Ask HN: How to get started with SaaS?
4 comments
Alright, so here's how you go about it. I'll first give you the general approach, then an example.
1. Find a demographic that you care about. Someone you want to help from the heart (not just intellectually). This will keep you going through the dark times.
2. Find an online forum or vertical where a critical mass of this demographic hangs out. This could be a specialized forum, a subreddit, or twitter.
3. Read through their posts and find pain points and existing businesses that solve these pain points.
4. Create a SAAS that helps these businesses you found above. Typically you can help them become more efficient at something. They will most appreciate a SAAS that helps them book more customers.
Here's the example I promised:
1. Let's say you care about pets and pet owners
2. Spend time on /r/pets and /r/aww and find their major pain points
3. You'll see that vets (veterinarians) and animal shelters come up a lot.
4. Look at Vet websites and animal shelters and see how you can make them better and offer differentiated services for these vets and animals shelters as a SaaS (note, these are businesses and you're thus a B2B SaaS).
That's how you come up with a good first part of the founder/product/market fit equation :)
Execution is a whole different ball game and then there's the marketing. If you've done your research right, then feedback and early customers should come from the very forum that you discovered the pain point at.
Your motivation will come from knowing that by improving the services offered by the vets and animal shelters (even if it's in the billing department), you'll be helping a lot of kitties and puppies at the margin.
This is the only way I know to do meaningful work and make some decent money at it.
TL;DR: Find a demographic you care about; climb one or two nodes up the tree until you hit a business that serves this demographic; create products/services for these businesses.
Edit: clarified B2B and added TL;DR
1. Find a demographic that you care about. Someone you want to help from the heart (not just intellectually). This will keep you going through the dark times.
2. Find an online forum or vertical where a critical mass of this demographic hangs out. This could be a specialized forum, a subreddit, or twitter.
3. Read through their posts and find pain points and existing businesses that solve these pain points.
4. Create a SAAS that helps these businesses you found above. Typically you can help them become more efficient at something. They will most appreciate a SAAS that helps them book more customers.
Here's the example I promised:
1. Let's say you care about pets and pet owners
2. Spend time on /r/pets and /r/aww and find their major pain points
3. You'll see that vets (veterinarians) and animal shelters come up a lot.
4. Look at Vet websites and animal shelters and see how you can make them better and offer differentiated services for these vets and animals shelters as a SaaS (note, these are businesses and you're thus a B2B SaaS).
That's how you come up with a good first part of the founder/product/market fit equation :)
Execution is a whole different ball game and then there's the marketing. If you've done your research right, then feedback and early customers should come from the very forum that you discovered the pain point at.
Your motivation will come from knowing that by improving the services offered by the vets and animal shelters (even if it's in the billing department), you'll be helping a lot of kitties and puppies at the margin.
This is the only way I know to do meaningful work and make some decent money at it.
TL;DR: Find a demographic you care about; climb one or two nodes up the tree until you hit a business that serves this demographic; create products/services for these businesses.
Edit: clarified B2B and added TL;DR
I'm glad you brought up subreddits—that's generally been my strategy as well. If you build your own SaaS, you'll generally have to do your own content marketing. It has to therefore be an industry you care about/know enough about that you won't mind reading and writing about it daily.
So I take my list of followed subreddits and identify which ones have b2b markets, which really narrows things down for me.
So I take my list of followed subreddits and identify which ones have b2b markets, which really narrows things down for me.
Funny coincidence, a friend of mine will launch https://www.pawsquad.co.uk/ this month. I don't know if he looked on /r/pets for inspiration though.
Howdy-
I'm the founder of a SaaS for dog daycare, boarding, grooming and training businesses. Have a few customers in UK/Ireland and they may be interested in chatting.
My email is on my profile here if interested.
I'm the founder of a SaaS for dog daycare, boarding, grooming and training businesses. Have a few customers in UK/Ireland and they may be interested in chatting.
My email is on my profile here if interested.
Thanks for your reply, I think that point #3 is where I always get stuck. It's difficult to identify "pain points" that appeal to a good number of people without being too obvious that someone else has already implemented a solution for them.
That balance between something that enough people need so it's viable to implement as a SaaS and so many people need it that there are SaaS businesses offering already.
That balance between something that enough people need so it's viable to implement as a SaaS and so many people need it that there are SaaS businesses offering already.
I don't think finding a unique SaaS idea is the way to go. You're better off studying the competition and trying to see how you can sufficiently differentiate your offering from them and creating an overall better service.
If you or your team have strength or experience in marketing, you can even create a clone and out-execute them on the customer acquisition front.
There are still vast swaths of businesses that use paper and pen and Excel for many things. So your competition will not be other SaaS offerings but, in fact, no solution at all and not even looking for one. Converting them to your solution is the hard part.
If you or your team have strength or experience in marketing, you can even create a clone and out-execute them on the customer acquisition front.
There are still vast swaths of businesses that use paper and pen and Excel for many things. So your competition will not be other SaaS offerings but, in fact, no solution at all and not even looking for one. Converting them to your solution is the hard part.
Yes, I have had the intention of just cloning a couple of services, but then again trying to win on the customer acquisition front seems to be another difficult matter.
Most SaaS businesses use the exact same techniques: Cold calling, cold e-mailing, ads... so the differentiation factors are very narrow.
Most SaaS businesses use the exact same techniques: Cold calling, cold e-mailing, ads... so the differentiation factors are very narrow.
Is there anything from your freelance development projects that jumps out as potentially worthwhile? Many of the best bootstrapped SAAS businesses I've seen have come from problems people encountered while freelancing or working on other things:
Tyler Tringas created StoreMapper based upon freelance work he was doing: http://tylertringas.com/storemapper-store-locator-bootstrapp...
Andrew Culver created ChurnBuster after repeatedly running into credit card renewal problems for clients: https://www.churnbuster.com
I built ExpeditedSSL - https://www.expeditedssl.com - after getting fed up with adding SSL to client sites.
Josh Pigford built BareMetrics - https://baremetrics.com after getting frustrated with trying to understand his metrics from other SAAS projects.
In general freelancing is a great spot to be in to observe what pains businesses have that are sufficiently difficult that they'll shell out actual amounts of money to deal with.
Tyler Tringas created StoreMapper based upon freelance work he was doing: http://tylertringas.com/storemapper-store-locator-bootstrapp...
Andrew Culver created ChurnBuster after repeatedly running into credit card renewal problems for clients: https://www.churnbuster.com
I built ExpeditedSSL - https://www.expeditedssl.com - after getting fed up with adding SSL to client sites.
Josh Pigford built BareMetrics - https://baremetrics.com after getting frustrated with trying to understand his metrics from other SAAS projects.
In general freelancing is a great spot to be in to observe what pains businesses have that are sufficiently difficult that they'll shell out actual amounts of money to deal with.
There are a few things that have some potential, but then I enter in the ethical part of if its OK to take something I have been paid to built as a base for my own business.
Specially because those few things that might be interesting enough are projects that I developed to give some competitive advantage to a specific client on a specific area, so If turn it into a SaaS I burn them.
Specially because those few things that might be interesting enough are projects that I developed to give some competitive advantage to a specific client on a specific area, so If turn it into a SaaS I burn them.
You definitely can't take code you wrote for other people, but attacking similar problems is usually fair game. Even better, I've seen a few instances where a freelancer agreed to tackle something for a reduced rate with the express agreement that they would also be re-using, reselling that portion of their work.
This struck me as very clever as it was a way to keep cash flow up by continuing to freelance, but also to get that crucial first paying customer who can help guide you in building a product.
This struck me as very clever as it was a way to keep cash flow up by continuing to freelance, but also to get that crucial first paying customer who can help guide you in building a product.
How'd you make such a compelling sales site for expeditedssl?
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/ and http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
The SaaS metrics guide is very complete and interesting. thank you so much for sharing.
This article by a16z is very insightful.
http://a16z.com/2014/05/13/understanding-saas-valuation-prim...
Ever since I learnt how to write code my dream has been to have my own SaaS business, however I struggle on finding how to get started with it.
Specially on what regards on finding a viable idea to convert into a SaaS platform.
Any advice on how to get started?