How to monetize a SaaS creation tool?
I have an internal tool that I use to generate codebases whenever I'm setting up a new SaaS product.
Been thinking about making this into a product that can help others quickly get started with a SaaS. The approaches I've considered have various degrees of maintenance burden with increasing price tags and range from:
- Giving away the tool for free and selling a short e-book that describes how it works.
- Selling use of the tool as a SaaS that produces new SaaS code, possibly also including deployment.
- Using the tool to sell a productized service and build SaaS systems for companies (I'm probably too busy to do this).
Would appreciate new perspectives on how to think about go-to market for this kind of tool!
If a SaaS product is to succeed as a business, it needs to generate sufficient revenue to pay bills, pay investors or incentivise investors to provide operating capital to the business. Go for the following strategies:
Software licensing solutions.
Subscription business model
Freemium model
Open-source model
In-app purchases
In-app advertising
Partnership or sponsorship model
Pay-as-you-go model
Utilize PR. You can leverage a lot with it.
Hit up the top influencers and content creators in the niche. Offer them a premium package in exchange for a review of the platform.
These 2 will jump start your business. Down the road you can implement other marketing strategies if it makes sense.
I don't get the maintenance burden part.
So far I've seen people selling SaaS boilerplates while providing free video-courses/tutorials around it for education and marketing purposes.
Thanks! Yes, that's the option without maintenance burden, just selling an e-book and maybe a static code bundle (or how do they ship the boilerplate?)
The other options require maintaining a SaaS or even end-customer systems