Growing a new SaaS in 2021 is different to growing an established one

After moving on from my last startup in March this year, I've been working with loads of biiiig SaaS companies ($5M-$60M ARR) on demand gen and growth.

It really made me realise:

The tactics and strategies that used to work for getting your earliest customers – like PPC, SEO and Content – don't work anymore because there are SaaS-whales competing for the same customers as you.

But you can do things differently because you're small, have nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain.

Here's how I'd go about growing a new SaaS company today:

Start by validating the idea

For ~2 years I built a survey tool that respected respondents anonymity

But neither my customers or their respondents actually cared about it

We wasted two years of time pushing a product no-one needed or wanted

Lesson: validate your product or you'll waste the most previous commodity – your life.

Instead, run through product validation 101:

• Find people who have the problem you're thinking about solving
• Ask them open ended questions about their specific challenges
• As you speak to more people, common themes will reappear
• If those themes don't match your idea, rework it

Build a solid set of value props

Let's assume you took my advice and validated your product, you should now have a pretty strong idea of what your value proposition is

Value propositions that are clearly defined are the foundation of your growth in early stage

There are really 4 components of effective value props:

1. Problem – what's the problem you solve?
2. Impact – what's the visceral pain of this problem?
3. Solution – how do you ease that pain?
4. Benefits – what is life like after easing that pain?

Here's a set of value props that I did for a hypothetical landing page builder tool:

BTW – I'm actually in the process of writing a micro-course based on this framework. It's going to launch at the end of next week and it'll be $80. But you can get it at a pre-launch price of $20. I sold 20 copies within 12 hours of announcing. Don't sleep on it. Check out the course page here

Don't build a landing page

You probably don't need a landing page yet. You'll only get distracted by design, platform etc.

I love landing pages (and spend 50% of my day job time thinking about them)

But right now, you need to test out your message with actual customers.

Here's how you can do that within an hour:

Shoot 2min Loom demo

Write a short message (150 words max) that:

• States the pain point you're solving
• How you're solving it
• What life will look like after using your product
• Link to the loom and signup form (a Google Form is fine at this stage)

Then send that to the people you spoke to while validating your idea. Ask them to pay you for the idea.

If you've nailed the pain point and validated the product, some people will pay you

If they don't ask them what was missing

From here ask yourself:

1. Do I need to revisit the product features?
2. Would trying to find more early users change this?

NOW you can build a landing page

If people validated it and signed up to your form, you can build a landing page.

But don't waste too much time on it. The best landing pages convert mostly because of the value props and messaging, the design is a bonus.

Take your email from the last step and turn it into this short landing page format:

1. Hero
2. Summary of how features align to pain points
3. CTA
4. FAQs

Your hero should do the majority of the work for you. Use this formula if you struggle with headlines:

Solve [Pain point] with [Product features]

Include your loom demo or a simple product illustration.

ANALYTICS!

We're going to go off and find some customers we've never met before in a second but before we do... let's just talk about the least sexy but second most fundamental concept in growth (first is positioning - but you don't need to worry about that this early)

If you don't track what's happening on your site and in your app, you won't have any idea where people are not converting

There are two things you need to do this effectively:

1. Conversion events
2. Somewhere to track them over time

Conversion events in new SaaS businesses should be as simple as this funnel.

• Landing page view (Pageview)
• Start Trial (Event)
• Key activation step taken (Event)
• View paid options (Pageview)
• Viewed upgrade successful page (Pageview)

And then build out a simple funnel data tracker. Here's the one I've been using in work for years. (Make a copy and use it yourself :))

Getting strangers to buy from you

Now that we've got a simple landing page and somewhere to track its performance, we can go find customers we've never met before.

To identify places they are, there's two easy options:

1. Go talk to your existing customers and ask them where they like to spend time networking
2. Or use Sparktoro which is probably way faster and data driven.

Sparktoro just did this brilliant thread which shows you how:

Do pain point content

Why did we start with cold outreach when we could have been doing content/SEO or PPC?

You probably don't have the money to invest in PPC.

And because we want to validate our positioning and value props quickly, content/SEO won't work. Plus it's so much more competitive than it used to be and a lot of people get the strategy wrong.

The right strategy for almost every early stage B2B SaaS is to create pain point content:

I created content that clearly addressed a pain point for a customer

It had medium search volume

It converted to free at over 20%

It converted to paid at about 5%

Here's the data:

The great thing about pain point content is that

• You don't need to worry about keyword difficulty because the search tools don't have that data
• Pain point content converts miraculously well
• It is great to be able to point people to the content directly

Summary:

1. Validate your idea
2. Write down value props
3. Test with early users
4. Write a brief pitch and product demo
5. Set up analytics
6. Reach out to communities
7. Create pain point content
8. Sign up for pre-launch access to the Early Stage Growth Playbook which expands on these ideas and gives you all the resources you need to execute

Let me know if you have questions