How to launch your Saas company in 12 steps?

Sasha
12/03/2024

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Does a business exist by its idea? No, a business exists through its execution.

That’s the phrase of the day. 💬

The important thing with a business idea is that it answers a problem.

Often, we start with the solution, when we should start with the problem. To do this, you need to ask yourself the following questions: 👇🏼

1️⃣ Is this a recognized problem?
2️⃣ How urgent is this problem?
3️⃣ Is this a difficult problem?

In short, today we’re going to explain in 12 steps how to launch your saas company. 🤩

PS: this article is a summary of this video, so feel free to take a look. 👀

1) Find out about your target

First of all, go to LinkedIn and sign up for a free subscription. Sales Navigator and look for 3 types of people you think are your potential target.

You can add various filters, such as :

📅 Seniority.
📍 The region.
💬 Business sector.
✍🏼 The title.

Among this famous 🎯 potential target, try to identify 3 personas, or rather, 3 types of customers you want to contact.

But, you’re not going to do it manually, it would take too much time. 😏

Use an automated prospecting tool

That’s right, you’ll be importing your list into an automated prospecting tool. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, but we have a slight preference for our favorite Waalaxy. 👽

On this tool, you will 3 different lists and, for each list, one to two different campaigns to test messages. 👀

💡 In these messages, you won’t be trying to sell, but to understand.

The idea is to approach your prospect by saying: ⬇️

“Hi, I’ve identified this issue, which I think is shared by people who practice your trade and are in the same sector, and, I’d like to look for an answer to it. Can we have a chat about it?”

This was an example, there are a multitude of possible approaches. ✨

Nevertheless, the idea here is not to sell, but rather to understand the prospect’s need and ask about the issues he encounters today.

2) Create an impactful landing page

Next, you need to create a landing page. 🖥️ There are a number of tools available for this, whichever one you choose.

💡 For less than 30 euros, you can buy and create a domain name.

So you take a template and start structuring your speech.

Part 1: Defining an impact phrase

The structure of the speech is an impactful sentence that defines your proposal of value or rather, a sub-sentence that describes your product.

For Waalaxy, for example, it will be “Turn Linkedin into your number 1 acquisition channel”.

👆🏼 That’s our value proposition.

Part 2: Product description

Below, we’ll add the product description. For example:

“An automated prospecting tool, that’s going to be simple and effective and allow you to contact x thousands of prospects per month”.

Part 3: Identify 3 key features

Next, the idea is to determine the three key functionalities that will either differentiate you, or add value to your product value to your customer. ✨

For example, for us it’s going to be :

1️⃣ Send messages automatically on autopilot.
2️⃣ Personalize your approach.
3️⃣ Find your prospects’ e-mails to feed your CRM.

As you can see, the idea is to define three key functionalities 🔑 which will be the three components of your landing page.

Part 4: Call to action for registration

Last but not least, a call to action(A bit like what we did for one of our new features 🫣).

Get your first customers this week

Take advantage of the power of Waalaxy to generate leads every day. Start prospecting for free, today.

3) Create a beta registration

So, you have two options for signing up for a beta, here they are:

Form.
Creating fake LinkedIn accounts.

The advantage of the form is that you’ll be able to collect a multitude of emails and get in touch. 💬 Nevertheless, you won’t be able to interact with your audience.

Toinon prefers to create fake accounts on LinkedIn, while putting “CEO” or “Growth Manager“at “the product he is creating”.

💡 His role is to collect all beta registrations. 🧲

Why do this, you might ask? 🤔

Well, this way, you’ll be able to have a 📍 point of contact with all the people who are interested in the beta and with whom, you’ll be able to exchange and discuss.

At this stage, you haven’t written a single line of code, you don’t know exactly what your product is going to do. But that’s okay, the idea 💡 is to understand why certain people have arrived on your site, why they’ve decided to sign up for the beta.

So, in no time at all, you take care of :

Build a site. 🖥️
Pimp your LinkedIn. ✨
Add a beautiful banner and a fake photo.
Use a title that explicitly explains your intentions.

Once you’ve done that, you launch Waalaxy campaigns with your main account and you’ll start prospecting people you think might be your customers and try to send them to your website and see how many convert. 👀

If, out of 1,000 people contacted, you have more than 30 people registered at your beta, something’s going on and you need to dig into it, because there’s a potential market 🔎.

4) The budget to get started

In terms of budget, to launch a saas, you’ll need about a hundred euros:

🔵 30 euros to buy your domain name.
🟣 Set up your landing strategy.
🔵 Find a logo.
🟣 Find servers to host your code.

In fact, that’s all you need.

5) Have your own in-house developer

One of the main issues when launching a Saas is finding a developer to partner with to code the product. 👀

In fact, virtually all companies that have outsourced their development fail, because you need a feedback loop and a very fast cycle. ⚡️

If you work with an agency, you’re going to have developers who are outsourced to another country and who are going to code certain things that they don’t know about, because you yourself don’t really know what you want to code. 🤯

So, a successful Saas company is one that has one or more developers on its entrepreneurial team. 😇

6) Choosing between sales-driven and product-driven

You have different boxes, those that are sales driven and those that are product driven. 👀

Sales driven: definition

Dirty driven boxes are those where you often have complex tools, which are very expensive per year, and which will sell to a small number of customers commercial. ⬅️ That’s the majority of SaaS boxes today. 😇

Indeed, the sales process will be :

“I book a demo, the user will adapt the product, because it’s customizable to my company, and therefore, it will synchronize with my tools.”

Our bricks are quite complex, and often target 🎯 large companies, key accounts with fairly lengthy sales processes.

Product driven: definition

Then we have a second category of company, which will be :

🥇 Product driven.
🥈 Product led
🥉 Product led growth.

💡 The idea is that the product will sell itself, it’s self-service.

Users have a one- to two-week free trial period, during which they will be able to get to grips with the tool on their own, and will have to discover the functionalities and get value out of it all by yourself. 😌

For example, when you subscribe to Spotify no one gives you a demonstration. Well, it’s the same thing here, except that we’re going to be working on slightly bigger budgets because we’re in b2b.

Sales or product-driven: which to choose?

No one is better than the other, but it’s very important from the outset to understand what you intend to do.

If you’d like to do some sales driven the energy will be put into making a product that : ⬇️

Will be stable.
Integrates well (often with other tools).
To sales people who are efficient in the sales process.

On the other hand, when you want to make product life (which is the case for us at Waalaxy), you need to be demanding in terms of simplicity and product path.

Put yourself in the user’s shoes, and within the first few minutes of experience, they should have understood how to use your tool. 😇

To do this, ask yourself the following questions:

Where do customers come into the product? What steps are necessary to become a customer?

Next, you’re going to create a product arrival path so that all prospects who test the product have to go through these steps, always in a conversion. 🧲

When you want to launch your saas company, you need to understand which category you fall into to grow your business. 📈

7) Understanding the challenges of product-driven saas

When you want to launch your saas company where the user is going to use the product on his own, without assistance, tutorials or a salesperson to do the configuration, the user experience must be just right. 🩵

Often, this is where companies go wrong 🪴 because they’re going to add new features to add more value often, you simply need to simplify the product. 👀

Show the value of the product as quickly as possible

So you have to build a path into the product that will lead the user to see the value as quickly as possible. This is called the “ah moment”, meaning that there’s a place or moment in the product where the user goes “Wow, this is what I came for”.

To find that moment, we need to look at and analyze what stages current customers have been through. 👀

✍🏼 This is fundamentally important, as it will maximize conversions from user to customer.

Is the value of a feature sufficient?

When designing a product, there’s one fundamental component that must not be overlooked when you want to launch your saas company, and that’s to ask yourself, as soon as you add a feature, if the value it brings is sufficient compared to the value it takes away from the existing base.

Don’t you get it? No problem, I’ll explain. 😇

Today, we have a multitude of users who are completely unfamiliar with new technologies. 🤖

Indeed, each button, each element on a page will add cognitive load, i.e. if I’m on a page where there are 10 functionalities, I have 10 options, and therefore, 10 buttons.

With wear and tear, this may diminish my ability to see the value and understand the steps I need to take to see it product value. ✨

To sum up, the load will be cognitive which means that the user will be faced with too many choices, won’t understand what’s expected of him to distinguish the value and will therefore leave, thus reducing the conversion rate. 📉

8) Keep in touch with your users

One of the fundamental rules when you want to launch your saas company is to be in contact with your customers as often as possible customers. 💬

That’s why we’ve set up a cat (I’m not talking about the animal). 🐈

Setting up a chat

One of the big advantages of chat is that you can manage conversions yourself by asynchronous. In the beginning, when you are alone as an entrepreneur, you don’t develop any particular process, you just go with your intuition. 🧠

💡 The aim here is not to sell, but to understand.

The idea is to discuss with different users and understand their problems. Sometimes, if you come across the same bug at least 3 times, then it could be a feature request, or friction. 🥊

Taking feedback into account

Often, you have two options: ⬇️

1️⃣ Either it’s a product option, like renaming a button or putting it in a different place.
2️⃣ Either it’s an educational dimension, i.e. the user doesn’t know how to use it.

Creating educational content

In this case, we’re going to create educational content by creating blog posts with complete answers, trying to anticipate any sub-questions there may be.

For example, if a customer asks you a question during a conversation many questions if you like, you can put all these questions together in an article. ✍🏼

So the next time a customer comes in and asks the same questions, you redirect them to the article directly. 💬

It allows the user to self-educate, self-train on the product and get more out of it value and prevent them from leaving. 🕊️

9) Get real chat support

From then on, we decided to have only chat support. The idea is that the person arrives and can use the product alone, without ever having to talk to a human except in case of questions. 🙋🏼

Manage large volumes of tickets

One of its main advantages is that it allows you to manage large ticket volumes. Nothing to do with telephone support, where one person can only answer one customer at a time.

Here, we’re able to have a dozen simultaneous conversations, and therefore manage 10 times more customers than with a conventional telephone support. 📞

Structuring answers

What’s more, we’ll be able to come structuring answers. Let me explain. 😇

Our support teams will have recorded answers to frequently asked questions. Today, we have more than 600 recorded answers and they are accessible in two clicks 🐁, which will make it possible to propose new solutions complete structured responses to customers in seconds. ⏱️

Paradoxically, customers think they’ll be better helped over the phone, since they’re used to expressing their needs orally. But this is not true. ❌

Toinon’s personal conviction: 👇🏼

“A person who can’t express his needs in writing has poorly defined them. So, on the phone, it’s going to be hell because you already know that, it’s not going to be clear. If he needs to express himself orally, it’s because it’s not clear in his head”.

Finally, we regularly use gifs so that the user can immediately reproduce the manipulation at home, making it a very effective channel for support. 💪🏼

10) Reactive support

Nevertheless, chat support requires immediacy. 🤯

Today, whether on different channels, we’re used to chatting with everyone, on Messenger or even WhatsApp. These channels aren’t like a channel emailing where you expect a response within three days. No, we expect something pretty instantaneous. 👀

Well, for the support cat, it’s the same thing. You have to put a lot of energy in this channel to respond quickly to the various problems that users may encounter. 😇

At this stage, we’ve done the hardest part of the job, because we’ve managed to :

1️⃣ Promote the product.
2️⃣ Convincing him that he could use it.
3️⃣ Get him to sign up.
4️⃣ Start using it.

Getting organized

In the early days of Waalaxy, it was our priority to have a reactive support. We had the chat open on a screen and we tried to answer in less than 30 seconds. In the end, it was a bit of a challenge, or a mini-game between us. 🎮

Of course, the more a company grows, the harder it is to maintain momentum.

As an entrepreneur, this is also what will enable you to build 🏗️ your company intuition. That’s why it’s one of the things you need to delegate the latest.

11) Choose your pricing

In general, you’re never expensive enough. Why?🤔

When you start out, you often want to attack ⚔️ the market with a low price. I think this is a good technique, because if there are tools on the market, we risk being less good than them in terms of functionality. 😔

That’s why differentiating yourself through price is a must good strategy the goal 🎯 is to grow.

Define your price

Nevertheless, we don’t have any specific advice on how to set your price, other than to look at the tools available on the market and set a price accordingly. 👀

And then, well, it’s just a matter of getting started. 😅

In general, if nobody pays, it’s because your product doesn’t deliver the value, or because your product is too expensive… That’s why you should regularly iterate your prices.

For example, at Waalaxy 👽, we regularly raise our prices.

💡 The more notoriety you have, the easier it is to sell at a high price.

Increase prices for new users

The idea is to increase the price for new users, but also for existing users past users.

Often, when we increase our prices by 30%, we also increase our sales by 30%. 📈

12) Keep an eye on your sales

A fundamental metric that is interesting when you want launch your saas company to take into account is how many sales you come home.

It doesn’t matter if you want to set up a business on your own self-financed (i.e. without fundraising), or with financing, the metrics you’re going to have to look at 👀 is how much you’re cashing in.

But that’s not all, you also need to think about maximizing your margin by asking yourself, “What percentage of profit do you make on each sale?” 🤔.

So, if you ever want to raise funds, you’ll want to maximize your growth of sales. ✨

Analyze your growth

In fact, the investor has little interest in the profitability at start-up, but he’ll mainly be looking at growth. 👁️‍🗨️

For the first three months, you can look at your growth on a weekly basis and ask yourself the following question “Am I doing better every week?”.

If you do less than 3% better, you have no product market fit and in this case, you still need to try and understand who your customers are, what they want and match the product to that. 💟

In this case, there’s no point in going out and getting new customers and users by the thousands, because your conversion rate aren’t good anyway. 🥲

So you need to focus on the ones you already have, and understand why you’re failing to generate growth. 🧐

Here are a few percentages to consider: 👇🏼

Less than 3% → you have no product market fit. 😔

Between 3 and 5% → start iterating. 🔎

Between 5 and 10% → you have a product market fit, your box launches. 🚀

More than 10% → exceptional case, something’s going on, get ready for trouble because it’s going to grow very big. 🤯

How about a recap of the article “launch your saas company”?

To sum up, if you want to launch your saas company, it’s not a question of resources or technology, but a question of mindset ☁️.

Objectives? Here they are! 👇🏼

🔵 Understand what my customer wants.
🟣 Develop functionality.
🔵 Iterate.
🟣 Be really focused on execution.

I suggest you jot down the sentence below somewhere, or put it in a corner of your mind: 👇🏼

I understand the need → I develop something → I see if it works → I start again in this loop.

Frequently asked questions

Don’t go away just yet, we still have a few resources to pass on to you, which I think you might like. 😇

What’s an example of saas?

If you haven’t figured it out yet, a software as a Service refers to a category of IT services where software is provided as a hosted service. Here are a few examples:

🥇 Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365).
🥈 Salesforce.
🥉 Dropbox.
🏅 Google Workspace.

How does saas work?

Overall, here’s how a Saas works:

1️⃣ Centralized hosting : the software is hosted on central servers managed by the service provider.
2️⃣ Internet access : users access the software via their browser.
3️⃣ Subscription model : this model avoids the high up-front costs associated with purchasing traditional software licenses.
4️⃣ Automatic updates : users automatically benefit from the latest features and bug fixes without having to perform manual upgrades.