What I learned running a seasonal SaaS business
Things I learned growing and running a seasonal SaaS business. Sometimes growth happens during specific times of the year no matter how hard you hustle. Learn to embrace the natural sales cycles and be ready for them when they come!
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I genuinely agree with that. I personally have observed this. Until its time, you will not get the sale results you have targeted.
This has made some very interesting points, it good to know that even Seasonal products, can still make revenue year round, and I like the idea of making the updates during the off-season.
Thank you for sharing this!
Really informative post Vance,
I have never worked on seasonal products before, but after reading this post I would like to dig into deeper.
some great points.
Running a seasonal SaaS biz? Embrace the ups and downs, plan for prime time, stabilize revenue, and wear multiple hats. Go with the flow and thrive!
Since it is seasonal, how do you manage during off season, Should such ideas be a side gig only?
As stated in the article, the signups are relatively seasonal, but the money comes in all year round since it is recurring SaaS. Once you get the app up to your target revenue level, you can absolutely go full time with a seasonal business.
You can also expand your offerings and find ways to make it not so seasonal, which is what I am looking into now. Everything in life changes, and so can your business!
Very informative post. Great one!
What do you use to track your sales and churn data?
Churn data is very improtat to track!
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You can Integrate it with your SaaS and eCommerce business!
All my sales are through Gumroad, and they are tracked there. I export all sales to a spreadsheet (because of course I do) so I can do some further analysis on the data there.
Yeah, I figured syou might be dogfooding a bit of your own budgeting data (because of course).
What made you go with Gumroad vs Stripe directly or some other solution?
Good question. I originally went with Gumroad over Stripe because I built everything in the extension itself and I had no web service of my own behind it. Gumroad had a built in License Key issuing feature along with an API I could use to verify the license keys, so it was less work for me to integrate from the start.
Now that I have my own whole web service behind BudgetSheet though, I am rethinking that approach and will probably move to Stripe as I build in more ways for my users to manage their own subscriptions instead of having to go through Gumroad like they do now.
The other day when l logged into Gumroad, I saw that my Tailwind UI purchases were listed, meaning Tailwind also uses Gumroad so it may still be worth the trade-offs depending on the type of SaaS and how you're wanting to scale.
Yeah, it's nothing against Gumroad - they have been great. I can just provide a more seamless checkout and subscription management experience with Stripe on my own site, plus get a much better dashboard for all the key SaaS metrics I need to be looking at. There are also a lot more integrations with Stripe to boot.
Interesting
Do you have any reasoning on why churn rate is high during a high sales time of the year?
It's just natural churn. It's not necessarily higher in terms of percentages, but it is higher in terms of raw numbers just because the signups that time of the year last year were higher also.
The post has got some great points ..Must read
What are all the possible use cases for your product?
There may be a specific segment of the market that needs your product during Q3 / Q4.
For example, a quick look at the search volume for the term “google sheets budget template” reveals that the search volume is actually pretty steady throughout the year.
So, you might be able to offer the very best budget template for Google Sheets in exchange for an email, then convert a portion of those leads into paying customers.
Also, a friendly reminder that customers are created long before they ever buy your product. So if you’re waiting until the peak season to start marketing, it’s already too late.
That screenshot you posted is far from a flat line, and shows some definite seasonality. I don't think I have exhausted all possible customers or niches yet, so there may be a way to stabilize it. The article is just reporting what I have experienced so far and how I am dealing with it.
I agree that marketing should be done continually - it's more of a focus and intensity. You want more marketing when users are searching the most so it pays off faster. Since it's only me and my time is limited, I find that I get more "bang for my buck" if I oscillate a bit and switch primary focus with the seasons.
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