Starting to write down “in public” my SaaS journey.

We are now 1 month after the beginning.

On Monday 20th of November. We went to the south of France to start building our first SaaS.

We’re a tech agency, and we have all already launched different tools, products, and services, sometimes pretty well and, more often, not that well. 😂

But now it’s time to swap time against margin. This means reducing our Service Business margin (Tech and Design as a Service) at Figue.io to have more time to launch our Product Studio, which aims to build and launch 6 SaaS/per year.

For the first one, we decided to tackle a pain we’re facing as a Tech Agency—the collaboration between Tech and Business teams (internal or external).

We use Linear for Product Management. And that’s awesome for Tech teams, but business teams don’t like it; it's too “noisy” and complex.

So we shipped SteelSync.io, a Product Management tool integration to create a third business view on top of all your PM tools (Linear, Jira, Coda, Notion, etc) starting with Linear.

We spent 2 weeks designing it with Figma and then developing it.

On Friday, we built our Landing Page with Framer.

In parallel, I've made a User Research avec +20 potential users to understand their pains better. (that's why we could ship this tool quickly; we knew exactly what was needed).

So, last week, I focused on finding and planning our first beta testers.

🎯 target: 10 companies

💰 Deal: get the tool for free, for life, in exchange for feedback

♟️ Strategy: ask persons from the User Research, go to the Linear Slack and find people struggling with the problems we’re solving, and reach out to them + ask persons around me using Linear for a feedback call about what they like and dislike about it.

✅ Output: 19 persons In for a call, whose 10 In for a beta test. 85% (16 effectively book a call).

I know that now one of the most challenging parts is starting activation 🤯

In a nutshell:

• Do significant user research before starting to build your SaaS
• Focus on a dozen companies as beta testers to fully understand the pain/benefit you are offering

I hope it will help you too, as builder in public to ship your first SaaS in the best conditions 🫶