I’ve driven 100M+ ARR for SaaS companies of all sizes. AMA.
Hey IndieHackers,
My name is Dev Basu and I'm the founder of Powered by Search, a B2B SaaS marketing agency where we work with about 50+ B2B SaaS companies at any given time.
My team and I have driven millions of dollars of trial and demo signups since 2009 and have published all of our playbooks for free documenting how we do it.
Ask me anything about building a demand generation flywheel for your IH project or product.
I'll be by later today (Aug 5th) to jam with you.
Hey Dev,
I follow you on Twitter, nice to see you on IH as well ✌️
We are running a self-service B2B SaaS growsurf that targets B2C+B2B tech companies without any sales calls. Currently around $30k MRR, 5 team members, and allocating a lot of resources on SEO and content. Any suggestions or tips?
What's up Kevin! Sounds like you've built a great business.
I think you're doing the right thing by placing your best on SEO and content.
I spent some time looking at your site, and it took me a minute to 'get' what you guys do. If I were you, I'd look at polling your current site traffic to see if they resonate with the way it's messaged currently, or if there are parts that are unclear.
Tools like wynter.com or even a Hotjar/RightMessage poll are great to do this. 5 second tests are another great way to see what a cold visitor recalls once they visit a key page (like your home page).
I think the fact that you focus on offering a plug-and-play referral capability is a bit hidden so bring that to the surface more would help with your visitor:trial conversion rate.
Thanks Dev, really appreciate your feedback!
Hey Dev, thanks for doing this!
I'd love to get your thoughts on generating a trial flywheel for Divjoy, a tool that enables devs to generate a codebase with everything they need for their project, like user accounts, data fetching, payments, etc.
It doesn't currently have a trial, as I've been reluctant to let people export a codebase for free, but maybe I'm overthinking it and this can just enforced legally via the license? Am I missing out on some serious revenue by not doing trials/demos?
For reference, currently doing between $5k-$15k per month (non-recurring).
Hey Gabe!
Sounds like you're building a great business. Your product sounds like it saves devs a ton of time, and helps them ship a quality app faster.
There's nothing wrong with going straight to ask for the sale, but it does mean that the only people who will follow through with that need to believe...
Now all said, that's a lot of things that need to be true for a dev that just discovered your site to say 'yes!' to.
In terms of building a trial flywheel, here are a few ideas to think about:
Is it possible to give buyers a partial result with a free trial? (only do this if you truly have customer feedback that your audience won't really use this for more than one project)
Is it possible to gamify this somehow? Perhaps you unlock a free codebase if the user does X, Y, Z (things that would be product qualified lead indicators)?
What would happen if you opened up your funnel if you did include a free trial, or a freemium option and got in front of a lot more devs?
All of these focus less on traffic acquisition and more on experimenting with the offer you're putting in front of your buyer.
The offer must be both clear (i.e easily understandable) but also compelling (can't refuse it).
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have follow-up questions or thoughts. Thanks!
Thanks so much Dev! You've given me some great things to think about here.
You folks have done a great job the past year or two with early/mid-stage SaaS content - how to build out a site, handle product releases, develop positioning, etc. I've noticed that almost everything you cover is stuff that I'm working on right now.
It's a very good example of how to continually nail pain-point content for an audience, and I'd love to hear more about your process for identifying that content with your clients.
I'm well versed in different ways to come up with content ideas, but when it comes down to pain-point content for my own product I hit a mental wall. Would love to know what that brainstorming structure looks like for you?
Hey, thanks! The process on our end is simple — we listen and note down every time prospects have a question, concern, myth, limiting belief, or logistical concern in our client engagement process.
Then we turn our response to them into content on our site. Then, the next time a prospect asks a question we've already published content about, we just screen share or point them to the link of the stuff we've already published.
It's simple, unsexy, and works like a charm.
We don't really focus on keyword research or keyword volumes that much (shocking given doing SEO for our clients is 1/2 our biz).
TL;DR — note down prospect concerns and pain points, and turn that into content.
More here https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/how-to-create-pain-point-content-that-converts-in-b2b-saas/
Hey Dev Basu, congrats on your success! And thanks for the opportunity.
We are launching Trafft, a B2B SaaS for service businesses, for automating booking, staff scheduling, managing employees, locations, services, processing payments, generating invoices and managing taxes, etc. The first industries we target are: salons industry (Beauty, Spa, Barbershops, …), photographers, partly healthcare and sports.
We are trying to figure out the best strategy for acquisition, and for getting people to start the trial. We are coming from the WordPress community (and we are pretty successful there with our other booking tool), and we use the same strategies for now (content marketing, PPC). We have decent traffic already, but very low % of signups.
Is there something you can recommend?
Thanks 🙂
Hey Alexander, we work with a number of Vertical SaaS "workflow" software like yours so happy to weigh in here.
If you think about your Wordpress, it's a horizontally positioned platform (i.e anyone in any industry can use WP).
For Vertical SaaS focused on specific niches, we've found it beneficial for our client's positioning to be pain-point focused vs being solution-focused.
That may sound counter-intuitive but think of this way — a solution only matters to a prospect if (a) they know they have an observable problem (i.e they do not need to be convinced they have a problem and (b) they believe you offer the most effective path to solving that problem.
Here's how that plays out in terms of your visitor:trial conversion (run this as an experiment)....
Instead of leading salon owners to pages that say "The Salon Appointment Software for Successful Salons", send them to a page with the headline "Tired of dealing with no-show clients and dead spots during the day?".
More on that here https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/how-to-create-pain-point-content-that-converts-in-b2b-saas/
Thank you very much - we will definitely give this a try!
Another question, if I may - which acquisition channels would you recommend, i.e. where should we invest more?
We are trying now, with small daily budgets (to scale more successful ones)
We are considering working with influencers in the target niches - never tried that so a bit puzzled.
Also, thinking whether it makes sense to try publishing ads in Twitter, Quora, Reddit.
Thank you!
We always work from the most problem and solution aware (but product unaware) audiences to the least aware audiences. This means that even if the CPC's are expensive, Google Search ads are a great way to validate whether or not you should make an investment in SEO for the same keywords.
Once you have nailed Google Search ads, then move on to Facebook Ads. Keep in mind that with Facebook's recent updates, you'll need to monitor your blended CPA overall (vs what FB Ads dashboard shows you).
Build an omnichannel remarketing campaign from the very get go. We call this win-back system the Boomerang Method. More on that here https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/remarketing-strategy-for-saas/ and in the talk I did for ProductLed Summit (https://pls6.productled.com/talks/how-to-fix-the-leaky-bucket-in-your-productled-funnelthe-boomerang-method/)
Think about whether your target audience spends time reading newsletters, listening to podcasts, etc. In our experience, these channels have not worked well to reach a vSMB audience. They work great for other types of audiences like creators for example.
Twitter ads work well for tech-focused audiences (SaaS, digital marketing etc).
To sum this up, try mastering Google Search Ads first, then move on to other channels.
Thank you so much - really a logical and insightful approach. I will browse for your blogs for several days now, making notes :)
One last question (maybe DM would be more appropriate?), would your company be able to help us in this early stage, and, if so, what would be the cost range, and what would be the best way to get started?
Thanks again!
How does demand generation change, if at all, when your a start up or pre-revenue company vs. being an enterprise.
Both need leads...so I'm guess both need demand gen strategies but curious on what you see the two main difference would be
Hey rmondo — Great question. As you scale your company, you might move up-market, or sell to multiple customer profiles. When this happens, it creates a knock on effect in the way you might manage your targeting, messaging, budgeting, and customer journeys.
Effectively, you'll have multiple demand generation campaigns running at the same time as part of a larger demand gen program.
One more thing... Sometimes moving upmarket means selling to enterprises as well which tend to have slower buying cycles. The means that there's a need for more nurture and revive content needed as part of the overall demand gen process.
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Thank you so much. This is a great place to start: https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/saas-demand-generation/
Our playbooks aren't meant to be secret because we want everyone who is building a SaaS business to have them. We've been a profitable multi-million dollar business ourselves for many years and publishing our playbooks for free serves two purposes:
a) We know our content will help more founders than our services ever will.
b) Great clients find us through our content. We're just doing for ourselves what we do for our scale-up B2B SaaS clients.
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