Lessons from repositioning our SaaS

My co-founder and I have been working on an AI SaaS in the enterprise search space for the past few months.

I'm a huge fan of design partnerships. So I used my network and cold-DM's to find people to talk to about their problems in this space.

And this led us to reposition (and slightly pivot) our just launched SaaS,  AskJack - Your AI-driven HR assistant.

Why we repositioned

Through our design partnerships and cold outreach to potential customers, we uncovered a couple of key pains that we started to focus on. Namely, a few audiences within companies spend an inordinate amount of time answering repetitive questions from the rest of the company: HR, IT, operations, and legal teams, to name a few.

As we talked to our target market, they kept seeing AskJack as a tool to solve this problem, not to search across the entire organization. They also realized that using AskJack could save themselves 25-50% of their time because AI could answer these repetitive questions.

Our first hint for repositioning was that they could use AskJack as it is today but for a very narrow problem.

Seeing this and validating it with more customer research convinced us to reposition.

We could have niched down to HR, IT, operations, and Legal leaders. But at this point, we know HR the best; it's our beachhead. So, we chose to focus only on HR today. We can expand to others over time if we desire. However, focus is critical with positioning (just like selecting an ideal customer profile).

Repositioning has amazed us with how everything started to click.

Marketing copy is more straightforward. Instead of addressing a general problem shared by many different teams, we are speaking to an audience of one.

Just one HR leader in a company. Not every team leader in the company.

Our copy writes itself from interview notes.

We no longer have to try to mingle multiple audiences into one message.

Pricing became easier. Our pricing started as per seat. Then, because of this use case, we had a flat monthly price for the use case and per seat if you wanted full enterprise search.

However, we struggled to make it clear and not confusing for the single-use cases while still making sense for companies of different sizes.

Now, we have straightforward tiered pricing. It's dead simple.

Features became far more manageable. We also nuked a ton of our potential roadmap. Features necessary for the enterprise are not needed for a single problem. Bonus: A few of these features would have been time-consuming for a team of two.

Customer interviews are far more actionable because we are now focusing on HR.

Our first design partner call after the repositioning exploded with possibility. In fact, the design partner got really excited on the call because now we could go beyond nudging her problem to fully addressing it. Where before it wouldn't make sense to add HR-specific features, it does now, making it more of a desirable solution.

We now have less competition. Before, we competed against enterprise search and AI assistants, but now we only compete against AI assistants. This should make differentiation easier because we're focusing on HR. In contrast, our competition focuses on a few ideal customer profiles.

Finally, sales should be easier. We now sell directly to HR leaders, so our messaging is tightly focused on their problems. It makes sense in one second vs. five seconds. And since our product doesn't integrate as deeply into an org, it won't trigger as deep of a security review.