How do you market multi-purpose SaaS?

Interesting, we've worked through this, here is my thought on it - it depends on your primary marketing style. If you are making calls, live demos, webinars, etc. then you should be fine as you can talk/walk your way through the problem with the prospect, however, if you are doing link building/content marketing - you are going to need to streamline.

At a minimum, you will need to design your site to clearly state those. My experience and the numbers show that it's nearly impossible to efficiently market a multi-purpose SaaS app, especially if you are bootstrapped.

Also, I tend to be wary of what people like Jason Fried or similar say, simply because times are different, the attention span these days is down to seconds. They started ages ago, built a community, a following, RoR, and several other avenues. It's not the same now, also keep in mind they had several apps in the days of 37signals, that's almost 21 years ago - now it's just the all might loving Basecamp.

My advice is to shoot for the 99% and not the 1%, unicorns are hard to find.

To answer your question, to market a multi-purpose SaaS, pick your winning feature and market it with that as the main feature and then gradually surface the others as you have more data and experience.

Yup marketing conversion funnels for every audience group. Give examples and show value. You can always have these as sub-pages in your marketing site that links from the home page.

That said, if you're indie and it's a relatively new product it would be worth focusing on one group to make sure what you are building has demand, engagement, retention before spreading your attention out too much.

Without knowing more about your product, I'd be curious if you're having high engagement and satisfaction from your existing customers to make sure it's simply a marketing and distribution issue.

The Product-Market-Fit Engine is a good way to identify where you are at in that journey, and what your different users have in common so that you can focus your general marketing on the common painpoint they all have. The example in the article is around email, which similar to your case could apply to a lot of different personas: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/

We've build https://www.wellybox.com/en and we're facing kind of same "problem". We do an automatic collection of financial documents and we have 2 very different audiences: 1) Freelancers / Self-employed in various countries which use us to be tax compliant and sometimes reduce their tax payments. 2) Office managers/bookkeepers who mainly use us to reduce chores of data entry. So when it comes to the question: how to market to different audiences, my feeling is that the right question is: "which audience I should pick first" since marketing is all about details (copy / createive / message etc..) - My belief is that at ceratin point you should pick one and focus on it.