How We Scaled Our SaaS To 21,479 Customers Using These 7 Productivity Tools

Hey IndieHackers! I'm the Seattle-based founder of Bookafy, an appointment booking SaaS. I've resolved to start producing more quality content and share valuable insights from my own experience.

To start off, I'd like to share exactly how I've been using these 7 SaaS tools to scale my own SaaS to 20k+ customers.

(The full article is available here: https://www.bookafy.com/7-saas-tools/ with screenshots of exactly how I'm using each tool, and a checklist to help you decide which tools you should be investing in)

If your SaaS on-boarded 5,000 new customers tomorrow - what would happen?

👩‍💻 Would you have to rush to hire 10+ new staff?
⚙️ Would your whole system fall apart?

My productivity tools are the reason I can onboard 5,000 new customers and only need 1 new customer service representative.

I've shared exactly how I use these 7 apps for my SaaS, and how I have them set up.

Follow the steps to get there!

STEP 1: Read my "How-to" article on using 7 kickass productivity tools to scale SaaS businesses.

STEP 2: Pick the tools that will make the biggest difference for your SaaS.

Here's some background for you:

We started Bookafy as a 100% bootstrapped SaaS startup.

This meant that we were keeping costs at a minimum and figuring out how to profitably acquire more customers. We were performing each task - whether it was operations, marketing, or development - manually. I was in charge of almost everything, including the development and growth teams.

This is absolutely fine for when you're starting out, but eventually, this kind of approach directly hampers scalability.

Challenge #1: 📈Marketing Strategy and Platforms

We started off acquiring customers through Facebook.

Setting up paid ads and tracking visitors and customers on one platform is completely manageable.

But soon, we were expanding to other platforms and including other tools in our marketing tech stack.

We found ourselves manually managing customers and data across Facebook Ad Manager, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and more.

Our approach was absolutely not scalable as our manual effort grew with each platform and each new lead.

Our solution? 📊 Segment and Zapier 📊

Using both these tools together basically let us set up a way for all these platforms to actually talk to each other. Our customer data is now shared automatically between them.

Challenge #2: 🙍‍♂️ The people problem

It wasn’t just our marketing campaigns that were growing in size.

Our small development team grew from just me and a couple developers to an independent team of 10 developers.

I could no longer prioritize managing all the development work myself. I had to focus on operations, growth, customers, and more.

As the team grew, so did the chaos. I found that Ideas were no longer being accurately translated into developed features, and developers didn’t always know what they should be working on, and overall, a lot of time and work was wasted.

As our customer base grew, so did the requests for customer service. We had a few customer service representatives available, but the system was being overwhelmed.

Our solution? 🧑‍💻 Jira Software + Jira Service desk 🧑‍💻

Jira Software lets us efficiently manage our development team. We can easily assign tasks to developers and no time is wasted. Our ideas were being finally being translated into features again.

Plus, it integrates really well with Jira Service Desk. Jira Service Desk by itself let us cut down a lot of our Customer Service work by setting up a knowledge base.

On top of handling all our customer service tickets, we can easily send a bug over to Jira and assign it to someone in our development team. Really cuts down on our turnaround time for bug fixes.

Here's our process for approaching each of our 7 favourite tools

1► Start by using Segment to share data 📈 across all your marketing platforms and track your users and visitors anywhere.

2► Check out exactly how we mapped out our whole funnel with Funnelytics - so we could attribute results to the right marketing channels and make smarter decisions 📝.

3► Now that you know what your funnel looks like and you’re sharing data across apps, segment 📊 your customers in ActiveCampaign and run tailored email campaigns to them.

4► Is booking meetings 📅 key to your business - does it affect your bottom-line? Learn how to prioritize your time with Bookafy.

5► Take a look at how we use Jira Software for project management 🧰 along with Jira Service Desk for customer service.

6 ► Finally, Zapier lets you set up thousands of automations 🦾 for repetitive tasks. We have automations set up for Stripe, Bookafy, and MailChimp, among others.

7► Still confused? We’ve got a checklist ✅ to help you decide which tools are worth your money!

Keep your biggest challenges in mind 🧠 while you read the article - I’d be willing to bet you can benefit from some of these tools ⚒️.

The pay-off is really clear to me: We can acquire 5,000 customers tomorrow and just need one new staff.

This is your opportunity to see exactly why we choose these tools in particular for my SaaS business.

I've got screenshots showing some more details of how I've got these tools setup for my SaaS, but I couldn't include them here.

I've got all the details + screenshots for you over here: https://www.bookafy.com/7-saas-tools/

Also, feel free to ask me any questions you have here or in the comments of the article - happy to help out this community.