What to do pre-launch?
I built many products/services in the past on devices, mobile apps, and webapps. This is the first time I am building a small SaaS product. So treat me like a noob.
tldr; I started a project few weeks back, one thing led to another, I think I should make it into a freemium service. My initial plan was to start a consulting agency and also build smaller product/services that supports the consulting business. What are the things I need to watch out for?
Current outstanding tasks: (I still got few features to add before finishing in a month or 2).
-implement payment (probably will use stripe). I am on blazor/.netcore as my stack.
-get domain and ssl
-start a business (get business license/open bank account...)
-test, test, test
-probably should improve UI...
Any other recommendations?
Others may disagree, I am not a fan of freemium at all. Perhaps as a temporary measure and to gather initial feedback. Only way to know if this works well for your product and audience is to test.
I'd rather focus on building a fantastic product and offer which is hard to turn down. You could do a lifetime discount for early adopters.
Are you thinking freemium because you're afraid to ask for money? I've noticed that's a problem for a lot of people. Not saying it is for you, just curious.
Burning out. I could understand if you already have a consultancy and you start expanding into products/services, but doing both at the same time? Sounds like you'll stretch yourself very thin.
Do you really want a consultancy or do you want to build a SaaS? They are very different beasts.
Yes, ship something asap. Don't worry about building up a big launch. Put it in front of people, ask for their feedback, ask for their money, make note of and deal with their objections, talk about it, write about it. Create lots of valuable content and get busy on social media.
Do not make the mistake that many of us have made and get carried away in development for months on end without shipping. This is a huge hurdle for many people, break through it as soon as you can and move onto iteration -- that's where you'll build the most value.
Thanks for taking the time, I'll look into them.
I think one thing led to another that made me approach future businesses, that I plan to build incremental improvements for products with existing markets (maybe target different niche audience).
Regarding freemium, I've always approached that I need to add value in my product and services. If the existing solution is free, I'll need to offer a version that is close to that price. Take my current project as an example, it's a financial modeling tool that anyone can do with excel or any spreadsheets. So at the minimum, the tool have those fields and can generates charts with few inputs. Clearly this is time saving to just empty spreadsheet. Then, I've added few other value-add features. Competition-wise, a pre-rendered excel workbook with all the fields typically starts $79 to $99. So the market and price is pretty clear. Free part is just for others to try the tool with very low cost to me. Competitions just have empty excel as example.
Ideally, I just want to build products. But it seems consultancy is easy money. The combination is more like to up-sell the consultancy part. Basically, I've built so many libraries that can speed up client's development. Typically, before project kick off, I'll analyze what they want and come up with work break down. I'll give them multiple choices for the architecture/solutions they can chose from. One options is to use custom built, 3rd party solutions, or some of my libs.
Regarding consultancy, I am at the stage of not just bill by expertise & time but by future values. I typically will either ask for equity. However after few failed startups, I'll probably need to have a better mix or evaluate their business better. Hence, this financial modeling tool also help clients evaluate their business before they spend $ or me spending time.
I only started 2 weeks ago, after kids go to sleep. I've been sharing on IH and I've already got few feedbacks. It would be great to be able to publish this as a stand-alone product for others that's not my clients.
The free version currently host on here: https://increnovation.azurewebsites.net/fermi
The standalone / premium version would be on wasm.
Thanks again for all your inputs and time.
Create lots of valuable content and get busy on social media.
Any recommendation or resources on this?
I'd recommend following Justin Welsh on Twitter. He has some excellent content and advice for building a following: https://twitter.com/thejustinwelsh
I think he's quite versed in building an audience on LinkedIn and has a course on that, though haven't checked it out myself.
You could also try one of the many social media tools for scheduling content. Stuff like MeetEdgar, SocialChamp, Radaar.