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The Business of SaaS

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Re: The Business of SaaS

#161

Post by ludston »

jcadam wrote: post #112
a13n wrote: post #74

Yikes, that was the best article on SaaS that I've read all year. So much great information. A few things jumped out to me as off: > Conversion rates of low-touch SaaS trials with credit card not required: > 2%+: extremely good Really? 2% seems awful. If a company signs up for your trial, they must have a problem they're trying to solve. If you don't solve 98% of peoples' problems, it seems like you have a problem ge…

Well, I've had my little SaaS up and running for about 6 weeks. - The landing page gets about 30-70 hits per day (excepting the occasional spike) -- how many of those are bots and crawlers, I wonder? - I've had a grand total of FIVE (5) trial sign ups. - No buyers yet - My linode bill is currently about ~$120/month. - Still within the free tier on S3 and Mailgun. - You know, when I'm the only one using the app, I don…

This product has a subset of features from Drop-box, Trello and Instagram?

Re: The Business of SaaS

#162

Post by lettergram »

lugg wrote: post #154
lettergram wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't need the standby server, just use automated backups. You also don't need the linode running nginx, with so few users put it on one server. Finally wordpress should be $5/month or less. Right there you could drop at least $15 / month.

$15 / month. Kind of not even worth thinking about when you're a developer and should be internally billing yourself for $100/hour+.

Fair, what I decribed should reduce overhead as well (less nodes = less complexity typically).

Also when you're starting something you can't bill yourself anything mentally. Else you'd go out and be billing someone else, you'd likely make more money. In part cutting costs is important because it's actual savings, i.e. imagning billing yourself doesn't produce real money.

Re: The Business of SaaS

#163

Post by Trundle »

Trundle wrote: post #109
amelius wrote: post #73

Nice article, but the most interesting question remains unanswered: how/where to find SaaS business ideas?

Do contracting at rates affordable to small businesses. They'll come to you with problems they're willing to pay to fix and can't find a decent premade solution for.

Didn't flesh this out in time for edit.

- Don't position yourself how you normally would if you were going for a new job and trying to maximise your income. No "senior developer with experience in python, node, etc"

- Do position yourself as just a general "software developer". I said contractor before but I wouldn't (didn't) even make it look like that. More like a small agency. If they're completely outside of the tech industry (what you want) then they're going to be wanting someone to just give money to in exchange for solving their problem, not someone they're going to have to manage. Instead of hiring Dave by the hour, they're hiring "[town name] Premier Development" on a fixed project basis.

- Be selective with who you take on. Again, you should be positioning yourself pretty cheap to the point where if this wasn't basically an exploratory exercise for you then their project wouldn't be worth your time, so you don't want to get stuck doing work that isn't a potential SAAS for you down the line.

- You want them coming to you trying to get something done for $15k that would normally cost $100k+ to build. Then you say "hey, if you're willing to be my test dummy/case study/first customer, I'll build it and give you a licence for $10k"

Re: The Business of SaaS

#164

Post by jcadam »

ludston wrote: post #161
jcadam wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I've had my little SaaS up and running for about 6 weeks. - The landing page gets about 30-70 hits per day (excepting the occasional spike) -- how many of those are bots and crawlers, I wonder? - I've had a grand total of FIVE (5) trial sign ups. - No buyers yet - My linode bill is currently about ~$120/month. - Still within the free tier on S3 and Mailgun. - You know, when I'm the only one using the app, I don…

This product has a subset of features from Drop-box, Trello and Instagram?

I don't know about Instagram (haven't used that much), but I'm shooting for (long-term) a card-based, simplified replacement for tools like Confluence, which I find overwrought and difficult to use.

It uses cards, so I suppose it superficially resembles Trello and similar agile board-esque tools, but it definitely has a different feel to it.

I actually got the idea for the basic layout from Pintrest (I originally had a masonry-like layout to the cards, but switched to CSS grid -- makes sorting/searching/scanning for something specific easier, IMO).

Re: The Business of SaaS

#165

Post by ci5er »

Denzel wrote: post #160
ci5er wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. I had a pretty amazing job at Motorola (remember them? :-) ) when I moved back to the US from Japan. They wanted me to run around the world (on their credit card) to figure out what business they needed to be next. I found one. They didn't get it. I ended up quitting: "Fine - I will do it myself". I remember the first meetings I had a 6.30am or 7.00am at breakfast places with VCs... They would listen and…

Can you provide any links or books that'd provide guidance on speaking "their language"? Seems like a wonderful opportunity to educate. I'd love to learn more as someone that tried to raise money, albeit from a smaller sample (~50 engagements), and failed miserably.

That's a great question. Let me go through my collection and see if I can find any that might provide guidance.

I found that it was like a fraternity, though. I only learned it by hanging out with them. Kind of like how doctors call bruises 'hematoma's. They all know what it means, but it wouldn't occur to us normies to call it that.

If that book doesn't exist, maybe somebody should write it!

Re: The Business of SaaS

#166

Post by amelius »

Trundle wrote: post #163
Trundle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do contracting at rates affordable to small businesses. They'll come to you with problems they're willing to pay to fix and can't find a decent premade solution for.

Didn't flesh this out in time for edit. - Don't position yourself how you normally would if you were going for a new job and trying to maximise your income. No "senior developer with experience in python, node, etc" - Do position yourself as just a general "software developer". I said contractor before but I wouldn't (didn't) even make it look like that. More like a small agency. If they're completely outside of the…

Hmm, so the client says "I want X", and you say "okay, I'll build X, and sell it to A, B, C, and to you of course". I'm not sure if the client would be too happy with that (it's their idea after all).

Also, why work as a contractor if you already know what SaaS the company wants? And if you don't know what SaaS they want, how do you know you want to work for them to find out?

Re: The Business of SaaS

#167

Post by Trundle »

amelius wrote: post #166
Trundle wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't flesh this out in time for edit. - Don't position yourself how you normally would if you were going for a new job and trying to maximise your income. No "senior developer with experience in python, node, etc" - Do position yourself as just a general "software developer". I said contractor before but I wouldn't (didn't) even make it look like that. More like a small agency. If they're completely outside of the…

Hmm, so the client says "I want X", and you say "okay, I'll build X, and sell it to A, B, C, and to you of course". I'm not sure if the client would be too happy with that (it's their idea after all). Also, why work as a contractor if you already know what SaaS the company wants? And if you don't know what SaaS they want, how do you know you want to work for them to find out?

Depends on what they are. Plenty of brick and mortar stores only compete with other providers within their city/area and don't really care what's going on in other cities. Offer them exclusivity in their region of business if you need to.

Even if that's not the case. If it's genuinely out of their price range to get built custom just for them, which it almost always will be, then they should be willing to collaborate just to get it at all.

Sorry, I guess you don't ever need to do any actual contracting at all if it's just exploratory. I was writing from experience as half of a "software development agency" so we did do custom work, I just noticed that a lot of what we were building could easily be turned in to a product.

I will say though that actually doing some work for them, basically getting carte blanche to poke around their workstations and getting rundowns from their staff on how to achieve their tasks, reveals a lot of opportunities. You come across things like them moving over to a different pc. "Oh we need to use this because it has our X on it, which we use to do Important Task. It's not made any more so we can't get a new version".

Re: The Business of SaaS

#168

Post by jcadam »

tinymollusk wrote: post #147
jcadam wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I've had my little SaaS up and running for about 6 weeks. - The landing page gets about 30-70 hits per day (excepting the occasional spike) -- how many of those are bots and crawlers, I wonder? - I've had a grand total of FIVE (5) trial sign ups. - No buyers yet - My linode bill is currently about ~$120/month. - Still within the free tier on S3 and Mailgun. - You know, when I'm the only one using the app, I don…

I can help you increase your visit-to-signup conversion rate for free, if you're interested. Just soft launched my own service (www.leadnexus.co), where I will split test your signup forms to find more effective options. Your volume might make it a little tougher to optimize, but I bet I can improve on that ~0.3% conversion rate for you. (That goes for anyone reading this -- happy to see if I can help, to test out my…

Nice site :)

Might want to fix this passage:

> We use an emphasis on optionality, machine learning, and a dedicate to results to get you more users and leads. We don't want you to pay us for unless we improve your results.

Re: The Business of SaaS

#169

Post by jcadam »

lugg wrote: post #154
lettergram wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't need the standby server, just use automated backups. You also don't need the linode running nginx, with so few users put it on one server. Finally wordpress should be $5/month or less. Right there you could drop at least $15 / month.

$15 / month. Kind of not even worth thinking about when you're a developer and should be internally billing yourself for $100/hour+.

Hey, my day job doesn't pay nearly that much :)

Re: The Business of SaaS

#170

Post by csa »

the_bear wrote: post #129
a13n wrote: post #74

Yikes, that was the best article on SaaS that I've read all year. So much great information. A few things jumped out to me as off: > Conversion rates of low-touch SaaS trials with credit card not required: > 2%+: extremely good Really? 2% seems awful. If a company signs up for your trial, they must have a problem they're trying to solve. If you don't solve 98% of peoples' problems, it seems like you have a problem ge…

Yeah, that's the one part of the article that seemed off to me. For my low-touch, no-credit-card-up-front SaaS product we get about 25% trial-to-paid conversion rate. I think it's possible we're above average, but we're not doing 10x better than "extremely good" peers. Maybe there's just so much variance that it's impossible to give a good benchmark, but even still, 2% seems low. I also suspect that marketing has a l…

Your numbers are great, and congratulations. That said, I will guess that you are leaving money on the table by not having a wider target audience for your marketing.

Also, the idea that a company is “better at marketing than at converting” isn’t really the correct way to look at it. Basically the math says that you want to keep increasing the width of the net you cast as long as it is profitable. In some cases, you will find a profitable group to market to, but the reasonable conversion rate for that market (i.e., people who end up loving or product) is just naturally lower than your high-conversion group.

As a simple example, someone may have a very technical finance newsletter that they sell to finance professionals, and they covert that group at a high rate (and a high price). This newsletter can probably also target HNW individual investors profitably, but they will not likely have the same conversion rate.

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