An unconventional approach to a SaaS product launch
Most rookie software founders think a successful product launch day looks like a hockey stick. You need a marketing team, a super bowl commercial, and a splashy Product Hunt launch. When launch day rolls around, your sales pipeline is completely full.
That's rarely the case. In our experience, many successful SaaS companies’ growth charts look more like incremental improvements that compound over a large enough span of time.
Not to mention, a successful launch plan starts before the product is even built when you are still building an audience and producing content to see what resonates. Then, once you've landed on a couple of pain points or two, take the time to talk to prospective customers in one-on-one interviews to understand the core problem you are solving and what a viable product might even look like.
Rather than posting a generic product launch plan, we're sharing the story of Transistor, a rather unconventional but successful saas product launch.
Choose your market carefully
Before you even think about building and launching something, it is important to think about the market you are serving.
This is why you shouldn’t start with an idea. Instead, start with the group of people you want to help.
If you are not sure where to start, here are a few questions to ask yourself to find your market.
How do you currently make a living?
What kinds of customers do you serve at work? (This is a great jumping off point because these people are already paying you for expertise.)
What communities do you belong to?
What do you do better than anyone else?
Once you have a market or a few in mind, you also want to evaluate the market. In truth, some markets are just bigger, easier to reach, and more profitable than others.
Here are some factors to consider:
How do they spend money?
How big is the market?
How easy are they to reach?
What trends do you see in the market?
What do they search on Google when they are looking for answers? And even, do they even turn to Google in the first place? If not, what do they use?
In addition to learning more about this market, you also want to figure out if you are the right founder for this market. (a.k.a. founder/market fit).
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Am I solving a real problem for potential clients in this market?
Am I the right person to solve this problem?
Do people in this market have money to buy this solution?
Do I even want to be in this market?
What’s your target audience investing in right now? (Note: If you are a consultant or run a service business, you have a massive advantage since you likely have deeper insights into what your clients are buying.)
This can solve a lot of problems down the road, from the example Justin shared in this talk about his first entrepreneurial endeavor running a snowboarding brick and mortar shop. He loved snowboarding but realized quickly that snowboarding customers were far from his ideal customers.
Or, you might be lucky enough to have a successful business. But, you wake up 2, 5, or 10 years from now realizing you actually hate your business or dread talking to customers because you chose the wrong market to serve.
Help your customers get what they want
While founder/product fit and founder/market fit matter a lot, a great SaaS business is ultimately about your customers.
A great business isn’t about you and your dream. It’s about helping your customers achieve their dreams.
Do more customer research
Up until this point, most of your research is likely online or through emails and DMs. At some point, you need to talk to your potential customers, though. Setting up a handful of interviews over Zoom, phone calls, or in-person will tell you 10x more in less time than keeping it all online.
If you are an introverted technical founder who is terrified of jumping on a customer interview, this Startups for the Rest of Us episode is a great primer for conducting these calls.
Customer interviews will provide more unbiased feedback and real insight into the biggest pain points that your market has and how they talk about these pain points, among so many other things.
While the number of customer interviews you do will vary based on your market and business idea, once you’ve done a handful, start summarizing your research. You should start to see some patterns emerging. That can become the foundation for a quick product or early MVP.
Write out your hypothesis
Once you have a better understanding of your target market and the pain point you are solving, write out your hypothesis.
When you are first starting out, it can help to think of launching your new SaaS like a science experiment.
First, it is about getting clear on the goal or objective.
Then, write out your hypothesis for how you think you can solve this problem for your target market. When you are writing out your hypothesis, both include the technical stuff about HOW you are going to tackle this as well as the marketing aspect of how you are going to reach your target market.
For instance, when Justin and Jon first started building Transistor.FM, a podcast hosting SaaS platform, Justin already had a lot of interesting data points from years in the industry. He knew that 75% of the people who bought Marketing for Devs (his course) were also listening to one or both of his podcasts at the time.
So, his earliest hypothesis looked something like this:
Many tech businesses want a branded podcast but struggle with getting listeners. I can help them by:
Improving their show art and description
Getting them more ratings and reviews
Making their episodes easier to share
Now, their podcast has more downloads, and their business has more brand awareness.
Start small
“For an idea to get BIG, it needs to start small.”
This now-classic quote from Derek Sivers is a great reminder that most successful businesses started off with a small MVP or a tiny fraction of what they are today.
Let’s use Amazon as an example. Before, they were the giant eCommerce behemoth they are today. They started out selling books in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Unicorn businesses aside—like Amazon— starting small also means the stakes aren’t so high. You can learn just as much but with fewer consequences if you need to pivot or realize it is not for you.
The other reason why it helps to start with the smallest possible idea is it makes it easier to evaluate for both marketing/founder fit and product/founder fit. Both are just as important as getting to product-market fit but will have a bigger impact on the quality of your work and, to a smaller degree, your personal life.
After all, if you are going to devote years to building a SaaS, you owe it to yourself that it is in an area you are passionate about (ideally) or at least don’t dread the idea of talking to customers in that niche.
Get in the game and start helping customers now
What’s the smallest possible thing you could do that would validate your hypothesis?
The goal is to build the smallest possible thing that solves a real problem for real people in your target market. Instead of spending months or years building a complicated product (that people may not even want), you are spending days or weeks on a humble MVP version that you can release and start collecting real feedback and ideally money from your target customers.
In fact, the best validation for an early version of your product is sales. The next best thing is preorders. The third best approach is email addresses.
So, what could this look like?
A productized service that tackles the problem in a slightly more manual way initially
A no-code / low-code "working" product demo.
A beta version of your product
The earliest concept will likely change a lot. So, the only thing that matters is collecting more feedback from real customers. Any customer who is handing over their credit card and is willing to provide actionable feedback is infinitely more valuable for you (and/or your product team) than anything you can learn from Google Analytics or a survey to your email list.
Tying it all together
With Transistor, the actual SaaS didn’t launch until March - April 2018. However, a lot of the work that led to this product started way back in 2015 when Justin started showing blog posts and tutorials on podcasting based on his experiences running two shows - Product People and MegaMaker.
Then, he launched paid courses and workshops about podcasting.
The initial MVP version of Transistor was initially built, and they sold one customer - Jon’s employer at the time, at the end of 2017.
All of the years learning about their target market, shipping bigger things as they learned more about their target market (i.e. podcasters) is what ultimately helped shape the product and gave them loads of traction once it was ready.
Looking for more stories about how successful SaaS founders came up with their initial ideas and launched their products? Watch any or all of the videos in this Youtube playlist.
