Early-stage SaaS founders are busy, but they don't have to be. Here is an early-stage SaaS growth model around only the highest-impact things (80/20 rule) that I’ve developed over the years. Whether you are a team of one or ten, you can implement it for sustainable growth even in uncertain economic times.

First, what is SaaS growth?

Is it more demos, new signups, higher activation, more conversion to paid, or renewals? Turns out, it's a derivative of all of that.

In non-jargon words, SaaS growth is the continuously increasing product engagement.

With that out of the way, let's look at the growth model.

Growth Model

It has three layers - foundations, acquisition, and engagement.

Let's discuss each layer in detail.

Foundations 

Without these essential steps, you will always wonder why things are not working as expected.

1. Research: A lot of business success depends on deep insights about the target market, competitors, trends, and the industry. Thus, the first step is to discover these insights.

2. ICP: Most products are fit for multiple customer profiles, but you can't target them all at once. Thus, select one market segment for the 6 to 12 months, get the ball rolling, and then target another segment.

3. MVP: An MVP should do only a little but do that extremely well - small scope, brilliant performance.

4. Narrative: This is the first and most important exercise in positioning and messaging. Answer the questions like: "What is the problem you are solving?", "Who has it?" "What is the cost of living with that problem?" "How is it currently solved?" "Why can your product solve it better?". The answer to these questions will form the basis for most of the marketing going ahead.

5. Foundational content: It is the must-have content you will always need - landing page messaging, sales deck, product demo video, a long-form blog post introducing the product, cold email sequence, one-minute sales pitch, etc. Prepare them.

Acquisition

You are now all set to go out in the market and get some early clients.

There are three motions involved here:

1. A Gentleman's Evangelism: You need to write/talk about the challenges of your market, empathize with their pains, offer ways to solve them, and place your product in this discussion. You can create video, audio, or written content, whatever you find comfortable doing. But you have to do it consistently over a long period. A tested way to execute it is to spend 10 minutes daily writing about these things and creating a repository of micro-ideas that you can use in your long-form content. You still have the rest of the 23 hours and 50 minutes to stay busy with whatever you want. It is not 'building in public' or 'demand generation' or any other fancy term - this is simply establishing yourself in your market, being there if someone searches for you, and, more importantly, opening an opportunity for yourself to capture the existing 'hot' demand. A complementary exercise is to post short-form content on any channel of your choice.

2. Lean outbound: Outbound gets a bad rap mostly because it's easy to abuse - people buy big email lists and spam them to death. Don't do that. Instead, set up a cold email infrastructure to send 2 or 3 extremely targeted and relevant cold emails daily. It's manageable and has a higher impact. Please ensure tracking and follow-ups.

3. Tools: Create templates, PDFs, widgets, or even discord servers to help your target market solve problems. You can offer them for free or even charge $10 for them. They will increase the surface area and open the window of more nuanced conversations with your potential prospects. 

Engagement

You get no benefits if new signups don't use the product. It's a waste of all the effort. So, product engagement is the holy grail of SaaS growth. Here are five ways to get it right:

1. Manual Onboarding: Manually onboard the first 50 customers in person or over a Zoom call. Be there when they sign up, guide them to complete the onboarding, and help them with the setup and integrations.

2. Product 101 video course: Create a video series that new users can watch to learn how to use your product. Short videos work best, and you don't need professional production grade as long as videos are clear and watchable. Open Loom or OBS and record yourself using the product while being reasonably professional.

3. Founder-led customer support: Manager support from day one. Solve their problems, communicate with them, and own up your shortcomings.

4. Help content: Set up a help center and add a few posts. Whenever you see more than one customer facing the same issue and raising a support ticket, create a post to solve it, add it to the help center, and direct all future queries to that post. That's how you prioritize and build help content.

5. Community Forum: Set up a forum from day one and let it exist. You don't have to do much about it except actively replying to customers' posts. It will compound in ways you can't fathom on day one.

Tactical activities

1. You need to distribute your content a lot, and you can't know beforehand which post will perform better on which platform.

2. You need a mindset of relentless execution. Giving up is not your character.

3. Startup launches are not like corporate launches. You are not a big corporation that can invite the whole world to their launches. So, you have to launch many times, go to a new place every month, and launch there; you are on a launch marathon for 12 months! 

4. Be careful about whom you onboard; it's perfectly okay to have a 'book a demo' process for six months and then gradually move to self-serve free trial/freemium signup. Or do whatever you need, but be selective about whom you work with. Don't be rude, but be careful.

5. Please don't use paid ads unless you know what you are doing. You will waste your money, time, and hope. Paid ads work, but you are not there - I want to cover this topic in one of the future posts.

You can do it all by yourself or work with me to execute this model for your business. Schedule a strategy call with me if you want to explore working together. On the call, we will diagnose your business and fine-tune this model for it. And if it's a fit, we will find a way to work together to implement it.

Schedule a strategy call

❤️ Thanks for reading Issue #29.

We'll talk soon.

Until then,

Ankur

Founder, Thoughtlytics

PS - Are these emails provoking questions or reactions? Hit Reply and let me know what's on your mind. Don't be shy! ❤️

---

Enjoy reading? Leave a review for the Organic SaaS Growth Newsletter. It would mean a lot to me.

If you liked this, please forward it to a friend! Or send them to the Organic SaaS Growth newsletter.

Were you forwarded this email? You can subscribe to the newsletter or explore the past editions.

Connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn. 🙏