Lessons learned in 10 years of bootstrapping an enterprise SaaS
https://chenwang.org/posts/2021-02-volcube-10-years-series/
(First post @ Indie) Sharing some of the hard-learnt lessons when bootstrapping an enterprise SaaS business, which hopefully help others to avoid some of the mistakes mentioned.
Great resource, thank you very much for sharing your experience. Reading this now instead of Physics HW
thanks for sharing it is interesting, i read all 3 parts :-) .Would it be possible for you to write about sales as well? how did you acquired customers etc.? i know you said it was handled by simon but surely you must be knowing it as well being there at that time.
Good question. He's the domain expert given his experience in the industry, and he leveraged his network in the field to get some intros. But other times it was cold calling and emails just like any other SaaS business. I see a lot of benefits of CEO being the sales + product person in one, as you have no gap between listening to customer feedback and applying those learnings to the next iteration of the product. In fact, it gave me the inspiration and confidence to do exactly the same myself with my next venture.
In terms of actual sales, selling to banks was super tough and we ended up giving up on banks and targeting trading firms instead, which are generally smaller organisations with a short decision loop. Since the joint venture, there were dedicated salespeople so the situation got a lot better. What I saw there was that having vs not-having sales function in an organisation made a huge difference in revenue. It sounds like a no-brainer but in tech startups, people tend to believe growth is product-led. I used to think like that but not anymore.