SaaSpirin

I have been beta-testing 4 new packages these last two months, with our existing customers:

• interview-based blog posts (for thought leadership content)
• long-form sales pages (similar to our current homepage)
• case studies
• pillar pages (for SEO)

These will be shown on the new version of the website I'm working on, which I intend to release in February :)

To follow-up on my last update, we did a survey among our current customers to identify how we could better serve them.

A lot of ideas were shared, and we had to choose between different options so as not to scatter our efforts too much.

We are currently "beta-testing" the following add-ons and new services with a few customers:

• publishing the blog posts to their CMS (so far, customers had to do that themselves, and some still prefer it that way)
• full whitepaper lead-gen package, including landing page and ad copy

SaaSpirin is now making a bit more than $5000 a month, and this is thanks to additional customers from my network but also some from online marketing: SEO, some ads, and my outreach on groups in social networking platforms.

BTW these new customers also validated the new pricing, which is reassuring.

I am now thinking of how to better serve them with additional services, based on their feedback.

Now that we have learned more about our real costs and streamlined our processes, I did some number crunching and realized that we had to increase our prices to become profitable. The initial prices were somehow decided on a hunch and I think this is normal because back then the goal was mostly just to validate demand.

Our three plans were $349 / $649 / $1199 per month, and we have now increased to $499 / $949 / $1749 per month.

We now have 5 early adopters and I plan to be in touch with each of them as much as possible to learn and improve our services.

A lot of our work is still being done in a ad-hoc manner, as we are building our delivery processes, so we are far from being profitable right now, but I know from experience that this is obviously normal.

Exciting!

Today I got my first customer: Robin from ManyRequests (https://manyrequests.com/).

Robin is a fellow Belgian who I met online through his great Facebook group Productize Community (https://www.facebook.com/groups/192719694795609) and then IRL in Singapore back in March.

He inspired me a lot to start SaaSpirin, so I couldn't have chosen a better first customer :) He's also quite active here (@Vinrob).

I'm still busy on my other business so I can't do everything as fast as I'd want to, but I made a list of all people I knew from my network and who could be interested: past/current customers, other entrepreneurs I met at events, friends, etc.

I'm going to start reaching out to them individually because this is the best way to get feedback and potentially early adopters.

I decided to partner with a content writer and strategist I had worked with in the past for my other business. She has a lot of experience, having worked with famous SaaS copywriting and SEO agencies. We built our first website with Landen: https://www.saaspirin.co

The design is obviously basic and this is something I'm not used to (I'm a perfectionist and building nice websites and apps is what I've been working on all my career so far ;-)), but I'm trying to do what I teach and be as lean as possible. We will improve later if it works, the most important thing is the message we are communicating.

After 12 years growing and managing my Ruby on Rails software house, primarily helping SaaS founders, I noticed a common need among them on top of having their MVP built.

Most SaaS founders realize the importance of marketing, and especially content and SEO, but they usually don't have the time nor the expertise to do it themselves. So this sounded like a useful complementary service I could start providing.

I also wanted to fulfill an old dream of mine to create a 100% location-independent company that works totally online with subscriptions.

I obviously thought of SaaS, but launching a productized services company seemed like a more risk-balanced way (no big upfront investment), especially since I should be able to motivate some of my current customers to try this and learn from there.

BTW the name "SaaSpirin" is meant to play on the question frequently asked in SaaS communities: "is your product a painkiller or just a vitamin?" - I hope with SaaSpirin that my service will soon be recognized as a real painkiller for SaaS founders!