5 Small Changes To Improve Your SaaS Product FOREVER

0:00making even small tweaks to your startup can have massive impacts on your growth over the long term the first thing I tell almost all SAS Founders is you should probably increase or at least revisit your pricing figure out if your pricing models think about the different tiers you charge are based on the correct value metric it's not always about increasing prices but pricing is the biggest lever in SAS it is one way to dramatically increase growth overnight by just changing one number on a pricing page so I mentioned earlier value metric that's where if you charge per subscriber or you charge per seat that is your value metric and sometimes

0:40that's obvious and other times you have the wrong one and so a lot of Founders that I speak with are unsure if they have the right value metric and so I would either get some advice from someone in your Mastermind a co-founder you can hire a pricing expert or you can look at the competition and figure out are they doing it better than I am another common mistake I see is where pricing tiers are too close together so someone has 29 49 149 well 29 and 49 are approximately the same in that case and so my loose rule of thumb and look this is not gospel this is just a loose rule

1:12of thumb please take it as that is to start with the price and then double it and double again so I might go $50 $100 $200 it's probably where I'd start and say does that feel directionally correct but if I went 50 79 109 they're just they're clustered too close together and so it's something you may want to look at given that it is a common mistake another thing you want to look at is that you don't have a cheap tier with high churn with no one upgrading to your higher tiers because usually that means that cheap tier is attracting the wrong type of customer and again loose rule of

1:45thumb is you should probably just get rid of that lowest tier and the last thing to think about with pricing is to offer annual plans and sometimes even default to annual plans because if you offer a discount even if it's like 2 months free what's at a 16.7% discount you can dramatically improve your own cash flow so instead of getting your $50 a month plan over the next 12 months you get $500 upfront if you do give that two-month discount but having that $500 allow you to potentially hire someone now or run extra ads or spend a little more on something to help you grow faster tactic number two is to remove

2:21signup friction go through your signup flow as if you're a new customer shorten any long signup forms don't require email verif ification to sign up but maybe you do it before the user actually takes the final step in your product to go active like publishing the page they've built or sending an email you can add sign in with Google Facebook Twitter GitHub you know whatever is relevant that can dramatically increase the number of folks who try your software and then there's a big question about should you ask for credit card upfront or not in fact Asia arangio and I recently talked about this because we put together the state of independent

2:57SAS report you should have seen a video on this channel if not you'll see a link in the upper left and in the description where we talk about the pros the cons and the considerations of asking for credit card upfront my third piece of advice is to look at your onboarding metrics your activation metrics of how many people sign up for a trial or take a demo but never get activated and start to think about ways to improve that number what gets measured gets managed and so if you're not thinking day-to-day week to week about the percentage of folks who are in your app who are not AC

3:29at you're probably not going to do something about it now realize that if you are just bleeding customers out because you haven't built anything people want and are willing to pay for then this tactic of improving onboarding is is a Band-Aid like it doesn't fix the business but if you have a business that's generally working and people are getting value out of it but maybe they're just a little bit confused about how to get started maybe they hit a stumbling block or a piece of friction whatever and they can't quite get past it so you can do things like add a product tour or an interactive tutorial

3:58you can and should Implement a welcome email series to guide new users this is not news you've seen it from every SAS app you've ever signed up for and the reason is is because they work in addition think about setting up email sequences based on user Behavior so it's not just hard-coded to this many days after the trial starts but think about if they fill out a certain form or they use a certain feature you can trigger emails in behavioral tools like user list and customer.io and also consider if you have the time adding in app chat for new trials strategy number four is to strengthen your social proof it's

4:33pretty hard to have too many testimonials it's pretty hard to have too many quotes of people saying how they're getting value out of your software you can add testimonials to your marketing website show customer logos and success stories prominently you can have case studies and I mean detailed case studies that highlight specific results that folks can download you can have quotes and testimonials during your signup flow and you can use social media and of course email to share customer testimonials and reviews this is where you just can't have too many cuz there's so many ways to use them speaking of social proof if you're liking this video please give it a like

5:09subscribe to the channel and drop a comment below that kind of social proof really does help the Channel all right back to tactic number five number five is to refine your target audience or your ideal customer profile so this is where you start thinking about developing detailed buyer personas so it's not just a general hey it's every HR manager at every company everywhere you might say it is HR Helena and Helena works at companies with 20 to 50 employees and Helena struggles to have enough time in the day cuz she doesn't have enough budget to hire an entire HR team but she really needs to get this

5:47stuff done so you start to get pretty detailed with it and then you sanity check that with yourself with your team and you start focusing things on that you focus marketing efforts on your most profitable segments you focus your sales efforts and your verbiage around that ideal customer profile so you're tailoring your messaging to address specific needs of the ICP can you have two different ideal customer profiles you can can you have three probably but you're starting you're starting to get to the edges when you get to three in my opinion especially if you're below you know what what 100,000 a month should you be really marketing towards four

6:20different icps kind of makes things muddy because not only are you targeting messaging but you have to build your product for this ideal customer you want to make it the best product anywhere for folks in that audience and the more icps you have the harder that becomes if you like this content you should check out my podcast startups for the rest of us for the past 14 years I've shipped an episode every week on building launching and growing startups and these days I focus on bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SAS companies but realistically it covers the gamut of Entrepreneurship especially for folks who are trying to do it on their own

6:54without raising buckets of money in the podcast I share lessons I've learned as well as lessons from the best Founders I know that I bring onto the show you can find And subscribe to the podcast in apple podcast in Spotify all the podcast apps you want and you can also find it here on YouTube just go to the search bar type in startups for the rest of us and my bonus tip or the thing I teased at the start of this video is to add customer success if your pricing supports it you can be your first customer success person just thinking about proactively reaching out to

7:26customers to ensure they are getting value helping them get set up help helping them get onboarded and then circling back with them every few months that's a big part of customer success customer support is inbound and reactive customer success is outbound and proactive it can also be reactive as well but there are a lot of things you can do you can offer webinars or workshops on how to best use your product and thinking in the customer success mindset is identifying and addressing churn risks early so you may want to start by doing this yourself and hire for it once the need arises I know that once we hired our first customer

7:59success person at my last startup our trial to paid conversion rates on our biggest accounts where we were actually applying customer success increased pretty dramatically and even our demo close rates went up I didn't have a salesperson I had customer success running my sales demos which we can do a whole video on when you would do that and why you would do it I've talked a lot about it on this channel and in the podcast but our sales demo to close rate went up two to 3x whenever our customer success person would talk to them so in the first tactic of this video I said that pricing was the biggest lever in

8:32SAS the 2 minutes or so that I had in this video to cover that point really isn't enough time to cover it in depth so you'll want to watch this video next in it I cover my 10% price increase Rule and go deep on all things SAS pricing thanks for watching we'll see you next time