Starting in SaaS – what are your biggest challenges?
It's been a while since I started out, and the whole landscape has changed so much in the last 5 years.
I'm keen to understand: when starting out a SaaS business today, what are your biggest hurdles / challenges / problems?
A few things to get the ball rolling:
- Is it deciding on the idea?
- Deciding a name, domain name?
- Getting a site built?
- Deciding on pricing?
- Implementing pricing / billing?
- Building tech of some sort?
- Finding a co-founder?
- Hiring?
I suspect many will have different answers to this question, but I am very keen to hear what you all have found!
Thank you!
Starting a SaaS is easy, that's why everyone is doing it. Getting customers and attaining meaningful revenue is the hard part
@dtm Thanks for sharing this, Dean! I hope you don't mind me asking to go deeper on this – what specific things do you find to be hard about getting customers?
None of that, finding users. That's it, that's the only hard part.
@wparad thanks for this! How have you managed to find users? What within “finding users” have you found most challenging?
What do you think are the possible answers to this question? It isn't so easy for me to just be more specific, but if you lead me I can tell you more.
I was hoping that would be enough of a response, maybe I'll say, I want to increase the number of users we have, we get some to our site, and some sign up, but then drop off. We believe it is because the wrong users are getting there and we don't know where to find the right users.
Primarily, it's getting an audience/marketing the product. However, I assume that problem stems mostly from not finding the right idea in the first place.
@Harrjm Thank you for sharing this! Is this a challenge you hit yourself? Did you manage to overcome it?
Getting the right Product-Market fit & Building an audience without a sales team, especially in B2B SaaS. There's much more :) but stopping with two.
@prettycold Thank you so much for sharing this! Very handy to know. I take it these are problems you have experienced yourself? Did you / are you managing to overcome them?
Yep, these are problems we faced. Now we understand Product-Market fit much better. Second point still exists and I suppose it will take time.
Educating the end audience becomes important if we try to build something ahead of what someone is used to. As a result, our focus turned towards building features that will improve adoption. These are few lessons learned.
Hope it helps!
@prettycold V helpful – thank you so much! And good luck!
Thanks James and good luck to you too!
The Problem is to find the right moment to finally launch 😬
If you have feedback - please share it with us https://paperless.io/
@Garreis_Jonathan Thanks so much for stopping by! And I agree, finding the right time to launch is hard – too early, or too late – they both have their problems!
Paperless looks great – also GREAT name. I suspect we could dive into more here, but my 2 second quick reaction to the landing page was "this looks great but not sure if it's for me" – I think I would do some testing on the title of the page to see if you can get to a more compelling value prop / tagline than "All-in-one document workflow." Just an idea but perhaps I would experiment with a line like "Say goodbye to printing, signing, and scanning PDFs" or something that calls out the pain you're really solving.
Great point! Did you have the reaction "this looks great but not sure if it's for me" because you don't need a tool like this or was there another reason?
Thanks for the tip with the title! We will work on that 🙌🏻
The biggest challenge is to create a product or service that people want to use, and want to pay for it. These are two different things - using and paying.
Regards ,
Andrzej
https://pagemtr.com
Creating a SaaS product that customers want to use and pay for is easy.
Building trust and getting the product in front of them customers is the challenge.
There are 100s of clones of SaaS apps with the same features, maybe even better UX> But if the customer doesn't know it doesn't matter.
Without trust there are no customers, so... yup, actually this is a challenge.
If you have no customers then it is not as easy as many may think (and now loop to the top of this comment :-)
I don't want to get into a long discussion here. In my opinion if it was so easy then all had own saas. Unfortunatelly a low percentage founders finish with product fit, paying customers, and in general - success.
Compared to getting paid customers, creating a SaaS product is easy.
You can google everything about creating a SaaS.
Yup, that's the reason why I said:
Pay attention to "want to use", what literally means "want to pay". So, we ended up with that a saas is easy to do, hard to sell, what is directly pointing to my first sentence "Creating a SaaS product that customers want to use and pay for is easy.".
Cheers!
Biggest challenge is always creating the product. For everything else you can grab a book and learn but this can’t be copied. If you fail in this nothing will work. 🤓
@sarthology Thanks for this! Are you a technical founder, or non technical? What aspects of building do you find hardest?
I’m technical founder. I think it’s pivoting the right thing on right time.