What no one tells you when launching a SaaS busine...
# ask-a-growth-questiont
Tina
10/17/2022, 8:19 AMWhat no one tells you when launching a SaaS business?
o
Oras
10/17/2022, 9:00 AMFinding customers is harder than you expect.
🙌 3
r
Randy Chai
10/17/2022, 9:15 AMYou could’ve de-risk and validated many hunches before building and launching
🙌 1
s
Stefan Despotovski
10/17/2022, 9:26 AM
Don't launch your product/service if you don't have an active user base.
🙌 1
a
Aditya
10/18/2022, 1:06 PMAgree with Oras, it is difficult to find your early customers i.e first 10 or 50 or 100 customers.
Aditya
10/18/2022, 1:08 PM@Oras @Stefan Despotovski @Randy Chai I had one question instead of coming up with some innovative or out of the box idea can we instead pick an idea which is already validated by market? i.e pick product which is already doing 30-50 or 100k MRR. In that case can we skip PMF step? because idea is already validated because there is a need and people are interested in buying similar products. Any idea if this approach works?
o
Oras
10/18/2022, 1:16 PMIt does work all the time. The process is:
• understand what is currently being offered.
• Research the cons and bad reviews. What their customers don’t like.
• Build around these pain points.
But again, try to find the customers and convince them to use your product wouldn’t be easy.
It’s not the idea or the product, it’s how you package it and how you sell it.
👍 2
r
Randy Chai
10/18/2022, 1:16 PMBut why jump head-first into a red ocean? Unless you have such a significant info, ops, capital or tech advantage that allows you to deliver a 10x better experience. If you don't, you're not gonna overthrow the incumbent or gain enough market share to breakthrough
👍 2
a
Aditya
10/18/2022, 1:22 PMIt’s not the idea or the product, it’s how you package it and how you sell it.Agree it comes down to sales and marketing 🙂
s
Stefan Despotovski
10/18/2022, 1:25 PM
@Aditya
Even if the Idea has been validated and successful by someone else, it does not guarantee your success. That is why there are so many Uber and Airbnb-like companies that believe they can simply create a similar product and succeed. Which is 99% of the time not the case.
If you don't validate, you're going blind, which will cost you a lot of time and money.
a
Aditya
10/18/2022, 1:29 PMGot your point Stefan. But Airbnb, Uber are very large companies and market in which they are dealing is different. They are handling things at a different scale. My goal is to build business with 10k MRR, or may be 30 or 50k MRR revenue. So my question was around that.
👍 1
s
Stefan Despotovski
10/18/2022, 2:12 PM
I believe it is the same even for those business, you can try it out if you think that will work for you. But I believe it is a big gamble and skipping validation in my opinion is a bad idea.
👍 1
a
Alessandro Cavaliere
10/26/2022, 12:04 PMProbably the right KPIs to monitor