Are you thinking of building SaaS solutions for enterprise customers? - **If so, throw out everything you learned in The Lean Startup.** Here's how to land enterprise clients, and hit the sweet spot of continued, organic growth. - **What makes a comp
Are you thinking of building SaaS solutions for enterprise customers?
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If so, throw out everything you learned in The Lean Startup. Here's how to land enterprise clients, and hit the sweet spot of continued, organic growth.
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What makes a company name stick? Emotion + recognizability. In this short guide, Sophia O'Neal gives advice on choosing a brand name that's impossible to ignore. Hint: High-value Scrabble letters help!
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Founder Gisele Muller Sasso has been indie hacking with her husband Eduardo for 13 years. Below, she shares the product that landed them on TechCrunch, and how they divide responsibilities.
Want to share something with 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
💼 Building for Enterprise Customers
by Devan Sabaratnam
Are you thinking of building SaaS, or some other sort of solution, for bigger businesses or enterprise level customers? As a founder of a six-year-old HR SaaS that has several SMB clients and enterprise level customers, here are some lessons we've learned!
The hard bits
1. Be ready to roll:
You have to basically throw out everything you learned in The Lean Startup model! Larger customers are absolutely not interested in a mocked up MVP, a Carrd page, wireframe mockups, or even pitch decks.
They will want a product that is ready to go out of the box. They will almost always want a demonstration of capabilities, and evidence that your solution can be modified or customized extensively to suit their needs.
If you say that your product can do X by Y time, you had better be sure that it does it. You only get one chance to impress them, or they may be lost for good.
2. Talk to the right people:
Enterprise customers have many layers of people and management, and quite often, the people who may initially reach out to you have no buying power. You will find yourself giving the same presentation to many people at different levels (sometimes up to the C-suite level) before you can expect any commitment.
Often, they are not interested in what your product actually does; they just want to reduce risk, or make themselves look good to upper management. When talking to different layers of management, you may have to change your pitch to suit what the person you are talking to wants to achieve, which is rarely about listing the features that you have. Rather, you have to craft the story to fix their particular pain point.
3. Get sales-y:
There is no getting around the fact that you have to put your salesperson hat on. Almost all of our bigger customers asked for a 1:1 demo session of our system, and wouldn't sign up for a self-paced trial.
They will have very specific questions and scenarios, and you need to be able to answer them face-to-face. If you can explain a workaround using your system, or a better way of doing it using your tools, it will help in getting them to commit.
4. Get a track record:
Nothing improves your chances to sell to a big business like having some other player in the same space (or company size) already using your solution.
Get other big companies on board by offering a "free for X months" option, or a deep discount. Then, get some testimonials. Most of our sales come from our Capterra and SourceForge reviews. We copy the best ones to our website, and also to a dedicated reviews page. They work!
5. Regulatory hurdles:
Big companies have to comply with many rules and regulations, including privacy, security, and safety requirements. Be prepared for their operations and IT teams to grill you on your own security practices, including compliance with GDPR and local privacy laws.
If you are intending to sell to customers outside your own country, you should be familiar with the laws of every country where your customers operate. You will have to provide detailed answers to questions such as how long you keep backup records, where your data will be located, whether you encrypt data at rest, etc. You may even have to provide policy documents to prove that you provide security training for your team to minimize phishing attacks and things like that.
6. Integrations:
Large customers love integrations, so be ready to reach out to other SaaS vendors to build integrations between your systems and theirs. This adds to the "lock in" once an enterprise customer signs up, as they will be reluctant to leave if they are tied into multiple systems through yours.
The good bits
1. Money, commitment, and development:
The best thing about dealing with enterprise level customers is that they have deep pockets, so there is rarely any sticker shock. They also like to pay annually upfront to meet their internal finance and budget requirements. Furthermore, enterprise customers stick around for the long haul, and are a very low churn risk.
Bigger customers will also readily pay for customization or tweaks to the system, if needed. Plus, they expect to pay consulting or onboarding fees to get up and running.
2. No posing required:
Most enterprise customers don't seem to care if you are a small operation or a one-person show. They just want evidence that you are serious, and can solve their problem.
The stack you use is of no interest to them, as long as it gets the job done.
3. Natural growth:
Once you have your first couple of customers on board, things will markedly grow. Once other larger customers hear of their colleagues using your system, they will trust you more, and reach out at unexpected times.
4. It doesn't have to be complicated:
You don't have to build a solution with a ton of features. Seriously. You would be surprised at how often the basic problem is just several people wasting time updating a simple spreadsheet, and if you can save them time, they will keenly give you a purchase order.
In conclusion, I hope that I haven't scared you away from seeking big enterprise customers. I just wanted to warn you that this is very much like big game hunting, with the resulting big rewards. You just need to do a lot of groundwork early on to reap the benefits later!
Do you build for enterprise customers? Share your experience below!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
🎙 LinkedIn has debuted its own podcast network.
🦍 The Bored Ape owner is suing OpenSea for $1M over the "stolen" NFT.
🪙 These meme cryptocurrencies have prospective futures in 2022.
📱 Your old iPhone could now be worth over $24K.
❤️🔥 Investors don't like to fund dating startups. Here's why.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
🔊 Choosing an Un-Ignorable Brand Name
by Sophia O'Neal
Naming your startup can be fun, but it can also be quite stressful. When naming my branding agency, Ignore No More, I wrote down what my goal was for the agency in conversational terms: To build brands that were impossible to ignore.
I decided to write it in conversational terms because my branding style is fun, colorful, and very eye-catching. Read on for more tips on naming your startup!
What is branding?
I believe that branding is the experience that a visitor has with your company, and it starts with these key elements:
- Brand voice.
- Visual brand.
- Brand personality.
If those three things all connect with the core desires of the customer, your brand is unforgettable.
It's important to understand your company's core values when coming up with a name and defining your brand. When your story comes through, it shows. These questions can help you to articulate your story:
- How did you get interested in this industry?
- How did you realize that there was a problem?
- How did you build the product, and why did you build it that way?
- How is this product life-changing?
- Why are you excited to bring this to market?
Often, I ask founders to use voice-to-text so they don't self-edit so much.
Names that stick
When it comes to my copywriting, I make sure that it is:
- Exceptionally relatable.
- Usually casual.
- Free of jargon.
- Tailored to the reader.
- Easy to understand.
Names that stick often have at least two of these distinctions:
- An inside joke, real or imagined: Think Spanx or Singing Carrots.
- A strong letter in them: These are high-value Scrabble letters like Q, K, X, Z, Y, etc.
- A strong sound: Alliteration or digraph (a combination of two letters like “oo” or “sh”).
- A strong verb that demands emotion or action: Think ignore, stop, fight, fury, power, run, etc.
- A promise of some sort: Include the words no, yes, always, or never.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t believe that a name has to speak directly to what the product or service does. But it should speak to the core desire that your product fulfills, or the core fear that it helps customers avoid. Also, from my experience, names should be three words at maximum.
When you hit the sweet spot of emotion + recognizability, it makes people mentally rank you at the top in your vertical. It's brain SEO!
In my case, my company name has alliteration, a strong verb, and a promise: Double "i's," "Ignore," and "No."
Search party
When considering names, you want to conduct two major searches:
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A Google search (of course): Search your potential name keywords along with anything to do with "SaaS," "startup," "branding," or "agency."
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A domain search: In my case, while “ignore no more dot com” was taken, “ignore no more dot agency” wasn’t. I knew that with this domain, the kind of company that I was would be much more obvious. I considered the grammatically correct "ignored no more," but stuck with the present tense version. Present tense shows action, while past tense subconsciously feels old, even if it’s technically correct.
Now, I get DMs from people at least once a week saying how much they love my company name and site copy, so it really sells my services perfectly!
How did you come up with your company's name? Share below!
Discuss this story.
🧠 Harry's Growth Tip
from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
Make your product make sense as quickly as possible:
Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.
Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.
👫 Eduardo and Gisele Sasso are Indie Hacking as a Couple
by Gisele Muller Sasso
Hi indie hackers! I'm Gisele Muller Sasso, and my husband Eduardo and I have been working together for 13 years. We are both Brazilian; he is a software engineer, and I'm a writer with a business degree in the drawer, as we say in Brazil. That means you graduated, worked in your field for a while, and went off-road at some point, so your diploma sits nicely in a drawer somewhere!
Eduardo's passion for developing products and solving problems is contagious, so it didn't take long for us to start working on some ideas together. I'm from a corporate 9-5 background, so the idea of working from home and creating my own schedule was mind-blowing for me. Our two-person enterprise has launched a few products over the years, and we've slowly learned more tricks about how to be indie hackers.
Mentaway, which we launched in October 2010, was a geolocation-based service that gathered check-ins from Foursquare, Twitter, Flickr, and Posterous, and turned them into beautiful personalized travel maps. Everything was automated and worked seamlessly. Remember that this was back when geolocation had just started to make headlines!
We had the idea for Mentaway when we were on vacation in Santa Cruz, CA in 2009, and I told my husband how amazing it would be to have a virtual map with pins marking the places we visited on our trip. We brainstormed, and Eduardo started coding not long after that. After months of coding, tuning, and working on visuals, we launched Mentaway, timing it to apply for Y Combinator.
Unfortunately, they were not interested in our project, which stung. But that rejection inspired me to write to TechCrunch. I emailed them late at night, mentioning that after rejection, and a couple of doses of whiskey, we had decided to launch our idea anyway. That got their attention.
Michael Arrington himself replied to my email, which was thrilling. Back in the day, being featured on TechCrunch was similar to making the Hacker News front page today. I exchanged a few emails with them, and they published "Turn All Your Location Check-Ins Into A Travel Map With Mentaway." This changed everything.
After that article was published, we gained momentum, and had investors reaching out from Brazil (which had never happened before, although we'd tried). We also had several publications reaching out to cover our idea. Then, hubby got a job at a travel-related startup, and within two weeks, we packed our bags and moved from Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, to Santa Clara, CA, USA. Those two weeks are still a blur of paperwork, adrenaline, and important decisions. Looking back, I wouldn't change anything!
Once we settled in the US, Eduardo was giving his all at work, so we stopped our side projects. He was doing his thing, and I was writing for a few web design blogs. After the startup that brought us here was sold, and hubby had more time, we got back into creating things.
Now, indie hacking is who we are and how we operate. Eduardo codes, and I wear all the other hats. That's how our enterprise works. Keep working hard and putting your heart into it. Results will come!
Here is a timeline of all of our projects:
Launched in 2010, when geolocation was still not as popular as today, Refilmagem would show you movie showtimes near you in a clean way. Everything was automated, and we would aggregate movie data from different sources.
The project that opened all doors.
A compass app that helped you find your way around easily, and was 100% offline.
A beautifully designed stock market newsletter that delivers market insights to you daily.
A stock market API powered by SQL. You can use Hotstoks to screen stocks, track performance, identify trends, and much more.
Coming soon! We are developing a passwordless user authentication service using Stripe. Stay tuned.
My latest solo project is an e-book about password security, and how to get started with a password manager.
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
by Tweetmaster Flex
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Devan Sabaratnam, Priyanka Vazirani, Sophia O'Neal, Harry Dry, and Gisele Muller Sasso for contributing posts. —Channing
