Starting a SaaS Business? Here's Your Winning Go-to-Market Plan 🚀📈

0:00in this video i talk about building a winning go to market plan for your sas product i'm a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits author of three books about building startups and an investor in more than a hundred companies i've always thought the term go to market feels just a bit pretentious because i thought it just means launching your product into the market but what i've learned and what i'm going to talk about in this video is that there are a lot of components to a go to market strategy it's not just about launching which is usually just your marketing it's five things and five things in this order

0:28target customer positioning pricing marketing and then your sales strategy and frankly a go to market plan can include more than this if you're a fortune 500 company bringing a product to market a go-to-market plan can be massive but for an entrepreneur like yourself these five key components are the ones that you need to think about and define before you launch your product and let's be honest many of these will be guesses or hypotheses because you just don't know the space well enough until you've launched and talked to customers and you're gonna have an initial hypothesis of what each of these things should be and then you're gonna have to

1:00move and pivot and adjust as you have contact with customers so let's talk about the first piece and this is your target customer the way i would start to dive into this is to research the competitive landscape i would look to see if there are customer segments that are not being served or not being served well so for example the founder of builder prime noticed that home improvement contractors were not being well served by traditional crm software and so jonathan the founder of builder prime who is a company that i've invested in through my accelerator tiny seed he built one and the reason is because there was a customer segment

1:35that was not being served or not being served very well sometimes all customer segments are being served relatively well and you have to figure out a different angle and that's where positioning comes in is there a corner of the market where you could position your product carve out a niche for example project management software has existed for years and project management sas is a relatively crowded space but the founders of gather which is at gatherit.co they realized that traditional project management software was not serving interior designers very well and so they carved out that niche and they positioned themselves as being the go-to sas for interior designers and

2:12architects and when you're just starting out you don't know these things for sure you're just trying to figure out is there a customer segment that we think that we have a hypothesis is not being served well and is there a corner of the market where we could position ourselves and then you go from there but those two things that inform how you can price how you can market and how you can sell this product so let's look at part three of our go to market strategy which is pricing does your space have large incumbents which have used their brands to raise prices and go up market leaving

2:40a large space at the bottom of the market for you to enter for example intercom is a beloved piece of software but they have definitely raised their prices frequently and i see opportunity for someone to come in and compete with intercom as a less expensive but still mostly fully featured version of intercom my last sas company that i sold did this in marketing automation there were a bunch of premium providers they were 400 to 4 000 a month and up and there was no one who was selling marketing automation for less than that and so we came in and we positioned ourselves as a lighter weight version of

3:15marketing automation but we were able to under price the competitors in a way that allowed us to build a brand and by the time we were doing a few million dollars in revenue we had a pretty solid brand established and then we had pricing power and we could start raising our prices now i would never give the advice to go in and compete on price try to be the low you know the low cost provider because that is going to tend to bring customers that you don't want they're going to churn they're going to be price sensitive they're going to be asking for discounts but in a space

3:42where there are really expensive players that are let's say bulky hard to use maybe not well liked there is opportunity for you to position yourself in a way that can be advantageous to you as you go to market the fourth element of your go to market strategy which is informed by the prior three are the marketing tactics you can use so are there any marketing tactics where you have expertise or where your competitors are weak so one example of this is signwell which is electronic signature and seinwell competes with all the massive docusigns and hello signs of the world but the founder of that rubin is amazing

4:18at seo and so he has used seo as a way to gain traction in that space if you don't have any expertise then you're going to want to start looking at your competitors and spy on what they're doing with their ad strategy with their content strategy and figure out is there somewhere where i feel like i can beat them and in fact your pricing informs how you can market because you can't spend a ton of money on marketing if you don't have you know higher prices people willing to pay higher prices for your software and the fifth piece of your go to market strategy is your sales

4:47strategy so are existing players only using enterprise sales tactics to sell and can you make your product mostly self-serve or vice versa if everyone's doing self-serve and they're on the lower end of the market can you go in and do a more high-touch sales process where you have a higher price point but companies who really want that white glove service will come to you we watched bounce exchange do this they gained traction several years ago now five six years ago they were charging a hundred times more than their competitors these are competitors like optinmonster and sumo.com they were charging way more than them by providing a managed split testing service over

5:22their email opt-in widget and that allowed them to have some type of differentiation right it allowed them to have that higher price point allowed them to position themselves as the premium offering and then it allowed their sales strategy to be a high-touch enterprise process i don't want to imply that you always have to zig when others are zagging but if you enter a market with the same pricing positioning sales and marketing strategies as major incumbents with stronger brands and bigger budgets you are creating a major uphill battle for yourself because they have more money and they have more experience so it's better to find some kind of vulnerability or some area

5:55that's being missed in the space it's that missing scale on the dragon's belly if you will hobbit reference anyone so let's say you think you know your best target customer you have an idea about your positioning your pricing how you're going to market and sell it so let's look a little deeper at marketing because that's such a big piece of going to market so many things hinge on your ability to let people know that your product exists even if you get everything else 100 correct if you drop the ball on marketing and you do not generate demand you will fail so as you go to market and

6:26you're evaluating marketing approaches i would be looking for advantages that you have do you have an existing audience if you have one great if you don't unless it's the strength of yours to build audiences i wouldn't do it in sas do you have a great network whether you have one or not build one there are communities like microcomp and indie hackers and dynamite circle where you can go to find other like-minded entrepreneurs and to build your network as you emerge into this space as you go to market as you launch such that the next time you do launch a product you have a better network because your

6:56network not only gives you advice but you can do joint venture partnerships you can have founder friends who are helping you promote your product and are helping you spread the word and a third potential advantage is having a despised competitor that is a leader in the space this may not seem like an advantage but it's amazing to have someone who has gone ahead of you they've already taken the arrows in the back they've made the mistakes both in their product and in their marketing and they've got some things refined and if you look at them and you realize well the real downfall for them is their customer service sucks

7:24or no one likes their sales process or they're overpriced or their product is old it's 15 years old it hasn't been revamped well you know that if you build an amazing product with amazing ux maybe you underprice them a bit and you do a sales process that people enjoy and you use most of the same marketing approaches you're probably going to gain some traction so having a large competitor that people dislike that is doing some things right and something's wrong in my opinion is better than not having a competitor at all because then it's pure experimentation on your end and in terms of startup marketing i've

7:55talked about it in several other videos on this channel about launching but something i say so often is start marketing before you start coding get a landing page up start talking about your product you want to build that email launch list because you want the first day that you launch to be an amazing day of interest not just on product hunt or hacker news or reddit but you're gonna want hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people on an email launch list in order to have that amazing launch day that you imagine because getting lucky and playing the hacker news the product the reddit lottery

8:27that's not a way to have a proven launch or a way to have something that's probably going to work having that email list of people who are super interested in hearing what your product does to in hearing when it launches is an amazing way to have that incredible first launch day if you want to hear how i built my email list for my most recent sas product look for the video how to validate your idea and launch to seven thousand dollars in recurring revenue you can look for it on our youtube channel and as you launch to the world you're going to be scratching and calling to get those early customers

8:58i've already mentioned product hacker news and reddit but there are things like q and a sites like quora and stack exchange these don't scale but in the early days they can be worth it depending on your price point to get folks in and get the buzz and start building brand you can do a podcast or a youtube tour you can hang out where your customers hang out these are places like facebook groups slack groups forums and then you start looking at blocking and tackling you know what are the five most common b2b sas marketing approaches it's content seo cold outreach pay-per-click and partnerships and integrations and

9:31you look at those and you think about what is your price point how much money can you commit to acquiring a customer and which of these are gonna work in your space and i have an entire video dedicated to that topic that i want to tell you about in just a second but before i do i wanted to let you know there is a companion podcast to this youtube channel it's called startups for the rest of us and on that show every week for about 30 minutes i talk about things like this about launching about marketing about building sas bootstrapping mostly bootstrapping sas and i've been doing it for more than 10

10:01years we have more than 600 episodes and so check out startups for the rest of us on any place that podcasts are available including apple podcasts spotify stitcher downcast overcast so if you want to go deeper into the marketing side of this i know i've talked a lot about go to market which is a full package but if you want to know about building a flywheel this is a process i cover in detail in the video and this channel titled how to get your first 100 customers for your sas product so i hope you enjoyed the video today about building a winning go to market plan

10:31i'll see you in the next video [Music]

10:44[Music] you