.
Most times, you won't have to create an audience yourself - they will already be in another active community online somewhere - you just need to find where and get involved in a non spammy way, and you will be set.
wow, totally agree, I now use it. btw in you cases, how do you have idea that your customer hang out on "Capterra, G2 Crowd, LinkedIn", I mean do you just randomly check linkedIn and found out that and HR posting about her difficulty on HR system and reach them? (I often lost in this process, and end up posting on facebook group of HR [in your cases, If I were you] )
It was a calculated guess - we just started reaching out to HR Managers in larger companies on LinkedIn and got good results early on. We then discovered from talking to them that they usually hang out on Capterra, SourceForge etc. to look for business software so we started advertising campaigns on those platforms. And yes, getting involved on HR Facebook groups etc. also helped, as did partnering with large payroll vendors.
Basically, we had to discard all the vanity sites we were posting on (as much as we enjoyed the enthusiastic feedback), and really only spend energy on the sites where our actual buyers were hanging out.
that is amazing journey, It's on my indie hacker framework now. But still, do you prefer to promote a product when outreaching people or just do it the mom test way (not promoting, instead ask a core problem question) ?.
In your cases "reaching out to HR Managers" what did you do? (promote product or use the mom test way)?
A bit of both, but our initial messaging on LinkedIn was to find the HR Manager or owner of a ~100 employee business and send them a short message along the lines of "Hey, I see you are running a successful business and just opened a branch in [x]. Let us know if you need a hand with managing your employees as we have an HR tool that may be useful for you when dealing with remote teams."
We are never pushy, and personalise each message with a little something we learned about the person (i.e. recent promotion) or the company (i.e. new hiring/funding round, won an award, expansion etc.) and framed our pitch accordingly.
This worked a treat in the early days, but dropped off as the spam really started to take over LinkedIn, so now we look for other ways.
I always forget to try personalize each message, thank you devan
Having an audience already in place when you launch a SaaS can certainly be helpful. Especially if you've built trust with them and they've bought something from you before.
But it's definitely not necessary.
If you just launched a new SaaS, the first users are going to be your early adopters.
Those are not folks that don't need you to be an "established" company to become a paid user. They don't need to have seen you everywhere or already be a member of your audience.
Most people will pay for a product if it:
If you have those 3 things, you can find early adopter communities everywhere and find your first customers. Just be respectful in your outreach and know it's OK if not everybody takes you up on giving it a shot.
More proof. My first company WP Buffs is ~6 years old and does ~$1.5M in annual revenue. Our first few hundred customers came mostly through content marketing. They searched for help with a WordPress issue, found our website, booked a discovery call, and signed up. Never did they ever join our audience.
Driftly is the new startup I've co-founded. I'm not known as a SaaS founder so I'm kindof starting from 0 when it comes to audience.
Marketing channels we've decided to put bets on initially are...
So...lots of options even though we don't have a big audience yet!
It isn't required but would be super helpful in terms of support, sustainability and profit.
It's not going to harm your growth, but do you need it? No.
The audience already exists. It is not necessary to build an audience from scratch.
Building an audience takes time. The good news is you can easily access existing audience on social sharing platforms like Indie Hackers, Reddit, ProductHunt, Twitter, Kickstarter etc.
In my experience, it makes far more sense for makers to build the product and then focus on marketing so that whichever of these communities’ benefit from your product get to know about it. Then, if the product is discerned enough, or provides sufficient value, those communities will pick up on the product and establish the first echo chamber to give you the beginnings of product market fit.
You don't need an audience, but it helps to have your customer segment clear and think about ways how to reach them.
Start talking to them via the MOM-test, and get to know their problems.
You don't need an audience first, but getting to KNOW your audience first is very helpful.
I just had a long chat about this with @cotealexandra11 from Wynter.
We broke down go-to-market strategies for three levels of founders:
Hope it's helpful to you or any other founders:
https://youtu.be/rkM0Xpq0BIc?t=1220
Just watched it - that's a really cool background lol
nice
You don't need an audience , but you need a clear view on who is your potential buyer and how you will be able to reach them with marketing. In an ideal scenario you test in advance what your expected cac (customer acquisition cost)will be. you can do that with a free landing page and a form
in essence : you make a tool for priests , be sure to make a plan in advance on how to get into contact with them dat makes economic sense.
What I believe is that you should have a certain amount of people who are ready to use what you're launching.
It is good if you are launching when you have an audience . And to have an audience, you must "sell before you launch"
I m also not sure much about building the audience first. However, it helps you a lot gradually. We are also building a no-code platform for backend development. We are in our early alpha stage. We can do custom integrations and support based on customer requirements. Currently, we are also looking out for initial users who can try our product and give feedback on the product. Any suggestions on how to find early users?
Absolutely not. You don't even need to be on social media. Some ways to find customers with 0 audience:
And I'm sure there are many more!
That said, it sure can help if you have an audience, if that audience is also your target market.
At the end of the day, you need users. If you are able to solve a problem with huge demand and low competition you probably won't need a big audience at first because, as you said, people will be already desperately searching for it. Now, finding such a problem is extremely difficult, it might take you multiple failed products until you find it (that's why the 12 startups in 12 months approach work so well). If you don't have such a product you will have to find your clients "one by one" and having an audience already helps.
It is not something that you need. But it is good to have, as it can help your SAAS to get traction faster. And for the same reason, I keep posting my updates on Twitter,
You don't NEED. However, it's a nice-to-have. In the end, product success may depend on your ability to convert attention.
I've read somewhere that the most important question when launching a business is "where will you find your customers?". I think it's an extremely important question.
Having people google the problem you're trying to solve is part of the answer. Do you feel confident you can capture that flow ? If you're planning on doing paid ads, the sustainability of doing so is going to depend on conversion ratio and profit margin. If you plan on doing organic SEO, you may face competition.
I've run the math for my business and I would lose money indefinitely if I relied on customer flow. What i'm relying on instead is a free software component which is very popular, and which I use to funnel people to my paid offering. It's sustainable in the sense that i don't need to keep shelling out money for ads.
I guess if it's a b2c saas then it probably helps but understand most saas products are b2b. I doubt Marc Benioff was recording vlogs when building salesforce
The terminology is confusing. I think of it as Prospects First.
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