8 things I wished someone would have told me before I started a year ago
This year I grew my first successful SaaS to over 2,500 users and 80 active paying customers. It’s been a year of many lessons and mistakes, so here are some of those lessons for you so you can learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes.
- Keep your service free or at a low price for as long as you can.
In the beginning it’s all about gathering feedback and getting your product validated. It’s hard to resist the urge to raise prices and make more money, but in the end, it will be worth it. All the feedback you get will help shape your product into something that’s actually worth paying for.
- It takes time, more time than you think.
This goes for everything: getting users, building an audience on social media, improving the product, learning new marketing methods. When I was starting out I honestly thought we would be making good money in a couple of weeks of work. I simply didn’t know better. It’s a competitive landscape, everyone’s trying to succeed, the majority don’t. What do the majority have in common? They give up when they don’t see the results they want after weeks/months of working. So outworking the majority means continuing to put in effort even as the months go by. It took us seven months just to get our first paying customer.
- Track your metrics and let them guide your decisions.
One thing that’s helped us prioritize what needs to be done when there are endless things to improve, is looking at our metrics. They’ll tell you where your bottlenecks are and what you need to focus on to improve.
- Set clear goals and say no to almost everything else.
Once you start gaining momentum there are so many opportunities that will pop up all the time for you. Some take a little time from you, some take a lot of time. When you impulsively jump from one opportunity to the next, you won’t give each one the proper time it takes to follow through on it. For example, you’ll want to try every marketing channel, but if you do, you’ll never spend enough time getting them right. It takes both time and skill to learn how to get each new channel to work effectively. You have to learn to say no to all the tempting options that present themselves if you want to stay focused and succeed.
- Spend a lot of time making your product great, and it will be one of your best marketing channels.
When you build a product people love, they can’t help but to tell their friends about it. And word of mouth is one of the best marketing channels you’ll ever have. You’ve probably heard this before but one person tells two, two tell four, four tell eight, etc. You’ll quickly have a huge marketing channel working autonomously for you.
- Talk to your target customers before building.
This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way by wasting months building two projects that no one wanted. For both of them we didn’t validate our idea with our target audience before building. Although the projects were well-executed, there was simply no demand for them. For our third project we realized our mistake and interviewed our target customers before building, and the results speak for themselves. 100 users for our MVP in the first two weeks, and 2,400 users and 70 active paying customers in just about two months after launching the full product.
- Take part in communities.
Communities with other founders provide so many different benefits to you. You get to learn from people who are one, two, and three steps ahead of you, you get valuable advice for free, you can support each other when it’s needed (like a Product Hunt launch for example), and it helps you stay accountable and motivated to reach your goals.
- Implement productized feedback early on.
Having your users quickly give feedback as they’re using your app and its features will help you a lot with improving it and turning it into a valuable product worth paying for. You’ll quickly discover what people like about the product and what can be improved, which will also guide you in determining the next steps to take your product to the next level.