The SaaS Club Newsletter

⚡️ Presented by Designli

Hey Reader

Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club:

 In this week's newsletter:

• 🎧 From legal nightmare to focused 7-figure SaaS
  

• 🧑‍💻 Expert help for SaaS dev headaches in just 1 week
  

• 📊 Add customer analytics without coding for months
  

• 🚨 The silent growth trap most founders fall into
  

• 📗 The hyper-growth playbook every founder needs

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🎧 Podcast: New Episode

Summize: SaaS Lessons on Narrowing Your Target Market

Tom Dunlop is co-founder and CEO of Summize, a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform helping companies create, review, and manage contracts.

In 2019, Tom was working as an in-house lawyer for a tech company. During an acquisition, he had to manually review 500 contracts.

It was a painful task that got even worse when he had to repeat the entire process just to check one additional clause!

This frustrating experience led him to partner with a software engineer to build a prototype that could automatically create contract summaries.

After getting positive feedback from potential customers, they raised 250K to build the product. Then COVID hit right as they were launching.

But what seemed like terrible timing became an opportunity as companies scrambled to understand their contract obligations during the crisis.

Still, the path wasn't clear.

They spent their first 18 months chasing any customer they could find - law firms, in-house legal teams, companies of all sizes. They tried free trials, they tried events, but nothing really clicked.

The breakthrough came when they focused solely on in-house legal teams at mid-sized companies and made Summize work inside the tools people already use daily.

Today, Summize brings in late 7-figures in ARR and growing over 100% yearly. They've raised $10 million and the company is based in the UK.

In this episode you'll learn:

• How Tom validated his initial product concept and secured funding before building a full product

• What critical lessons Tom learned about the dangers of lacking focus in the early stages of a SaaS startup

• Why their product-led growth strategy failed and how they successfully pivoted their go-to-market approach

• How Tom transformed event marketing from their worst to best ROI channel

• What strategies they used to successfully expand into the US market despite significant regional differences

I hope you enjoy it!

Check out the full episode on:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Web

🧑‍💻 Dev Issues? Stop Wasting Time, Get Expert Help

Struggling with SaaS development issues, UX inconsistencies, or scaling problems? Many founders waste months troubleshooting, not realizing a clear fix is within reach.

That’s where Designli’s Impact Week comes in. It’s a one-week deep dive where their senior engineers, designers, and product strategists analyze your SaaS product, uncover bottlenecks, and provide a structured roadmap for scaling and optimization.

They only offer four Impact Weeks per month, so space is limited.

👉 Want to learn more? Book a free 30-minute chat

📊 Embed Customer-Facing Analytics in Your SaaS

Building embedded analytics into your SaaS product is a massive engineering drain—but your customers expect real-time dashboards. 

Instead of spending months on custom reporting tools, Explo lets you embed fully customizable, white-labeled dashboards in minutes.

Explo works with your existing data, gives you full design control, and scales with predictable pricing; without pulling devs off core product work.

Hundreds of SaaS companies already trust Explo to power their analytics. Now, it’s your turn. For a limited time:

👉 Start your free trial and get $1,000 off your first year

🤔 SaaS Insights

The Silent SaaS Killer: It Looks Like Growth, But It’s Not

When you’re building a SaaS, every new customer feels like a win. 

Every dollar of MRR looks like proof you’re on the right track.

But early-stage founders are under massive pressure to grow—fast. And in the rush to hit $10K MRR, a lot of them take on customers they shouldn’t.

Customers that aren't your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) create an illusion of getting to product-market fit that eventually comes crashing down.

Here’s what actually happens:

• They buy out of desperation, not fit. They have problems your product wasn’t built to solve.

• They eat up way too much support. Non-ICP customers need 3 to 5x more help than your ideal ones.

• They pull your roadmap in the wrong direction. Their feature requests don’t align with scalable growth.

• They trick you into thinking you’re on the right track. You feel like you’re building for the market, but you’re actually building for outliers.

And then—when you hit $300-400K ARR—reality smacks you in the face.

Growth stalls. Churn spikes. Retention tanks.  

The Fix:

✅ Lock down your ICP before your first sale: Be ruthlessly specific—industry, company size, pain points, tech stack. The clearer, the better.

✅ Score every prospect: Rate them 1-10 on ICP fit. Track retention by fit score. Patterns will show up fast.

✅ Say no—even when the money is tempting: A $2K MRR deal from the wrong customer can easily cost you $10K in distractions.

✅ Filter feedback by ICP fit: Feature requests from ICP customers should drive your roadmap—not noisy one-offs from bad-fit users.

✅ Measure retention by ICP fit: If ICP customers stay and non-ICP customers churn, you're good. If both churn, you’ve got a problem.

I've worked with several founders who walked away from deals that looked great but were wrong-fit customers. It was painful at the time, but not one of them regretted that decision looking back.

The Hard Truth:

In early-stage SaaS, who you turn away often matters more than who you let in.

Real growth isn't about getting every dollar you can find. 

It's about nailing one problem for one type of customer—and watching that turn into a self-feeding cycle of referrals and expansion.

Stick to your guns. Build for the right folks. The rest will take care of itself.

Want to join a group of like-minded SaaS founders supporting each other to $10K MRR and beyond? Apply for SaaS Club Launch here.

Already running a 6-figure SaaS and want to join fellow SaaS founders all scaling towards 7-figures and beyond? Apply for my Mastermind here.

 📗 Book of the Week

This week's book recommendation is from Tom:

From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin

"I think certainly as we're talking about the first 10 customers and kind of getting that goes to market flywheel going the, the best one I've read, which is quite known as Impossible to Inevitable. It was kind of a step-by-step guide to kinda get your go-to market function going. And that's still been the most influential book probably on on our journey today." - Tom

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😍 Let's Get Social

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Have a great week!

- Omer

Interested in sponsoring The SaaS Podcast or this newsletter?

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Join SaaS Club Plus: Get early access to our new community for early-stage SaaS founders. Join the waitlist now!

2. Apply for SaaS Club Launch: Designed to accelerate your journey to $10K MRR for new and early-stage founders.

3. Apply for SaaS Club Mastermind: Scale from six to seven figures with our focused mastermind group.